Landing Page Tips | Finch Sells

Are You Telling Or Are You Selling?

Oct 25 2010

Because there’s a big difference.

Good sales copy is an art that’s slowly being forgotten. Lost under the piles of misinformation about traffic sources, how to get the best CTR and whatever else is the current flavour of the month on Affbuzz. I get the distinct impression that affiliates are forgetting the method in their madness. The fact that wherever they buy traffic from, however many eyeballs they drag to a page, you still have to sell the god damn product you’re promoting.

A successful affiliate campaign is like a jigsaw puzzle. You can have all the traffic sources, all the hottest products and all the best ad ideas. But if you don’t piece them together correctly, you’ve got precisely jack shit. And in my opinion, the piece that keeps getting confined to the affiliate’s peripheral vision is the sales copy.

I don’t think many affiliates are actually that competent when it comes to selling what’s in front of them. And it makes perfect sense because, well you know, not many of us went to marketing school. I sure as hell don’t have a degree in the art (or any other art for that matter), but I have taught myself to appreciate the importance of creating a sales funnel.

And so should you.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in the UK we’re currently facing a spending crisis where you’ll often hear the term “we need to do more with less”. In a slightly different way, I think affiliates are going to soon hijack that quote and apply it to their own businesses. Prices are rising on traffic sources and it’s no longer as easy to get the same CTRs as you were scoring twelve months ago. So you’re going to have to make the most of your advertising outlay. And the best way to do so, in my opinion, is to stop publishing such shitty amateur landing pages.

Stop assuming that x amount of clicks will equal a sale, no matter how good or bad your landing page happens to be. Start working with the mindset of “How can I maximize the likelihood of a conversion with every single click?”

Good sales copy isn’t only noticeable in it’s ability to turn features in to benefits. I won’t waste my time explaining why that’s important. I’m sure most of you already know. But good sales copy is also adept at highlighting the potential stumbling blocks that could prevent a sale – and then eradicating them from the reader’s thoughts.

This is even more important than selling the benefits of a product. You have to be aware that before you make a sale, or a lead, the reader is weighing up two sides of an argument in his head. “Do I stand to gain more by using this product/service than I stand to lose by not using it?”

Unfortunately for you, nearly every potential customer is more inclined to find reasons NOT to buy a product than he is to find reasons why he should. We’re a generation that’s so trained to the monotone world of advertising that it takes a significantly greater number of incentives to outweigh the modern day consumer concerns.

Now you could argue that the acai berry craze proves the argument to be wrong. There was no shortage of buyers there, right? But I’d attribute the acai boom to some incredibly misleading advertising which sufficiently weighted the argument – for those dumb enough – in to making the risk worthwhile.

Look at three of the biggest concerns to the potential customer, and how affiliates neutralized them to eventually force the sale:

Customer thinks: Well, it sounds like it costs a lot of money to buy these wonder supplements and they might not work.
Affiliate says: Not at all! You can have a FREE trial to see for yourself.

Customer thinks: Well, they sound amazing. But has anybody actually tried them and seen results? Where can I find a review?
Affiliates says: I’ve got a dirty great flog with your name on, baby.

Customer thinks: Okay, it’s cheap to try and people are seeing good results. Why is this the first I’ve heard of it?
Affiliates says: Have you not SEEN my “breaking news” YouTube video? What about my box of copy and pasted “As seen on” TV channel logos?! Pretty sure you’ve just had your eyes closed all this time, fatty.

The way to nail that conversion isn’t to explain extreme weight loss in four weeks, list a bunch of exotic ingredients and hope for the best. But to ANTICIPATE what concerns the reader is reacting to as he/she reads through your copy. And if you can pinpoint the source, you can blast those concerns out of the water.

Before I promote any new product, I like to brainstorm as many questions as possible that a potential customer would have. And sometimes you have to dig a little deeper to really understand what’s going through your target market’s mind when you sell to them.

For example, I was doing a little background research to see what would stop a Facebook user from installing a dating application. I learnt more from that research than I ever learnt from posing the question “what do you look for in a dating application?”

One of the things I discovered was that a large percentage of younger users didn’t want to install a dating application in case their friends found out on their profiles. They didn’t want to be seen as virtual dating sad-acts of the twenty first century. It’s something I would never have worked in to my ad creatives before, but armed with the information, you can probably imagine some of the aggressive sales copies I came up with to combat the fears.

When you’re creating your sales funnel, it’s important to place yourself in the reader’s shoes. And don’t be afraid to ask questions that shoot holes in your existing sales copy. Your sales funnel is effectively a corridor heading towards the conversion. The reader normally can’t be bothered to play along and is looking for the first exit out of there. Poor sales copy leaves doors wide open for the reader to justify leaving at any time. It’s your job to keep those doors bolted shut and direct them towards the end of the corridor where your money is made.

