Archive for the ‘Copy Writing’ category

Ezine Classified Ads: Copywriting Guide for Newbies

February 20th, 2009

by Adrian Jock, 2009
=====================================

Many newbies can be heard saying, “I don’t need to write
my own ezine ads. My guru provided in the members area
all the ads I need.”

If you don’t want to remain a newbie for the rest of your
life, then stop being a copycat. Improve your own skills
and don’t be afraid of failures.

Yes, FAILURES.

The path from newbie to expert always includes one
or more failures. But if you keep going, you’ll soon
see the SUNLIGHT at the end of the tunnel.

Sure, there is an alternative: remain a copycat. But
at the end of your tunnel you will always see …
just another tunnel.

You don’t like this perspective, do you?

Do yourself a service: stop right now being a copycat.
Here is your copywriting guide for ezine classified ads …

Ezine classified ads are short ezine ads. That’s why it’s
easier to write such ads and you will spend less money
on advertising.

When you’re at the beginning of your learning curve
you have to start small … Let’s start …

Rule #1. Forget the pronoun “I” and learn to use “you”
and “your”.

Reason: The readers are neither interested in your person,
your life, your achievements or your failures, nor in
your friends and their success.

Rule # 2. Tell the readers how THEIR lives can
be improved by using the product or service you
promote.

Reason: It’s obvious!

Rule # 3. Don’t waste the advertising space by
saying unimportant things like:

- starting & ending wordings typical for
letters or solo ads (Dear Friend, To Your Success)

- your name

Reason: The advertising space for such ads is very
limited. The more unimportant things you say, the
less space you have for important things.

Rule # 4. Emphasize the most important words
from your ezine ad by writing them using only capital
letters.

Reason: Writing in capital letters grabs the reader’s
attention.

Warning: Don’t write using ONLY capital letters.
When you try to emphasize everything, you won’t
emphasize anything.

Rule # 5. Avoid the hype and grammatical errors.

Reason: Both of them affect your credibility.

Rule # 6. Don’t mislead the readers.

Reason: It’s immoral. In addition, in most countries
it’s illegal to mislead the consumers.

Rule # 7. Forget about simple and common calls to action
like “Click here” or “Check this out”.

Reason: Such simple calls to action only waste the
space. They are a NO-NO in copywriting. When you
will be more experienced don’t forget to approach better
this aspect. It’s an important one and you need to
learn how to write a good call to action.

Rule # 8. Use at maximum the advertising space you buy.
For example, if you buy a 7-line ad space, then write a
7-line ezine ad, not a 6-line ad.

Reason: You need to grab the reader’s attention
and you can do it only by revealing as many benefits
as you can. If your ad tells almost nothing, you will get
the same in exchange: almost nothing!

Rule # 9. Use a service that shortens the link to your
website and works like an ad tracker at the same time.

Reason: You save advertising space by using
shorter links and you also track the results of your
advertising campaign. By analysing the results, you
will be able to improve your future actions.

Rule # 10. Write more versions for your ezine ad and ask
your relatives, colleagues or friends which one grabs
their attention and makes them click on your link.

Reason: No one is able to write the best ad on the
spot. Even the best copywriters write more ads
and test them to see which one is better.

Forget about excuses like “I don’t know how” and
“I don’t have time”. Start RIGHT NOW to write
your own ezine classified ads and you won’t regret it!

To Your Success!
Adrian Jock

========================================
Adrian publishes Ezine Advertising Info Newsletter,
an ezine dedicated to help ezine advertisers succeed.
To read recent issues or subscribe free to his ezine,
visit his blog: http://www.ezineads.info

If you want to use a professional service for placing
your ezine classified ads, Adrian recommends you
ADS HOME Ezine Classified Ad Co-op:
http://sgrant8905.hmmceo.hop.clickbank.net
========================================

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How To Get More Out Of The Traffic You Already Have By Jack Humphrey

October 7th, 2008

Easy, fast conversion booster included at bottom of
post…

Most people only want to hear what I have to say about
getting them more traffic. Everything in my business is
geared toward more, more, and more targeted traffic.

While I am sure there are a few readers out there who
have completely studied, tested, split tested, and
tracked their conversion results to a strong control
conversion, most people fail pretty badly at this task.
I’m talking about the optimization of your sales
conversion and monetization strategy of your site to
come up with the most income you can generate with the
traffic you already get.

When sales aren’t going well the universal assumption
is that more traffic will solve the problem. And if you
are converting at all, yes, you will technically do
better with more traffic. But how much of the traffic
that you think you need are you wasting on poor
conversion and poor monetization?

I believe in more cases than not, people who are
generating what they think are low traffic levels would
be shocked at how much more money they could make if
they even tested just a couple things on their sites. I
often ask clients this question:

Do you want a million visitors or do you want to
make money with your site?

This is usually answered by “huh?”

You see, most people think traffic equals money. That
they are one in the same. They are not. There are more
sites online that get incredible amounts of traffic
with very poor results than there are sites with much
less traffic who have optimized their conversion and
monetization strategy to blow the high traffic sites
away in profits.

