:Article Marketing At Its Best

If you are selling your house you want it to be presentable so that whoever is interested wants to buy it. It is not like you can just put your house up for sale and not do anything to make it look better and expect to get top dollar for it. If you don’t want to do it yourself, then get a company that will come in and do it for you. For just a few thousand dollars they will come and make your place look inviting for the possible buyers. They can make it so when the prospects come in, they can’t refuse it. They want the house so bad that you will get full price. So for a few thousand, you could end up with way more than that.

If you have a yard, then you will need to get landscapers to come in and make it green and beautiful. Have them plant flowers and trees and make the grass look great. Get rid of any clutter or garbage. People can often make a decision if they want to buy a house within the first two seconds of seeing it. That first impression counts. Seeing it and smelling it are very important. Pretend that you are a prospective buyer looking at it for the first time. Imagine yourself in their shoes and you should be able to sell your house that much faster.

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Ask Yourself Some Questions. How good is your sales letter? The old adage: “Sell the sizzle, not the steak” is as relevant now as it was in the old days of door knocking.

If I buy your product, how will I benefit? • Will it help me to become rich? • A better person? • Happier? • Better looking? • Will it make me more attractive to the opposite sex?

Convince me of just one of these, or similar things and the price you charge will not matter.

Let’s look at the sales letter. • Has It gone stale? • How good was it in the first instance? • Were you happy with the initial response? • If so, what went wrong? • Would a makeover put it right? • Perhaps it just needs a new headline.

If the click through rate is good, it would appear that the headline is doing it’s job. Should the ratio of purchases to clicks-through be poor, I would suggest that the text of the letter is not up to scratch. Just changing a few words here and there can give a quite different impression to the reader.

Whatever you are selling, a very large percentage of the population will not be interested in it. You must aim at those who would get the most benefit from your particular product.

You would not think of advertising fishing rods in a fashion magazine.

It is amazing how many things are aimed at e-zines and other media that have little or no relevance to the product.

Whatever you do, don’t give up. If you have faith in what you are selling, you will find the best methods of promoting it.

When writing an advert concentrate first on the headline. This is the most important part of the project. The headline must capture the reader’s attention. Without a good headline, the best advert in the world will be overlooked and just a waste of space, time and money.

Look now at the text of your sales letter/advert. Are you talking to a real person? Are you explaining what you and your product can do for that person? Do you come across as an honest reliable person? Or is your letter full oh hype with no substance?

Your prospect is not really interested in you. He/She is only interested in what is in it for them. Few people surf the net looking for something to buy. As a general rule they are looking for information. That is the reason that your headline has to stand out from the crowd. It must make them stop and take another look. It must intrigue them enough to make them want to read more. The content of the ad’ must excite them enough to want to purchase something that they did not even know existed just five minutes ago.

Does your advert do that? Writing an advert is not a skill that the majority of people are born with. It is something that needs to be learned. During your lifetime you have learned numerous things that were difficult in the beginning but that you rarely even think about now. They have become part of your lives. Writing adverts and articles is just another thing that you need to learn how to do well.

Looking back at some of my first efforts at writing adverts, it is a wonder that I ever sold anything, but I did, not a lot but I sold enough to realise that with a little practice there was money to be made by anyone with the will to learn and to take proper advice from the experts on how to go about it. (One day I hope to be an expert there is still a lot for me to learn.) It’s an on-going ever evolving process. Study as many adverts as you can. Try to figure out what it is that excites you and what just leaves you cold. Study the headlines. What made you read this one rather than that. Does the author of the advert strike you as honest and knowledgeable? What sort of guarantee is on offer? Be honest with yourself. Would you buy from this person?

Study, Study, study and keep on studying. You have just taken the first step on your way to becoming a very wealthy expert in your chosen field. Don’t let it stop there.

Homer.

Copyright 2006 Homer Farey

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It doesn’t matter whether or not you have your own product to
sell…despite all the opinions to the contrary. Me and a whole
mess of others have made money promoting other peoples’ products.

Sales people are among the highest paid people in the world
because nothing happens until a sale is made.

But there’s one sale that you rarely, if ever, hear about. It’s
the most important sale there is. It’s the one sale that, if not
made, will never make you any money.

And that sale is YOU. You have to be sold on the product -
whether your own or not - before you can effectively promote and
sell it to others.

You should be completely, totally and utterly sold on the
product or service itself. You should have a total confidence in
the product or service you’re offering to others.

Yep, the first sale to your success is selling yourself. That’s
the first step.

Step 2 is communicating that confidence to your audience.

Funny thing, though, we find that the very definition of money
is…

An idea backed with confidence.

The product or service is the idea. Do you have total
confidence in the product or service that you’re offering to
others? If so, are you effectively communicating that confidence
to others so they, too, gain confidence in that product or
service?

See, the ‘confidence’ part of the definition of money is the
most difficult part to master. There are many, many parts and
steps to confidence.

‘Confidence’ could be said to be ‘the taking of the correct
actions and overcoming the barriers toward a known and
acceptable goal.’

Though confidence itself is a bit deeper than that, going
through the correct actions and blasting through those barriers
that pop up will give you confidence.

The more and the bigger barriers that you overcome, the more
unshakable your confidence becomes.

Making mistakes and failure are two of those barriers that pop
up…and quite frequently at that.

They teach us what the wrong actions are. They give us
character. They teach us, by default, how to succeed.

But that still doesn’t teach you how to communicate your
confidence to your audience so they, too, gain your
confidence…or at least enough confidence to take some kind of
action. (That ’some kind of action’ could be signing up for a
free ezine, asking for more information, leaving their email
address for something free…or any other step in a multi- step
marketing campaign.)

I can’t teach you how to communicate your confidence in a short
article, but I can teach you some basics you can use today to
help you increase your sales.

BASIC 1: Read the sales letter you have for one of the products
that you’re offering to others. Only read what’s actually
written, and pay particular attention to your headline. Does
your sales letter make YOU want it?

(If you don’t have a sales letter for every product you offer,
you should write one and lay everything on the line, tell the
whole relevant story and create want and curiosity.)

BASIC 2: Your audience buys results, not products. Does your
sales letter tell over and over, and in different ways exactly
how the product or service will enhance their lives? Bullet
points are good for doing that.

BASIC 3: People decide to buy for emotional reasons, then they
seek to justify their decision with facts and logic. That’s one
thing your bonuses and guarantee are for.

BASIC 4: Curiosity Rules. You lead your reader through your copy
with curiosity. You let them know what the product or service
is, how their lives will be made easier quickly, how simple it
is, that they can do it, and how to get it. You never tell how
it is done. (Very few exceptions)

BASIC 5: Building credibility boils down to getting personal and
almost intimate (not sexual) with your reader. Let him or her
know how to contact you, how you’ve helped others - preferably
with testimonials, but not necessarily if your product or
service is brand new. (That’s covered in a different article
altogether.) Tell them about yourself in such a way so they
trust you.

BASIC 6: Ease of order and quickness of delivery. The easier it
is to order, the more orders you’ll get. The quicker the
delivery, the more orders you’ll get.

BASIC 7: Does your whole letter convey your own personal
confidence in what you’re offering? It better.

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