guide How to make great sales pages, email, copy.

[BrandPlease]

Hi All,

Just finished this guide for my main site, wanted to share as I hope it will be helpful to some here on NP.

Would love to hear any feedback, suggestions, or mistakes you might find.

Thanks,
Brian
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The key to outstanding client engagement is to understand what your customer’s pain, issue, or problem is. Why are they in pain? What is causing this pain? If you dont have a way to relieve that particular pain, do you have a reason to contact them?

Fundamentally when you really want to understand what motivates someone to make the decision and make a purchase – it typically boils down to how will X improve my quality of life (business & personal are factors).

So the first thing we need to do is to get into the customer mindset as we craft our message. This really is an important step and one of many product sales tips in this guide. We have to craft our message in a way to communicate our value, create instant credibility, and ensure the message is read.

Lets look at the components and structure of sales copy:

The Headline
Why is the headline so important?
OK this may be one of the most important product sales tips and is pretty self-explanatory, but just to highlight. Headlines catch attention, yours everyday as well. Your headline plays the exact same role in your sales copy. Just to put it into perspective – less than 20% of online purchase are made post-headline. Meaning almost 80% of the time customers didn’t bother to read past the headline.

How do you craft a good headline?

• First, what is the most important benefit of this product?
  • Right to the point. To the point here is important because you have, less than 6 seconds to get their attention or they have moved on.
• Even better Question Headlines
  • People are captivated by questions. Let’s face it, when somebody asks you a question, you’re almost forced to answer it, unless you have absolutely NO interest in the subject matter. Making sure you know your audience is extremely important.
• Another approach to writing headlines is with the Powerful Statement
  • Here, you don’t ask a question but just make a statement that is so bold that it almost sounds like it’s too good to be true.
• Another approach to writing headlines is to feature the offer
  • In other words, you’re offering a free trial membership for a site
• Another method that copywriters use to come up with headlines is the Powerful Offer.
• Another method of writing headlines is what I call the “Pain point/Resolution Headline”
  • This is where you point out a person’s pain in the headline and then at the same time, show them how you’re going to take away that pain. Remember, people buy things because they want to solve a problem or feel better. Well, when you’re in pain, you’ll do anything to feel better.
• Another method that copywriters use to come up with headlines is the Testimonial.

When thinking of a headline, think of what you would say to somebody whose attention you’re trying to get and they’re in the process of walking away from you. What product sales tips to use, what are you going to do?

That headline has to scream off the page. It has to be a matter of life and death. Don’t be afraid to be outrageous with your headlines. Sometimes the most outrageous headlines are the most effective.

I can’t stress this enough. Make sure your headlines are the best that they can be for whatever you’re promoting.

It’s also a good idea to come up with at least 5 headlines for your sales copy and test them all to see which one converts the best.

The Opening Paragraph
The opening paragraph is really just a continuation of your headline. You’ve just grabbed your reader by the throat and dragged him into your copy. So, imagine you do this and then lead into something like…

Dear Friend:

Can I have a moment of your time to show you…

Please! Good luck getting noticed in the mountain of inbox spam

Basically, here are the things that you want your opening paragraphs to do. They don’t have to contain all of these items, but they should at least contain one or two

• The Compelling Story
  • Tell them a compelling true story that they can relate to as I have done in my copy. This is especially effective if your headline is using the same technique as mine did. Usually you do want to keep the headline and opening paragraph similar so that one flows into the other. For that matter, your whole sales copy should flow smoothly.
• The Compelling Offer
  • Make a compelling offer. Hit them with your offer right off the bat. No need to beat around the bush. If you’re offering them a year of mentoring for the cost of a dinner out, then tell them that right in the first sentence. The key to this opening is to follow up with the details and the benefits of your offer
• The Question
  • Ask them a question and force them to answer it. For example, you might ask something like “Would you like to increase your profits by 817% in just 30 days?” Naturally, the answer to this is going to be yes. In order for them to find out how to do this, they’ll have to read the rest of the copy
• The Guarantee
  • Put your guarantee right up front. For example, you might say something like this. “I’ll give you triple your money back if my acne cream doesn’t cure your acne in 3 days or less.” This does more than one thing. First of all, it states that the person’s acne will be cured, which is what they are looking for. What it also does is take all the risk away from the customer. If they’re not satisfied with the results, you’ve promised to give them triple their money back. It’s hard to pass up an offer like that
• The Testimonial
  • If your headline is a testimonial, you can use a similar testimonial in your opening paragraph. I wouldn’t use the same exact one because testimonials should be kept intact, word for word. So, if you’re going to use this method, choose a different testimonial for your opening paragraph. You might even want to follow it up with more testimonials. We’ll get more into testimonials and where to put them later in the book.

The key to the opening paragraph is that you want it to have the same impact as the headline. The only real difference is the formatting.

Sub-Heads
After you have completed the opening paragraph, which is basically a setup for the rest of the copy, what follows is simply that, the rest of the messaging.

In order to make it easier to write the remainder of the copy, we use subheads. The reason we do this is because we want to group each section of our copy into smaller chunks. This makes it easier to read the copy and also makes it so that more people will read, if not all the copy, some of it.

Like it or not, there are people who don’t read much of sales copy. They’re skimmers. The problem with skimmers is that they’ll skip over large chunks of copy until they hit sub-heads or something that breaks the copy up. That’s why we use sub-heads in copy, to break the copy up and give skimmers a place to stop.

