Your Web Copy

Step 1. Understand exactly what you want your web copy to accomplish. In other words, define your objective, but this time, be more specific.

Step 2. Take action to fulfill your objective. This includes writing the best possible web copy and marketing communications and getting traffic to your website (using linking strategies, search engine optimization, a revenue-sharing [affiliate] program, pay-per-click search engine advertising, or any other traffic-generating methods).

Step 3. Observe what’s working and what isn’t working. Track and test your results continually. Do more of what’s working, and eliminate what’s not working (including, but not limited to, key elements of your web copy).

Step 4. Keep adjusting your actions. Do this until you accomplish your desired objective.
When you do these four things, you’ll never be without options.

You’ll never sit there and say, “Why does it work for others and not for me?” Probably the most important step is Step 3, “Observe what’s working and what isn’t working.”

On the Internet, you have to be tracking results and testing continually. You should test email subject lines; you should test whether personalizing the subject line was better than not personalizing the subject line.

You should test lead-ins, dissonance elements, and various formats of newsletters. You should test web copy headlines, web designs, sites with pictures and those with no pictures.

You should even taste different prices, offers, guarantees, closes, and bullet points. You name it-You should test it.

Search engines change their algorithms constantly, spam filters and pop-up blockers are becoming ever vigilant, and acceptable business practices on the Internet are being altered by regulations and sanctions.

That’s why nothing beats the practice of constant testing and tracking to obtain your own marketing intelligence for your particular audience.

The kinds of things you discover when you track and test are amazing, and they affect the profitability of the website not just for the here and now, but also for the long term.

Testing and tracking are so fundamental in direct-response marketing that they are given; yet most people on the web don’t test anything.

They write the web copy once, they launch the product or service, and when it doesn’t pull, they wonder why.

They don’t realize that tracking and testing can significantly boost the sales of a website.
While the concepts of tracking and testing would require another book to explain thoroughly, here are some fundamental concepts that will help you get started.

Track Your Results
Let’s assume that this month you used the marketing methods, including writing a free report or promotional article and disseminating it in newsletters and e-zines, ads in e-zines, online classified ads, pay-per-click advertising, a great SIG file that your affiliates use every time they send out e-mail, and so on.

But, you received a decent number of orders. What do you do next month? Repeat all of the same things again, right? Wrong!

You find out which things worked and which didn’t so that you can repeat more of what worked and none of what didn’t.

If, for instance, you determine that your free report that ran in an e-zine last month accounted for 93 percent of your sales, and the online classified ads did not produce a single sale, then you would contact more e-zine and newsletter publishers to run your free report, and you’d cancel your online classified ads.

The thing to remember is that it isn’t you who decides what works, no matter how many years of experience you have in marketing, nor is it you who determines the best-performing headline, offer, guarantee, or price.  Nothing works until the tests prove it works.

Marketing great Ted Nicholas, who reportedly spent over $500,000 testing and tracking copy elements, asserts that simply by changing the headline, you can increase the pulling power of a direct-response ad by 1,700 percent, even when the rest of the ad is identical!

The only way to learn this is through testing.

Let’s say you are running an ad that’s pulling a 2 percent click-to-sale conversion rate. You figure since 2 percent is it decent response rate, you’re earning a net profit of $1,000, and your advertising cost is $500, you can’t complain.

Why, that’s a 100 percent return on my investment, you say to yourself. But what if you discover, through testing, that another one of your ads pulls a 4 percent response rate, you’re earning a net profit of $2,000, and, since your advertising is a fixed cost of $500, that means you increased the return on your investment fixed cost of $500 to $1,500, or from 100 percent to 400 percent!

Online, many programs and scripts are available that enable you to test and track results. For instance, rotator scripts allow you to track the clicks and sales generated by two or more different versions of copy.

Ad tracking software or services allow you to test and track results without hassles. In a nutshell, here’s how these services work:

A redirection URL is assigned to each campaign you run, which allows you to count actions such as clicks, sales, and sign-ups to your newsletter or opt-in offer.

It allows you to view detailed information and analysis for each campaign: for example, how your pay per click campaign is doing at Overtime (a research engine), how your ad in the Yahoo! Classifieds is doing, how that free report that you’re giving away via autoresponder is doing, and so on and so forth.

