One-page sales letters that promote information products aren’t subtle. They’re not meant to be. But they are effective, and they need to be well written.
Usually, the best way to produce a sales letter is to hire an experienced copywriter to do it for you. Freelance services like eLance (www.elance.com) can be good places to look, and you can also try writing agencies like Scribat (www.scribat.com). Be sure to look at samples, but don’t expect the writer to be able to provide conversion results. Clients rarely share them with the writers who produce their sales letters. You’ll have to look at the sales letters and judge for yourself how persuasive they are.
It’s also possible to write sales letters yourself. Although they look tricky, sales letters actually follow a very rigid structure and use all sorts of little copywriting tricks to lead readers to believe that they need your product. You’ll start with a gripping headline that attracts attention, lays out the problem, indicates that you have the solution, and describes the benefits that those solutions will bring. Subheadings are used to break up the sales letter and introduce new benefits, while testimonials help to build the trust you’ll need to make the sale. You can get those testimonials by handing review copies of your product to friends and colleagues and asking them to say something nice if they like it. Just make sure that you follow the FTC’s finicky new guidelines.
If you don’t want write it from scratch, there are plenty of templates available that you can use to form your sales letter. My friend Michel Fortin, who has been called “the best sales-letter writer on the Internet,” has created a very neat program called ScribeJuice that makes the whole process very simple. You can find it at www.scribejuice.com. Even if you prefer to hire a writer rather than try to do it yourself, check out the sales letter on that page; it’s a perfect example of how a sales letter should work:
• The gripping headline provides a solution to a big problem right away.
• Bullet points at the first scroll down the page sell the benefits, not the features.
• The red subheadings create urgency.
• The black subheadings describe the content so that readers are able to spot the features that appeal to them.
• And there are tons of testimonials that deliver that trust.
Notice how Michel offers different products and uses an e-mail field to capture the addresses of people who haven’t been persuaded. He’s likely to pick up a very high conversion rate with a sales letter this good, but he’s not going to turn everyone into a buyer. In addition to sales immediately, he’ll also pick up plenty of near misses that he’ll be able to convert in the future with mailings and bonuses.
One advantage of using a template system like Michel’s is that you have the freedom to test different sales letters. That can be very helpful. You can even do this before you begin selling. Create three different kinds of sales letter and instead of collecting payments, invite readers to leave their e-mail addresses so that they can be contacted when the product is ready. Keep track of which sales letter brings in the most addresses, and by the time you’re ready to launch you’ll have a list of people you can pitch to directly—and you’ll know which sales letter delivers the best conversions.
Recruiting Your Affiliate Sales Team
The sales letter acts as a kind of sales assistant. It talks to your leads, persuades them to buy, and takes their money. It goes KaChing. But you still have to bring those leads into your store. Your web site will act as one gateway; search engines will provide another. But you want more than that. You want to recruit other publishers in your field as sales assistants for your product.
You want to build up a team of affiliates.
Affiliate selling is one of the Internet’s biggest success stories. I couldn’t tell you how much money I’ve made as an affiliate, promoting other people’s products on my web sites; it’s always been one of my biggest and most reliable revenue streams. In Chapter 5, I explain how you can do the same thing. First, you should know how to recruit affiliates to sell your product for you.
The principle is very simple. Other people in your field will recommend your product to their users. In return for cashing in on the trust that they’ve built up, you have to give them a share of the sales price. That share can be pretty big. Half isn’t unusual, and some sellers in very competitive fields have even been known to give away as much as 70 percent of their revenue to affiliate sellers.
The best way to calculate how much you should be giving away is to do the research. Search for other information products in your field and look at their affiliate programs. If you find that affiliate commissions for products similar to yours range from 35 to 50 percent, there’s little point in trying to buy market share by offering more. In fact, doing that could even signal that you think your product can only attract affiliates based on sales volume. Affiliates want products that sell and that please their users. Those sorts of products can offer lower commissions. Amazon, for example, has one of the lowest payouts on the Web, with commissions for sellers as low as 4 percent. But it can get away with those low percentages because it has such a trusted brand that people are not hesitant to buy from Amazon.
To keep track of the amounts you need to pay your affiliates, they’re assigned a unique code that’s worked into the link that they use to send