Saying you have a million visitors a month does not
guarantee that you are living on your own private
island in the Bahamas. When someone starts to brag
about how much traffic they have, I often just wait to
hear the rest of the story. If they are talking to me,
there must be something wrong or they’d have no use for
my input.

Usually what’s wrong is they have no idea how to turn
their traffic into money.

Double Any Sites’ Income By Testing Everything

What if you could keep the amount of traffic you have
and simply double your conversion? Have you tried? Have
you tested everything on your site against other ideas,
headlines, copy, ad placement, banner and text ad
design and copy?

Things you can test…

* Headlines * Ad placement * The way you review
products (if you have a blog where you review
products you are affiliated with) * Every aspect of
your copy on direct sales letters from headlines,
sub headlines, testimonials, fonts, graphics,
pictures, guarantees, colors, to purchase buttons -
they all can have a positive or negative impact on
your overall conversion right down to the smallest
detail.

And it can all be measured. It sounds like a lot of
work, but so is trying to get 1000% more visitors you
might not need to meet your income goals just because
you have low conversion.

In fact, it isn’t anymore. Rather than simple trial and
error, which most people do on blogs like this one by
testing ads in different places and products that will
ring positive with visitors, you can test landing pages
and static copy (direct sales letters) with
multivariate or Taguchi testing.

This method, for which there are many pieces of
software you can buy, tests many different elements of
a page at the same time, rotating in your different
headlines, banners, ads, color schemes, buttons, and
copy segments, coming up with the ultimate, best
converting control possible among all the tests you
run.

This type of testing is impossible to do quickly by
simple experimentation. It uses mathematical voodoo to
come up with the best performing total piece possible
among all the variables you choose to throw at it.

Here’s a definition and description from Jason
Calacanis‘ site:

* The Taguchi Method was developed 50 years ago
and has been used with great success to
optimize automobile and other product
manufacturing. More recently, The Taguchi
Method was applied to direct mail and web
applications. The Taguchi Method takes a number
of elements on a page with one or more
alternatives for each element and dictates
exact combinations that will allow you to
estimate the positive or negative effect of
each element/alternative. * There are three
extremely exciting aspects to this approach.
First, by creating a “best page” using the best
performing alternatives for each element,
significant improvement can be achieved.
Second, the length of the test cycle and the
number of visitors required is surprisingly
small. And finally, since the “recipes” are
created using modular element/alternatives,
using a solution like Offermatica, Taguchi
tests can be designed and executed in a
surprisingly small amount of time. * Taguchi
tests have been run on email, PPC ads and
Landing Pages with great success. Where an AB
Split Test might create a 5-10% improvement, a
Taguchi test cycle will regularly return 25-45%
improvement and has been known to improve
results by 100% or more. A test cycle includes
two weeks of testing a large number of elements
in just two alternatives to identify which
elements increase the likelihood of converting
a visitor to a customer, a second test where
the high-impact elements are tested with a
greater number of alternatives, and a final
test of the “best recipe” against the original
page. The test cycle takes from a couple of
days to a month depending on traffic and
variance and can be designed and run without
significant quantitative marketing or
statistics experience.

A killer definition of Taguchi and A/B testing is on
Michel Fortin’s blog. He includes the software
recommended for testing in his post as well.

Another spot to check out is David Bullock’s site.
David is the $100,000,000.00 man. He’s made Fortune 500
companies that much more by working his testing and
tracking voodoo for the over the last decade. He’s got
some great info on the topic on his site.

You now have much of the testing and tracking puzzle
figured out with the above resources.

Quick and Easy Increase In Conversion Tip…

What I want to show you is a simple conversion booster
I use even on blogs. It is a trust thing. And it really
works.

I found my affiliate and personal product sales went up
after I signed up with Hacker Safe. I know, you thought
that only really improved consumer trust on ecommerce
shopping cart sites. I did too.

Until I met a rep at Stompernet who showed me some very
impressive stats for non-shopping cart sites. I’d like
you to take a look at probably the fastest, easiest,
and most effective thing you can do today to improve
your conversions, affiliate sales, and credibility in
your niche.

Hacker Safe is a very serious company with very serious
proof of concept with over 600 split test results for
their security program. It really does a lot for any
kind of website running it.

—About Jack Humphrey—

Jack Humphrey is the editor of the Friday Traffic
Report.  He teaches blog marketing, social marketing,
and link building strategies.  Stop by and subscribe to
his blog at http://www.jackhumphrey.com

Popularity: 14% [?]

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Write Articles WITHOUT Writing!

August 23rd, 2008

By Larry Dotson

Face it, writing any article can be a tedious and time consuming task for a beginner or even an expert writer.
Here are four ways to make writing articles a lot easier:
1) Use My Articles – You could add your own name, resource box and web site link to 199 of my prewritten articles. You can even rewrite them if you want. Just allow other people to republish them. For details visit:
http://www.ldpublishing.com/viralarticletoolkit.html
2) Interview An Expert – You could interview an expert in exchange for free publicity. Just ask them questions.
It could be about their personal and/or professional life. You want the interview to be long enough to create an
article.
3) Excerpts Of Information – You could ask a writer or publisher to use excerpts of their information to create an article in exchange for giving them free publicity. You both could share the resource box of the article.
4) Hire A Ghostwriter – You could hire a ghostwriter to write an article for you. They would write it and you could add your name as the author, a resource box and your web site link.

