Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Selling the Most Desired Action

After you define your sales process, your next big question is, “What stands between customers and the next step?” If you want them to download your free report, what do they need to be feeling and thinking in order to go ahead and do it? If you want them to call, what might cause them to hesitate and then bail? If you're asking for the sale, what action-freezing second thoughts might they be entertaining?

A cliché in the sales world is that you have to work as hard to sell a $10 item as a $10 million item. On the Internet, you have to work just about as hard to give something away free. Your landing pages must answer your prospects' questions, reassure their doubts, assuage their fears, and guide them clearly to what they should do next.

The masters of persuasive copy know a lot of tricks and techniques, but the basis for their effectiveness is a deep knowledge of what their prospects want to have and want to avoid. As you can read in Chapter 4, marketing tricks without having your finger on the pulse of a substantial market is like doing a technically perfect triple gainer into an empty swimming pool. So the following copywriting tasks can be accomplished effectively only against the backdrop of market insight.

Using bullets

Sales bullets are the foundation for all effective sales copy, whether they appear in actual bullet form on the page or not. Ken McCarthy, one of the top copywriting teachers online, gives you a very useful phrase to focus ...