Checklist: How to design a landing page that sells

1. What are you trying to achieve? If you are trying to create a landing page that converts your visitors into paying customers, I can help you.

2. Does your opening has a strong promise that leads the reader into your copy? Don’t give away everything at once. News and benefits in the headline work every time.

3. For example: the title of the bestseller book “How to win friends & influence people” still sells today – after 70 years. Why? Because it promises a benefit that appeals to the reader’s self-interest, and has the words “How to” that command you to find out more.

4. Do you demonstrate the product? The internet allows you have as many videos, pictures and words as you want. Try Before & After shots. They tend to work.

5. Don’t be afraid of long copy. Be afraid of not being interesting. Say enough to make the sale. To get ideas on what say on your website find out what are the most common questions people ask from your customer service. You will help everyone if you answer them in your copy.

6. Do you use active language and short, simple words? Instead of “we utilize” say, “we use.”

7. Are you appealing to logic only? Humans are emotional creatures, even business people. Did you know gimmicks work especially well on them? Many of them are bored behind their desks.

8. Add icons of banks and credit cars to your website to increase your credibility. Make your phone number visible – and answer it if someone calls.

9. Mention your money back guarantee early in your copy.

10. Have you tested different versions of your landing page? Here’s one free tool for that: www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

11. Do you have high production quality? It builds trust. Clear pictures are important because the reader cannot see the physical product.

12. Do you show people on your landing page? This also build trust.

13. Testimonials from your customers and respected authors in the field are convincing and should be used lavishly.

14. Do you have an incentive if the visitor acts today?

15. Do you ask for the order at least three times? McGraw-Hill research revealed that an average salesman makes the sale after the fifth call. 

16. Captions under the picture are read more carefully than rest of your website. Use them to sell.

17. When you design your web site ask what the visitor is looking for when they arrive? Where do they come from? Directly or through a special ad? Are they able to find the information they are looking for quickly?

18. Is the message personal, clear and direct? Claude Hopkins, the author of Scientific Advertising says: "Your message should single out your prospect like a bell-boy paging a man in a crowded hotel lobby."

19. Are you talking to yourself or to the prospect?


Please write to comments what would you add?

A free gift for Finnish readers

As the rest of Europe is still on summer holiday, us Finns are working. Here's something for Finnish readers only:

Tulospohjainen internet-mainonta Suomessa: Näin kasvatat myyntiäsi ja voittojasi ilman riskiä  Lue ilmainen 8-sivun opas.

Discover the hidden profits that lie in your online advertising budget

If you are like most marketers today, you are losing money online – and you don’t know it. Read this and I will tell how you can discover the fortune that lies hidden in your online advertising budget.

There are three ways you can advertise on the internet:

1. Display advertising
You pay for attention. You buy time on the media or views. Media owner’s pet. This model is familiar from TV and print advertising. You don’t have to pay for clicks or sales that your advertising may produce. Easy to buy and budget.

The least interactive – and usually the most expensive – way to communicate online.

2. Pay Per Click advertising
You buy visitors to your web site. You pay only when someone clicks your ad. You get the views for free. Easy to buy and budget. Google makes their money here.

You don’t know who clicks your ad. You need be ready to “invite people in” at your web site. Don’t make the mistake most companies make; flush your visitors down the toilet. Try get the people to your database to start a relationship with them.

3. Cost Per Order advertising
You only pay when someone buys something from you. If you don’t sell anything online you can use this model when someone registers to your service, signs-up to your newsletter, inquires for more information, for example. You get the views and clicks for free. This is risk-free advertising.

For an advertiser, the Cost Per Order / Cost Per Action advertising is easy to buy, but challenging to budget because no one can guarantee sales in advance without testing.

Can you guess which models are the most popular? The first and the second. Hard to believe? You are not alone.

Why the Cost Per Order / Cost Per Action advertising is the underdog of online advertising and how you can profit from it:
It’s a sad truth that an average marketing director rather spends his budget on something that doesn’t produce results than to budget a part of it to something that guarantees profit.

“What if no one buys from us?” “What if I’m not able to spend my budget by the end of the year?” “I may not get as much money again.”

What many marketers and agencies fail to understand: You can’t lose money with Cost Per Order advertising, because you only pay for your advertising when someone buys something from you. The commission is fixed, your cost will never outmaneuver you – even if you are poor in math like I am. It's an investment that feeds itself. You can’t lose.


