In this article the author is going to share with you about how to write mouth- watering sales copy that will make your customers to take out the wallets, yank out their credit card and buy your product. You see, I like to surf the web and do my research the whole day, while am browsing, I see many poorly written sales pages. To be honest with you, you can do all the marketing research and create the ultimate product, but if your sales page is weak or poorly written, nobody will buy from you.

So, in todays post, I’m going to reveal the insider secret of creating a killer sales letter. I can guarantee that if you implement what I share in this post into your sales page, not just you will get more customers but you’ll get even more sales. Sound great? Good! Let’s start the ball rolling”¦

Below are the nine elements of any world class sales letter:

Headline

The first and most important part of a sales letter is your headline. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you’re like those lazy marketers, you’ll simply put up a headline as an afterthought after you finished the sales letter. You see, this will straight away kill your ad!

Always remember the purpose of your headline is to get attention of your target audience when they first reach your sales page and get them to read your sales letter. You must understand that everyone, including me has a million things going through the mind, like when to finish the work, project deadline to meet and many many more that anyone can think of. You see, I know and understand this, that is why the headline has to cut through all the clutter, grab the prospect lapels and entice them to read.

For excellent examples of powerful and terrific headline, check out the following site : SuccessDoctor.com

This is master copywriter Michel Fortin’s web site. Scroll down and click to see some of his master work. The opening

This is where many marketers and writers really screw up. They give a long boring introduction at the beginning of the sales letter, as if they are giving a long book report in high school. I still remember sitting down in the class listening to some people reading a book report and you know, how boring it was.

When you’re writing your copy, you have to assume or pretend that you are talking to your prospect. Am sure you wouldn’t start off with a lame or stupid introduction when you were talking to your friend one-on-one. You see, if you are going to start off with a lame and stupid introduction, you’ll bore your prospect to tears and they’ll politely nod their head while thinking about some other stuff in their head. So is important to get right to the point in your opening! No fluff, no filler”¦ just get straight to the point.

One of my favorite opening is the classic Gary Halbert - “If”¦Then” introduction. If you were selling an informational product, you opening would read like this:

“If you are looking to earn money online from blogging, then this blogging product by Alvin Phang will be the most important product you cannot afford to miss.”

Above is a simple example but it makes the point. You’re going to tell your prospect about blogging product that will help them to make money from blogging and then roll into your pitch. Defining The Problem

After you headline and opening, the next thing you want in your letter is to introduce the problem that your product is going to solve, make sure you don’t talk about your product just yet. A really good way of doing this is to tell a compelling story that illustrates the problem. People love stories, and if you write an interesting and intriguing story that fully presses the prospect’s hot button or hypnotize them, they will keep reading till the end.

In this section, it is important to put or inject credential in your copy. If you are selling a product on how to make money online, make sure you prove it with bank account statement, checks, etc to how much you earn in how many days of using the product you are promoting.

You see, many people are skeptical when they shop online, I have this feel sometime too. They are skeptical because they are afraid that their credit card number will be stolen or afraid that they will waste money on worthless product, so they don’t believe what you are telling. In order for your prospect to trust you and lower their guard, you will need to describe the problem as descriptively as possible and providing plenty of proof. By doing this, you will exponentially increase your chance of closing the sale. The Offer

Now remember and keep this in your mind, you are not selling your prospect the actual product. You are selling the solution to their problem. Many marketers keep thinking they are selling the product, you see, if you think of selling the product you are not going to solve the problem for your prospect, but if you think it another way like selling solution to them, prospect will more and willing to listen and buy from you. Therefore, in your order you have to maximize the perceived value and real value of your product.

When you are describing your product, you need to give the most emotional rendition of how your product can help to solve their problem. Add in how your product is going to primary benefit them and you’ll talk about the other benefits later.

In other words, describe in full details on how their life is going to be infinitely better once their problem is solved when they’ve used your product. You can also talk about the features of the product and how much time and effort was put in to creating the product. By doing this, you increase the perceived value of the product and justifies the price you will introduce later on. Bullets

This is where you’ll convert features of your product into benefit laden bullets that will entice your reader to buy your product.Below is an example of a bullet:

“œThe one mistake most marketer make that kills their sales”¦”¦ and how you use simple, easy adjustment that will increase the sale by 200% or more.”

