February 26th, 2008 — Tactical Copywriting
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Just in case you’re curious “The Mouse Terminator” doesn’t exist. I chose this “product” for several reasons. One I think we had a mouse problem at the time :-).
Many of you may have heard the saying “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”
Nice saying. I disagree. If nobody knows about your mousetrap who will buy it? Marketing is mostly the process of spreading the word.
Sales copy is your message.
The nice thing about writing sales copy for a product you devise out of thin air is it can be as perfect as you want. Real life and real copy isn’t that easy.
Now about the letter itself…
It’s not complete by any means but it has all the basic parts. Want to add audio or vidio? Go for it! What about side boxes (a form of Johnson box) , More sub heads, PPS’s and well the list goes on.
You can absolutely add all those things and more. My intention here was not to present the “Ultimate Sales Letter” because I don’t think such a thing exists. I also don’t think it’s necessary. Quite frankly, if I still had a mouse problem and I saw this letter, I’d probably buy it myself.
If the letter is sufficient to tell your story - to ask for and get the sale enough to make a reasonable profit - then it is a good start.
My advice is to build your basic letter first. Once it’s up and running profitably then you can work in the bells and whistles to crank up sales even more.
By the way, the letter is on a separate page because I could not get the format to work to my satisfaction in Wordpress so here’s the link
Anatomy of a Sales Letter
God bless,
Andy
February 26th, 2008 — Testing
Just opened Rich Schefren’s email. Below is a video of Mike Filsaime talking about his experience with Gary Halbert.
All I can say is I’m beginning to feel like I’ve actually learned something!
Check it out (You may have to go to the full post to get a clickable link)
http://www.strategicprofits.com/blog/mike-filsaime/
Conference Update: The #1 Thing To Test In Your Sales Letter
I had to snicker a bit when Mike confessed he didn’t know what Gary meant! Of course he’s at the Strategic Profits Conference and I’m sitting home so I guess I shouldn’t let my head get too big here.
February 26th, 2008 — Testing
Actually you can’t “buy” real expert opinions on copywriting. Why not? Because (IMHO) real expert opinions come from the marketplace not so-called “experts”. That includes myself even though I feel I have a lot more to learn about copywriting than I know.
Here’s the thing…
Go to any forum where copywriting is discussed and you’re likely to find a bunch of posts wanting a critique on their copy. I participated on one such post recently. My favorite comments included (paraphrased):
“Your headline doesn’t grab me”
“Try a headline like this…”
“Your headline is just fine”
and so on.
Who was right? There’s only one way to find out for sure - test the headlines. And then test some more. Same goes for every chunk of copy. Only the people looking for a certain product can offer votes that count. The vote is buy or not buy.
Even there a huge majority of the people looking at your sales page (generally 95% or more) will vote with their feet. They will leave without buying.
For squeeze pages, where visitors give you their email address or something before getting a report, access to your site or the like, conversions generally run higher because they aren’t parting with any money. But for a money page - convincing more than 5% of your audience to buy is considered very good.
Of course I hope to change all that with Sales Page Makeovers. Keep in mind nobody can guarantee a specific result but I think the science is getting to the point where very accurate estimates will become common. I don’t mean just for my service but also for testers in general.
Testing is really the most exciting area of marketing and copywriting because you can actually see the results you’re getting. Few things are more satisfying online than changing a few words here and there and watching your sales take off.
Okay, I’ll step off the soapbox for now. By now I hope you realize if you are not testing - you should be. By this I don’t mean you should be using my service. Yes, please, conisder it, but more importatntly find a way to test. There have never been more excellent options available!
God bless,
Andy
P.S. If you DO happen to want to know more about salespagemakeovers.com - why not head over there now? 
