I Found a Sales Page That I Actually LIKE

Caroline,

Thanks a lot for writing this. Strangely enough, I was just looking at the same letter yesterday, and I had many of the same thoughts. I should have blogged about it then ;-)

So many otherwise intelligent folks answer the “OMG the long sales letter’ complaint with the simplistic, “well, they work.” So does walking from Portland Maine to Portland Oregon, but there are much better ways to get there. Being a copycat is not being a leader.

In my last ‘brick and mortar’ job I was running my own sales and service business. I sent out many snail mail letters to prospects and had a very low success rate. After looking at what I did then, and after feedback from folks who had received the letters, many of the same points were made.

Talking about the excellence of the product and all the rest of the fluff that clogs so many current sales letters is really just an obstacle to sales … sales are being made in spite of the overblown letters, not because of them.

Tell the prospect the problem, and how the product will benefit the prospect … the prospect already assumes it is a good product, else why would you be selling it … and by all means put in a one click “Buy Now” link, _with the price_ … just in case some one actually wants to buy.

You’ve discovered my hidden secret – I love talking about landing pages. It must be the inner marketer within me (or nerd).

The long landing page debate has been popping up quite a bit lately. I agree with Dave’s points, and would add that “conversion rate is not everything”. If the message or design on your landing page is inconsistent with your site, then you’ve lost, at least a little bit.

SeoMoz held a contest (last year, I think) that had me truly captivated. They invited 12 landing page designers to give it their all to sell premium memberships to SeoMoz. The success rates ranged from 1% to 10% conversion, with a long landing page winning out.

Those are amazingly high rates. What I learned, while reviewing each page, was that I found one design that really struck a cord with me – the short checklist. The short checklist had a conversion rate of 9% and seemed to have a chance to slay the long landing page. More to the point, it was more appropriate for that particular contest, at least in my head.

Here’s the short checklist page(9%). Here’s the long landing page(10%).

Will’s last blog post..How to use Toon Boom to Create an Animated Gif

Caroline, I really, really hate sales letters as well and I very rarely go past the first paragraph of any I do happen to stumble across. What I am interested in though, is the part about adsense. I have a few niche blogs I have set up over the last couple of months and would be very interested in what you learn about adsense and setting it up, as I am sure I am going about it all wrong. Please be sure to fill us in on anything interesting you may learn :)

Hi Caroline,
I noticed you were looking at Ebay and I must admit the idea is still appealing.
I must say though that I’ve had a couple of these Ebay portals running for a couple of months now and made zero with them. Of course I am crap, but nothing at all from my end.

I’m not using the BANS version, but I have 2 others which were MUCH cheaper. Infact I even have resale rights, so if someone wants to test the Ebay portal idea for LESS than 20 or 40 bucks, they can contact me through my blog. I don’t even have a sales page at all – LOL

I bought 2, the one I personally prefer is a niche only version, because it is dead easy and logical to manage. It does need a mysql database (and PHP of course).
I think you can make it look prettier, but I haven’t had time so far. What I like about it the most, next to the easy management, is that it is so easy to add extra “content” pages, so it is not just an Ebay RSS clone which ads no value. You can actually explain why you have picked this Ebay category for instance.
This one I can sell for $40. That should be $39.92 of course ROFL but we are all grown up here to know that means 40 bucks.

The other one is more like the BAN one from first glance. It is a multi category, Ebay replica, but it does add google adsense if that rocks your boat. AFAIR this one does NTO need a database. It’s purely an RSS pull type thing which uses the Ebay API. This one I can sell for 20 bucks.

I can show working examples in my niche if anyone wants to see them in action.

These are one off fees, there’s no manual, newsletter or “club”.

Like the BAN one the beauty is supposed to be that it constantly refreshes as Ebay does, so it is on auto pilot.

Note you do need to sign up with commission junction to get the Ebay commission and there is a UK and USA scheme for sure, maybe other countries too?

For adsense obviously you need erm an adsense id.

As I said, I’ve run these for a few months now and made ZILCH but i am not very lucky like that.

I’ve mainly added them to my niches, NOT for the Ebay affilaite commission, but because it provides constant refreshed content on topic.

much prefer the databas eone becaus eyou can actually acdd soem content of balue to it.
Actually I hate the ebay clone one, becaus eit is justa clone in your niche. No value.

Google slapped the YouTuibe version of these, because of that, no added value, and I suspect the adsense par will get slapped too!

I must say it seems like the regular IM HYPE dream, to just do an Ebay clone script on auto pilot without adding any value at all.