Now remember, you cannot have too many bullets. It only takes one bullet to pique the curiosity of your prospect and motivate them to buy. So make sure you try to squeeze as many bullets out of your product. Value Builder

The reason to have a value builder is to show the prospect, in great details, why what they are paying you is a bargain. In this case of the information product above, you can talk about how much money you’d earn from using the simple and easy adjustment that will save them time and money over and over again.

I hope you get the picture - the solution their problem. You can also increase value by offering bonuses. Sometimes people will buy because they want your bonus more than your product. Just make sure that your bonus is related to or will enhance your product. This is important as there are some bonuses I see totally had no related value to then main product and because of this it bing down the value of your main product.

It is also crucial to assign a dollar value to each bonus in your copy and add them to show the prospect the awesome value they are getting. With this you are showing the prospect they are getting the deal of a life time, which of course makes the prospect irresistible. Guarantee

The purpose of the guarantee is to remind your prospect of all the claims that you made in your copy of how your product is going to solve their problem. This sets a standard for what they can expect in the product or service and gives them a way to back out if they are not happy with the product.

In your guarantee, you can urge your prospect to test the product for a certain period of time. Yo can also introduce more elements of credibility, such as testimonials in this section of your copy. Saying your terms of your guarantee and refund policy is very important too, so do remember to do that.

Take Away

After you’ve built up the value of your product or service, it is important to insert take away elements into your copy. If you’ve done a good job of increasing the perceived value and real value of your product, the price of your product may be too low to be believed. You can leverage this by explaining that the current price is only a test price and that, after a certain time or number of sales, the price may return to normal or even higher levels. Keep in mind and remember that you have to give your prospect a reason for lowering the price.

Marketers test price online all the time, so you can say that you’re testing the price for ten days and you will test a higher price after that time period is over. You can also say that you are offering a lower price initially to get more sales and gather testimonials so that you can eventually charge more in the future. Post Script (P.S)

It is recommended that, after your signature, you give at least one solid P.S. Here, you should recap the emotional payoff the prospect will get by using your product. Again you want to be as descriptive as possible about how your customer will primarily benefit. You want to get them future-tripping and imagine how their lives will be so much easier after they’ve started using your product.

Another reason to have a strong P.S in your copy is because most people will scan to the bottom of the page automatically when they are viewing a new website, which I also do that sometime. Because I know I also scan the page, that is why I know having a strong P.S will keep scanner to scroll up and read the letter.

So that’s it! By implement the structure of a sales letter in your next sales piece, you’ll be miles ahead of your competition who are just clueless about this.
 

About the Author

For More In-dept Secrets Of Making Money Online That Top Marketers And Super Affiliates Never Told You About Go To This Blog Now —> EmpireDotCom.com

It’s not uncommon to see Mac users living and dying by Apple’s Safari browser that comes built in OS X, but in a surprising bit of news today, PayPal is warning users that they are better off using an alternative if they want to avoid fraud. Just like the average Windows user usually doesn’t bother to download a browser different than Internet Explorer, Safari is commonly the browser of choice for Mac users.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean Safari is a bad option, not even an insecure browser, but in the eyes of PayPal it is lacking two important anti-phishing security features that “Internet Explorer 7 or 8 when it comes out, Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, and indeed Opera” already pack in. The two features mentioned by Michael Barrett, PayPal’s chief information security officer, are a built-in phishing filter and an anti-phishing technology, called Extended Validation certificates.

PayPal happens to be in a very unique position for making an educated assessment regarding web security, but we don’t see either of those two technologies making miracles for saving users from fraudsters. That said, we wouldn’t be surprised if Apple implemented them on its browser in a matter of weeks or months, depending on how badly they are demanded by its users. At the end of the day, there is no better anti-phishing filter than yourself, being aware that scammers are out there and they are trying to get you. Just make sure you browse the right sites and follow links where you can trust them.

Extra Tech

Traditional Rss Icons are commonly seen on every blog nowadays and as time goes by it is essential now for blogger’s to offer both Rss Feed and Rss Emails on their blog. You need fresh ideas on how you can create unique buttons for both your Feed and Email.