In addition to these basic tracking functions, a tracking service allows you to evaluate all your visitors’ click trails so that you can:

1. Know exactly what trail buyers take and, as a result, streamline your site to get all visitors to follow that proven linear path

2. See what paths non buyers take and eliminate the bottlenecks and roadblocks at your site

3. See what visitors who subscribe to your newsletter or opt into your lead-generation system really do on your site

4. See which traffic sources create the most sales-or no sales-so you know where to focus your efforts

For those of you who have newsletters or e-zines or who run e-mail marketing campaigns, there are also good direct e-mail marketing services that enable you to easily track and test the results of your e-mail marketing.

For example, you can find out who opened your e-mail message, who clicked on which link, what they looked at on your website, how long they stayed on your site, whether they bought something, which item(s) they bought, how much they spent, and who they are, based on demographic and registration data.

Here are four e-mail services that track and test results:
www.emaillabs.com
www.email-marketing-central.com
www.gotmarketing.com
www.constantcontact.com

A website with killer copy but no traffic is like a beautiful store filled with desirable merchandise located in the boondocks - people will never find it.

What good are killer copy, opt-in offers, autoresponders that convert website visitors into customers, and all the tracking devices in the world if no one stops by to visit?

The topic of traffic generation is vast. Therefore, this post limits the discussion to a few strategies that have been effective in my own experience.

Search Engine Positioning
Whenever the subject of traffic generation is discussed, invariably search engine positioning comes up.

Some Internet experts contend that an estimated 86 percent of the average website’s traffic comes from search engines.

While it is true that website promotions that include search engine positioning and optimization may contribute to a website’s success, a website can nevertheless succeed without it, as long as it employs other traffic-generation strategies.

I’ve seen highly profitable websites that get little or no search engine exposure. Still, no discussion of traffic generation would be complete without the topic of search engine positioning.

I’ve learned that trying to get top search engine rankings is a major undertaking that is best left in the hands of professional search engine positioning and optimization experts.

Seeking high search engine rankings in all the major search engines is a complex undertaking that requires diligence and attention because the search engines use different algorithms (sets of rules) to rank pages.

Even if you succeed in satisfying all the algorithms, those algorithms change constantly, which means if you get the advice that tells you to have your target keyword appear no more than 12 times on your home page, that advice is probably obsolete by the time you hear it.

The search engines are always five steps ahead of everyone. For this reason, I leave search engine positioning to professionals who specialize in that field.

Trying to maintain a high search engine ranking is a time-consuming endeavor, and requires constant maintenance, so I do what I’m good at and let search engine professionals do what they’re good at.

The Internet abounds with search engine professionals who can guarantee that your website listing will appear in the top 10, top 20, or top 30 search results in the major search engines under specific keywords or phrases.

Do a search on any search engine for the keywords, “search engine optimization” or “search engine ranking” and you’ll find hundreds, if not thousands of professionals who can improve the ranking of your website, thereby increasing your website traffic.

Pay-per-Click Search Engines
Pay-per-click search engines are search engines that allow you to pay for placement or ranking in their particular search engine.

This is an effective way to attract inexpensive, targeted traffic to your website because you pay only for eyeballs of people who actually click through to your website.

Overture is the leader of the pack when it comes to pay-per-click search engines.

The minimum bid is 5 cents per click, but in order to have your listing among the top search results, the per-click price you would need to bid may have to be considerably higher, depending on the popularity of your keywords or how highly searched or how competitive your keywords are.

Here’s an example of how pay-per-click economics work: If you bid 50 cents per click for the keywords “water purifier,” and 100 people click through to your website, your cost would be $50 (100 clicks x 50 cents).

If you happen to be bidding for highly competitive words, it may cost you $2.00 or more per click, but that’s because many more people search for those words, which drives up the bid price.

In the end though, it doesn’t matter how high you bid or whether you’re ranked number one in the search results, because if your listing is not compelling, no one will click.

Overture allows you to create your own listing, so when you design your listing, make sure you follow the guidelines for writing online ads while at the same time abiding by the rules of Overture (or any other pay per click search engine).

With a well-constructed listing, you can at least be assured that you will get a good percentage of click-through to your website.

Warning: Do not - I repeat, do not-bid to have a high ranking if you do not have killer copy on your website backing you up. All the clicks in the world are worth nothing if your web copy doesn’t convert those visitors into customers.

