Crafting The Hard Sell

One of my most recent writing jobs was to co-author an ebook based on the content of two websites I had helped to develop. No problem. Then I was asked to write the sales letter to go with it. Panic! I'd never written a sales letter before. Feature articles, yes. News articles, yes. Copy for print ads, yes. But never a sales letter. As usual, I said yes and then began to think about how I could do it. I did a web search and came up with an immensely helpful article by David Frey. Frey, author of the Small Business Marketing Bible describes seven 'the hurdles which lead to buying resistance'.

He then sets out a 12-step plan for overcoming these hurdles and crafting a foolproof sales letter. The 12 steps are:

1. Get attention
2. Identify the problem
3. Provide the solution
4. Present your credentials
5. Show the benefits
6. Give social proof
7. Make your offer
8. Inject scarcity
9. Give a guarantee
10. Call to action
11. Give a warning
12. Close with a reminder

He then goes into more detail on how to carry out each of the steps. The full article is worth a read. It is clearly set out and anyone can follow it. At the very least, following the plan will allow you to produce something credible to present to your clients. At best, you'll have done the job perfectly and impressed the heck out of them. What have you got to lose?

PS. In case you're interested, here's the sales letter I wrote after reading Frey's advice. I'm sure it's not perfect, but I was pretty pleased with it, considering I'd never written one before. If you think of any improvements, be sure to let me know. Thanks for reading.

How I Put My Site On Steroids

I’ve previously given several good reasons why freelance writers should have a website. Once you’ve got that showcase for you and your work, you’ll need to make sure that people see it. When I launched doublehdesign.com in June 2005, I had 26 unique visitors (and I knew most of those by name) and a paltry 757 hits. By the end of January 2006, that had risen to 620 (Dec: 472) unique visitors and more than 16,000 hits. How did I do it?

I took some advice. Early last year, my husband bought and downloaded a book that promised to share the secrets of the super-affiliates. These are a handful of people who have made megabucks from the internet. Naturally, I was interested to see how this was done. What I didn’t anticipate was that Rosalind Gardner would show me free ways of increasing traffic to my site and raising my profile.

So what were the steps I took? First of all, I wrote some free articles for article directories, with a link back to my site. One of the best of these is ezinearticles.com, in my view. Signing up was simple and seven days after writing my first article for them, I appeared in the search results on Google. I also wrote reviews for a number of consumer reviews sites, which I then linked to from my own site.

I did some keyword research and found the best keywords for my site, using the tools she recommended. I followed some of her advice on site design, though I admit I’ve not implemented that as well as I might. I also got a blog and an RSS feed for my site and submitted both to several directories. I put a search box and a sitemap on the site and made sure there was a place for people to contact me. I also put some free-to-reprint articles on my own site. I also got an Adsense account.

So far, there’s just one recommendation I haven’t agreed with. Rosalind Gardner recommends Elance as a good place to find freelance work, but it hasn’t worked for me. Guru is far better, in my opinion.

So what’s the bottom line? Although Rosalind Gardner’s primary aim is to tell you how to build an affiliate marketing business, the content of her Super Affiliate Handbook works just as well for general profile raising. My stats (which have increased even more this month) prove that. And I’m not done yet. Every so often I go back to the book and look for the next step, and when I’ve got more money to spend, I’ll be carrying out some of her other recommendations. I’ll keep you posted.