Archive for article marketing
How to Write Sales Letters – Passion, Voice, Simplicity
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Knowing How To Write Sales Letters Is A Useful Skill
For a writer, knowing how to write sales letters is a very useful skill, one that can open up a good source of income. As a result, I am often asked, by budding freelance writers,
“Which book should I buy to learn how to write sales letters?”
“Which sales letter template is the best?”
My answer is none of them.
A quick browse through Amazon brings up countless search results, books claiming that they have the secret that will help you to create compelling sales letters and make thousands of dollars everyday. However, I have found that very few of these writing guides have any substance or contain real pointers. Instead, most encourage laziness and concentrate upon helping the talentless become even more talentless.
Killing Your Writer’s Voice
The problem with sales writing books, or the equivalent online resources, is that they usually adopt one of two approaches.
- Cut and Paste ‘Em: These books give you a ‘tried and trusted’ template, based upon a sales letter structure that they claim is guaranteed to work, every time. This is despite the fact that unoriginal sales copy does not work.
- Paint by Numbers: These authors explain the process in intricate detail, telling you where you put every last full stop, persuading you to use ‘power words’ drawn from 1980s middle-management meetings. “Lets think outside the box, use blue sky thinking, and incorporate paradigm shifts…” Useless unless you intend to buy a suit with shoulder pads and travel back to the Age of Yuppiedom.
These two approaches carry the same inherent weakness; namely that they make it very difficult for you to develop your writer’s voice. This unique voice is the gift that makes any type of writing stand out, and it is certainly no different for sales letters.
The best sales letters, as with any other style of writing, are most effective when they are infused with emotion. The key to writing an effective sales letter is not about which words you use; it is about you, as a writer, and your personality and individuality.
Companies don’t want to pay a few hundred dollars for a copycat template or bland sales letter – they pay for your unique style and, if you can allow your personality to shine through in your writing, you will be successful.
A Sales Letter Skeleton
Now, despite my claims that you should avoid using templates, there is a basic layout to sales letters that can help you to succeed. It operates upon the principle of ‘Identify a problem, provide a solution,’ but gives you plenty of room to add a personal touch.
Title
First Paragraph – Identify or manufacture a problem.
Body – Explain how Product X can help
Final Para – Tell them how they can buy Product X
That is it – use this basic template to build your own sales letters, incorporating a style based upon your own unique voice and flow.
I have seen sales letters where the writer managed to fit everything into a hundred words and achieve great conversions. On the other hand, I have seen some writers flaunt convention and draft 1000 word monsters; their style is so engaging that clients still read the entire letter, bucking the trend towards instant gratification often found online. Clients make up their mind to buy long before they reach the bottom of the page.
Whatever approach works for you, try it – through trial and error, you will develop a style that works.
Now, I have given you a few pointers – now go out and do it!
Oh – you want an example – well, this post is a sales letter of sorts, but my Sales Letter Page is built around the basic skeleton.
My Russian friend offers a great translit product on his website, so I have created a sample sales letter for him:
Sales Letter Sample
Mikhail Alexandrov - Inventor of Translit
Across the English-speaking world, most of us take typing for granted. We boot up the computer, open the word processor, and start to lay down our thoughts. For Russian speakers, the process is much more difficult; they can buy a Cyrillic keyboard in their home country, but this option is not always available to expatriates.
To get around the restrictions, enterprising Russians have learned to use transliteration, the process of typing Russian words with Latin letters. For this, a good transliteration program, which shows you the right keys to press, is essential.
Online services, such as translit.ru, are a good way to get around the difficulties, but they suffer from one infuriating problem. These services are only available online, tying you to your internet connection and forcing you to copy/paste the work into your word-processor. A program that runs from your computer would be much easier, but a quick search online reveals that there are few commercially-available software options.
At transliterator.org, an expatriate Russian software engineer, keen to speak to his family and friends in his own language, developed a program to help computer users needing a phonetic Cyrillic translit program. This application gives you the freedom to work and write, without having to connect to the internet or vainly search for a Wi-Fi hotspot.
The transliteration program is simple to use: you simply download the program, run the installer, and start typing. With this Cyrillic translit software, the intuitive interface makes communicating in your own language straightforward and instinctive.
With full customer support and guidance, this product will not let you down. Escape frustration and make life easier – download the Translit Russian Keyboard.
