Collect leads with your autoresponder. You will get an e-mail digest of everyone’s e-mail addresses who requests information from your autoresponder.

Publish a price list of all the products and services that you offer. You could also include order forms, product descriptions, and other sales material.

Publish free reports in autoresponder format. The reports should be related to your business or web site. Giving away free stuff will quickly increase your traffic.

Collect vital customer satisfaction information by publishing a survey in autoresponder format. This type of information will help you serve them better.

Instead of answering every customer question that’s e-mailed to you, publish ” Frequently Ask Questions” in autoresponder format. This will save time and money.

You could publish your testimonials or endorsements in autoresponder format if you don’t have the room in your ad copy. It’s more effective to include all of them.

Provide back issues of your e-zine archives in auto- responder format. This will give your subscribers and web site visitors easy access to them.

Publish your entire web site in autoresponder format. Sometimes visitors don’t have enough time read your entire site. They could print it out and read it offline.

You could offer your ebook in autoresponder format. Your visitors won’t have to download it or have the software to read it right away.

You could publish the terms and conditions to any business transactions in autoresponder format. This could include return policies, purchases, refunds etc.

Make your reader visualize they have already bought your product in your ad. Tell them what results they have gotten and how it makes them feel. They’ll already become emotionally attached before they buy.

Turn your ad into an article. It could be a story, or how-to article. This will lead them into your ad without them knowing it’s an ad. They’ll already be interested when they get to your sales pitch.

Make sure you show your reader that they are getting a bargain. Tell them the usual price you sell your product for is $99. Then tell them if they order today they can buy it for $69.95.

Direct your ad headline to your target audience. Your readers will feel important and belong to a select group of people who buy your product. For example; “Attention! Accountants, Discover A New Way To Increase Your Client Base!”

Tell your reader how fast they can receive your product or service in your ad. Their buying decision may be based on how fast they can receive your product. They may need it by a certain deadline.

Use bullets to highlight your product or services benefits. Benefits are the key to selling anything, make them standout in your ad. You can use dots, dashes, or circles to highlight them.

Give a money back guarantee that surpasses a normal one. Instead of the normal timed guarantee, give them extra back. Tell them they can keep the free bonus or give them double their money back.

Tell your reader they’ll receive surprise bonuses. This’ll raise your reader’s curiosity and make them want to buy so they can find out what the surprise bonuses are.

Let your reader know this specific package will not be offered again. You must create urgency so people buy now. You may always sell the same product but not with the same bonuses or price.

Give them a couple tips in your ad that will help them with their problem. This will give your business credibility and gain your readers trust to buy your products or services.

Provide your visitors with free content. Your content will be more attractive to your visitors if it’s up-to-date or original. You could also offer people the option to reprint the content in their e-zine or web site.

Offer a free online directory. The directory could be full of interesting ebooks, e-zines, web sites etc. If people find your directory to be a valuable resource they will visit it over and over.

Give your visitors a free ebook. You could also include your own ad in the ebook and allow other people to give it away. If you don’t want to take the time to write one, you could ask other writers permission to use their articles.

Hold free online classes or seminars. They could be held in your web site’s chat room. The idea of “live” information will definitely entice people to visit your web site. You will become known as an expert on the topic.

Give visitors a free entry into your contest or sweepstakes. The prizes should be something of interest or value to your visitors. Most people who enter will continually revisit your web site to get the results.

Let visitors download free software. It could be freeware, shareware, demos etc. You could even turn part of your site into a free software directory. If you created the software, include your ad inside and let other people give it away.

Offer free online services or utilities from your web site. They could be search engine submitting, copy writing proofreading etc. The service or utility should be helpful to your target audience.

Give free consulting to people who visit your web site. You could offer your knowledge via e-mail or by telephone. People will consider this a huge value because consulting fees can be very expensive.

Give your visitors a free membership to your online club. People want to belong to something, why not your online club. You could also give away a free e-zine for club members only.

1. You’ll brand your web site, business and yourself by submitting articles to e-zines. You could include your name, business name, your credentials, web site address and e-mail address in your resource box.
2. You will become known as an expert on the topics you write about. This will give you and your business extra credibility which will help you compete against your competition.
3. Your article might also be placed on the publisher’s home page. If they publish each issue on their home page this will give you some extra exposure.
4. You might get extra exposure if the e-zine publisher archives their e-zine on their site. People might want to read the back issues before they make the decision to subscribe.
5. You will get free advertising. This will allow you to spend your profits on other forms of advertising. You could buy advertisements in other e-zines that don’t publish your articles.
6. You might get extra income from people wanting to hire you to write other articles, books, or even ask to speak at seminars. This is a great way to multiply your income.
7. You could allow e-zine publishers to publish your articles in their free e-books. Since people give them away, your advertising could multiply all over the internet.
8. You will get your article published all over the web when you submit it to an e-zine publisher that has a free content directory on their web site. They’ll allow their visitors to republish your article.
9. You’ll gain people’s trust. If they read your article and like it, they won’t be as hesitant to buy your product or service. You will then be able to increase your profits.
10. You could get your article guaranteed to run in an e-zine. You could agree to run one of their articles in your e-zine if, in exchange, they run yours in their e-zine. It’s a win/win situation.

