The Hard Sell is Dead

Great Marketers are great story tellers and great landing
pages tell great stories. People won’t buy your product or
service on facts and benefits alone. They need to see
themselves using your product. They need to feel the benefit
that comes from using your product and that feeling only
comes about by telling them a compelling story that they can
relate to.

You don’t need to be the next coming of Mark Twain to write
effective copy (although it wouldn’t hurt either), but you
do need to be able to engage readers at their own level.
That’s one of the reasons why the conversational style of
writing is so popular and effective. It draws people to you.
You’re not a salesman trying to pitch yet another product at
them. Rather you’re a friendly voice relaying your
experience and findings in an topic of shared interest.

Seth Godin is one of the best marketing authors in ages and
has a great take on what makes a good story. Her are my some
of my favorites tips that have helped my marketing
tremendously: Great Stories true; Great Stories make a
promise; Great Stories are trusted; Great Stories happen
fast. People have a remarkable ability to ferret out scams
and insincerities.  If you don’t believe your story, they
won’t either. That’s one reason why it’s so much easer to
market products that you yourself use and rely on in your
everyday life.

Marketers frequently get caught up in all of the great
features that their product has to offer. However all of the
whiz-bang features of whatever you’re promoting aren’t worth
a thing if your reader can’t see the value. Granted the
story you write needs to be backed up with a solid offering
but features alone are not what move people to action. They
need to believe the story you tell and most importantly, be
able to see themselves as the story’s main character. As
soon as they see themselves in that role, your message can
start to seep through.

Getting your story started can be the toughest part of the
the writing process. A blank page staring you in the face
can be quite intimidating. The best way that I have found to
get the ball rolling is to get into a state of “flow”.
“Flow” is a mindset where you develop a running stream of
thoughts in your head that overflows out onto paper.  The
techniques for getting into this mode are many but one
simple way is to just “turn off your internal editor and
write without criticism”. The book “Flow: The Psychology of
Optimal Experience” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers a
complete discussion of the topic and I highly recommend it.
Once you compose your initial draft, you must revise and
edit it until it takes final form. Some people can simply
rewrite their work calling upon years of writing experience.
However if you don’t have years of experience there are a
couple of other paths to good copy. Working under the
mentorship of a great copywriter is very effective but can
be very expensive and time consuming. There’s also software
that can statistically analyze your work and guide you
towards higher converting copy. I’ve found the software
approach particularly effective, it’s always ready to work
when I am, and the more I use it, the less I need it,
because it’s a powerful learning tool too.

Discover how to optimize your sales page to drive
conversions through the roof. Recommended by Trevor Stalling
http://www.conversionchamp.com/tools/stats.php

[tags]long copy, hard sale, optimize sales page[/tags]

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Ray Burton is a personal training business owner, online writer and growing net entrepreneur. He is also the author of the controversial workout e-book, The Fat 2 Fit Program which is also part of his passive income sources along with the membership site FitterFast.com.

Attention webmasters, ezine publishers, bloggers and forum owners: This article may be reprinted online or offline, provided the biography and website link information is included. (Click for affiliate/business opportunity)

Trackback URI |