Political Spam and a Freelance Writer’s Site
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I am almost entirely indifferent to your 'Tea Parties'
As you can imagine, my website attracts a lot of spammy contents, more often than not from the usual suspects, such as penile enhancement, Viagra, and my apparent lack of a hot chick (My other half reads my posts, so I have to careful what I say here). Throw in a few SEO companies seeking cheap backlinks, and my anti-spam program (Akismet) works overtime.
I spend a lot of time stripping away links to the more questionable sites and, unfortunately, it means that I no longer bother replying to comments, simply because I am not sure if the comment is genuine or from one of the many spambots and comment factories that infiltrate the internet.
This Is A Freelance Writer’s Site
Recently, I have noticed an increase in comments from political and religious sites, warning me of the ‘Progressive Agenda’ infiltrating US politics and how ‘Barack Obama is the Antichrist.’ I have no idea if these comments are the result of automated programmes or if some poor sap is actually sitting down and typing out poorly written, grammatically incorrect posts and deciding that a freelance writer’s personal site is the place to hold a political conversation.
Maybe they see the long hair and assume that I am a liberal hippy, living off welfare and threatening to destroy the American Dream. Perhaps they are trying to save me from myself lest I end up in the depths of hell, spending all eternity listening to Celine Dion and eating nothing but Brussels sprouts, marmite, and celery.
So, to all you amateur political activists out there: I am British and live in Greece. I have no interest in the Tea Party or the Pinko-Commie, Atheist, Dolphin-Hating, Red Tide sweeping across America. I couldn’t care less about Obama’s move towards creating an Islamic States of America. We have enough problems of our own over here and I really don’t give a tinker’s cuss what happens in your country.
Sorry, but that’s the way it goes. This is may be a futile plea, but please stop wasting my time with idiocy and irrelevance.
Photo: _MG_8947 under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Using a Professional Freelance Writer: The Article Bubble Bursts
Posted by: | CommentsAn increasing number of companies are starting to understand the importance of using high quality website content and articles. Instead of paying cheap freelance writers to churn out spun copy for their marketing, they want to use a professional freelance writer to produce meaningful, unique content.
This is nothing new, and many marketers and writers have known about this trend for a long time. However, I want to expand upon this point, because this move towards producing informative content ties in with what the search engines are doing to clean out the Adsense optimized content plaguing the internet.
I read a post by respected online guru, Grizzly, today and this supports what most marketers and writers have suspected for over a year; Google is going on the offensive and is looking to clean up the net. Google advertisers pay good money for prime adverts locations, and expect their adverts to be shown on useful, targeted content. Instead, their Adwords are often displayed on a content-thin blog with the sole intent of making customers click on adverts, just so that they can escape the empty content and keyword soup.
Great News for Professional Freelance Writers
As a professional freelance writer I am, naturally, very pleased about this news, although I am probably at odds with a few of the marketing-oriented people. From my point of view, anything that gets rid of the article mills paying mediocre freelance writers a couple of dollars to churn out content spun from Wikipedia or Ezine is a good thing. Simple supply and demand will now mean that experienced professionals receive a level of pay that matches their talent, without the disgraceful rates paid on many freelance sites becoming a stick to beat down rates and fuel a race to the bottom.
The interesting point in Grizz’s post is that most of the marketing experts are advocating building one or two informative, authoritative sites, instead of throwing up 20 blogs with minimal content, all set up with the purpose of funneling people towards Adsense traps. Foresighted companies are developing well laid out, content rich sites, and are cleverly using article marketing to attract direct referrals, rather than scatter tripe around the net in the vain hope of building a few backlinks.
Freelance Writing: Research and Increased Productivity
Less time spent wading through respun rubbish might mean that this freelance writer can actually have the occasional day off!
As an online writer, much of my work involves a lot of research, and being able to navigate search engines, without the same, automatically spun content dominating the search-engine rankings, is going to increase my productivity immensely.
There is still a need for good SEO practices and, as a writer, I still have to understand the basics of online marketing, such as keywords and backlinks. However, I am confident that this move towards quality will mean that I can spend more time writing and less time leaving comments on blogs that I have little interest in reading (Much like this one, I hear you say!)
As with many things, this move is nothing new and SEO is moving back towards old-school marketers, who are ethical and prefer to help online businesses grow organically, rather than follow the latest fad. The knowledgeable Peter Hoggan, at Escocian, is a great believer in Ethical SEO Services, and I have no problem giving his organization an organic link; I like what he has to say.