PS. Please share this message with anyone you think could profit from learning more about risk-free online advertising.

How to sell: Why keeping your mouth shut pays you more than talking

Don’t know how to sell? Shut up and listen.

It’s that easy. When was the last time you met salesman who listened you? Was he or she a someone who asked lots of questions before the sales pitch? If you met a person like that, chances are you didn’t see him or her as a someone in sales, but as a someone who was genuinely interested in you and your problem. 

Discover why keeping your mouth shut pays you more than talking

1. How do you know your prospect really interested in your offer if you don't get to know his or her situation?
2. You spend less time with your prospect after you have asked enough questions about his business and field to understand it better, rather than shooting with eyes blinded. With more information you can tailor your offer to match his needs.
3. How many times when a telemarketer has called you, you would have told that you have already a similar product or that you just don’t need it right now – but never got the opportunity to speak? Instead of questions about you, they talk how great their magazine is, even though you may only read articles and news online. If they asked more questions, they would know that, and could be already talking to the next, more potential customer instead of wasting time with you.
4. Next time when you run out of words with your customer, hold your tongue. Watch what happens. Often it is the customer who starts to talk to fill in the silence. That new information you get might help you to make the sale.
5. It is much easier, and smarter, to keep the prospect talking than try to come up with clever lines just to impress a silent rock. You need feedback to target your message. Your questions produce that feedback. Questions are also a great tool to build trust between you and your customer. It shows that you care about them.
6. During all my time in sales, no person has ever asked me to stop asking questions about him or her. (Do you enjoy talking about yourself or do you enjoy a pushy salesperson who tries to force you to buy instantly the new super glue? Frankly, I’m more interested in myself.)

How to make people buy from you  

People buy from people whom they believe and trust. Your first goal as a salesperson is to make your customer trust you. You can't start selling before that. Trust is the only way they will buy ever from you. Ten odd years ago I learned that the job of a salesman was to ask excellent questions from customers, not to create sleek sales presentations. Don't believe me? Try it.

For more information about listening your way into sales, listen Brian Tracy’s The Psychology of Selling audio cd and read Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people

As Dale Carnegie's book says: “From now on, I keep my mouth shut. It pays.”

Ad Man's Book Club: July 2010 Choice

How to Write Sales Letters That Sell: 

Learn The Secrets to Successful Direct Mail 

- Drayton Bird

David Ogilvy said, "Drayton Bird knows more about direct marketing than anyone in the world." That's the statement that got me curious about Mr. Bird. To my surprise – and maybe to his own – Drayton Bird is still around writing copy after 50 years in the business.

He has written four books so far. I think How to Write Sales Letters That Sell is the most practical. There is very little theory. The book is filled with examples from companies you would never guess use direct mail. 

Who uses direct mail today

One letter sells frozen steaks, one is from Richard Branson offering free drinks on a Virgin airplane, another one is the famous "Quite frankly, the American Express card is not everyone" -letter. There is also a copy of the Wall Street Journal's two-page letter that sold subscriptions for over ONE BILLION dollars.

Bird doesn't just show you successful direct mail, he explains why they worked or didn't work, and how you too can write successful letters that make people buy.

Why direct mail is more than just paper in a flashy envelope screaming "Buy!"

On the page 129, there's a story how Ogilvy & Mather used live pigeons to deliver their sales message to Cessna airplanes' prospects. To get a free test flight, the prospect had to let the bird out. The story goes that many of the pigeons never returned because, according to David Ogilvy, "Some of those mean bastards cooked and ate the birds."

On the page 18: The most important letter you will ever write... 

... Your job application. And you will learn to do it better than most of your competitors by reading this over 300-page book. Did you know that Victor Ross, the former Chairman of Reader's Digest said it is, "the ultimate how-to book of direct mail letter writing."

You can get How to Write Sales Letters That Sell from Amazon.

Online Advertising: A Challenge to Marketing Directors

This article is my war cry to you, fellow marketer. I live in a country where engineering skills are more appreciated than salesmanship. It is a common joke in Finnish universities that those who spent their first year partying go study marketing, and later to work in marketing.

