It seems I’ve once again managed to be away from here a little longer than I originally planned. And, while I’ve been playing catch-up with some Internet happenings, I thought this bit of information about sales letters might be of interest. So, here’s my piece…

People include all kinds of sales pitch in their sales letter, yet sometimes they will still not achieve the results they want. The importance of a sales letter is likened to having a shop to sell cars. If the looks of your shop isn’t delivering a good impression, no one will be buying your cars.

So, you must make sure your sales letter has answers to the most basic questions, and encourages interest in your visitors towards your product.

Here are five specific questions to consider when writing a sales letter:

1. What’s in it for me?
The number one rule of salesmanship – people only buy for one reason, which is to get the results from a product, and what they will receive from it. To achieve this result, you must quickly catch their attention right off the bat, starting with your headline. Create a very convincing headline and in that one shot tell your visitors what they will get.

2. How will my life be better?
Here, you have to understand the emotional appeals that attract your prospects like bees to honey. So think about what your potential customers want. Such as things like whether they want to become richer, smarter, better looking, thinner or more popular? Do they want to save time, money or effort?

Study your niche market until you know what emotional buttons to push, and you’ll instantly see a huge increase in your sales. Use their desires to attract them, that’s where you will get them nodding their heads, and they’ll continue reading right to the end.

3. Why should I trust you?
People are skeptical when something requires them to take out their wallets in order to buy a certain product. Thus, you need to clear their doubts by providing positive testimonials from your previous customers. You can also emphasize the benefits of your product.

If you don’t have testimonials for your product, search for forums related to your niche and offer to give a complimentary copy in exchange for a testimonial. Usually you will get a hot response in no time.

4. What will happen if they say no?
Actually, you are not going to let them say no; that’s it. Remind them about the problems they are having, the frustrations, how much money they have, or how sad their lives are currently. Tell them how they can change all of these in one easy shot just by a small investment in your product.

5. Will I be stuck with your product?
This is where you seal the deal. Tell them you provide a 100% satisfaction guarantee, and they must get it now. The most important thing is to make your offer strong enough you get them to buy.

The rest depends on their choices.

It’s interesting to note that 70% of the people who purchase a product will not refund it unless they have seen something similar before, or if from the beginning their original plan has been to only “borrow” it.

So, when you have all these points in your sales letter in answer your prospects’ questions, not only will you gain an unfair advantage over your competition you’ll also let your prospect know you truly care about their problems.
They’ll also easily know you have the solution they need!

With that said, take a look here; that’s where I discuss some of the services I provide that might help you in your online marketing activities.

Yours in writing sales letters,

I’ve been somewhat “offline” these last few days, although I was really on…just perhaps working somewhat at half-staff; it seems my “main computer” is having work issues or something because after I had it “tuned up” it immediately went into hibernation when I brought it home.

Which means, it did the exact same thing it did (like shut off) before I took it in to be tuned up!

Since I’ve finally got my files, documents, software and the like transferred to my extra (now main) computer, I don’t have to lay as low as before and can get back into the swing of things.

And just in time to let you know that I have some exciting news. Traci Knoppe, creator of the “Beginner to Blogger in 4 Weeks” ecourse is offering a physical delivery DVD!

Traci says, “This is perfect for those folks who want to work at their own pace, and don’t want to wait 4 weeks to get all the lessons.

This is the exact same content – all the PDFs and videos all on one DVD!

The price for the DVD is $67. The DVDs will ship to each customer within 48 hours of their order.

So, feel free to check it out here.

Yours in learning blogging,

Okay, so you’ve written a “killer” article that can help you stand out in the crowd. But, will it? Check out these tips to see if they apply to your article:

1. Your Target Market Niche

Often, article authors will send their article to the wrong target market/niche directory. Make sure your target audience will have access to it. It’s best to try to not blast every ezine publisher on the web. If you are niche specific, you’ll have a better chance for your article to be seen by your target market.

2. What’s It About?

It you’re sending your article to an online publisher, be sure to include the headline of your article in the subject of your email. This means, actually include the title of the article rather than just writing “New Article for Submission”.

3. It’s Not About You

Sometimes when article authors write articles promoting their products or affiliate programs, they spend their time, and the space in their article, writing about–themselves. As a result, many article directories will reject the article because it’s “too advertisy” or “too salesy”.

Information about your business, your services and you go in the Resource box, along with active links to your product or service.

Your readers will also quickly click to your Web site if you give something away, or if you offer a free bonus.

Yours In Writing Articles,

Pay Attention to Your Inner Talk

I have BAD news and GOOD news…the bad news is my main computer has taken a turn for the worse and has been sent to the “infirmary”! When my computer kept shutting off after I had turned it on, and did this several times in a row over one morning last week, I decided it was probably a good time to have someone with a lot more experience than I look at it.

The GOOD news is two-fold.

When I took my computer in, I was informed they were having “free tuneups” all this week…so I’m getting it looked at, cleaned, etc., initially at no cost! Woo hoo!

