Knowing what not to do helps to give a clearer picture of what to do. Here are seven mistakes you should never make when writing sales copy.

1.  Being slow to get to the point

• impressions are made in moments
• mention the main benefit and incentive right out of the gate
• your opening should be impossible to ignore
• tell the reader  “what’s in it for me” (WIFM)

2.  Not giving the reader some WIFM at every point

• use headings, illustrations, videos and captions to communicate prominent benefits wherever the reader’s eye might land
• repetition is okay just vary the point each time

3. Failing to do a complete selling job

• give every sensible reason why the reader should respond
• overcome those objectives
• omit nothing relevant

4. Failing to prove your statements are true

• use testimonials
• when possible use photos of those giving testimonials and their letters in original form — don’t edit them

5. Failing to connect as people

• show your own picture or pictures of customers
• people look at and relate to people

6. Failing to cut the fluff

• every element of your message must contribute to the result
• don’t distract the reader
• don’t belabour the details
• balance between effective repetition and overkill

7. Failing to guide the readers response

• a strong opening with a weak close leaves the reader feeling more frustrated than motivated
• make it easy for the reader to respond
• close persuasively — repeat all the reasons your reader should respond
• guide the reader to a yes/no choice
• have more than one call to action

Anything I missed here? Please let me know in the comments.

visit the Patti Network News to see where else I'm writing.

7 Deadly Copywriting Sins

When it comes to making sales on the Internet, it seems that copywriters and search engine optimization experts are always at odds with each other.

You see, one group wants the sales letter to be absolutely perfect to make maximum sales, and the other group wants the page to be optimized perfectly for the search engines to send free traffic their way.

I remember my first experience with a search engine optimization firm. I had a site that was designed to sell sunglasses, and I’d just finished writing all the sales letter for the different types of sunglasses available. At the time pay per click advertising was a brand new concept, so I wasn’t using it. I wanted to get the free search engine traffic available from sites like Yahoo and Google, so I hired some SEO experts to make my site perform better in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). I gave them access to all my pages so they could optimize everything as necessary.

When they got done my website was properly optimized, but my well crafted sales letters were a complete mess. My writing no longer flowed nicely, my headlines now sucked, and there were a lot of erroneous words all over the place on my pages. However, the pages did perform better in the search engines.

However, I was not satisfied with better performing pages if it meant I couldn’t sell my visitors anything due to the fact that my sales letters weren’t very good. It was at this point that I fired the firm that I hired and vowed to learn how to do the search engine optimization myself, and I was going to make the search engines like my pages while still preserving the integrity of the salesletter.

The first thing I did was go back and redo the sales letters again. I looked at what the firm I hired tried to leave in certain keywords or phrases, but I made them seamlessly blend into the salesletter.

Then as I started to learn more about search engine optimization myself, I started to learn about the importance of having links pointing to my website. So I went out and started to find people who would link to my site.

I frequently tweaked my sales pages, but I always made sure that they made perfect sense to my visitors.

Good copywriting and well optimized pages do exist, especially these days. Here is my checklist for making both work together:

• Write your sales letter as you normally would.

• Get links to your sales letter with the links containing the anchor text you want your site to rank well for

• Make sure the key phrase is mentioned somewhere in the sales letter, but ignore ideas like keyword density.

• Make sure your title tag contains the keyword you want to rank well for.

• Update your sales letter frequently (you should always be testing your sales letter anyway)

• If your entire website is just the sales letter, add a blog to the site to give you site more content, as all the search engines like to see a website add new content over time.

The most important item on the list is the links. So if you’re not going to spend time getting quality links pointing to your website, then don’t waste your time optimizing your salesletter for the search engines.

About the Author:
Gary Ruplinger is an SEO expert and author of UltimateTrafficBlueprint.com. To get professional SEO consulting or to hire Gary’s link building services, visit us.

Read more articles by: Gary Ruplinger

Article Source: www.iSnare.com

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Making Copywriting And Seo Coexist

There are many ways to get traffic to your website, but if you know how to use article marketing to increase web site traffic for free then you should be on to a winner in the website traffic stakes.

You only have to consider what article marketing can do for you and it becomes a no brainer. It is such an obvious way to get traffic to your website that even if you cannot write for yourself, then you should employ an article ghostwriter. Just consider what even one article can do for your website, let alone dozens. Let’s have a look at what is involved in writing an article, and what benefits it can give you.

First, your article must be relevant to the theme of your website. I know it sounds obvious, but don’t write about cats if your site is about dogs. I know . . . Laugh! However, that’s what some people do! Stupid, I know, but it happens, so that is why I am stressing here that you must write about the theme of your website.

Next, your article must provide good content. It must provide useful information, but it must also be well written. The adage that “as long as it can be understood” does not hold water in article writing. The spelling must be correct for the country (USA or UK) and the grammar must be reasonable. Nobody expects perfect grammar but it must be free from silly errors such as “They is American and we is not” sort of thing.