Here i have compile a list of designers who have dedicated their time to teach you on a step by step tutorial on creating your own Buttons. The tutorial ideas gives you a rough concept of how you can design the Rss like button, so add your own words to give the final effect.

1. Iris-Design - How to Design A Web 2.0 Like Rss Button
   

2. PinkZap - Turn Traditional Icons into Rss Icon & Button
   

3. Psdtuts - Make a Rss Button Like the Ones you Pin on a Shirt

   

4. Boonage - Creating an Orb Rss Button
   
   
5. Empiredezign - Creating a Rss Button with a Gel Effect

   

6. PhotoshopPack - Make a stylish Rss Button in Less than a Minute

   

7. Tutorialstream -Create Big Attractive Rss Buttons
   

8. Time2photoshop - Dirt Looking Rss Buttons
   
   
9. Funphotoart - Cherry Red Gel Button
   
   
10. Boonage - Perfect Shiny Button
    
    

These are just 10 of the ways your Rss Buttons can look like,Try to be different from others, don’t use that old and original looking Rss Icon you can find in everyone’s blog.

Source

(InfoWorld) - While the landscape for rich Web development technologies is getting crowded, industry dignitaries at The Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose, Calif. Thursday nonetheless saw a place for the various entrants in this space.

The field of technologies has grown to include AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript), Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun’s JavaFX, said Neal Ford, application architect for Thoughtworks, who moderated a panel addressing rich Web development. Audience members also gave a nod to the Ruby, Python, and Groovy languages.

Panelist Scott Davis, an author and consultant, said he originally thought that AJAX would rule the world. “It runs in any browser,” Davis said. But his horizons have expanded.

“Quite honestly, I’ve gotten really interested in Flex recently,” Davis said. The recent open-sourcing of Flex has made it more attractive, he stressed.

AJAX drew affirmations with reservations from panelist Jon Ferraiolo, an IBM Web architect who manages the OpenAjax Alliance. “My perspective is that AJAX works today. It’s fantastic, it does nearly everything you want to do except for multimedia types of things,” Ferraiolo said.

“I think there’s room for Flash, Flex; there’s room for Silverlight. These things are going to be the cutting-edge applications that require the latest features,” said Ferraiolo.

With the proliferation of mobile devices however, HTML browsing will not be available on all these systems, and the iPhone does not have Flash and probably will not have Silverlight either, said Ferraiolo. AJAX, however, is always there and is open and can be counted on, he said.

“There is a continuum of experience that needs to be looked at,” said Josh Holmes, an evangelist at Microsoft who is speaking on Silverlight at the conference. There is the standards-based Web with HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and there is AJAX, he said. Moving on, there are platforms optimized for a particular OS or hardware that can render 3D graphics, said Holmes.

“My personal opinion is that Silverlight and Flex are definitely on that heavy, rich but not quite platform-optimized edge,” Holmes said. There are benefits to both, he said.

Another panelist sided with Flex for enterprise usage. “In the enterprise space, I tend to recommend things like Flex because the development is much faster to get up and going,” said Bill Scott, AJAX evangelist at Yahoo.

“Creating a desktop style [application] in AJAX is still really hard,” Scott said. AJAX does fit into a lot of areas, but none of the rich Web technologies will rule the world, he said.

Panelists also addressed the question of application-testing.

“Yes, testing is absolutely crucial, and as an industry, it’s something we have not taken seriously for the last couple of years,” Davis said.

“I think this is a space that the market realizes isn’t served really well right now,” said Ryan Breen, vice president of technology at Web performance tester Gomez.

The Crosscheck open-source testing platform was cited by panelist Stuart Holloway, co-founder of software developer Relevance.

The issue of tools for JavaScript was raised. IntellliJ, said Davis, “has got killer JavaScript support, and it’s got wonderful CSS support,” he said. But lately, he has been developing with the simpler TextMate tool.

“I’ve found that the overhead of a big heavy tool is less valuable to me than having something that’s easy for me to bring up, bring down, refresh,” Davis said. This lighter format seems to fit the Web development model, he said.

