Free-Reprint Article Written by: Mark Silver See Terms of Reprint Below.
***************************************************************** * * This email is being delivered directly to members of the group: * * [email protected] * ***************************************************************** We have moved our TERMS OF REPRINT to the end of the article. Be certain to read our TERMS OF REPRINT and honor our TERMS OF REPRINT when you use this article. Thank you. This article has been distributed by: http://Article-Distribution.com Helpful Link: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Overview http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm --------------------------------------------------------------------- Article Title: ============== Hey! Why the Long Sales Pages? Article Description: ==================== So, you get one of those emails from someone whose business you kinda like. And it's got some enticing little message in it - so you click to take a look at the offer. And suddenly you find yourself in highlighter land. Broad streaks of yellow, lots of exclamation points, and pages and pages of words making all kinds of claims and promises. And when you scroll allllllll the way down to the bottom, there isn't even a price. You need to click on an 'order now' button before they even tell you the price. Additional Article Information: =============================== 868 Words; formatted to 65 Characters per Line Distribution Date and Time: 2009-04-01 15:00:00 Written By: Mark Silver Copyright: 2007-2009 Contact Email: mailto:[email protected] For more free-reprint articles by Mark Silver, please visit: http://www.thePhantomWriters.com/recent/author/mark-silver.html ============================================= Special Notice For Publishers and Webmasters: ============================================= If you use this article on your website or in your ezine, We Want To Know About It. Use the following URL to let us know where you have used this article, and we will include a link to your website on thePhantomWriters.com: http://thephantomwriters.com/notify.php?id=6664&p=load HTML Copy-and-Paste and TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of Article Are Available at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/s/long-sales-pages.shtml#get_code --------------------------------------------------------------------- Hey! Why the Long Sales Pages? Copyright (c) 2007-2009 Mark Silver Heart Of Business http://www.heartofbusiness.com/ So, you get one of those emails from someone whose business you kinda like. And it's got some enticing little message in it- so you click to take a look at the offer. And suddenly you find yourself in highlighter land. Broad streaks of yellow, lots of exclamation points, and pages and pages of words making all kinds of claims and promises. And when you scroll allllllll the way down to the bottom, there isn't even a price. You need to click on an 'order now' button before they even tell you the price. Steaming, you swear by all that is holy that you will never, ever subject your customers to that kind of nonsense. So when you go to sell your own offer, say for instance a seminar, you write up a simple, clear paragraph or two about it, add few bullet points, and an understated offer. And hardly anyone responds. Oy! Do you have to be hyper-hypey to get customers? Let's get clear: these sales pages are there to do one thing... and it's not selling. Nope, they aren't selling. So, what are those pages doing? Those pages are holding a conversation with the reader. What conversation? The same conversation you would hold if you were trying to fill a seminar, and someone who was interested called you to ask about it. I've had plenty of those conversations, and I bet you have, too. How long are you on the phone? Twenty minutes? Thirty minutes? An hour? Time flies when you're connecting heart-to-heart. Have you ever read Shakespeare? Remember studying plays in grade school? Your middle school Arts and Literature teacher Mr. Snyder tells you, "Read through page 61 of Romeo and Juliet for Monday." And the class groans- 61 pages by Monday! Yup, 61 pages. The first half of the book. How long is 61 pages? I believe it takes about two or three hours to play out Romeo and Juliet on the stage. The Folger Shakespeare Library edition is 245 pages, but every other page has historical notes. So we'll just count half. 122 pages. Let's be generous, and say 122 pages in three hours. 