Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

In today’s Internet marketing world we are so used to seeing those long sales pages with a huge list of testimonials including plenty of smiling faces, sometimes audio and even video comments endorsing a product or service or person.

The last few days I’ve been preparing my first draft of the sales page for Blog Mastermind in preparation to hand it over to my friend Will Swayne for a review, who knows copywriting better than me, and then to a paid copywriter for a final review (apparently copy is important or something!).

In some ways I think having a long-form sales page is a necessary evil when it comes to selling online. I realize a lot of people will join Blog Mastermind just on the back of knowing me and sampling my work. They will probably scroll straight to the first “join” button and sign-up, ignoring all my carefully constructed copy. That’s great of course, yet I can’t simply launch a product with a page that says “join” on it because I’ll be loosing a lot of potential clients.

There will be those who come to Blog Mastermind with little prior relationship with me, or with certain sticking points they have to move-past before they will join. It might be looking for a money-back guarantee, or a demonstration of proof that I actually make money from blogging, or a further explanation of how blogs make money in the first place. All these issues need to be addressed in the sales page, along with all the other classic sales page triggers that copywriters know and utilize as staples of their craft.

Many people hate long sales letters, I’ve felt similar feelings at times myself, but the fact is, when you need to address all the possible concerns or questions a potential customer has, the long sales page is a stable performer. I could on about the long sales page, including some interesting evolutions I’ve seen coming from the Ari Galper/Perry Marshall clan, but I’ll save that for another article. Today I want to talk about testimonials.

Inserting Testimonials

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time on an activity that was, well, a lot of fun. I was reviewing all the great things my readers had said about me and sent me as testimonials and then adding them to my sales page, along with all their smiling face photographs.

Here’s a snapshot of the people featured as testimonials for Blog Mastermind:

All these wonderful people provided comments for me to use as endorsements for my work and it’s a wonderful feeling to read them all and know they will help so much with the success of Blog Mastermind.

I have to admit I’ve been skeptical of testimonials before, but now that I’m actually adding genuine feedback from real people, which was provided just because I asked for feedback (no incentive), I can see how powerful they really are. My sales page would be empty without them and heck, even I’m interested in joining Blog Mastermind now - that Yaro guy seems to know what he’s talking about based on what all these other people have said ;).

How To Gather Your Own Testimonials

If you are considering releasing your own product or service online then you must understand the importance of having genuine testimonials. It’s vital to understand that testimonials are not just given because you ask for them, they come from months or even years of building a relationship and adding value to people’s lives.

My testimonials came from people who have read this blog for years and subscribed to my newsletter for just as long. They know my work well, have been influenced and benefited from what they learn from me and as a result are willing to “give something back” in the form of a testimonial when I ask. What’s great about this is that these people genuinely benefited from my work so the testimonials are that much better - you can feel the authenticity (or at least I can!).

Authenticity is very important for testimonials to be believable and it’s important that you start fostering relationships now because you never know when you might need to call on the support of your friends to help launch a product or endorse what you do.

In a lot of ways my sales page, including the testimonials, is the culmination of years of work. As a static point in time it may have looked easy from an outsider’s point of view for me to get feedback - I just emailed and wrote a blog post asking for testimonials - but it was only easy because of years of work.

You have to start planning for your future too, so start building relationships now.

Yaro Starak
Testimonial Giver

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I’m living in a new rental in Toronto for the first time on my own in this fair city, as opposed to living with family as I usually do when in anada. So far I have opted not to have a television since cable access seems to be the only way to get any good channels here and I don’t see the need to pay for something that ultimately makes me less productive. At least that is the theory, but I am having major entertainment withdrawals and not laughing nearly as much without the Simpsons, Family Guy, Seinfeld and my new favorite, Robot Chicken, in my life.

In particular there is one time I usually have the TV turned on where I am missing it the most - when I eat. It’s hard to use a mouse and the web when you are eating, so the computer hasn’t been an apt replacement for the good old tube during meals. Since I work at home I often cook myself a fresh lunch and have a “lunch break” with my friend the television, and frankly I miss this ritual, though I’m not sure how much of this problem is merely a bad habit I’ve formed over the years (very likely).

What is a television addict to do?