Overture is the top pay-per-click search engine, followed in popularity by FindWhat.com.

There are several hundred pay-per-click search engines out there, and if you want to know who they are, as well as to get tips and strategies about using pay-per-click search engines, go to wwwpayperclicksearchengines.com/.

Linking Strategies
Another way to get top rankings in the search engines-without really trying-is by getting other websites to link to your website.

The algorithms of the search engines take the number of websites linking to your website into consideration when ranking you. The more websites that link to you, the higher your search engine ranking.

The more websites linking to your website, the higher your search engine ranking. Even more important, when you get those websites to link to your site, your website will be exposed to all the web visitors of all those websites that link to you, and that means more web traffic and more sales.

The key is to get websites with high traffic to link to you. If you get dozens of high-traffic websites funneling their traffic to yours, you’ll be amazed how much traffic you can get.

Once you get a link from a website, the link will probably stay up forever, paying you dividends in terms of traffic for weeks, months, and years to come.

Of course, websites won’t be inclined to link to your site if all you have on your site is copy that reeks of advertising, which is yet another reason to aim for an editorial style of writing crafted with hidden selling.

How to Get Websites to Link to Your Site.
There’s a long, tedious way of doing it, and there’s an easy, painless way.

I’ll tell you about the long, tedious way first so that you’ll really appreciate the easy, painless way that I will show you.

The long, tedious way is to scour the web looking for websites that are most likely to link to yours.

You’d use a search engine and type in a keyword or phrase that would yield websites that are similar to or related to your website.

For example, if you have a website that sells widgets, you’d search for websites catering to widget users, the widget industry, and so on.

When you get your search results, you’ll have to scroll through the hundreds, even thousands, of websites and click through to them one by one to find the contact information or the e-mail address of someone to whom you can send your linking proposal.

Then you have to type an e-mail to every e-mail address you find, cross your fingers, and hope that after spending countless hours doing this, some of them will say yes, they’ll link to your site.

The easy and painless way is to use two invaluable tools that you can download for free. The first is webFerret, at www.ferretsoft.com, and the second is 2bpop, at www2bpop.com/.

They work beautifully in tandem. Once you’ve downloaded them, go to one of your website’s competitors-one that has many websites linking to it.

Using webFerret, you can then pull up every single site on the Internet that links to your competitor’s site and save the list.

Next, open 2bpop, which will automatically find an e-mail address on that website; 2bpop allows you to load and send the same template e-mail very rapidly.

You can even set it up so that your 2bpop merges information from the website you’re viewing into your template e-mail. This makes the process lightning fast.

E-Zines and Newsletters
If you’ve been involved in Internet marketing for any length of time, you’ve probably heard it said that dollar for dollar, the best marketing promotion you can do is to run ads in other people’s e-zines and newsletters with the same target audience as yours.

Even better is to write compelling promotional articles or free reports and offer them as content to websites, newsletters, and e-zines.

Type the keywords “directory of e-zines” or “e-zine directory” on any search engine and you’ll find resources that list e-zines and online publications in which you can advertise or submit content.

It hasn’t escaped anyone’s attention that the Internet has become a global marketplace such as the world has never known. Fortunes have been made, and will continue to be made.

Involvement devices are devices that get people involved with your copy. They move people to read every word of your Copy.

Getting your website visitors to read your copy is job number one if your objective is to sell them something. When you use involvement devices, you effectively own your audience; that is, you hold your audience captive.

Let see how an involvement device on the website could make a deference.  This client’s web copy original headline reads, “Learn how to be prosperous, successful and happy in just 10 minutes a day,” was an attempt to get at what he thought were the hot buttons of his target audience.

But, although reasonably successful, the headline sounded vague, and it definitely was not riveting.  It didn’t call out to the real desires of his target audience.

The involvement device asked readers to identify their wants, needs, and dreams.  What could be more riveting to your target audience than their specific dreams, the dreams they might not dare tell another living soul?

The involvement device asked them to name their dreams, and it gave them a safe place to do it because they knew that no one would ever see their response.

Bringing the readers’ desires into focus allowed us to present the product (affirmation software) as the means of achieving those desires.

Do you see how powerful that is?  Involvement devices break people’s preoccupation with other things.

At any given moment, a people’s attention is occupied with dozens of things–everything from how they’re going to pay for their children’s college education to what they’re going to have for dinner that night.