The Benefits Of Being A Lazy Disorganized Bastard

Sep 07 2010

My desktop is a barren wasteland. A derelict graveyard of broken down CPA campaigns, rogue index.php redirects and semi-pornographic dating imagery.

I recently made the decision to invest in a new dual screen setup for my Mac. The idea being that with two screens, I’d have one for my emails and one for whatever I’m working on. Well, it didn’t really pan out like that. Blessed with twice the space, I now hoard twice as much shit. There are icons and folders scattered all over the shop. I have landing pages tucked away in places where your computer probably doesn’t have places.

One of the benefits of having a gigantic hard drive is that you rarely need to spare a thought for your disk space. I’m not much of a digital hoarder. I have the discographies of Radiohead and Of Montreal, a slowly expanding library of The Wire, and not much else. I don’t have much reason to empty my trash can. So I don’t.

It was only last week that I took a sweeping glance over said trash can. I’d imagine I was probably young enough to still be growing in to my chest hair love rug the last time I dared open that shit. Somehow on this nostalgic voyage in to the unknown, I rediscovered every single CPA campaign I’ve ever created. All the way back to late 2006. Considering I have an output of creating a campaign on most days of the week, most weeks of the year…it was quite a collection.

It’s really dawning on me, in the time it’s taking to sort through this shit, that we can be pretty rash to disregard good ideas and interesting concepts if we fall at the first hurdle. How many marketers out there test new campaigns and then ditch the creatives that don’t turn over a profit? It’s almost instinctive and I’m guilty as sin.

There’s no such thing as a perfect landing page. Some of the creatives I’ve been familiarizing myself with took me a whole day to put together, and about five minutes to disregard. Let me tell you how my usual house maintenance goes.

The brain wave strikes and I harvest a bunch of landing pages to sit on my desktop. I upload them to my server and setup campaigns. They either fail or succeed. Most of them fail.

The next day, I’m hung up on a new concept and the previous day’s work gets unceremoniously dumped in to a folder called “To Sort”. A couple of weeks later, “To Sort” becomes “To Sort From August”. Give it a few more days and “To Sort From August” finds itself clicked, dragged and subchilded inside a new “Seriously Finch, Sort This Shit Today” folder.

What happens next?

Yep, I throw a hissy fit and it gets dumped in the trash. Never to be seen again.

Today I have been slowly and meticulously restoring each and every failed landing page in to an archive. This is the sort of task I would only normally embrace if the other items on my to-do list were building backlinks or some other lame shit. But it’s actually great for finding inspiration.

When I first started affiliate marketing, I judged the success of my campaigns on whether I could choke a positive ROI from them on Google Adwords. Well, that ship sailed and so did the optimized – and actually quite effective – landing pages that I had at the time. But for all the hours I’ve spent preaching about building assets in this industry, surely every single landing page you create is an asset that you should store and reserve for the future?

Why trash your hard work? Even if a campaign totally bombs on Facebook, it could still make a killing on POF or PPV. The traffic source and targeting are where your profit is normally made. But you wouldn’t throw your toys out of the pram and never market to “25-30 year olds” again just because targeting them once didn’t work, right?

Sure enough, a few of these old campaigns were retarded from the get-go and never destined to pay my council tax let alone make me rich.

I opened an old dieting creative and almost choked on my coffee when I saw the strapline:

“Be Honest, Love, You Can Afford To Lose A Little – Can’t You? …Don’t Be A Fat Bitch”

Vintage marketing. Offend the masses.

But in all seriousness, I’ve found some great inspiration and some excellent concepts that I was far too green as a marketer to ever make work at the first time of asking. I’m slowly working through the lot and screen-capping every landing page.

Two of the biggest stumbling blocks for new marketers are:

1. Giving up on campaigns too easily.
2. Lack of creativity.

Think twice before you disregard your failed efforts. Maybe when a new traffic source opens up, or when a new offer lands – they will suddenly become relevant again. You should remember that not many campaigns succeed at the first time of asking. If you trash everything that isn’t an overnight success, yes, you will have room for more porn on your hard drive. But you probably won’t be very rich.

It’s important to learn from your mistakes. And it can be tempting to mass delete work that ultimately flourished like a damp squib. But don’t do a Finch and bury your one moment of inspiration six folders deep in July’s “To Sort” pile. Sort that shit and keep it for future reference! You might make money from it someday.

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Clearly the moral of the above post is that you’d be a retard if you didn’t follow me on Twitter.

Follow me on Twitter – Add me on Facebook – Like this blog on Facebook

I’m trying to think of more shit I can ask you to do, but I’m pretty much out of ideas until I get an ebook. Stay classy, affiliate marketing.

Are Your Landing Pages Failing To Convert?

Aug 10 2010

When I get asked questions about building landing pages, I’m always left with the impression that affiliates are searching for an exact science.