I turned to my best friend, the Internet, and started looking for movies and TV online. I’ve never been much of a YouTube casual movie watcher looking for giggles - I want full length episodes of sitcoms, dramas, movies - basically television online, on demand - heck I’d even pay a dollar or two for some movies or television shows if I could download and watch them instantly. I’m not a torrent downloader because I’m trying to avoid any somewhat “suspect” activities, so I’ve been looking for legitimate solutions.

Unfortunately the era of digital delivery of television entertainment online has not yet arrived in 2006. The options are few and far between and frankly stink, so I gave up looking.

Instead I’ve discovered the joys of public domain entertainment, otherwise known as movies and television that are no longer copyrighted and can be distributed freely without risk of legal retribution. I’ll be honest with you - the selection is minimal and most of the stuff is old, but it’s getting me through my addiction and I usually finish eating and get back to doing productive things anyway.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

That little background story was a segue into my business lesson for today’s blog post (yes it had to be in there somewhere!).

I watched an old 1951 black and white sci-fi movie called The Day The Earth Stood Still, which while not being the most amazing piece of cinematic glory, has it’s moments and certainly makes me laugh now and then. Nostalgia is always fun.

At one point in the movie the main character, an alien, causes all the power in the world to stop working for thirty minutes. So nothing works at all and the earth basically “stands still”. However he pulled this little trick with the proviso that he would not cause any harm to anyone. While I was watching all these cut scenes of places around the world with no cars moving and all these people mulling around wondering what happened, it dawned on me -

“What about the hospitals? What about the planes that were flying in the air?!?”

I think shutting down hospitals and planes mid-flight would surely cause some harm to people?

Five minutes later the plot continues with a bunch of important men sitting around a table talking about what happened. One man explains the situation based on reports coming in from around the world and it appears that not everything had been shut down:

The hospitals and planes in mid-flight were still working. Nice.

My question had been answered and I didn’t have quite as much scorn for the movie as I may have had previously. It just became that little bit more legitimate in my eyes because they had adequately answered my question - in fact specifically addressed the two areas of concern I had.

Predict What Your Client Will Ask You

So what on earth does all that have to do with Internet business you ask? Aha! Remember everything is the same, and everything has a lesson for us relevant to business hidden away somewhere. Here’s what I am getting at…

One of the very first lessons I learnt from professional copywriters was to ensure your copy answers the questions that a prospect has going through their head as they read your sales page.

This technique was developed originally by face-to-face salespeople who would manipulate a prospect by answering questions on-the-fly based on how the potential customer reacted. A good salesperson removes all buying barriers by carefully guiding the conversation and knows the right triggers to use based on verbal and non-verbal communication.

This principle translated to the online world resulted in the long sales copy page. The long sales page attempts to answer all potential questions - points of resistance - that a prospect has before making a purchase. Since you can’t respond dynamically to a prospect’s communication cues online, the sales page must anticipate the most vital questions that the whole potential marketplace of customers may go through.

Imagine how powerful it is when a person is somewhat interested in your product and is reading the sales page and a question forms in their head, and then a paragraph or two later that specific question is answered.

Prospects may have concerns about whether the product is right for a certain type of business or person, whether there is a guarantee, can the product be used to solve a specific problem, how about size, shape, color, endurance, relevance, timeliness, applicability, quality, compatibility, ease of use, etc. All of these characteristics may relate to questions or concerns your potential new customer has about your product and when your sales copy directly answers their question a feeling of satisfaction will wash over them.

Yes, this is the right product for me because they know what I want and what situation I am in. I now have justification to buy.

That’s the feeling you want to elicit in a person when they read your sales page. If you can anticipate all of the common questions asked by a typical consumer of your product you will increase your conversion rate.

How To Anticipate Questions

If you are very close to your product and know your market well initially you should be able to come up with a handful of typical questions and roadblocks that prospects may go through in their head before buying. You must address these questions in your sales copy.

There are also standard responses or triggers - questions that the majority of consumers ask themselves before buying that sales copy can address, which professional copywriters will include in almost every sales page. Things like the money back guarantee, examples/case studies/testimonials from other people just like you who have had great results with your product, help to remove psychological barriers to making the purchase. I’m not a professional copywriter though, so if you want more assistance you might want to try Michael Fortin or Dan Kennedy or John Carlton.

A good copywriter can step into any industry and anticipate the questions that people will ask about a product after spending time researching the market. It’s something that is not easy to do. Personally I know the industries I work and play in well enough because I do it every day but there is no way I could write effective sales copy for different industries without first researching a lot about the needs and intricacies of the client-base in that industry. That’s one of the distinguishing factors that separates the good copywriters from the average - their innate (and refined through research) ability to understand the marketplace.