Think of your prospect’s mind as an antenna that receives signals from everywhere.  Like a radio tuner, an involvement device gets people tuned in to only one signal, one station, or one channel–in this case, your sales message or your web copy.

Getting someone’s attention on the Internet is probably the biggest challenge you face, because attention is in short supply–with over 4 billion webpages clamoring for attention.

In an effort to capture attention in the overwhelming marketplace that is the Internet, an increasing number of websites in various industries have begun to employ involvement devices.

For example, I’ve seen a retailer of loudspeakers feature a Home Theater Wizard on its website.  The Home Theater Wizard is simply an involvement device that asks a few simple questions of the web visitor, about budget, room characteristics, listening preferences, and equipment setup.

The web visitor clicks on check boxes to answer the brief questionnaire, thereby becoming effectively involved.

Based on the answers given, the Home Theater Wizard recommends one of the company’s preconfigured home theater systems customized to the customer’s wants and needs.

Since there’s no way the company could know what web visitors are looking for in a home theater system, and it offers more than 350 different combinations of speakers from which to choose, the involvement device gets visitors to participate in customizing a system for their needs.

In the process, the device causes casual web visitors to stay in the website (instead of clicking away) and take a close look at the website’s product offerings.

Amazon.com has a Jewelry & Watches division that employs a similar involvement device.

Its website uses a wizard that enables visitors to create a diamond ring to their specifications by answering four questions (visitors click on radio buttons to select their preferred shape, number of carats, type of metal for the setting, and the setting style).

When a web visitor answers all four questions, he or she can preview the ring, then select the diamond quality and ring size.

The wizard recommends a ring from the Jewelry inventory and gives the price of the ring and ordering instructions.

This is a more effective approach to choosing a diamond ring than viewing hundreds or thousands that are available.

An example of an involvement device used on a website that sells a real estate investment course.  The quiz does two things:  It gets prospects involved and makes them curious enough to click on a text link (“Click here for correct answer”) to learn something they don’t know–something that whets their appetite for the product being sold.

When respondents click on the text link, a small pop-up box reveals the answer.  They are not taken to another webpage, which potentially could take then, away from the intended sales path.  This is essential when designing a device like this one.

Involvement Devices and the Recovery Principle
The recovery principle of marketing not only gets people involved in the sales copy and makes them raise their hands and prequalify themselves as your target audience, but also captures their contact information.

The recovery principle is not new.  It’s something used often in direct-response marketing.

Here’s how it works:  If you fail to sell your web visitors on your primary product at the full price, but succeed in selling them the same product (or perhaps a different product) at a lower unit of sale, you recover the effort and cost of getting viewers to your website and plug them into your income stream.

That’s how it got its name.  Even if you don’t make as much profit on each of these sales, you recover costs, which add to your overall profitability.

More important, you turn someone who might otherwise never have done business with you into a customer, and, of course, those customers have a lifetime value since they will be buying future products from you.

Once you understand that you don’t have to offer your product at only one price, but that you can adjust your offer on the fly, you can make far greater profits than if you had not employed a recovery device, which can dramatically improve your website’s profitability.

According to an eMarketer report, acquiring a new customer costs five to ten times more than retaining an existing one.

Therefore, every effort must be made to keep customers.  Some companies use the recovery approach to increase customer retention and minimize product returns.

A software company sends out the following e-mail to those who want to return a product:

Dear [name of customer],
Thank you for our recent order of [name of software].  I’m sorry to hear that you’ve found it necessary to return the software for a refund.

We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that [name of software] meets the needs, and exceeds the expectations, of entrepreneurs like you.

Therefore, unless you’re dissatisfied with the way [name of software] performs, we’d like you to continue enjoying the benefits and convenience of owning it.

In this regard, we’d like to offer you the rebate of $68.50–that’s 50%–of the price you originally paid for it.

We’re offering you this special accommodation because we certainly don’t want to lose you as a customer, and look forward to serving you for years to come.

Simply reply to this e-mail, and a check in the amount of $68.50 will be mailed to you immediately.

Please understand that your acceptance of this rebate signifies your decision not to return [name of software] at some future date.

Should you not wish to accept this rebate offer, and choose to return [name of software], please place it in the original packaging (or another appropriately sized box), send it back to us insured (for your protection), and we will issue a full refund of your purchase price within 4 weeks of receiving the product.

