Archive for September, 2009
September 12th, 2009 | 
Author: 
The simple answer is when it does not sell. Now while that may sound like a bit of a throwaway line it does not make it any less true.
The function of a sales letter is fairly basic but a basic letter will not get the job done think about the last time you walked into a store and after you told the assistant what you wanted, say a camera, if all you were told was “Here are the cameras, this is what they cost let me know when you pick one”. How likely do you think you would be to hand over your cash at the till?
Before I go into the differing areas of the letter with you there are two things to remember. The first being, as much if not more effort goes into writing the sales letter for a free item or service as goes into a paid one. The paid item already has a perceived value in your readers mind while with a free item you need to convince them of the value. The second thing to remember is that your aim is to get your reader to want the item, there is a saying in marketing circles that people buy what they want not what they need.
Right, now for the breakdown of your letter. Let’s say your product is called Joe’s Wonder Book.
First on your list is the headline/subject line. The headline is your shop window, it is there to grab the interest and make them read on or open the email. Instead of, Use Joe’s Wonder Book To Improve Your Business, you need to create a need in your reader to keep on reading so try something like 3 Simple Changes That Could Double Your Business In One Month. See the difference, already they can see in their mind what doubling their business would mean to them and if they can do it in one month just by doing 3 simple things it must be worth having a look at. Mission one completed.
Now that you have them reading you need to get them on your side and wanting to know more. The best way for this is to personalise the letter, by this I don’t mean having their name plastered all over it but by making it seem as though it has been written just to them.
One of the simplest ways is to open the letter with a few well chosen questions, but they do need to be worded in such a way that the answers are already known. Something like,
Want to stay one step ahead of your competition?
Do you feel that your business could grow quicker if only you knew how?
Another thing not to forget is the power of just the right amount of fear, fear that their competitors might know something they don’t or that they are not keeping up to date, so you could try,
Do you know how many businesses’s fail because they don’t grow quick enough?
Want to know the one thing that could make sure you are still in business this time next year?
You get the idea. You would of course word these to suit your product but the principles are the same no matter what you are offering. You now have them eager to know more as you have asked the questions that they want the answers to even if they have never asked themselves these question before, all backed up by the fear of not knowing the answers.
In part two we will cover the middle section, the all important closing and the one section that is either left out or even never used that is just as important, in fact could almost double your sales if done correctly.
Dont forget about my free letter writing course, get it HERE
See you then.
Gregg Montgomery
Posted in Marketing, Sales Letter Writing, Training | 
Tags: letter writing, selling, Training | 
1 Comment »
Give-away events, everyone must know what they are by now. You can’t open your inbox without someone promoting one, two or even three of them.
Just in case you have missed seeing these, I will give you a quick rundown on what they are all about. The idea is that everyone gets together and offers a free downloadable gift each. Then you all mail to your lists to get people to sign up and when they download a gift they of course have to supply their name and email so if it is your gift, your list grows, and that’s it in a nutshell.
This worked fine until about a year ago. Up until then there would be one event every month or two, so each one was getting really large numbers of sign ups and you could grow your list by several hundred each time and most of the gifts were fresh and new.
Since then the number of events has started to outgrow the number of people signing up. When you have three or four each month of course, fewer people will be joining each one. Not only that but the same old gifts get recycled event after event and month after month, which also causes fewer to sign up.
How can you tell they are no longer the little goldmine they used to be?
Just look at how they are now run. Keep in mind that the reason you join is that your list is on the small side and this should be the quickest and easiest way to grow it, the guys with the large lists are the ones who run them as they can kick start the event with one mailing.
The big listers grew their list by adding every person who signed up, I don’t have a problem with that, it is their event and they have put the effort in, your list grew by getting people to take your gift. All cool and dandy. Now here is the big BUT, now that numbers are down they feel the need to squeeze the little guy at the bottom but making it a condition of the event that they get sign ups or their gift will be deleted.
The problem with this is that if you have a smallish list not only are you mailing them about the event but so is everyone else so the chances of you getting a sign up are small, therefore you get told to mail harder or get deleted. If you over mail you will lose people of your list because they will see it as spam. Not really what you are after.
There is a way around this and that is to upgrade by paying $17 or $27, good idea if you were getting the numbers out of it but as numbers are low at the moment and not really worth it.
If you want my advice it would be to grab yourself three or four good free products from a recent event, sign up to every one going and rotate the products through them. Then after a month or so grab a couple more new products and repeat. Don’t worry about being deleted, this tends not to happen until a week or two in and the busiest time is normally the first five to eight days. Therefore, you get the best of the event and still have another three or four on the go anyway.
So sign up, enjoy and watch your list grow, slow but grow.
For a list of running and up coming events try HERE
Gregg
I see a lot of people who attend forums ask the senior members if they’d be willing to mentor them, as if having a successful Internet marketing is going to make them successful themselves. This article is going to take a very objective look at the whole business of mentoring and if it indeed will make you successful. This is coming from somebody who mentors and has been mentored himself. So I am speaking from experience.