40 pages an hour. 20 pages in thirty minutes. How long was your sales page again? Three paragraphs and five bullet points? Well, you've just had the equivalent of a 45-second conversation with your reader. "Uh, yeah, I've got 45-seconds to tell you about the seminar, and then I gotta go." Not very generous or helpful to your caller, eh? You can still put away the yellow highlighters. No, you don't have to write pages and pages of fluff, full of hype and yellow highlighters. But, you have to give me, your potential customer, more than 45 seconds. How much more? Here are a few pointers: Keys to Writing Your Offer * Find the questions. In the Opening the Moneyflow class, one of my clients took thirty seconds to describe an upcoming seminar- and then the other class members let loose. Question after question after concern after concern. Many of which my client hadn't considered before. Describe your offer, in less than a minute, to people in your target market, and then ask for any and all questions that come up, no matter how oddball. The answers to all of those questions need to be woven into your offer description. * Make the concrete very clear. There are logistical facts about your offer- price, what's included, location, time, quantity, materials, etc, etc. Put all of those in a box that is very easy to find and read. And put them at the bottom. Because the written format is static, it's hard to present the information in one way that everyone is going to like. If you put the information at the top, it's like putting a big price sticker over something, so they can't even see what it is. You have to peel back the price before you even know what you're looking at- that's not really fair to either party. If the information is in the middle- it can be hard to find. So put it at the end- easily accessible, right out in the open, but not in the way. * Start with empathy. Before you get into describing your offer, and the benefits, use a paragraph or so at the beginning to create empathy for the problem that your offer solves. For instance, if you help people who have chronic pain, spend a few sentences describing what it's like to live with chronic pain, so your readers feel seen and understood. Then they'll have more space to hear what you want to tell them about it. These are just a few pieces that can help your offers connect more strongly to your readers. Find successful sales pages from people you respect, and print them out. Study them carefully. See if you can find 10 or 20 things that you notice about those pages. And give it a shot yourself. Don't be afraid to wander into having a longer page, knowing that the people who really need what you are offering WANT the information, and may read it word-for-word several times. The best to you and your business, Mark Silver --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Silver is the author of Unveiling the Heart of Your Business: How Money, Marketing and Sales can Deepen Your Heart, Heal the World, and Still Add to Your Bottom Line. He has helped hundreds of small business owners around the globe succeed in business without losing their hearts. Get three free chapters of the book online: http://www.heartofbusiness.com --- END ARTICLE --- Get HTML or TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of This Article at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/s/long-sales-pages.shtml#get_code ..................................... TERMS OF REPRINT - Publication Rules (Last Updated: May 11, 2006) Our TERMS OF REPRINT are fully enforcable under the terms of: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR: ..................................... *** Digital Reprint Rights *** * If you publish this article in a website/forum/blog, You Must Set All URL's or Mailto Addresses in the body of the article AND in the Author's Resource Box as Hyperlinks (clickable links). * Links must remain in the form that we published them. Clean links should point to the Author's links without redirects having been inserted into the copy. * You are not allowed to Change or Delete any Words or Links in the Article or Resource Box. Paragraph breaks must be retained with articles. You can change where the paragraph breaks fall, but you cannot eliminate all paragraph breaks as some have chosen to do. * Email Distribution of this article Must be done through Opt-in Email Only. No Unsolicited Commercial Email. * You Are Allowed to format the layout of the article for proper display of the article in your website or in your ezine, so long as you can maintain the author's interests within the article. * You may not use sentences from this article as an input for any software that steals sentences from others in order to build an article with software. The copyright on this article applies to the "WHOLE" article. *** Author Notification *** We ask that you notify the author of publication of his or her work. Mark Silver can be reached at: [email protected] *** Print Publication Reprint Rights *** If you desire to publish this article in a PRINT publication, you must contact the author directly for Print Permission at: mailto:[email protected] ..................................... If you need help converting this text article for proper hyperlinked placement in your webpage, please use this free tool: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl ===================================================================== ABOUT THIS ARTICLE SUBMISSION http://thePhantomWriters.com is a paid article distribution service. thePhantomWriters.com and Article-Distribution.com are owned and operated by Bill Platt of Stillwater, Oklahoma USA. Learn more about our article distribution services by visiting: http://thephantomwriters.com/x.pl/tpw/info/article-distribution/index.html The content of this article is solely the property and opinion of its author, Mark Silver http://www.heartofbusiness.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ---------------------------------------------------------------------