How does THAT work?

Click here to find out.

Fortunately, Sitepoint has a great guide to copy writing for the web designer.

Over half of the respondents (55%) indicated that they had immediate purchase intents. 11% immediately bought online, 6% immediately bought offline. Of the remainder, 21% indicated that they would buy within 48 hours, and 17% within the week.

Now more than ever, it is clear how important it is for businesses to be accessible online — even if they do not sell or deliver services online; if they can’t find what they want to know from and about you, then the odds are that they will find it from your competitor.

More info here.

Recently I had an opportunity to help one of our largest clients evaluate just how they could adopt and leverage using “personal publishing” technology on their site. The approach I settled on involved embedding a mature, off-the-shelf package (Movable Type) into their site.

The advantage of this approach is that it can be embedded “behind the scenes”, exactly matching the look and feel of their existing site, fit into the existing template structure that their in-house development staff uses, and look totally “seamless” to the users of the site, except that there are now suddenly new “features” — navigation between news articles is simpler, look and feel is more consistent across the site, and user retention time goes up as users are led to similar articles of interest. More technical users are given the option of viewing headlines in news aggregation programs, such as NetNewsWire on the Mac, and Amphetidesk, NewsGator or SharpReader on the PC.

The more substantial advantages, however, are mostly invisible to the users of the site. These include:

1) Lowered cost of content development — their site uses a lot of “single page content” pages, some news, some general information. By using this system as a standard method of generating such pages, they go from having to have a developer create each page to allowing non-technical users to generate pages via fill-in-the-blank web forms, or desktop editors offering spell-checking and “click to publish”. The smart use of categories and various index pages insures that the new content goes into the proper area and is brought to the attention of site visitors automatically.

2) The structure of index and category pages is designed to help increase the site’s overall search engine page ranking by intelligently distributing links through the site. Over time, this should result in a substantial net increase in search engine traffic to the site.

3) Using syndication to bring in new visitors directly increases the traffic on the site. A plan for distributing both generalized and vertical interest RSS feeds to sites such as Syndic8 and NewsIsFree will bring in more visitors via news aggregators, and via RSS headlines being added to other sites. These same feeds are being made available to their more technical site visitors as well, many of whom manage small websites in their vertical market. By encouraging them to add headlines to their sites, traffic is increased directly. Indirectly, search engine link popularity is improved by the same mechanism, again generating steadily increasing search engine traffic.

4) By making it easy to keep adding fresh content to the site, and improving navigation through the articles, visitor revisitation and retention time both increase, giving more opportunities to turn site visitors into customers.

All in all, a very win-win strategy that can be implemented quite cost effectively. This particular client does have an in-house development staff that does the day-to-day updating of the site, but the simple “turn-key” nature of this approach offers even more leverage to small site owners who do everything themselves, or who depend on outside help to keep their site updated.

In the article (here), Alexis Gutzman offers some great advice regarding not only the content of your message, but also the formatting.

Worth a read.

Back in the early days of pop-up ads (which first hit their stride on the “adult internet”), the lesson was learned time and again — people complained furiously, but they still bought 25% more with the pop-ups on than they did with them off. Thus the pop-ups got to stay, and eventually ended up everywhere.

Sales copy does not have to be pleasant in order to work. Any decent direct marketeer will tell you that. The same direct marketeer will also tell you that he does nothing to his copy without testing it.

In the direct marketing approach, a mailing list is divided into control and test groups, and ads are sent to groups large enough to be statistically significant, and the responses tallied.

You can, of course, do the same thing on your web site. The simplest approach is to split your incoming traffic into multiple groups, and test your changes against your control. This can be done by something as simple as a little JavaScript to rotate different links each time a page is loaded; if you’re not sure how, speak with your web developer or technical resource.

This is not to say that there are not some good tidbits in the “writing for the web” guide.

Some of the ideas about site organization are very worthwhile (as long as you take into account how they will affect your search engine ranking), as are comments about having solid page structure and short single-point paragraphs.

But before your throw your effective sales copy out with the bathwater, be sure you test any changes you make.