Panelists and an audience member also mourned the lack of staying power of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics).

“SVG just breaks my heart,” Davis said. “SVG had the opportunity to be kind of a unified solution. I wish it would come back strong, but I’m not holding out hope.”

Silverlight, Holmes said, uses XAML instead of SVG. “My opinion is SVG has kind of stalled and there were some things that were needed beyond it,” so Silverlight uses other technologies instead, Holmes said.

Ferraiolo said he was one of the initiators of SVG while at Adobe. “SVG was there in 2001, 2002, but Adobe decided to pull the plug on it despite the fact that it was on 200 million desktops,” he said.

Curse, another online company that offers social networking around multi-player online games, has received a $5 million in a first round of venture capital funding.

Curse offers gamers the standard social networking features around their games, from image and video uploading, to blogging, social bookmarking, wikis, databases, forums and guild website hosting.

The funding, which comes from France’s AGF Private Equity and other individual investors, follows more than $800,000 in angel money, the company said in a statement. It also comes as venture capitalists are pumping money into a other companies doing similar things, from Multiverse, which provides a way for developers to produce their own games, to Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning’s Rupture, a more direct competitor that also builds social networking around existing games.

Gaming remains hot. Silicon Valley angel investor Jeff Clavier recently told us he’d resumed investing in Internet companies again after a brief hiatus at the end of last year, in part because of the promise of online gaming.

Source: VentureBeat, Blogforward

A simple way to build traffic to your site is to allow readers to bookmark your pages easily. Many blogs have a series of icons or buttons at the end of each post to allow readers to submit content to one of the social bookmark sites like Digg, del.icio.us or StumbleUpon.These can drive significant amounts of traffic to your site, either as an initial burst such as making the front page of Digg, or a more steady stream of traffic like I see with sites like StumbleUpon.

There are some good Wordpress plugins out there which make bookmarking posts easy. But all the plugins I have tried lack one thing - the ability to know which posts are being bookmarked.

Analytics packages such as Google Analytics or Clicky are great for discovering the most popular content on your web site, but they don’t tell you what posts are being bookmarked. To fill this gap I use AddThis.

AddThis works like several of the other Wordpress plugins out there. A button is displayed at the end of each post, which when activated displays a list of social bookmark icons.

What sets AddThis apart from the competition is that it includes a piece of tracking code which records not only which posts are being bookmarked, but which bookmarking site was used.

You may find that certain types of posts are bookmarked more often than others. Bookmarked pages stand a better chance of getting more traffic. You may therefore decide to create posts in the future you feel are more likely to get bookmarked.

You may also find that the majority of your visitors bookmark posts to Digg or StumbleUpon. If so you may want to consider adding a Digg This button to your site so that it is even easier for visitors to bookmark your posts.

Getting your own free AddThis button is easy. Just head over to their web site and get the necessary code to add to your web site. If this sounds too complicated then they offer a Wordpress plugin too.

To gain access to the tracking code you will need to register. Registration is free and well worth it. You can then logon to your AddThis account and keep track of which posts are being bookmarked.

They also provide a Feedburner flare so you can keep track of bookmarked posts in your feed too! Technical Itch recommends you browse around their web site as they offer other features too like widgets and browser add ons. They also offer an RSS feed widget too.

Overall AddThis is a great addition to any web site. It will help your visitors bookmark your website or blog, and promote it to the social bookmarking services, sending you back more traffic.
Source: Technical Itch

Feedburner announced today it can now afford to offer more of its premium features for free.

TotalStats and MyBrand, both previously for-pay services, are now being offered at no charge. And with FeedBurner Stats PRO, you can see the number of people that have clicked on the individual content items in your feed, and also obtain the context of your Reach, which estimates the number of subscribers that interacted with your feed content, on a daily basis. MyBrand is also offered at the PRO level, and lets you in a sense, brand your feed URL (mysite.com/feed rather than feeds.feedburner.com/mysite).

Previous PRO customers will not be charged as of June 2007, and those that sign up for new Feedburner accounts will also reap the benefits of having these existing tools now offered for free, as indicated by the PRO badge next to their feeds.
Mashable!

