Copywriting Tips To Help You Boosts Your Conversion

Photo: iraq by Army.mil

You and I both know how important customer and affiliate loyalty is crucial… especially in this day and age. The economy isn’t doing very well. People losing their jobs. Customers look for the lowest price and affiliates now hunt for higher commissions. You get the picture.

I hate having to compete on price. You know, paying out more commission to your affiliates than your competitors or lowering prices to be the price leader. It depresses my bottomline and at the end of the day, I probably don’t make as much as I can. Plus, customers who price hunt are normally harder to deal with. They have higher refund rates. They have more complaints. They require more support, etc etc.

Photo: Ist das die Sonne? Day 45 by Arwen Abendstern

As a copywriter, I have a lot of decisions to make  on a daily basis.

Should I use graphic A or B? Should start with a story or a strong benefit? Which headline should I use for this particular piece?

It used to take me a lot of time to make these crucial decisions. They’re crucial. So I should spend more time contemplating the choices right? What I did was I got myself educated. I gather as much choices as I can. Then I go back and forth on the potential benefits and disadvantages of a particular choice.

I know this is a little late to preaching about new year resolutions but listen up. You’ve got to hear this and do it… cause it will change your life.

It did mine anyways.

Look, before I start I’ve gotta confess this: I’m not a believer of goal setting. Well, not in the traditional kind of way anyway. I read popular goal setting books, did what they said and never saw anything came out of it.

So I stopped.

Photo: The Narcissist by Duncan McKinnon

This is a continuation of my previous post, Stealth Marketing 101 - education. In that post, I talked about how if you hate to sell, educate. When you educate, you sell without really selling.

This is the next step. What if you really don’t know anything? You would be surprised at how many people really have no knowledge to share. If you’re one of those people, listen up. This is easy.

Photo: Fisherman by Christopher Patterson

Ever heard of the saying “give a person a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a person how to fish and you feed him for the rest of his life”? When it comes to persuasion, that’s bad advice.

Because you see, we are all very very lazy people. We all like to get away with doing a little as possible to achieve our goals/dreams. We want the fish… and we hate fishing.

Think about it.

People want to swallow a pill and lose weight.

Photo: The New Dollar Bill by Simon Davidson

If you’ve been studying copywriting for a while, you’d know about “selling the sizzle, not the steak”. That means whenever you sell, you sell the benefits, not the feature.

For the sake of newbies reading, I’ll quickly explain the concept here.

The feature of a speaker, for example, is surround sound. The benefit of surround sound is so that you can immerse yourself in the acoustics. Listen to every detail. And have a more realistic experience.

Photo: Mountain view with sheep by Julie Berlin

Got a colleague you hate? Ask him/her to do you a favor.

That’s right. According to a study conducted by Jon Decker and David Landy, inconveniencing someone can actually make that person like you more. Sounds counter-intuitive? Wouldn’t asking someone who don’t like us for a favor make them like us even less?

Well, as much as we would like to believe, we humans are not rational creatures.

Just take a look at the iPhone. Would a rational creature spend so much more to get so much less?

Photo: Time goes by by Street Spirit

One of the best ways to rank well in the search engines is to build links. And the best ways to build links, is to simply write an article for articles directories and other web 2.0 sites like Squidoo.

The only problem with writing an article is that it’s time consuming. People tend to stare at the screen wondering what to write next. And even when they finally know what to write, they stop and pause to think how to write what they want to write about.

Photo: Whos’s a pretty boy by Aussiegall

People tend to hate self-promotion. You know, people who toot their own horn and correct your grammtical mistakes. I hate them.

On the other hand, sometimes people are just plain stupid. You know, the people who don’t really know what they are talking about but goes around preaching truths. You know better, and you want to shout it to the world.

But how can you do that without being labeled as boastful?