Oh....I know EXACTLY what you're talking about!

From the beginning I knew I didn't wanna be marketing like that. I think those over-the-top claims are from shady affiliate marketers and such, and I'm not interested in that (because many of those people are actually poor.....whereas the people who sell actual useful stuff in an honest way (like SaaS products) tend to make WAY more money.

For this exercise and your first draft of your sales page, just be honest!

Good point Zack!

I think the shoe example is good, and I don't mind pushing the envelope on this stuff a bit, but when it comes to selling craptastic eBooks ABOUT "making millions of dollars" I draw the line.

Also almost all supplement stuff I won't write for because I truly DO NOT believe 99% of their claims.

But yes, putting some theater and cool stats in your marketing is fine, but knowingly lying is not cool in my eyes.

Hmmmmm .....I've never seen an "Ugly Family Tree" sales page outline :-P

Share a link if you have one!

Hey Harry, I talk about that a lot in my paid course. However for the purpose of this experiment I am only doing sales pages.

Writing high ranking blog content gets a little more complex as is can vary A LOT!

That's awesome you use this same method Andre....I guess great minds think alike 🤣

Harry, I think it will work well with a book!

I will be going over how to choose which sections to include (for example a fiction book might not need all these sections).

Hey Suzanne! I'll be address the "length" question in an upcoming message....but hint: YES YOU'RE RIGHT!

On less complex and less expensive products (maybe like a $3 lightbulb from Amazon) you won't need as much copy.

Our example will be following how I make a new sales page for the KopywritingKourse which is a several hundred dollar product that's a little harder to understand than a simple physical product.

However even for any other product I would implore you to try this....as some real gems about the product could emerge :)

Hey Grace, excellent question!

I would substitute the testimonials about the product, for testimonials about YOU or your other work.

Even something like, "Grace was a pleasure to work with and helped the team out tremendously" would work well!

Keep in mind these sections of a sales page can be removed or moved around as you please.

That's awesome Judy....I work with lots of engineers because they generally think too technical to market to normal people.

Hint: Teach them how to solve people's problems without having to explain the deep tech workings of it ;)

Good timing indeed :)

You're right, less expensive products often require less explanation and justification.

To sell a $5 yo-yo is pretty easy......but to sell a $500 yo-yo you might need sections on how industrial strength aircraft grade metal is used to make it spin longer etc etc etc.....

We'll go into the "length" question much more in depth in the coming posts, stay tuned Grace!

Good point!

I added this to the outline :)

Bahahah.....I've given you the tools to combat the dark my apprentice...

(or something like that) 😆

This method has saved me TONS of frustration, and hope it helps you too Joy!

I will, Neville.

What's interesting to me is when a sales letter doesn't follow most of the rules, and yet the product sells well. It makes me wonder:

(A) Does the buyer just really like and need the product and/or

(B) What might sales be like if they used a more conventional sales letter (would it sell more, the same amount, or less)?

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this process. :-)

Hey Ian!

There's actually an [ABOUT THE AUTHOR] in there, and that's where you can insert stuff about your credibility.

There's also a related one called [PERSONAL STORY] that you can inject why people should listen to you.

Also, one of the secret things I'll talk about more later in the series is that a sales page is usually NOT the first piece of content a customer is seeing.

If you do it right, you're often demonstrating your value far before they see a sales page :)

LOLOL, Neville! So true! I've been hired by technical and science folks who are really smart but have trouble talking to people who aren't as tech- or science-minded.

Hey Suzanne, there's LOOOTTTSSS of reasons for this!

1.) The person just really wants the product (think iPhone X or something popular like that). The sales page doesn't matter much for a portion of the loyal buyers.

2.) It might not be in this same order, but often good sales pages hit all these points.

3.) It's a physical product that's easy to understand (think something like an iPad case).

4.) Sometimes a single great video or a bunch of nicely done images can convey what the product does better than a lot of copy, especially for physical products.

Tell me about it!

I love super technical people because they can make real innovations, but when they try to sell, they're often WAY too technical for normal people to understand.

That's where we come in :)

Is it still important to address objections in the sales page? I didn't see it in the skeleton.

I have another (less related) question, but you're the perfect person to answer! Backstory: I'm doing the "CopyHour Challenge," wherein you spend an hour a day handwriting copy ads that performed well. The ones I've seen in a lot of swipe files are much older, and they take quite a few paragraphs to tell the story behind the product. Is this still common practice? I feel like with the 8-second attention span idea, four to five paragraphs of story would lose a reader, no?

"What are some other pieces of a sales page you can think of??"

"Part where you think past the sale"

"Part where the reader is asked to pick one of two options, both of which are really far past the sale" (Too salesy, Nev?)

Neville, can you give us your thoughts about scarcity?

Where in the skeleton and how often should you mention it?

Your product/service or supply/time can't be limitless or why should I buy now?

Love that you're doing it this way 'cause that's EXACTLY the way I always start building landing/sales pages, and it's served me quite well.

It's also the method I outlined in my Landing Page Cookbook (let me know if you'd like a copy).

But dude, am I blind or did you not put a CTA section? WTF?

Oh man.....I left that out by accident Jack. Adding it now!

.....that might be a shirt-worthy observation ;)

Hey Jack, I used to hand-write a few ads before I felt the practice started becoming less useful.

I enjoy taking some lessons from those old ads, but often they are extremely aggressive and remind me of scammy affiliate letters.

Nowadays with far more touch points to a customer (social media, email etc), I think being honest is far better than being so damn aggressive.

Also you can convey a lot more information using a combination of text, images, gigs, videos.....so having to focus ONLY on text is an antiquated idea in my opinion.

I say you try this on like 3 ads and stop. Try copying Joseph Sugarman's ads, his were the least scammy of all from that era. I really liked his style versus other people higher on the "Shady Spectrum" :-P

Hmmmm.....I think that would be lumped in with [How much better life will be with the product]