In your case you should at least know your market well enough to brainstorm potential questions to get yourself started. All you need to do is step into the shoes of your customer and think about what they may be concerned with before buying. If you can’t do this, put a survey out and ask - get the data straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak. If you can anticipate the concerns of your prospects and address them during the sales process you will increase your conversion rate. It’s as simple as that - but of course, test it to be sure ;-).

Yaro Starak
Copywriting Drone

Learn more about Internet business in Yaro’s Forums.

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By Jon Symons from Art of Money.

It’s ironic but in the whole deluge of textual information presented on the web, the skill most sorely lacking it the ability to write. We’ve seen Yaro and others write about how AdSense (I’ve nicknamed it Crack-Sense) is ruining the Internet and it certainly is true. Not only has the fact that Google will pay you very well to put crap sites online contaminated the global well of information by spawning infinite spam sites, but it has also changed the nature of that information as well.

Thanks to the magic pill of search engine optimization (SEO) we have a new bizarre skill set that is dominating the online world: SEO writing. SEO writing is the art of writing like a search engine thinks - only backwards. Keywords are important, keyword density (the number of times, represented as a percentage, that a keyword appears on a page), tagging keywords in bold or italics, placing keywords in the first and last paragraphs; and on and on it goes.

With these shackles iron locked to their wrists the SEO writer is now given the task to write quality articles on a given topic keyword phrase. It just isn’t possible. Why? An essential ingredient in effective writing is to understand the audience that you’re writing to. SEO writing is the art of writing to the GoogleBot. Real writing is the art of writing to someone in your target audience. You get to pick only one or the other.

The choice should be fairly obvious (this coming from a reformed SEO writer) but you still see a surprising amount of effort and money put into finding the magic on page SEO factors.

The Arms Race

Google is constantly trying to make its search engine algorithm more and more organic. What this means to an SEO writer is that you are in a constant “arms race” with the Google algorithm. The algorithm shifts and you must shift your mental keyword stuffing pattern. The problem with being in an arms race is that there is no improvement factor, the best you can do is to just keep up with the formula: not a very satisfying position to be in. There is no business synergy in an arm’s race with a search engine.

What’s a poor webmaster to do? Write well and wait for Google to evolve. As the algorithm refines, it is becoming less and less productive (meaning the return on time invested is deteriorating) to attempt to consciously manipulate the search engine results. In my online business I’ve found this to be a very refreshing fact. I’ve taken “SEO” off of my business card and begun to focus on the craft of writing for humans.

Writing is to Evoke

Whether a child’s bedtime story or an online sales letter the point of the most writing is to persuade. It may be to empathize with the perils facing a curious teddy bear as he attempts to quench his appetite for fresh honey, to sell an set of e-books, or to express your perils when trying to balance your checkbook on your personal personal finance blog.

Whatever the topic or purpose, the result is accomplished by skillfully tickling the reader’s thoughts and feelings like a conductor coaxes sounds from his orchestra. As your writing skills progress the melodies can become more complex and incorporate more suspense, misdirections and delayed expectations which will increase the the level of resonance with your visitors.

The Three Most Important Writing Factors

1. Organization
2. Clear Intention
3. Empathy

God knows that rambling is a perfectly acceptable writing style on a blog and I indulge in the practice regularly, but when it comes to business you would be best to dig out your lessons from grade school, because your 10th Grade teacher had it right. A good essay, sales letter, magazine article, or an effective online article has a clear structure. The first paragraph introduces what is to come, the paragraphs flow into one another and at the end is a summary. There is a reason for this; our brains like this structure. It corresponds to the cycle of life; being lead along it by a skillfully written article or story is satisfying on many levels.

Getting Organized

How to achieve an organized writing style varies from writer to writer. The first method I use is to start with paper and pencil to scribble notes or even draw pictures of the story outline (pictures can be great for stimulating the writer’s imagination…they are like gasoline on the creative process).

The other method I use it to just start writing and pour every thought out onto the page without much concern for quality or organization. Then I’ll print out a couple copies double spaced and get away from the computer (don’t worry you’ll survive!). Heading to a café or some other place of refuge and with a pair of scissors and some tape and lots of markers, I’ll read and reread the article until I start to recognize the best structure for the material.

