Free Internet Marketing Advice - How to Make Money Online

Subscribe

  • Subscribe

Create Profitable Online Sales Pages

Your website won’t sell a thing.  Sales pages are designed for selling.  The best web sales pages:

1.  Graphically Vertical

Webpages blow all the information at you in one shotgun blast.  Internal links, external links, images, text, and more.  By contrast, effective sales pages are much like their print-era ancestors:  long and narrow.  The main flow is vertical, moving from top to bottom.

2.  Present a “Story”

Webpages have no narrative flow, no story, no argument.  That’s not their design.

If you’re selling something, you’re making an argument, telling a story.

An argument is different now than it was five minutes ago.  An argument is different on page 5 than it was on page 2.  It has progression.  It builds and climaxes to seal the conversion.  Seth Godin’s book All Marketers Are Liars discusses marketing as storytelling.

3.  Work in Concert with Great Web Sales Copy

Great sales copy pushes product.  All those photos and embedded YouTubes and Camtasias are great, but copy is king.  And we’re not just saying that because it’s our business.

But sales copy alone does not push product.  Sometimes a client hires Search Results LLC to write copy–just copy.  In many of those instances, we take the extra time and expense of writing up that sales copy within the graphically-rich environment of a sales page mock-up.  We like to see how it will look in the end:  with headers, images, columns, tables, and so on.

4.  Allow the Eyes to Move Around

Great web-based sales pages generally move the reader from top to bottom.  But also give your reader’s eyes a chance to skip around.  Use text boxes.  Throw in a short table.  Use images–but sparingly.  Unrelieved top-to-bottom reading loses readers.

5.  Hinder Escape

No external links in great web sales pages.  Keep the internal links to a minimum.  With any story, you want the audience engaged.  When a moviegoer visits the lobby to get Milk Duds, they lose the story’s thread–and their interest.

6.  Revolve Around One Major Point

Our product is best.  Our product is cheaper.  Our product works underwater.

Makes sense, right?  But you’ll be surprised at how many web sales pages don’t push one overarching point.

7.  Consider SEO and PPC

Could the old Madison Avenue advertising hacks have imagined that sales letters would some day turn up in random searches on a computer network?  They delivered them by good old U.S. Mail, by golly.  But with these new-fangled computers they’ve got nowadays–you really have to think about keywords, tags, meta.  All those basic SEO concepts.  After all, isn’t this why we’re calling these things web sales pages?

With organic search you wait forever for the search engines to sprinkle holy water over your site and bless it.  But pay-per-click, like Google AdWords, generates tons of directed traffic within 45 minutes.  Fortify your sales page against the onslaught of AdWords.  Stay on top of Google.  If your understanding of AdWords is last month, then it’s already a month old.