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An Interview with Yanik Silver Can you give us some how-to's on writing great sales letters? Yeah, absolutely! This going to sound a bit unusual, but one of the best ways to learn how to write a great sales letter is to read a lot of sales letters by others who promote via direct mail and on the web. Whenever you see one that really resonates with you, that you really love, and makes you want to buy, even if you know you can’t afford it, but it makes you want to buy the product, it’s a winner! If it’s on the web, print it out. Then, actually copy it. I mean, get a pad and pen and write it out by hand. As you handwrite several of these winners, you will start to learn the process for what makes a good sales letter. It is a skill, and you can learn it by doing it. For me, writing sales letters is not like writing the next great novel. A great sales letter is personal salesmanship in print. We want to grab attention so we do unconventional things; things you wouldn’t necessarily find in great literature. Like a one word paragraph, for instance. We will also write good sentences that are written for the eye and sentences that are written for the ear. The best thing I think I can do for your readers is to give them my 12 part formula. They will know exactly how I write a sales letter and they can do the same thing. I will also highlight some of the key points. Where do we start? The first thing you start with is a powerful headline. If you’ve been around marketing long enough, you’ve heard over and over the importance of a great headline. It doesn’t matter if it’s in print or on the web. On the web it’s especially important because people are literally whizzing by at the speed of light; clicking everywhere, going from one website to the next. So your headline has to reach out and grab them. For instance, on instantsalesletters.com, we have the headline “In Only 2 and a Half Minutes you Can Quickly and Easily Create a Sales Letter Guaranteed to Sell Your Product or Service… Without Writing!” If you’re working on a sales letter to sell your product or service and you don’t like to write, don’t want to write, or can’t write, that headline will grab your attention. The best thing that you can do is to create a bit of curiosity in your headline, along with the benefit. My 12 Point Web Formula provides great results - we're seeing 1 in 32 visitors purchase using this simple formula. The second step is to always put up a website. One thing I do want people to realize, I use a simple approach to our web marketing: our entire website is a sales letter. That’s it! And that’s why we spend a lot of time on our headline and sales letter. People look at any of our sites and its just one long scrolling letter. Almost like the same kind of letter you get in the mail. That’s why I say that the web is much more like direct mail than it is like TV. If you can simply do what we do, it will cost you a lot less money, than trying to fill your site with hundreds of pages of content, and then hope someone will buy something. We’re just being very direct. There are three things that people can do when they come to our site. They can give me their e-mail, they can buy our product, or they can leave. There is not much else that they can do. That’s the key: you want to limit what visitors can do so you can maximize your revenue from each visitor.
(C) 2007 Mitch Meyerson |
