Work at home on the Internet: internet marketing and affiliate program help.
Back issues here Issue 269 | Mar 23rd 2003

Letter from Phil

a few times recently I've written about an excellent search engine book called Rankings Revealed by Sean Burns.

One of the good things about it is that Sean doesn't clog your brain with a whole load of theory, he just tests things and when they work he writes about the results - so everything he reveals is practical and easy to follow.

So Sean's a search engine expert, especially with Google.

Now I hope Sean doesn't mind me talking about this, but the sad thing is that his book is not the massive hit it deserves to be.

We were discussing it the other day and we decided it's because of the sales letter on his site. He gets lots of visitors to the page, but it's not converting well.

This is a shame, because the book deserves to fly off his site quicker than the server can let people download it.

So don't let his un-hyped sales letter put you off, you should read his book.

Anyway, this got me thinking about sales letters in general.

It's very hard to strike the right balance between hype and (I know this is not a word) underhype.

If you want to make sales your "sales letter", usually your index page, has got to sell. That's the purpose of it.

Sean's index page at Ranking's Revealed under achieves.

On the other hand there are way too many sales letters that over hype.

The shame is they produce sales.

Personally I prefer the understated letters, because hype turns me off.

Perhaps what Sean needs to do is use one of the sales letter generator programs on his site.

I've got both Marlon Sanders Push Button Sales Letters and Armand Morin's Sales Letter Generator and they're both help you quickly produce sales pages that sell.

Seeing Sean is into testing he could produce a letter with one or the other of them, and put it up on the main page of his site for a week and see how the sales results compare to this current web page.

Of course he'd also need to use his own skills to tweak the page so he doesn't lose his search engine traffic - it will be a fine balance.

What about your own web pages? Are they ranking well in the search engines?

Are they converting visitors to sales? And I'm not just talking about promoting your own product here...you can apply just the same
techniques to produce affiliate sales.

Perhaps it's time to do some copy tweaking of your own.

Have you noticed....

how often a Site Build It sites comes up in the top 3 when you search for something.

The older SBI sites often have a fairly uniform look, so they're easy to spot. But things have changed. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of
sniffing around to work out they're SBI sites.

The great thing about an SBI site is a lot of the hard search engine work is done for you, leaving you to concentrate on producing content that sells.

Highly recommended.