What do you think of slick sales pages?

There's only one solution to this if you're actually creating a sales page.

Gain an intimate knowledge of the prospects who'll be going there.

You want to know if YOUR prospects will respond to fancy graphics or be put off by them.

You want to know what builds trust with YOUR SPECIFIC prospects and what gets them to take action.

Talking to your prospects, exchanging emails with them and engaging them in every way possible so you really get to know them is THE biggest key to successful marketing.

I will give you one tip that seems to work across all markets.

The more specific you are the more believable and enticing most sales pages and optin pages become.

For example if you say:

Amazing New System Can Make You Rich FASTER Than A Mint On Steroids!

that's not compelling or believable.

But if you're specific:

Georgia Housewife Makes $5,742.44 In 25 Days With System Recommended In The September 24th Issue Of The Wall St Journal

your chances of getting the attention of your reader goes up substantially.

Notice also how using very specific words and figures in the second headline eliminates the need for the hype you find in the first headline.

You can deliver specific facts and figures very low key and they're still very powerful.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh

I hear the bells very subtle, most likely unintentional

Hi Carl;

Yes, I have... First off, it's important to realize that the "make money" market is very different from most other markets, so what works well in one market may not work in another.

For "make money" ads, it's often the case that the hypey sales letters pull better than non-hype sales letters. (Not that it's always the case, but biz-opp'ers have been trained to expect some hype)

Transferring that hype to non biz-opp offers often fails miserably. (I remember being asked to review someone's sales letter once who actually said, "For the price of dinner and a movie, you can cure your cancer!" -Yikes.)

Anyway... I have a very detailed critique of two sales letters I wrote, the first one a bit hypey that didn't work well, and the second one with all hype removed, which converted at 1 sale per 10 visitors.

If you want to see review the sales letters yourself, they're in my free subscribers "Private" area, on the "Website Makeover" page, videos number 7 and 8.

You might want to review Paul Myers' "What Is Hype" thread for detailed info: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...what-hype.html

...The trick is, that just because a sales letter doesn't seem "hypey" doesn't mean it's not a very strong sales letter. A lot of people, when they're dead-set against writing a hypey sales letter, just create a really poor sales letter. Non-hype just means keeping credibility, not being a wimp.

Anyway, hope that helped. :-)

PS - My personal pet peeve is hype in software sales letters... I remember trying to choose affiliate program software years ago, and having to wade through crap like, "Imagine having an army of salesmen selling for you while you're sleeping!!!!" ...while I was just trying to A/B the features against their competitors.

I was kidding about the fine scotch (wishful thinking on my part)

I agree with you 100% the big trick here though as i see it is to determine who your audience is and to gear those facts in such a way that it will stimulate the buy it now response. The big question in my mind however is how to determine the best type of lead page/sales page for any given target audience

Hi Carl,

The comment I am about to make should really be saved to my roboform file, because I say it all the time to people yet few really seem to heed the lesson.

As Internet Marketers and as people we always assume we THINK we know what people want or need, and we tend to follow what everyone is doing like a bunch of zombies.

This whole process is really simple, you can assume whatever you like about what your audience wants, but until you TEST, you have no idea!

Plain and simple!