These are the basics. If you can’t write grammatical English and find it difficult to express your thoughts in writing then again, as previously suggested, employ a ghostwriter to write your article for you. Now we come to the aspects of article marketing that enable you to draw traffic to your website, since that is the whole objective of writing articles.

First you must submit your article to as many article directories as you can.. It is possible to do this manually by trawling the search engines and finding as many article directories as possible. However, you could save a lot of time if you used article submission software, available on the internet at varying prices, or use an article submission subscription service. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

If you buy the software you have to be sure that it is regularly updated to include new directories, but if you use submission services, where you assume that this will be done, it cane be very expensive. I have used both and still do so, though the monthly subscriptions would probably pay for the most expensive and sophisticated software systems in a year or so. Subscription services always seem cheaper because you are only paying a little each month.

Most, but not all, article directories provide you with an “author’s resource box” in which you can provide a few lines about yourself and a link to your website. You could do what most people do and provide a short biography then provide a link to your home page, or do as I do and simply state “More information on”.. can be found at…

The dots should be the topic of your article and the page on your website where more information is available on that topic. If you are writing about basketball, don’t give them a link for baseball. Don’t even provide the link for your home sports page. Make sure the click leads the reader to what they have been reading about – basketball. The whole idea is to get focused visitors to the web page that deals with the topic of your article.

That’s why any article that you submit to article directories has to be based on a subject on which you have a web page. If you don’t, then your article is a waste. It will do nothing for you.

The benefits that a well-written article that readers are interested in can provide are fourfold. First, readers can click on your link and provide you with traffic to the page concerned. In order to get them clicking your article must not only be of interest, but your resource box must be of equal interest. If a reader thinks that you can be of help to them, then they will want to know more.

Secondly, you get a one-way link back to your site from each directory that accepts your article. The more you submit to, the more links you get. However, that is not all, because the third benefit is that readers might be so impressed with the quality of your writing and the content of your article that they will copy it and paste it onto their own site. This not only gives you another link back to your website, but also provides you with the fourth benefit: readers of that site clicking on your web page link that has to be kept intact by anyone copying it for their own site.

It is quite true that if you know how to use article marketing to increase web site traffic for free, then you are on to a winner because traffic can be so expensive these days. Free traffic through writing and marketing articles is worth its weight in gold, and so are the writers than can give your web pages a massive boost up the rankings.

About the Author:
Peter is currently working on SEO projects and further information on article marketing can be obtained from his web page Article Marketing. He is currently ghostwriting from his website http://www.article-services.com

Read more articles by: Peter Nisbet

Article Source: www.iSnare.com

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How To Use Article Marketing To Increase Web Site Traffic For Free

– Rosalind Gardiner, guest column

How do you choose the products you buy? Do you simply accept as gospel truth all the good things a merchant says about their own product? Or, do you ask your friends’ opinions and look for independent product reviews before opening your wallet?

If you’re a savvy consumer (which of course you are), then you put more stock in your friends’ opinions and independent product reviews.

As affiliate marketers, we become much more successful when we approach our site visitors as friends and take the attitude that they too are savvy consumers.

From that standpoint, an affiliate’s real work is to pre-sell our merchant partners’ products by writing fair and balanced reviews, also known as endorsement letters.

Sure, writing a review for each product takes a little time and effort, but it’s an activity that sets the super affiliates apart from their less-super counterparts in terms of rewards… read ‘income’.

Product reviews can be either stand-alone or comparative. The first type focuses on a single product, while the second is an evaluation of similar items that allows readers to choose which product best suits them.

Before you begin to write a product review, you’ll need to evaluate the product. (Nothing like stating the obvious, eh?)

I prefer to endorse products that I’ve actually used. However, buying a product isn’t always feasible. If that’s the case, affiliate managers will often grant ‘proven’ super-affiliates access to products for their review. That’s especially true of information products and services that are delivered online, such as internet dating services.

But what if you’re not yet a super affiliate, and can’t fathom a basement full of treadmills to review for your exercise site?

Well, do what your customer would do if product reviews didn’t exist on the Internet – go to the store and test those treadmills out!

And how do you review acne medications for your skin care site if you don’t have acne? Surely, you have some friends with (previously) pimply-faced teenagers… ask them to tell you what worked for them.

If you can’t find out that way, search Google for “consumer reviews” + “acne medications”. Read as many as you can to come up with three to five effective products (that have affiliate programs).

Once you’ve collected information about the product, it’s time to start writing that product review.

The structure for a product review is simple, containing an introduction, overview and summary.

The introduction consists of a few sentences outlining the problem and introduces a possible solution for the reader, without going into detail. The overview describes the product’s promise, a description of how the product is used, as well as its effectiveness and value. The summary is almost a repeat of the introduction, and contains a strong recommendation for purchase based on your conclusions.

To simplify the review-writing process, I ask myself the following questions when writing product reviews for my own affiliate sites.