The other “good news” is I finally listened to me. And it’s paid off. If you’ve been reading along here regularly, you know sometimes suggest tasks you might perform, or various products and tools that could help you in your business.

One of my tips was to do regular backups. Which I have been doing regularly, using Carbonite Online Backup.

Fortunately, I’ve had a second computer that I’ve used off and on the last few months more for “turning on and turning off”, checking online email, surfing the web, all while taking my time getting it set up so I could begin to use it on a regular basis.

One of the other recent suggestions I’ve written about was to use PC Mover to transfer files from an old computer to a new computer. Luckily, I had that “moving day” about three weeks ago.

So, this past weekend I logged in to Carbonite, selected their “Restore” files feature (to get Carbonite installed on my new computer) and to begin the “restore” of my files.

So, I”m not missing a beat…well, I am a little because of the file transfer time…but the good news is I am not losing my files.

Note to self: Pay attention to those “inner voices” more often!

Yours in Learning,

If you’re like me, as one who is learning Internet marketing, you have questions about customer care in regard to your online business. While you’re eager to convince just about everyone you run into to hop on board with you, you could easily be spending your precious time, resources and money on people who just don’t really fit into the mix.

When working with niches and sales funnels, it’s important for you to know not everyone will want to follow you. And frankly, you probably don’t want them to anyhow.

If it’s not “their” niche, they aren’t going to get any use from it, and your time and resources could be better used somewhere else.

Understand Buying Behavior – It’s important to understand the buying triggers and purchasing behavior of your audience. It’s well-know, that people tend to buy from those they know, have established confidence in, and like.

And you can achieve all of these things with your customers without ever coming fact to face with them. But it does take some time, crafting your email messages with a slightly personal tone, and following those with trusting actions.

In other words, a little TLC.

It is possible to connect with people connect using these methods, your customers will feel they know you, even if they’ve never heard your voice or seen more than a picture of you on an Internet web page on their computer screen.

Valuable Information – You can also keep your customers happy and coming back to you, often with much excitement, when you give them a consistent supply of valuable information relative to the niche in question.

This information can range from e-books to articles and reports to audio sessions. It’s mostly dependent upon your particular niche sales funnel and what your customer base actually needs.

Consistent Communication - Encourage your Web site visitors and customers to come back often by offering a newsletter or a free product if they sign up to receive additional information from you. Offering quality resources makes it easier for even the most reluctant person to divulge their contact information to you, which enables you to connect with them on a regular basis.

It’s essential that you take care of your prospects and customers to keeping them engaged in your sales funnel.

They’ll appreciate the effort you put in to the service you are providing when they see something of good or even great quality offered on a consistent basis. It’s things like that that will keep your visitors and customers loyal to you. They’ll also be encouraged to recommend your site to their friends, too.

Try it, and see what happens.

Yours in Customer Care,

Have you heard?

Many marketers around the Internet think “free traffic” is just a waste of time; it is not effective!

Others feel that is not true, but rather it’s an excellent way to get visitors to your Web site in a positive flow.

Does it really matter how they get there, as long as they do?

After all, the reason to have a Web site in the first place is to get visitors and clients to know you, to relate to you, and to come to your Web site regularly. Whether you are able to effectively utilize and engage them once they get there will usually depend upon many factors.

Including you!

So it’s important to plan for them before they get there. If you have products or services, you’ll want to present them in the best possible way. Your real focus must be to somehow “stand out”, to make your customers want to grab your stuff right then and there.

Short of that, your message, your copy, your “draw” must be one that will coax them to come back later. And again and again!

While you’re at it, make sure to have a way to grab their contact information. You can then regularly follow-up with them over a long period of time.

Additionally, the message you convey in any articles you market, and your blog, must also target your visitor.

So, getting free traffic to your site is all good.

It’s what you do once you’ve got the traffic that could be bad!

Yours in Getting Traffic,

It’s tomorrow now, so here are the rest of the different “kinds” of ideas for blog posts…which I started yesterday.

1. The INDEX Blog Post

Blog readers love lists!

Just look at the most popular blogs; you’ll see that they make good use out of this type of blog post. Because, you can make lists fit any niche topic imaginable.

Lists are great ways to convey information online because they can be easily scanned by web readers who like to skim over information.

You can create resource lists that will help your readers find information on your niche. You can also create lists of different ways to accomplish a goal in a niche, like “5 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Sales Letter.” The possibilities are endless!

2. The INTERVIEW Blog Post

Although these require a bit of preparation, they can be very valuable to your blog. For instance, you can interview someone in your niche and share the results of the interview with your blog readers.

This will not only help provide valuable content for your blog, but you can also get more traffic to your blog. Likely, the person who you are interviewing will publicize the event on their blog and around the ‘net which will bring more traffic back to you.