—-

Write Articles WITHOUT WRITING – Add your name,
small ad and web site link to 199 prewritten, rewritable
ezine articles! Just allow other ezine publishers and
webmasters to republish them! It’s that easy! Just visit:
http://www.ldpublishing.com/viralarticletoolkit.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Larry_Dotson

Popularity: 9% [?]

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If Long Copy Stinks, Think Soap

August 21st, 2008

By Michel Fortin

Just two days ago, my friend and copywriter John Riskowitz published one of my articles on long copy to his list, to which one of his subscribers protested.

Coincidentally, his protest points out the fact that commodity products, like soap, do not require long copy. The coincidence is that I agreed with what this person is saying, and in fact I actually posted another article just last week on the very topic of product categories, and the different approaches, including copy length, required for each one.

Academia labels them as convenience products, shopping products, specialty products and unsought products. (Soap, among others, falls into the convenience category.)

However, John’s reponse to his subscriber not only made sense but also offered a powerful lesson I wanted to share with you today. In fact, to add more chutzpah to his reply he used an example originally created by another top copywriter, Drew Eric Whitman, on — of all things — soap!

First, here’s what this person said in response to my article:

Wrong.

The copy must be long ENOUGH to work. Long copy does not help the sale of chewing gum. Long copy does not help the sale of Copy paper. Long copy was not used to sell Generic products in stores.

Chevy doesn’t use long copy. Ford. Toyota. GM. Honda. General Mills. John Deer. All use short copy.

Here was John’s brilliant response to this gentleman, reprinted here with his kind permission:

I agree. The copy only needs to be as long as it takes to do the job. For more complex products and services, longer copy is needed. But even for chewing gum, long versus short is relative.

For example, let’s take a simple product like soap. Not the Ivory or Zest garden variety. Let’s say you sell scented soap in the shape and colors of fruit. In your copy, you could just say, “orange-scented bar soap” or “smells like coconut.”

Instead, why not compare the soaps to the freshest, juiciest slices of Mandarin or Florida oranges?

Or for the coconut-scented soap, why not compare it to the freshly cut coconuts in the sun-soaked western Caribbean… reminiscent of the white meaty centers and the sweet, luscious, milky juice?

If that seems a little over the top, consider that you’re selling more expensive specialized soap. You’re not selling Irish Spring.

Your soap has 2 things going for it:

1) It’s visually beautiful, and…
2) It smells delicious.

To NOT play up the 2 things that make your soap so appealing is missing the boat.

THAT’S what I got out of Michel Fortin’s article on the subject. He’s not saying do long copy just for the sake of being long. And he’s not saying use long and BORING copy either. He’s saying your copy needs to be long enough and persuasive enough to get the job done. And, you’re right: for commodity-type products, you don’t need longer copy. If your USP is price, sometimes stating that fact alone is enough.

For example:

Paper clips – $1.99/box of 500
Paper clips – $3.99/box of 500

Which one would you buy? All things being equal, you’ll probably go for the $1.99/box one, right?

But what is there was a good reason why the $3.99/box one was higher priced? What if they were more heavy-duty, or they have little ridges on them that let them grip the pages better? If that was the case, and YOU sold those higher-priced paper clips, wouldn’t you want to let your market know about it? Or would you keep the same shorter copy as your cheaper competition.

So long versus short copy is a relative thing. You obviously don’t need a 24-page magalog to sell chewing gum…unless your gum cured cancer. Or had a special vitamin and mineral supplement that reduced the risk of heart attack and stroke. Then you might need testimonials from doctors, pharmacists, and other experts. Testimonials from existing customers who swear by your gum. You need an avalanche of proof.

And as far as car companies not using long copy, some of them do. If you’re on their mailing list you might get some. Some of them don’t, because of the way their advertising agencies work. (Remember those Superbowl ads? Do you remember any of the products in those ads? I’m guessing very few.) But they all should use targeted direct mail with long copy to supplement their existing advertising.

The fact of the matter is, most car commercials suck, in my opinion. You see the same ad all the time: a car driving out in the country or some other place. Do you really remember which car goes with which ad?

Did you ever see David Olgivy’s ad for Rolls-Royce? The one with the headline, “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.” He used longer copy in that ad than most other car companies did. Not a 12 page sales letter, because it was a space ad. But longer than the other car companies’ shorter copy.

And that ad was responsible for breaking sales records for Rolls-Royce.

I hope I didn’t go a little overboard here. I just wanted to say that in principle I agree with you. But I also agree with Michel.

What do you think? I always welcome healthy discussion on subjects such as these. I always invariably end up learning a thing or two.

Best Regards,
John

— About the Author —
Michel Fortin is a direct response copywriter, marketing strategy consultant, and instrumental in some of the most lucrative online businesses and wildly successful marketing campaigns to ever hit the web. For more articles like this one, please visit his blog at http://www.michelfortin.com/ and subscribe to his RSS feed.

Popularity: 27% [?]

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