In Finland people who are fascinated by facts and measurable sciences usually study finance or engineering – but not marketing. In my experience marketing subject appeals to those who like big ideas, theories and intangibles. I want to change that.

Before the year 2000 things were different. Earlier marketing managers and their advertising agencies celebrated their TV and print ad campaigns. When sales grew, the clever campaign earned advertising awards.

When sales came down during the ad campaign, agencies invented new ways to measure success: brand familiarity and awareness. “Brand is feeling, and it cannot be measured in money” was the new mantra. And again, marketing directors and agencies popped bubbling wine to celebrate as the new metrics grew. But then something happened...

...A new comer started to gain ground – the internet took off. Unlike any other media in the history, the reason why the internet was invented – was not to make money, but to connect people and make information sharing easier. I don’t have to tell you that it didn’t take long for companies to spot its potential. It makes sense to advertise where lots of people spend time. And soon online services financed by advertising like Google and Facebook started to flourish. Popularity of the web wasn’t the only change that threw marketers and agencies off balance.

The internet and three major changes facing marketers

Online you can measure the results of your advertising per every cent you spend: who saw your ad, how many clicked the ad, who bought your product after they clicked, and who bought it two weeks later? This changed three things in marketing and media:

One, your return on marketing investment (ROMI / ROI) can be measured more accurately than ever before.

Two, your advertising needs to make people act now – not after 18 month multi-million brand advertising circus.

Three, the business model of media changed. Instead of media coverage, online medias sell you clicks i.e. visitors to your web site, or you only pay for the results your advertising gets. That’s result-based advertising where media coverage is free and you only pay for results you get, such as orders or inquiries.

Publisher’s confession

Against common belief, the result based advertising model is not new. For decades newspaper and magazine publishers around the world have sold their media space to mail-order advertisers, who could prove that the order was made because of the coupon on the paper. The same model can be seen on music television where ring-tone advertisers pay for the orders that their TV ad gets. These companies get the coverage and media time for free.

With online advertising networks, the advertiser only pays for the results which the ad network brings in. The online ad networks – such as AdEffie, to whom I work for – have collected hundreds, sometimes thousands of popular web sites together to aim automatically your advertising to right people, in relevant content, at the right time, to produce you maximum amount of sales, inquiries, visitors or coverage for you. All the advertiser needs is a set of banners, and the online ad network does the rest.

Risk-free advertising?

You think that the concept of results based advertising would be easy to sell for marketers, but so far my experience in Finland has been opposite. Sure, there are savvy marketers who get the it at once (thank God for those clients) but the majority of companies are still living somewhere in 1990’s where accountability and marketing is not mentioned in the same sentence. Unfortunately, the socially skilled Chief Marketing Officer who spent their youth partying in college may be unable to handle the challenge of scientific advertising.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons why TV and print still gets the biggest part of the marketing director’s budget. It’s old and familiar – and without any guarantees of concrete results such sales. Albert Einstein put it well, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

To managers it’s useful information that advertising and media buying has become a risk-free investment which can be a powerful weapon in right hands. Here is my question to you: what should the marketer do in this changing world?

P.S. Subscribe to my blog via email CLICK HERE

Ad Man's Book Club: June 2010 Choice

How to Write a Good Advertisement

- Victor O. Schwab

I was skeptical about this book for months. Its green cover with a weird picture of an old computer keeps showing up if you browse advertising books on Amazon. I didn't think the book had much to offer. How wrong I was...

The author Victor Schwab worked 44 years in advertising. He is a hardened mail order man who counted sales from every direct-response ad he wrote.

Besides selling products for millions of dollars, he documented what worked and what didn't work in advertising. Schwab doesn't guess, he knows, thanks to the scientific methods of testing every element of the ads he created.

One time reading is a mere scratch on the surface of this 224 page book. The best way to read it, is to enjoy it bit by bit and let the information sink in slowly. There is simply too much cake for one sitting.

How to Write a Good Advertisement includes:

-List of 100 headlines proven to sell
-Psychological backgrounds of common buyer types and how you can influence them

-It answers whether negative or positive tone works better
-You learn the eight milestones to a sale
-How to design effective layouts
-And much more...

Curiously, the real secret of the author's success in advertising was to work harder than his peers. Victor Schwab openly suggest to his readers to do the same, if they also want to get ahead in their careers. My advice to get started on that path is to read the book.