Sincerely,
[Name of customer service rep]

Marketing communications such as this one go a long way toward retaining customers, as well as recovering the effort and cost of getting them to buy in the first place.

America Online (AOL) uses a similar recovery approach when its “free trial” members call in to cancel their membership.

Instead of just letting customers go without a fight, AOL offers every member wishing to cancel the opportunity to continue enjoying AOL at no charge for another month–sometimes two or more.

The company is justified in thinking that if members become accustomed to using AOL, eventually they won’t want to cancel.

The key to the recovery principle is that no offer has to be static. Any of its parts–the price, the duration, the warranty, the privileges–should be flexible enough to meet the needs of customers.

Even if the profit margins from the down sell are considerably less than the standard margins, every unit of sales adds to the company’s bottom line, helps to recover costs, and keeps customers in the company’s income stream.

When you consider that repeat customers spend 67 percent more–and after ten purchases, the average customer has referred seven people (Bain & Company, 2002)–every attempt to exercise the recovery principle is well worth the effort.

In my experience, I’ve seen website sales double or even triple with the judicious use of any one of the devices I’ve described in this chapter.

This is why adding psychological and other devices is an integral part of the fleshing out process.

Strategically employing these devices wherever possible in your copy is essential if you want to maximize the sales generated.

What approach do you use to increase customer retention and minimize product returns?

Perhaps you’ve heard of the concept of modeling success.  If you want to achieve success at anything, the fastest way to do it is by modeling the strategies of those who are already successful at it.

That way, you take something complex and synthesize it into its essence so you can use it immediately.

You’ve probably heard of real estate agents going into selling mode by constantly repeating to themselves.  “I’m going to sell this house.”

Successful real estate agents start off with the mind-set that the sale is already made Model the strategy that successful people use to be successful.

In web copywriting, the best way is to model successful such a website that you admire greatly and that you know has produced tons of sales for its owner.

Start copying it by hand. Write the entire sales letter out in your own handwriting. Write it out two or three times over the next week.

Depending on how test you write, this will take roughly five hour–less if you write quickly or if the sales letter you choose is short.

An examnoke if successful web copy that you can handwrite can be found at www.MagicWordsThatMakeYouRich.com.

This takes a lot of discipline, not to mention time, but I assure you, it will be worth the effort.

Once you write this sales letter over and over again, you will start internalizing the wording, the phraseology, the rhythm, even the mind-set of the person who wrote the copy.

Your brain assimilates it and you practically step into the mind of the person who wrote it.  This is by far the best modeling exercise I’ve found for accelerating web copywriting skills.

Next time you sit down to write web copy, the wording, the phrasing, and even part of the writer’s thought process will have become a part of you, and you will find that it becomes much easier to sit down and begin flowing right into a winning sales piece.

A Simple Blueprint for Writing Killer Web Copy
Internalize the Golden Rule of sales that says, “All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, those people they know, like, and trust.”–Bob Burg

Before you write one word of copy, you must first
• Know your objective
• Know your target audience
• Know the product or service

Your objective
What are you trying to accomplish?  What response are you trying to obtain?  Your objective might not be to make a sale, but rather to get your reader to send for free information or to get your reader to sign up for your mailing list.  Or your objective might be to sell your product or service.

Your target audience
The more you know about your target audience, the easier it will be to convince them that they need your product or service.

The more specific your knowledge of your target audience is, the better.  Let’s say you are selling a book on weight loss.

Your target audience is overweight people, but you might fine-tune that to target overweight people whose jobs revolve around computer work and who have no time to work out, let alone go to the gym.  This is the target audience of a website called WeightLossTricksThatWork.com.

Your product or service
After identifying the audience to whom you are writing, it’s essential to know the product or service about which you’re writing.

Immerse yourself in it.  The five Ws of journalism are a handy tool to use for this:  What?  Why?  Where?  When?  Who?  and the bonus How?

Before you begin writing, ask yourself:
What is the product or service?  What is it made of?
Why was it invented or developed?
Where did it originate?
When was it discovered?
Who invented or discovered it?
How is it made?

Learn everything you can about your product or service.  Uncover the benefits of owning your product or using service.

Only after you identify your objective, falniliarize yourself with your target audience, and know your product or service thoroughly is it time to start writing.

Before you write one word of copy, what else described in here, you think should be considered?