5awzuy6jv7

Questions Are The Answer

If you want to write sales letters and ads that create an intense desire in the mind of your prospects to own your product, you absolutely MUST do some research. You need to understand your target market, your product, and how your product solves your prospect’s biggest pain or fulfills their biggest dreams.

It really doesn’t matter how clever your letters are or how successful the phrases and formats have been with other targets and other products. Your letter has to hit on what is important to THIS target with THIS product. You determine that with research.

Learn all you can about your audience. Understand why this audience will be interested in what you have to offer.

Empathize with your target market. Begin from the mindset of a typical prospect. Get inside his or her mind. Communicate from a solid understanding of your prospect’s thoughts and feelings of the moment. Empathy removes the barriers and shortens the distance between you and your prospect. Empathy builds rapport. Your ability to come from an understanding of your reader’s point of view, gives you an advantage and makes you a likely candidate for the prospect’s attention, interest, and business.

Investigate all aspects of the product or service thoroughly. Look at it in different ways and from unique perspectives.

Learn what you can about your competitors, their products, their offers, their strengths, their weaknesses.

Consider any and every likely obstacle that might keep your prospect from parting with his money. Think of possible ways around those obstacles.

Envision your typical prospect as you write your headline. Create an image of the type of individual you want to address and keep this image in the back of your mind. This strategy will help you develop a sales letter that forces your prospect to imagine himself enjoying the benefits you offer.

At this stage, all you’re focusing on is questions, not answers. What do you need to know before you can persuade your ideal prospects to buy from you? Without worrying about how or if you can find the answers, list every question you can think of that would help your message be more compelling and motivating.

Questions like:

• Who is my ideal prospect?

• What is his biggest pain? Her deepest desire? Biggest frustration?
• Who are my strongest competitors?
• How are they better? How are we better?
• What are the major objections – reasons a qualified prospect might not buy?

Possibly dozens more.

Take time to dream. If you had access to unlimited knowledge; if you could read minds – what information would help you sell as much of your product or service to as many qualified people as possible? Write them down as questions.

Maybe you’ll find the answers and maybe you won’t. But, you have a much better chance of finding the answers once you are AWARE of the questions. That’s what this step is all about.

Please understand this key point…

What makes a sales letter irresistible is NOT the wording, not the format, not the clever way to get attention – it is the connection, the TRANSFER of ideas, of emotion, of passion from you to your reader. And you create this connection by truly understanding your reader – her needs, her pain, her dreams.

When you know – really KNOW – what your reader thinks, how she feels, what motivates her — and you write your letter directly to her, addressing her needs, solving her pain, delivering her dreams – you WILL connect with her. She will have to own your product.

Before Your Web Site Makeover Goes Live  :

A Checklist

The web designer shows you her final version of your long-in-the- making revamped site. You clíck around and can hardly believe how gorgeous and rich it is. “Love it! Launch it!” Oops, not so fast. Too many times I’ve seen that sentiment lead to frantic scrambling, even to disaster. Before making your revamped site live, use this checklist to make sure you’ve caught or prevented horrible new-site glitches.

1. Timing. Never, never launch your new web site on a holiday, weekend or even on a Friday. Why? Because chances are high you’ll discover something weirdly wrong with your shopping cart, images, blog or regular web pages, and the tech support you need will be closed down or just skeletally staffed. Likewise, make sure your web designer or developer will be on hand for the next day or two to quickly fix any problems that become evident.
2. Test on as many computers as you can, and request feedback with the site parked in a test location. A colleague of mine (whose experience inspired this article) replaced her old site with the new one, then asked for feedback on a discussion board. Several people reported pages looking peculiar in their browsers or receiving an obnoxious warning message instead of simply seeing the home page.
   Too late, she learned she should have asked for this feedback before the site went public. What looked great and worked fine in her office had not-so-positive results in various browser and monitor combinations no one had tested the site on.
3. Match the new file names with the former ones. When your web site has been up and running for quite a while, visitors have bookmarked various pages of it or created links to your pages on their sites. You’d be foolish to sacrifice the benefit of those bookmarks and links by having all new files names and sending those looking for the old page names to an error page. Instead, as much as you can, make the new file names match the old ones and redirect any old pages lacking a corresponding new page to the nearest equivalent.
   Designers and developers, focused on creating a new site for you, don’t usually take care of this unless you ask them to. I often run across this foolish oversight when updating one of my reports that has a lot of links in it, discovering article links that go to a dead link rather than to the article that was given a new URL during a site makeover.
4. For SEO purposes, keep page titles the same. Experts in search engine optimization advise that if your site was getting good traffic from search engines prior to your makeover, keep your old page titles as much as possible. (The page title is the text that shows up in the upper left corner of the browser.) To search engines, a new page title can cause the built-up search engine ranking for the page to get lost.
5. Hunt down and eliminate boilerplate copy. If your designer or developer used a template (and if so, they’ll rarely tell you they did), the template may have pre-written text on extra pages that unexpectedly become visible to your visitors. The testing described in step #2 above usually flushes out these blunders so you can purge them from the site. Unless the new site is gargantuan, you can also hunt down the unwanted content by viewing all the pages one by one from your file manager program.
6. Run a sample order and subscription signup from the new site. If possible, test the ordering and líst signup procedures from your test location before making the new site live. Sometimes the “thank you” messages don’t show up properly or orders just don’t go through correctly after a makeover. If you can’t check this from the test location, run these checks as soon as possible after making the new site live and be prepared to fix the glitches immediately. Having a non-functioning site up even for an hour can lose you sales!
7. Delete all the old pages from the server. Do this just before uploading the new site if you can, or after uploading the new site hunt for and delete any former pages that were not replaced by new ones. Otherwise, you’ll be startled later by a visitor finding pages you thought had been superseded.
8. Immediately after uploading the new site, recheck all the links and pages. Start from the home page and first systematically follow all the links in your navigation system, then follow all the links on pages that contain many links, like an index of articles or your newsletter archive. As you do this, keep your eyes peeled for any missing images. Fix any problems you notice.
9. And last, for the next four or five days, monitor all the errors that show up in your web logs. This alerts you to images that visitors aren’t seeing, pages that aren’t linked to correctly, pages that are taking too long to load for some of your visitors and other problems. Fix any remaining glitches and bask in the praise for your well-done, nicely functioning makeover!

About The Author Marketing guru Marcia Yudkin is the author of Web Site Marketing Makeover: Improve Your Message and Turn Visitors into Buyers and numerous other books on marketing. Besides being a Webby Awards reviewer annually since 2001, she performs web site reviews for business owners and managers who want objective, constructive feedback – http://www.yudkin.com/sitereview.htm .