Let’s first take this from the point of view of the person who is doing the mentoring. Provided that this person knows his stuff, most likely, his mentoring program is all laid out already. He has every step planned and it’s just a matter of walking the person who he is mentoring through the process. Naturally, there will be some questions that will pop up that the mentor will not be able to plan for, but they should be easily answerable. For the most part, the mentor doesn’t have to do an awful lot of work, and in most cases, he is paid very well for this service. So from his standpoint, mentoring is certainly worth his time from a monetary standpoint.
But what about from a results standpoint? After all, this is not just about money. There are easier ways to make a living other than mentoring. Mentoring does take a lot of time. So you want to know that the time you are spending is worth spending. And that’s where the person you are mentoring comes in.
There is an old saying that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink it. The same thing is true about mentoring. You can teach a person everything you know, but unless that person applies what he learns, the mentoring does no good. For that matter, unless the person is able to even understand what he’s learning, the mentoring does no good.
From my own personal experience, about 1% of the people I have mentored actually went on to do anything with it. As most of these people usually just drop off the face of the planet, I can’t honestly say why the mentoring turned out to be a waste of time for both of us. It just was. The sad truth is, most people, once they find out what it takes to be successful online, don’t want to put in the work. They go back to trying to find the easy way.
If you find somebody who is really dedicated, then mentoring is worth is. Problem is, you never really know who is dedicated until you are far into the process.
Article Source: Steven Wagenheim
The three myths about list building that tend to get banded around most are for the most part true. Unfortunately only two are really true and the third, well lets just say that most of the mail you have in your inbox would not be there if it also was true.
Myth 1
You need a list to sell online. This one is true. No one really expects to make sales just by putting a site on the web and waiting for people to find it. Yes you could spend a fortune on Adwords etc. to get it to the top of the search lists but if you had that kind of money to spend why bother trying to sell when you could be on a beach somewhere. So yes you do need a list to sell to if only to off set your Adwords costs and get you in the market.
Myth 2
The money is in the list. Also true but it needs to be qualified by saying that size does matter in this case. It is all a game of numbers. The generally accepted number is 1%. That is an average conversion rate of emails sent out. By that I mean you can hopefully expect 1% of the people who read your mails to buy something. So if you send 100 mails you might expect 1 sale. Not really going to get you far. If you have a list of 10,000 well you do the math.
Myth 3
List building is easy. NOT true, again qualified by unless you already have a large list. Have a look at your emails, how many are promising huge numbers of sign ups in 7 days/30 days or whatever? Oh and just as an aside, how do you get to be told all these wondrous secret plans, that’s right you sign up on to their list. So their list get bigger and you get, well more emails really.
There are many ways to grow a list from scratch but they tend to be slow, time consuming and require a lot of work. This is why so many people give up early on. The pay off though is that once you have a fair sized list it does get easier because you can then be taken seriously by other marketers who will be willing to enter into ad-swaps with you etc.
So be prepared to spend the first several months doing not much more that list building, with the odd sale here and there.
The many list building tactics are matters for many more articles and I hope to get down and have them written up soon.
But whatever you do, stick with it and don’t give up.
Quick Video Of How PLR Can Work For You
If you didn’t know it before, I’ll tell you today. If you want to make big money online, you have to create your own products.
Forget about all the noise about AdSense and affiliate marketing. I’m not saying they cannot make you money, but if you want to build a sustainable internet business, then you must have your own products.
Or why do you think that the big AdSense and affiliate marketing guys have their own products. Even if you don’t sell them well at the beginning, you can offer your products as bonuses to people to come to your site and buy other products through your affiliate links and even to click on your AdSense.
Having said that, I must confess that it is a lot of hard work to create your own product. You have to do the following and more.
- You have to do a market research
- You have to write pages and pages of book
- You have to create ecover graphics.
Heck! Small wonder many people don’t do it.
You can however avoid the above problems and have your own product with your name and copyright on it by investing a little amount of money on Private Label Rights products. It is very easy to do.
So here is a breakdown of how to do it.
1) Purchase a Private Label Product.
2) Brand it as your own by putting your name as the author.
3) Edit it by adding what you want to the contents and also by removing what you don’t want to give it a personal touch. This is important because there will be others out there with the same rights.
4) Create a new ecover for it or edit the source file you were provided with.
5) Go online and sell your product or give away to build your list
Last note: Do not go for a right that is too cheap. If you’ve got a package of 20 products for just $5 then you should know that thousands of other people out there have the same rights.
Also you should buy rights directly from the creator of the products only and not those that bought the rights and are reselling the rights. Buy from only those that say you can only use it for personal business and not the rights to give the rights. No master resell rights.
Follow these tips and you will be creating your own products in the next 24 hours.
Article Source: Akin Alabi
When you submit articles to a newsletter/ezine publisher or a website owner as part of your article marketing campaign, you have to remember that they aren’t going to publish YOUR article for THEIR customers and visitors unless it is high quality content that gives something of value.