Hire a Freelance Writer – Get Ahead
As you can imagine, this news will take a long time to filter through the system, and many companies will continue to throw large volumes of mud at the wall in the vain hope that some sticks. Conversely, forward thinking companies can now concentrate on producing quality, using marketing techniques developed long before the internet appeared on the horizon. The article marketing bubble is about to collapse, and you have a chance to get ahead of the competition.
Internet Article Marketing Strategy – Unleashing the True Power of Article Directories
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Internet Article Submission is the Stairway to Success
Most businesses working online have heard of article directories, such as Ezine, and are aware that a good internet article marketing strategy must incorporate the potential of these sites. The idea behind article directories is elegant in its simplicity; you submit articles, and others are free to use them and distribute them around the internet, on the condition that they include backlinks to your site.
Article directories are well known by webmasters and marketers, who understand that a high-quality article site gives good quality backlinks and instant kudos with Google. Many of these flood the sites with spun content, hoping to gain an advantage in the search engine rankings.
Internet Article Marketing Strategy and Backlinks – An Unhealthy Fixation
Many of these marketers outsource work, use article-spinning software, or hire cheap freelance writers to generate content. This attitude is fine if you are chasing Adsense and affiliate sales, where you might get away with broken English and stilted, non-natural writing. However, this paradigm has leached over into mainstream marketing, and there is now a prevailing attitude that it is not worth paying a professional writer to submit quality content to article sites.
I have seen many articles, on Ezine, where the business owner has tried to hack some copy together, or has outsourced the work to the notorious article mills. They then sit back, waiting for the clients to roll in, and are surprised when this approach fails. The problem with this plan is that they became fixated on one aspect of article marketing, backlinking, and failed to understand the true power of using article directories as part of an internet article marketing strategy.
Basing Your Internet Article Marketing Strategy around Quality
Stepping away from online marketing for a while, think about what type of strategy you use in the real world. Most businesses, if they want to generate good business, focus their efforts on producing high-quality brochures and postcards, and delivering them to targeted areas.
Moving back online, that is the same type of approach that you should adopt with your internet article marketing campaign and you should see your articles as more than a cheap source of backlinks. Articles can actually form the backbone of your marketing strategy and drive high-quality traffic to your website. Using article submission directories as glorified link-farms misses the potential of two other marketing methods; direct referrals and organic growth.
The Power of Direct Referrals and your Internet Article Marketing Strategy
Sites such as Ezine, with its very stringent quality controls and human editors, are loved by the search engines. As a result, an SEO optimized Ezine article will often appear higher on search-engine rankings than your actual site. If you use them alongside informational sites, such as Hubpages, you will be able to dominate Google search results for targeted keywords.
As a result of this search engine impact, potential clients are likely to land there first and, if your articles are filled with empty-content, they are not going to click on the link. If you want to use article to their fullest potential, you need to treat them as if they were content on your own site; they are often the point of first contact and you must make an instant impression.
Making the Internet Work for You – Organic Links Keep on Giving
If you do your keyword research and manage to get your Ezine article onto the front pages of the search engines, then there is one other benefit of using a professionally written article. If the article is well written, then others are likely to pick it up and use it, which will include the carefully embedded links to your site. Apart from giving you a little more Google love, through organic backlink growth, this also increases your reach and the chance of direct referrals.
With a powerfully written, informative article, others are going to do the marketing for you, by distributing your links around the internet. This is the true power of article marketing sites, not the vague idea of building a few backlinks. There are other ways of building Google backlink love, and using article-marketing sites purely for this purpose is missing out on their true power. With a good, high-quality article, the backlinks will multiply, without any extra effort or expense.
Using a Professional Writer as the Foundation of your Internet Marketing Strategy
If you look at many of the article sites, you will see that many of the articles are merely sales pitches, consisting of two or three hundred words of clumsy language. Most people do not understand the art of writing web content and articles, which requires the careful touch of a master craftsman.
if you intend to sell something online, then going for the cheap option is a non-starter; you might think that you have a great deal by finding a reasonably competent writer, who will throw out articles at $5 a time. If this does not increase sales conversions, or the articles migrate into the Google sandbox, then you have thrown that money away.
A professional writer has the ability to write an article, seemingly about an unrelated subject, but use layered content and language to guide the reader gently down to the link at the bottom. Article sites invariably include your link at the bottom of the page, so you have to make sure that the content is well written and informative, enticing the reader down to the final paragraph and the all-important link.