The rule of thumb is that for every page of sales copy, you want one sub-head. The way we determine a page of sales copy is by opening up the sales page in your browser and hitting the page down key. That’s one page of sales copy. So, for every page down there should be one sub-head.

Ideally this would be great if we can do it, but sometimes it’s just not possible because of the amount of copy that is required for each section. So there are other ways to break up the copy, and we’ll be getting to them later on.

Usually, you shouldn’t have trouble including one sub-head for every 1-3 pages of sales copy. That should be good enough to keep the skimmers from bypassing most of your copy.

But sub-heads serve another purpose other than to just keep skimmers from bypassing your copy. Sub-heads are used to emphasize parts of the copy that we want the reader to pay attention to.

There are a number of ways to do this. Again, we go back to the same principles that we use for our main headline and opening paragraph. The only difference is that with sub-heads, we are presenting a “story” to the reader that is going to follow a logical sequence of events.

Testimonials
Testimonials may just be one of the most critical things you can get for your sales copy.
The bad thing about testimonials is you can’t write them yourself. You have to rely on the people giving them to give good ones.

And that’s where the problems come in. Most people who give testimonials do so out of the goodness of their hearts, and trust me, their hearts are in the right place. Unfortunately, these people are not writers and many of these testimonials just turn out to be plain awful.

So what do you do?

The thing to do is stop the problem before it becomes a problem. That means you have to follow a specific plan of action in getting your testimonials.

Send them a form with questions to answer about the product and service. This way, the response that you get will be structured and will include the details that you need to construct a testimonial worthy enough for your sales copy. Some of the questions you should ask are the following:

• What problems did you have before getting this product that the product solved for you?
• What benefits did you get from the product?
• Would you recommend this product to others and if so, what would you say to them to convince them?

These 3 simple questions should be more than enough to construct a good testimonial for your sales page. You can of course ask other questions that are more specific to the product, if you choose. The more questions you ask, the better the testimonial will be.

Now, where do you use them?

You want to put your best testimonial FIRST. The reason is because you want to hit people with your best right away. You then put your second best testimonial LAST so that you leave them with a lasting impression. Some people do this in reverse, putting the best last and the second best first. You can certainly test this and see which converts better, but you definitely want your two best testimonials first and last in the chain.

As with anything else in your sales copy, test the placement of your testimonials and see what works best.

The Guarantee
Fear of getting ripped off is one of the biggest fears on the Internet today. The number of scams that I have personally been subjected to over 4 years of marketing online has been staggering. So it’s no surprise that people are hesitant to make purchases online unless the merchant backs up his product.

If you’re going to have any success selling a product online, you MUST stand behind it 100%. This is not even debatable. Those who don’t offer guarantees on their products lose out on a large number of sales. The stats prove this.

The question is what kind of guarantee do you offer? When you make your guarantee, you want it to be one that is so compelling and so amazing that the person would have to be crazy not to take you up on your offer.

The Price
When I talk about price, I’m not talking about setting the price. That’s up to the creator of the product, though you might want to give him some suggestions if you think he’s pricing it too low or high. No, what I am talking about is HOW to present the price. There is an art to doing this that the best copywriters have down to a science.

Remember what I said. It’s all about providing lots of value for the customer. So you have to make him believe that he’s getting $X worth of product for $Y, where $Y is a lot less than $X. However, “making her believe” must be though honesty, facts, and data. The facts must be presented.

The way I, and many other copywriters, handle it is very simple.

Let’s take the example where you’re including a number of services with or in support of the main product.

The first thing you have to establish is what the main product, by itself, is worth. After you’ve done this, you then establish a value for each of the services and then the whole package together.

Let’s for argument sake say that the whole package has a value of $5000. You could then easily make a case for how you could sell this package for $970, $1970 or even $2907 and it would be a bargain.

After you make the case for how much the package can be sold for, you then present the potential customer with the actual price of the product, which is less than all the possible values you’ve presented.

Now you have presented and established not only value but credibility.

And… you MUST test your price. The greatest sales copy in the world is not going to convert if the prospect thinks the price is too high.

Summarizing the price
when I presented the value of the package, I also summarized what the customer would be getting. This is also important to do. The reason is because over the course of a sales letter, the customer is going to forget things. Remember, they’re seeing this for the first time – you want to remind them of what they are getting before you get to your call to action

Call To Action
This is the worst because it is easily fixed. I’ve seen phenomenal copy that was crossing all the Ts … until the call to action, and it all falls apart, like this…

“You can order today and get immediate access.”

And then below that is a link to make payment. And that’s it. That’s the call to action.

There is no call, not even a strong suggestion of action

If you visitors don’t easily recognize and know that your product, information, and service is so unique that not working with you would be the biggest mistake they could make.

• When you issue a call to action, it should be a call to ONE action and ONE action ONLY.
  • Remember you will have different actions or a different goal depending on the sales copy you are writing.
  • The wording is important action not order

Your call to action must be a strong one, but it can’t be too pushy. You don’t want to bully your prospects into buying. You simply want to remind them of what a great offer it is.

Remember, you have to tell your prospects what you want them to do. If you don’t tell them, they won’t do it. It’s THAT simple.

Check out BrandPlease.com when you have a chance as well.

Thanks for reading,
Brian