If you’re writing articles like crazy as part of your article marketing, but getting very few of them actually published, then you might want to re-evaluate your approach. Are you making one of these crucial article marketing mistakes?
1. Poor Subject Matter:
If you’re going to bother writing articles, write about something that people are interested in reading about. In other words, address a problem and provide a solution within your content. This is your best bet when in comes to article marketing. Content pieces that approach an old problem in a new way or with a new twist work well too — you don’t have to necessarily discover a whole new problem that no one else has ever though of before (If you discover a whole new problem and have the solution you better be thinking of product creation not just an article marketing!).
2. Write With Personality:
No one likes to read text books. Put a little of your own personality into your article marketing and make your content engaging and entertaining as well as informative. If you have a sense of humor, use it.
3. Write For Your Audience:
Don’t distribute content about the value of protein in the American diet to a Russian Political website or the publisher of a podiatry newsletter… They don’t care.
4. Write A Decent Sized Article:
Most publishers would rather an article be a little bit too long than very short. Four hundred word articles just don’t have enough meat in them. Don’t ramble when you’re writing articles, but you’ve got to provide some details if you want to be published.
5. Break Up Your Article:
When writing articles, don’t use three long paragraphs. Break it up into smaller paragraphs with a few single lines, bullets, etc. to make it easier and more enjoyable to read. Again — no one likes to read text books.
6. Spell Check And Grammar:
If you’re writing articles as part of a serious article marketing campaign, then you’ve got to spell check. No one will publish your content if it’s full of spelling and grammar errors.
7. Don’t Write A Sales Letter:
No one will publish an article that reads like a sales letter… period. Article marketing isn’t about selling, it’s about pre-selling.
8. Forget About Affiliate Links:
Use your head… why would anyone use your content article if it’s full of your own affiliate links? Ever hear of the “Golden Rule?” It applies to article marketing too. Would you publish another writer’s article if it were full of his affiliate links? I doubt it.
9. Create A Reasonable Resource Box:
A resource box should tell me who you are, what you do, and how I can get in touch with you. It’s not unlimited advertising space for you to describe every website you run and each product you sell. Article marketing is about providing content, not advertising. That “Golden Rule” thing applies to resource boxes too.
10. Only Write About What You Know:
Even if you’re writing articles based on opinion, get your facts straight. Don’t write content filled with advice that you have no business giving… it will hurt your article marketing campaign.
If you take nothing else away from this discussion, remember that a good article writing campaign always answers “What’s in it for me?”
When you’re writing articles to send to newsletter and website publishers, you have to answer that question on two fronts…
What’s in it for the publisher? Why should they show your content to their customers and visitors? Does it give something of value?
– AND –
What’s in it for the people who will ultimately be reading your article when it’s published?
After all, the idea behind article marketing is to provide some worthy content that compels readers to visit your site, subscribe to your newsletter, or buy your product.
Article marketing can be extremely lucrative… but you’ve got to do it right.
Article Source: Chris Yates
Building your mailing list to what you want it to be may seem like a daunting task when you are not sure about the channels that should be employed to achieve the goals. There are various ways to build it up using paid advertising and, in fact some types, unpaid advertising.
However, not all of it works and not all of it is workable for everyone. Using your money to make more money serves well if you can afford to start something with an investment. If you can not, then you are limited to taking free advertising of the various types; if you are for something new, try an adswap.
Take the traffic from someone else’s website and use that to generate more traffic to your own. The best part about this is that it costs considerably less. Using list members to make list members is a new concept to many of us but it has been proven to work in many situations..
Ad swapping is trading advertisements with some other publisher of ezines or articles which are of the same genre as your own as well as with a list of roughly the same size and interest. In this manner, adswap works when you send the other publishers advertisement to your own list members while the partner in your ad swap does the same with your advertisements.
Promotion of each others lists and consequently each others products does work, particularly if the general interest, numbers and activity of the lists are about the same.
Endorsing someone else’s advertisement can bring you multiple rewards. Cross promotion is a wonderful way to garner new members and increase your website traffic in a relatively short span of time.
As you begin the list to start with, your goal has to be to gather as many new subscribers to that list as you possibly can. Simultaneously, you should entice them to sign up for your mailings; this might be easier if they already have an interest in your topics.
Trading ads on mailing lists will have several advantages:
- It does not require money to accomplish
It helps your mailing list grow more rapidly
- It doesn’t require a great deal of advertising effort.
All one needs is a well-written ad and a well-targeted list to house it. Positive results can be obtained at no cost to you if you find someone who will ad swap with you. Sending the ad through as many different publishers of ezines and articles sites as possible will help to assure that you gather as many new subscribers as you possibly can handle.
In this fashion, you would have built your own mailing list of literally thousands of subscribers, which grows by a few members each day – and all this at no cost. This is certainly not something many website owners can say about their efforts.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Joe_Gilharry