Unfortunately in affiliate marketing, there’s rarely such a thing as an exact science. If something works, it’ll make you money. If it doesn’t, it won’t. Everything between the margins is a matter of testing, being creative and sometimes copying what others are already doing.

Everybody has their own opinion for what makes a great landing page. But this is my blog so fuck everybody else, here’s how you do it. Finding the magic formula is a question of ticking three little boxes.

1. Am I writing in a way that my intended audience can understand?
2. Am I writing in a way that sells my service or product to that audience?
3. Am I writing in a way that gets them to act now?

If you can answer yes to all three questions, congratulations. Puff your tits, buy your copywriter some lunch and look forward to making some profit.

If the answer to any of those questions is no, it’s back to the drawing board. Your landing page probably sucks as many balls as you feared it did when the conversions failed to lift off.

There’s a fourth factor to any successful landing page. The artistic and graphical layout of the page can make a huge difference to ROI. I’ve seen landing pages with a yellow background convert irritatingly better than those with a white background. I could get deeply entrenched in the effects of changing tiny details for boosting conversions, but I don’t have the attention span today so we’re going to stick with the language.

The actual meat and potatoes of your page – the shit that’s going to dictate whether you can actually afford any meat and potatoes when the wife goes shopping – is the writing. The words you use and the language you choose. Nothing sells an offer like some badass sales copy driving daggers through the consumer’s “will I or won’t I?” doubts.

How do I write in a way that my intended audience can understand?

Just because you’ve got a full English degree, doesn’t mean you should be busting out fucking Shakespeare wordplay on a 13 year old kid.

I’ve lost track of the number of landing pages I’ve seen where the language is quite blatantly phoned in from the notepad of an affiliate marketer who expects his language to be universal. Always write to the lowest common denominator.

If there’s a good chance that 40% of your target audience is too retarded to pick up a book – and let’s face it, CPA and Retards are a match made in heaven – BE SIMPLE!

I know you want to sound impressive and knowledgeable, but most landing pages are simply a medium of showcasing what makes a product such a fantastic solution for your target. If the prospect doesn’t understand, or is struggling to digest the copy, you’re letting your artistic greed ram a fist up your own jacksy. It’s never going to make you money.

Use short sentences. They’re much easier to read. Most of America can understand this. Simple sentences increase your reading speed. They also encourage people to read more. So they’ll learn more about your product. And this can only be a good thing, right?

How do I write in a way that sells my service or product to that audience?

See the question at the end of the last paragraph? This is probably my favourite use of language for selling any service or product. It doesn’t matter what you’re promoting, if you can get consumers to answer “YES” over and over again, half your job is done.

So much of writing to sell is about building up momentum and creating a positive image in the consumer’s head. The greater the momentum and the stronger that image becomes, the more likely you are to push the final sale.

Asking questions where the consumer has no choice but to agree or nod their head can really ramp up the effectiveness of your landing pages.

We’ll take a landing page promoting a dating offer to women over 50 as an example. Of course, it helps to hit them with the features and benefits of your service. But you can also generate that helpful momentum by getting the target to agree with you.

“You’ve waited long enough for love. It’s your turn, wouldn’t you agree?”

“If you leave love to fate, it might never happen. But if you join us today, you’ll be taking one step closer to happiness. Do you care about your happiness?”

“Our women were much happier with their lives after we helped them find loving partners. Are you searching for that new spark of romance?”

After each of these sentences, the user is forced to agree. It’s just a natural flow that builds momentum and keeps them interested. It makes them aware of their weaknesses indirectly and thus much more likely to snap at your bait.

Get your targets to say yes repeatedly and they’re much more likely to say yes when it matters.

How do I write in a way that gets them to act now?

If you don’t ask, you don’t get!

Would a charity worker ever get you to sign up to donate if she just left her phone number? Of course she wouldn’t. She’s harassing your arse outside the train station, backing you in to a corner and plying you with horrific imagery until you can see no light at the end of the tunnel when she asks for your financial help.

I remember the last charity worker I met in Shepherds Bush, we had an amusing conversation where I was pretty much filling in her next sentences. “You’re gonna ask me how I can afford to eat these McCoys but not donate Â£3.50/month to orphan monkeys in the jungle wilderness, aren’t you?”

I laughed because it works. It always works. The reason charities gets donations is because they have the balls to get in your face and ask for them.

So many landing pages out there fail miserably at the last hurdle. They do a fantastic job of selling a service but they forget the importance of a Call To Action. No CTA is effective without promoting the scarcity and urgency of what you’re offering. Yet you already know this because it’s all around you.

“Sale Must End Tonight”, “If you call in the next 20 minutes, ’cause we can’t do this all day…”, “Now accepting [7] new affiliates”

You know what they’re trying to do and still you can’t fight it. Scarcity manipulates the human desire not to miss out, while urgency rams the point home and seals the sale. Combine the two attributes with an unflinching Call To Action and what do you have? Profit.

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