Most ads are boring…
If you turn on the TV most of the ads will make your eyes glaze over. They’re easier to ignore than pay attention to.
Online it’s even worse. There are probably 100 horrible sales letters online for every good one. How often do you come across a sales letter online that grabs and keeps your attention from beginning to end?
It’s a pretty rare thing to see, yet if you want to maximize conversions you need to make your ads easier to read than ignore…
If no one pays attention to your ad, no one’s going to buy from it. So what’s the trick to keeping a visitor glued to your message until they hit the order button?
It’s Momentum…
Joe Sugarman calls it the “slippery slide”. You want the reader to start reading your copy and be captivated from beginning to end.
This is a lot easier said than done…
Here’s a few quick tips on how to do it…
- Always Write To Be Read… Starting with the headline, the first sale you have to make is selling people on spending their most valuable asset – Time – on reading your advertisement… Never forget that.
- Shorter Is Better… Wasted words have no place in sales copy. Keep paragraphs and sentences short… It’s easy to read and less intimidating…
- Break It Up… Use headings, bullets, white space and images to break the text up and propel the reader forward…
- Be Interesting… If you can write ads that are good enough to be read for entertainment value alone, you’ve got the readership problem solved…
You Need To Build Momentum From The Very First Sentence…
Your biggest challenge is the beginning of the ad…
The only job of your headline is to get them to read the first sentence.
The only job of the first sentence is to get them to keep reading, and you need to keep this in mind for throughout your entire sales letter.
Use short sentences and paragraphs at the beginning to keep the letter from looking too intimidating. Once someone commits to reading roughly 30% of your letter, as long as you keep it interesting and keep that momentum going, they’ll usually read the entire thing…
And if you can keep them interested enough to read your entire sales letter, assuming all of the other gears in the sales machine are in place, you stand a pretty good shot at making the sale.
Make your ads easier to read than ignore.
Peace,
-Scott Murdaugh