"All I really want is an unfair advantage."
- W.C. Fields
You've probably seen the above quote around the Internet: the idea that a certain marketing technique will give you the unfair advantage and literally wipe out your competition. Well, it just isn't so. Marketing is a never-ending process, and simply realizing this fact will give you all the power you need to succeed.
Do a little marketing every day, test your results, then do a little more of what WORKS for you. Ultimately you will develop your own system and refine it into a high-powered marketing machine you can count on for results.
Certain techniques do indeed work better than others, and one of them is using longer copy in your Web salesletters.
Of course it depends what you are selling. We work with (and pay close attention to) top-flight marketers who have tested their salesletters online, proving that long copy outsells shorter copy on the Web. For us, long copy = the 4-8 page Web salesletter, which is most often long enough to deliver your potent sales message.
Support it with testimonials, a guarantee, a free trial offer and whatever else you can that makes sense for your product or service. The goal is 100% credibility while you make the benefits of your offer crystal clear.
"What about people with short attention spans?"
It's true people demand instant gratification online, and will surf away if they are not engaged in 30 seconds or less. Which means, we as marketers must first recognize and respond to the Web as a direct response medium, where in a sense we make multiple offers at the top of a Web salesletter via buttons, testimonials, text links etc.
This gives those individuals who don't want to read the longer sales copy the opportunity to click around and make their buying decision that way.
Remember, you don't need to begin right away with long copy. Test this approach on one of your site pages:
Create a Web page summarizing your longer sales messages in 2-3 sentence paragraphs, each of which links to the full salesletters posted on separate Web pages. Once people click through to the information they
want to read, you are 'preaching to the converted' and consequently will hold their attention as they go through the material in detail.
Scott T. Smith is the publisher of 'Starting Point' newsletter, an excellent source for web page writing and marketing tips. You can visit Scott's site at http://www.copywriting.net or email him at scott@infowriter.com.
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