Piclens is a new plug-in for your Firefox Internet browser that lets you launch into a full-screen into a slideshow while browsing photos.

After you download PicLens, here’s how it works.

First, let’s say you want to look at all the pictures on Flickr taken by your friend while she traveled New Zealand.

You can then see a slideshow of them on your desktop by clicking on PicLens’ icon within any of the images on her album (you have to mouse over the image to see the icon, as shown below). Once you click, your screen changes into a full-screen slide show.

The image you clicked on blows up to fill your screen, and a strip of thumbnails below shows the other images next in line. You click on a play button, and PicLens scrolls through each of the pictures — blowing each image up to their full size on your screen. It does the same for images on Google and Yahoo, and Facebook photo album images. It will do this for any site that supports the Media RSS format.

.

Media RSS is a format created by Yahoo, but which is now an open standard and free for others to use. Web site owners can make their sites compatible with PicLens by pasting some code within their site, which specifies the content displayed. Emily’s Photo Site is an example site that supports Media RSS. See the code below for what this looks like.

Search for “flowers” on Google images, for example, and you can then see a slideshow of Google’s entire inventory of flower images by clicking on PicLens’ icon within any of the images.

To our knowledge this isn’t offered by anyone else. Slide and Rockyou offer slideshows, but to view them you have to store images on their site, or have them embedded in a widget. PicLens brings the experience to your desktop.

The company doesn’t have any plans to monetize this yet. They want to distribute the product and worry about that later.
There’s a raunchier use for this, of course: Use PicLens while searching Google images for “Alessandra,” or any other female name for that matter, and you’ll quickly grasp how a good portion of Piclens’ users are likely to use this product. Let your mind wander from there. Even then, we’re not certain how money is to be made.

It is the latest product offered by Cooliris, a Palo Alto start-up launched last year. Piclens was first released last year for Safari browsers only.

Source : VentureBeat via Blogforward

Chief exec Steve Jobs said Apple would release a version of the company’s Safari browser for Windows. Safari will also help with mobile applications for the iPhone, he said: “It’s all based on the fact that we have the full Safari engine in the iPhone…And so you can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone, and these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, check email, look up a location on Gmaps… don’t worry about distribution, just put ‘em on an internet server.”

Critics were disappointed, however, that this means developers will have to write two separate programs, one for the Macintosh computers and one for the iPhone. There’s more detailed coverage at Engadget, which carries the iPhone comments at the bottom.

Releasing iTunes on Windows has benefited Apple tremendously, so this is an extension of Apple’s strategy to embrace Windows.

Jobs also talked about Leopard, the company’s update to its Mac OS. Dean Takahashi of the Merc has a more succinct summary than Engadget’s live coverage — providing a look at the “Finder” and “Quick View” features, which make for easier file sharing and previewing compared to Microsoft’s Vista. Leopard’s widget feature, which lets you track changes at various Web sites directly from your desktop, is also more sophisticated than Vista’s equivalent. Leopard includes “BootCamp,” a way to let Mac users choose which operating system to run when they start their computers — Windows or Mac OS (see story by Troy Wolverton).

Source: VentureBeat via Blogforward

Synthasite is a new web-based design tool that enables you and your team to collaboratively work on your website design. Synthasite is currently in limited beta.

With South Africa-based Synthasite, you can work with the tools available within its service, which easily arrange text, images, badges and buttons to create a professional-looking site. There are a few items available by default, such as a YouTube video or a Flickr photo search, which can be added into your design as well. The offerings are currently rather basic, and mimic the templates and design offerings of programs like Wordpress. The functionality is very easy to maneuver, though, and could prove helpful for those teams wanting to create templates and other items such as a welcome page or a blog.

While Synthasite is currently in beta and has some useful tools, it has plans to add more in the coming months. Up next for Synthasite is file management, publishing, deployment and hosting, collaborative site building, chat, SEO, graphic design, blogging, wikis, developer resources, site analytics, and a whole set of features designed to build a community around Synthasite features and users. In the direction Synthasite is looking to go, it will be in the same realm as services like WetPaint and SiteKreator, with more functionality and customization, in some ways.

Mashable!