The best part of this method is that you can relax and really let it all hang out when you write the first draft. You can take risks and express things in creative ways and experiment with styles and even syntax; knowing that you’re going to thoroughly go over it before any other humans ever get to see it. By letting it all hang out you’ll often find a more powerful writing style that will be more compelling to your readers. And you can always tone it down a bit if necessary . On the flip side, there is a danger with this method and that is that when you do the first draft, you’ll get lazy and think you’re done, or half way through the first draft you’ll shift into final draft mode and call it done. Neither of these shortcuts will likely produce an effective article.

Your Intention Matters

Hand in hand with being organized is to have a clear intention when you are creating an article. If you are writing an article to submit to eZine sites then the intention might be to have it re-published on as many websites as possible, in which case you are writing to eZine publishers to get them interested in your article. If you also want get the eZine article readers to read the article all the way through and then get to the resource box and click through to your site, now you have a more complex intention: part one to attract the publisher and part two to seduce their readers away from the eZine and to your site.

Another possible intention would be to have someone click on an affiliate link from your site and go to the merchant site and make a sale. This style of writing is called pre-selling. It is like having a hungry person in your house, as an affiliate you don’t feed them, you just have a bunch of food on the stove so the delicious aromas whet their taste buds, then you send them to your friend’s restaurant and hope they will spend money because of the excellent job you did in stimulating their appetite.

The sales letter page or product sales pitch’s intention is to cultivate a need or want and to simultaneously remove the prospect’s resistance to commit. These pages have become a pretty standard formulas with the only real difference being how small the vertical scroll bar can become (shorter pages work better by the way).

One of the best research tools for this type of writing is the Clickbank product directory. Since it is organized according to performance you can see examples of effective sales pitches just by looking at the top products on any category. Read through a few and notice the intention as you go. They usually include: stress the benefits that the purchaser can expect (stats work great here: “Lose 10 pounds in 7 days!”), the testimonials to prove that others liked the product and so you will too. Then there’s the money back guarantee to remove the possibility that you’re getting ripped off. The last element is the email grab which allows those who aren’t ready to purchase yet to let you know that they’re willing to possibly convinced in the future.

Whatever the intention you are working on, having it clearly defined before you begin writing is fairly necessary. It doesn’t mean that you have to be obvious in directing your reader towards the intention, but taking the time to craft a strategy and understanding the elements the will affect your intention will increase your likelihood of achieving your goal dramatically.

Get in to Their Skin

By far the most important skill of a writer is the ability to get inside the head of her reader. It is to be able to march in lockstep with the experience of your reader as they make their way through your copy. You are writing for them after all. You can write solely to express yourself, but if you want to make money in your business you will need to write for an audience.

To know how to create a response in a reader by really understanding them is the most powerful form of writing. The further you’ll move into understanding and satisfying your readers wants and needs and imagination not only will your writing improve, but your business will improve in general. The key elements of this skill are to respect you reader, put their needs above your own agendas and to anticipate their experiences within your words.

The Business of Writing

Writing is a craft, you get better at it by paying attention, trying new things and practice and following the three guidelines above. There are not really any shortcuts, with the possible exception of paying a professional to write your business copy for you.

I’d be bold enough to say that if you’re doing business online, you’re in the writing business, no matter what your product, service or business model. Writing is about connecting with your customer or site visitor and building their trust in you by demonstrating to them that you care about them. It is this expression of concern that will really draw people in to your writing and your business in general. I’m hoping that you’ll join me in taking SEO off of your list of writing concerns and focusing your efforts on respectful communication with your visitors.

Jon Symons is a full-time Internet Entrepreneur blogging his brains out on Art of Money.

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To help Brian Clark prove he’s right, I’d like to let you all know about a good little e-book he’s put together called The Viral Copy Report (it’s free!).

I read the book last night before going to bed and I really enjoyed it. The little anecdotes and Brian’s writing style are enjoyable - I had a good little chuckle at a few of the stories. It’s a well put together e-book with some important points about viral blogging.

In the book you will find:

• The Four Viral Content Categories
• Eleven Strategies for Getting Link Love
• Why Headlines and Storytelling are Crucial
• The Counter-Intuitive Rule of the Internet
• Why Not All Traffic is Worthy
• How to Avoid the Dark Side

Brian blogs at Copyblogger.

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