The truth about long salescopy

If you’ve known me for any length of time, then you know that I am an avid supporter of using long sales letters (10 to 20 pages… or even more!) to promote your products online.

Of course, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but people who dismiss long salesletters because they "contain too much hyperbole"… "they’re too salesy"… or "they’re just too long!"… are missing the point.

A well-written long salesletter is the ONLY thing that can make up for the lack of face-to-face sales time between you and your online customer.

Think about it: If you sell your product from an offline store, you can personally approach a customer who enters your store. You can greet them, answer their questions, and demonstrate the benefits of your product and how it can solve their problem.

And your customer can use this face-to-face contact to assess your product knowledge, decide whether they trust you, and check out the product itself.

Of course, you can’t do that on a web site….

But you can get pretty darn close.

With a long sales letter you can you can mimic all the elements of a face-to-face encounter so your potential customers get everything they need to make the decision to buy.

That’s why a long salesletter is often perfect for selling a single product or service (or a group of very similar products).

And there’s a proven formula to writing an effective salesletter that converts targeted visitors into paying customers. So all YOU have to do is simply follow it!

I mean, I could go on for ages about how to make the most of this formula, but in a nutshell, you just have to:

• Create a problem: Nobody’s looking for products online. They’re looking for solutions to their problems.

  Figure out what problem your target audience faces, and show how you are able to solve it with your product or service.

• Establish your credibility: Explain to your audience what makes you an expert in your particular field — and make sure to include testimonials form happy customers.

• Tell a story: How did you develop or discover your product? Tell a story to build interest, add a human touch to your site, and help your target audience relate to you.

• Provide tons of benefits: Show your visitors exactly how what they stand to gain from using your product.

• Overcome their objections: Try to anticipate the key sticking points that your customers will have questions about… and address them before they need to ask.
  
• Ask for the sale: If you don’t come right out and ASK for the sale, you won’t get the sale. At the end of your salesletter, you need to flat-out ask.

Of course, there’s a lot more to writing a successful sales letter ( in our "Insider Secrets" course we spend nearly 100 pages on this subject alone).

But this formula WORKS.

If you still don’t believe me, you can ask Paul Jerard of Yoga-Teacher-Training.org. Paul won a site review from IMC that included a rewrite of his salesletter.

This is what he had to say:

"We went from $3,000 a month to $9,700 the following month by rewriting the salesletter. Now, I spend about one hour a month making small changes to see if I can increase sales."

So, to the doubters, I say test a long salesletter against your current salescopy and see if it works for you. I’m willing to bet you’ll be VERY pleasantly surprised!