Direct marketers understand this. Every time you open your mailbox and get a letter offering you yet another credit card, every word in that letter has been tested to evoke the maximum response for its target market. Direct marketers don’t write one letter and send it to a million people—they write dozens of letters and send them to a small list of people to test the response rates. They send the winner to the rest of the million on the list.

Web marketing is no different, except you can do even more testing for less money in a shorter amount of time. You may not need to subject every word on every page to testing—I know that you have a life—but most companies don’t do any testing at all.

Put the page up. We’re done.

Well, yeah, you’re "done" but in a different way than you intended. You’re cooked. Your page won’t work. Because it never does on the first try.

So, yes, use all the tips you can to do a better job of creating the right words. But remember too that the most important tip is to get feedback on your customer’s response and try something else. Over and over again. Eventually you will get something that really works. (And then you keep tweaking that, too.)

So stop the "one and done." Pick just one page on your site designed to convert (no, not the home page). Pick a page that you know the purpose of—maybe the latest special offer for your top product. Come up with several versions of that page and use multivariate testing to test them all. You’ll find that some of your new ideas are undoubtedly better than what you have on the page now. Some companies report 30% gains in conversion rate after a year of multivariate testing.

So what are you waiting for?

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]]> http://www.webpronews.com/the-secret-of-writing-good-copy-2007-10/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/copy-writers-see-yourself-as-the-product-2007-01 http://www.webpronews.com/copy-writers-see-yourself-as-the-product-2007-01#comments Wed, 24 Jan 2007 14:23:03 +0000 Chris Marlow http://www.webpronews.com/?p=34703 When I teach my copywriters and other coaching students how to package themselves, I use a specific formula to get them from “ground zero” to a “complete package.”

Although there’s not enough room to share the entire process here, I can highlight three of the most critical elements of crafting your own personal freelance lead-generation machine.

The first step requires you to see yourself as a product or service, because in fact, that’s what you are. Clients come to marketing agencies because they want to sell a product or a service. If you think of yourself in the same vein, as a commodity, it becomes more apparent what you must do in order to market yourself effectively.

Fill Out A ‘Creative Brief’ With Yourself As the Product

An exercise I often suggest to my coaching students is to fill out a Creative Brief with themselves as the service to be sold. (A Creative Brief is a powerful document that defines every aspect of a direct marketing promotion. There are many for free on the Web.)

A good Creative Brief forces you to answer such basic questions as “Who is my target market?” “What is my unique selling proposition?” and “What is my offer?”

By getting a firm grip on what your long-term goals are (e.g., earn $100,000 per year as a white paper specialist, or build a first year psychology practice), you’ll have a better idea of what markets you should target for your promotions.

Determine Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

For many of my coaching students, newcomers as well as established pros, the process of creating a USP is often daunting, then enlightening, and when we’re finished, exhilarating!

When I ask “What sets you apart from everyone else in your space?” my students usually don’t have an answer. And off we go on a discovery mission. Often it takes just one to two coaching sessions for the two of us to discover and develop a powerful USP, even for students transitioning from careers that seem entirely unrelated to the field of business they’re working in, or transitioning to.

This is one of my favorite moments in coaching, because it’s usually an “ah ha” moment for my students. Once they have a well-defined USP, they can suddenly see the power of their own positioning. No longer will they feel insecure when dealing with potential clients, because they can say with confidence, “THIS is why you should hire me above all others!”

Your unique selling proposition should become the underlying message throughout all of your marketing materials.

Do You Have An Offer?

Every direct mail promotion has an offer. That’s a fundamental of direct marketing. And you, as a solopreneur, should be using the strongest offer you can come up with.

Your offer is the “lead capture mechanism” of your business. If you support your USP in your offer, you strengthen your positioning with “proof.”

For instance, I trade on a history of higher than average response rates. I support it with my free “Direct Response Scorecard,” which lists the results of many of my direct mail and online projects. In a separate document I add even deeper support with Case Studies of many of the “mentions” found in my Scorecard.

Whatever you decide to offer potential prospects, make sure it’s something they’ll want, rather than something you’d like to create. Since few copywriters offer a Direct Response Scorecard, I believe that my offer plays upon a certain level of curiosity.

My coaching students offer valuable free information, such as a White Paper or free report. In every case however, their offer supports their USP. By creating an offer that supports your USP, your marketing materials can do most of the selling, allowing you to close the sale with much more speed and confidence.

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