3. The INSTRUCTION Blog Post

Like quick tips, how to posts help you provide valuable information to your readers. However, unlike quick tips, these posts go into detail on a certain topic. Some how to posts are even separated out into two or three part courses.

For ideas on what to create how to posts about, look at the most frequently asked questions in your niche and develop posts around those topics.

So there they are; a collection of five tips (from yesterday and today) to help you get noticed and to increase traffic to your site.

Yours in Unique Blog Posting,

You know it, I know it!

Just like candy and pizza and movies and books, blog posts come in many different forms and lengths. So if you want to keep your blog fresh and interesting, you should post often!

And coming up with different types of blog posts will help to keep your audience interested.

It will also keep you from getting bored with your blog.

Whether you are blogging to make money directly from the blog or blogging to drive traffic to an affiliate program, you should know about five kinds of blog posts I’m going to describe; two kinds in this post and three tomorrow.

1. The INSPECTION Blog Post.

Review blog posts can help you monetize your blog. You “inspect” (take a closer look at) a product. When you review a product and include an affiliate link, you’ll make a commission off of each sale generated with your affiliate link.

Review blog posts should go over some of the major plusses and minuses of the product. Even if you loved the product, you should keep your review balanced by mentioning a few things that could have been improved. Your audience will appreciate your honesty and be more likely to trust your recommendation.

2. The INSIGHTS Blog Post.

Quick tips are great “in between” posts since they are so short. They are normally between 100 and 250 words.

If you’ve got a great bit of information you want to share with your niche that doesn’t really warrant a full blog post, you can just post a quick tip. The tip should focus on one key area of the niche. For example, “How to Grease a Muffin Pan” is a perfect quick tip article for a cooking blog.

That’s it for today!

Tomorrow, I’ll post three more tips from this 5-Part Series that will give you some ideas on how to be a little out of the ordinary as you plan and post to your blog. Until tomorrow, I challenge you to practice a blog post or two, with the help of these ideas.

Yours in Unique Blog Posting,

Over the many years I spent in a downtown office setting, I had occasion to compose and to write thousands of letters, reports, grants, and other office documents to relay my message to clients and/or customers. During those years, it was important that what I was passing on to the reader was easy-to-read and to understand.

So, the way I went about it was to use words that were pretty simple and words that anyone reading would most likely be able to know what I was saying.

Although the inclination is for you to sometimes ramp up how smart you think you might be, bigger is not always better; so using words that have your reader either reading your work with a dictionary close at hand or commenting “What did she just say?” is a good sign you might want to rethink what you’re about to write–or what you’ve just written.

After all, you’re writing to “pass on” a message, you’re not writing to impress your reader with how many big words you can put into two sentences.

Besides, you defeat the real reason you’ve set out to put your thoughts into a memo or letter in the first place.

So the next time you sit down to write, choose your words correctly and make them be words your readers can understand. You’ll come off just as easily knowing what you’re talking about as you will if you use words that only you know how to spell and only you know what you’re saying.

You’ll also show you’re just as smart using small words as you are using big ones.

And as a result your readers and customers will be more inclined to come back to you on a regular basis.

“Simple-y” yours,

Yesterday, I revealed one of my deepest, darkest secrets…how I came to have a set of pots and pans in my cupboards that I acquired from a door-to-door salesman; a very persistent door-to-door salesman.

So now, I’ll continue my comments about today’s “persistent salesman”, the autoresponder.

You can create separate campaigns (using a list of people’s email addresses) with different messages for different types of products.

It is much easier to sell to a list of people that have a common interest than to just a common list. Set up each campaign with a series of pre-programmed messages to go out at a certain interval of days; eg. Instant, Day 3, Day 7 etc., etc. Encourage your list to take action, and use your words to help them see the benefits of doing that.

After you set it up once, this can all happen automatically as soon as the prospect subscribes to your list. You can just tweak the messages and improve on them over time until you have the perfect salesperson staying in contact with your customer and ensuring that you have every chance to make a sale. Meanwhile you are sleeping, surfing or working on other money making ideas.

For people to buy from you they need to trust you.

So, regular contact with the person and giving them useful information is a great way to achieve this.

Now before you get too carried away with this idea, are you in this business to send out information or to run a business and make money? You want to be very clear on that because professionally run businesses generally make the most money.

Sure, you want these people to improve their lives, and as a quality Internet Marketer, you always send people valuable information.

But remember this–people’s lives only change when the person changes, and the catalyst for that change is that they made a choice about something. Buying your product can be one of those choices that moves them towards something they want.

So set up a persuasive series of messages in your autoresponder to encourage your readers and list to take action and get your product.

Get them excited about the possibilities.

Continue your series of messages after their purchase to encourage them to take action and use the product to get what they want. If you help them with this, they will be much more likely to buy other products that you introduce to them.

So make sure you have a way to capture people’s email addresses and use the magic of the perfect, persistent salesperson to create credibility and plenty of sales.

No doubt about it, autoresponders are one of your best friends, so use them well.

Yours in persistence,