Insider Advertising Report

Chapter 7: Content (Part 1)

As explained in Chapter 5, the objectives of the Content of a sales page is to build confidence and infuse curiosity.

There are 3 types of confidence you have to build:

1. Prospects' confidence in you,
2. Prospects' confidence in your product / offer,
3. Prospects' confidence in themselves.

Let's use a case study to explain the points...

Below is a sales page that promoted a Forex trading seminar:

As we move down the sales page, I'll highlight several points that are worth discussing.

1) The advertiser emphasized in the headline that you don't need to know anything about Forex.

This builds the confidence of the prospect in themselves.

2) The advertiser started off with proof of earning.

This builds the confidence of the prospect in the trainer as well as the trading system, which is the product.

3) Another thing that is worth noting is that the advertiser used Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3 to lead the prospects.

This is a powerful strategy because prospects are lazy. They don't like to think. They like to be led.

If you tell them step by step what to do, many will follow.

In this example, the advertiser led the prospects to downloading a FREE report in step 2. Many prospects did that.

Conclusion

This sales page started off building confidence by showing their proof of earnings. It is half the battle won already.

Throughout the rest of the sales page (which is not shown here), the advertiser continued to provide more proofs of how he made money from Forex.

He also showed the testimonials of his students, which further showed the prospects how easy it was to make money from Forex. This will further increase the confidence of the prospects in themselves.

Some people say such a sales page format is only applicable to money making opportunities. This is not true.

Let me show you another example that uses a similar format.

It's the chatline service that I showed you in the previous chapter.

In the previous chapter, I've only shown you the headline. Let's now look at the content of the sales page and see if you can identify any similarity between this ad and the Forex ad.

Likewise, as we move down the sales page, I'll highlight some points that are worth discussing.

1) Two important questions to address at the beginning of a sales page are :

Who are you?

Why should I believe in you?

The answers to these questions will build your prospects' confidence in you.

In this ad, I started by saying they are one of the First and Most Established Chatlines in Singapore.

The same objective was achieved in the previous example in which the advertiser showed his proof of earnings.

2) I made it easier for the prospects to read through by using a Q&A format.

Remember, a sales page should be written to be scanned, not to be read.

3) Similar to the Forex example, I used steps 1, 2, 3 and a future step to lead the prospects.

Prospects like to be led. Tell them what to do and they will follow.

4) See how often the words "interesting" and "easy" are used in the sales page.

When prospects read a sales page, they won't remember what they have read. They only remember how they feel about the whole offer. By repeatedly telling them that "it's interesting", "it's easy", "you'll love it", they will get an impression that it's interesting, easy and they will love it!

5) Last but not least, notice how often I repeat the telephone number and how I purposely use the same color scheme of red for the telephone number throughout the sales page? This is because the whole purpose of the sales page is to ask the prospects to call that number!

Special Case - Sales Page For List Building

What I've shown you above are typical sales pages that can be used for almost all kinds of advertising purposes.

There is one type of sales page that is specially used for list building, i.e. to capture email addresses of the prospects.

Some marketers call it a Squeeze Page.

Don't be intimidated by all these jargons. Squeeze page or sales page, they are simply a web page. The only difference is Squeeze Page is short. It's objective is to collect prospects' emails.

Why collect prospects' emails?

Here is the problem: Your prospects don't trust you nor your product. They don't even trust that they can do it. What can you do?

The solution: Collect your prospects' email addresses. Follow up with them. Send them more info and tips so as to build their confidence in you, your product and themselves.

This is actually the top secret of how most online marketers become successful.

How to create an effective Squeeze Page?

Like a Sales Page, you can build the 3 aspects of confidence. You can also infuse Curiosity.

If you can stir up your prospects inquisitiveness, they will be willing to give you their email addresses to find out further.

This is similar to having a USP, as what we've discussed in Chapter 5.

If you have a me-too offer, people will not be interested in your offer. This is especially true in the internet marketing industry, which is dominated by many creative and savvy marketers.

To put your offer in the limelight, it requires some creative juice from you.

Here is a good example of an advertiser who successfully converted 15% of the traffic into his list and made money at the same time!

Some background information about this ad: If you have been in the internet marketing industry for some time, you may have seen several $1 offers, whereby a marketer pays you $1 for every lead you send to him.

In the past, most advertisers who promoted such a campaign would simply advertise the original sales page from the creator of the program. The response was average. However, in this example, the advertiser combined this money making opportunity with list building.

He basically wrote a 'mind-boggling' headline and left the prospects thinking how on earth they've made a dollar.

He then told them that he had made $327.50 in a similar event and they can do the same thing if they opt in to his list and get a copy of the report.

The initial response from this ad was 30%!! But the overall response was 15%, probably because the campaign had spread too fast by many other marketers and many people had downloaded the report.

But 15% conversion was still good. Moreover, he made an extra $512 while building this list.

Be creative and think out of the box. Make people curious about your offer. If you can do that, people will be eager to give you their email addresses to quench their curiosity.

But there is a warning for you.

People may opt in on curiosity, but they will only buy on confidence!

Bear this in mind in your list building exercise, then you will not go wrong.

Once people opt in, your task is to build confidence.

Forget about sales. Focus on building confidence.

Once confidence is built, sales will come naturally.

An Ugly Squeeze Page That Converts Like Crazy!

Here is another example in a non-internet marketing industry.

This ad is extremely simple.

It doesn't even have an opt-in form because the advertiser wasn't tech savvy.

But it converts.

The way the squeeze page is written plays a part in the conversion, but what is more important is the idea of saving 80% on handphone bill and making money at the same time, which is a strong USP by itself.

Having an interesting program is enough to stir up people's curiosity. The job of the squeeze page is to convey the novelty of the program and build confidence.

When the advertiser, Eve, approached me, she said she had no idea how to create a webpage nor prepare a sales page. Seeing the potential in this product, I decided to help her.

First, I asked her to give me 3 reasons why she liked the service.

You see, there must be a reason why you choose to promote certain product. Your reason may well be the reason why other people will like the product too.

As an affiliate, instead of promoting the corporate website of the product you wish to promote, you should prepare a simple page like the one above and tell your prospects why you think the product is the best.

If Eve were to advertise the corporate website of the company that provides this alternative mobile phone service, I'm quite sure that the result wouldn't be as good.

I'm speaking from experience because I've seen many other similar types of products such as save money on petrol and make money watching cable TV, but in most cases, the advertisers simply advertised the corporate website.

There was a lack of personal touch or trust. In other words, there was a lack of confidence.

On the other hand, if you share your experience with the product and provide your personal email so that people can email you and seek further clarification, it will be many times more convincing than a professional sales page.

This was exactly what I planned to do for Eve.

With the 3 reasons she gave me, the next thing I suggested to her was to write a simple letter that started with

"Sorry about this simple webpage, I am not internet savvy and I don't know anything about web design. But ...."

This is to compensate for the simple squeeze page and position Eve as a next door girl trying to share a good product with the prospects.

Finally, she gave me a raw sales page that looked similar to the final squeeze page. I did some formatting, highlighted some important points, used different colors to make the sales copy easier to read and underlined the words save money and passive income to further emphasize on these two 'baits'.

This strategy has been proven to work. Eve had since grown to become one of the achievers in the business. Her subsequent ads on other products looked much nicer than this one, but the concept was still the same.

In the next chapter, we are going to look at more concepts that you can use when preparing the sales page.