In fact my stomach is still churning from the BAN copy, Ebay does billions of dollars of stuff, so it can be yours if you run this” type pitch. It is so crows are black everything black is a crow type logic, I want to hit my head on the desk!

But anyway, why pay 100 bucks for it when you can pay 20?

I honestly don’t know if the BAN “club system” makes it any better?
As I said, I don’t use it myself for the vague chance of a commission, AFAIC its fresh content for a part of my site and as I use the 40 buck version mainly, I can still add CONTENT VALUE to it if I had time to. (Sigh)

Sorry for the sales pitch. Sorry there is no sales letter.
All just proves you have to go the extra mile to make your needle in a haystack work.

Which is still why I don’t think Ebay is an “easy” market, but it is undoubtedly a high traffic (and highly competitive) one. Especially with the glut of these me too ebay clone scripts which are spewing out of the wood work.

And like nearly all affiliate schemes you are relying on continual fresh meat (sic) as yu only get the client capture commission the once.

Is that a way to run a long term business? Maybe for some, but not for me…

Peter

Peter’s last blog post..Heidi Klum and Gary Sinise look like me!

“AdSense and the eBay Affiliate program don’t really mix…”

It depends on the content of the page of course, but I think in many cases they mix quite well. See for example, http://www.treenware.com.

You don’t have to buy anyone’s system to try out Ebay ads. Ebay provides a very easy to use tool for creating “sniplets” you can add to any page on your site with the look, feel and search terms you want shown on that page. For example, one of the treenware pages is set to look for auctions with the term “lignum vitae” in the title and return the 25 which end next.

With the “sniplet” approach you can include highly targeted auctions on only those pages where they are appropriate and are not committed to a sitewide system.

@Paul,
Great points. Adsense is always a distraction to your sales unless you are an info only site.
Guess my mentality was that an Ebay clone is just info to me.
Another reason for using the more expensive one then ;-) whcih is adsense free. Knew I preferred it for a reason – LOL.

I guess it stems from the youtube clones which are info only and have adsense on them.

I must admit when I looked at it I thought “ooo another revenue stream if they don’t bite for ebay, or maybe both”

Yep the ebay widgets etc are dead easy to configure and useful to monetise any static pages or blogs.

I’ve only deployed the Amazon widgets which are static products.
I presume then the Ebay ones are RSS fed like these clone scripts, so the content is always fresh?

That’s a great tip Paul!!
And damn you for losing me $20 – ROFL… (joke)
And the boys from BANS will be round to see you later ;-) (joke)

Peter

Peter’s last blog post..Heidi Klum and Gary Sinise look like me!

@Paul,
I note the teenware site is also doing (distracting) google adsense alongside the ebay rss feed.

Not your site then I trust?

Be great if we had actual figures on whether the adsense reduced the ebay commissions, or merely provided a secondary revenue stream when appropriate.
But I’m not sure how you could measure that “accurately” with so many variables (the 2 ad content streams and the site/surfers tastes).

Empirically personally I scanned both, ebay first as it was centre stage and then when nothing interested me, the adsense block. Which is kind of how I do regular search as well.

Be interesting to hear other peoples experiences on them when they view this page.

Apologies to who ever the page owner is, for getting superfluous traffic from us…

Peter

Peter’s last blog post..Heidi Klum and Gary Sinise look like me!

@Peter,

It’s a site I put up years ago with AdSense. I added the Ebay items several months ago. The listings come from javascript code created by the Ebay Editor Toolkit and inserted on the page.

My impression, not based on any quantitative proof, is that AdSense and Ebay are largely independent of each other.

I bought a copy of BANS when it first came out but prefer the more targeted approach using the editor toolkit. I worry that when programs like BANS get popular they leave an easily identifiable “footprint” that search engines could use to filter or downgrade rankings. The ongoing Whypark situation being a case in point.

@Will, that long page is REALLY long, I certainly like the short checklist though. It occurs to me that each type of page appealed to a different customer – wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way to tailor the landing page to the kind of visitor that lands there?

@Peter, hmm yeah thanks for the sales pitch there, I would have thought it should be $37 shouldn’t it? heh. The reason I’m not buying BANS is not because of the price but because I don’t really feel like going down the whole ebay affiliate route right now.

@Paul, thanks for sharing that site with us – a nice example.

Caroline,

I went to the site and checked it out. I think they found the right balance: it’s a bit gaudy but not too much, so it catches the attention of the reader but isn’t a turn-off; it answers questions but not all the way through to the meaning of life, thank goodness. It’s about three “pages” long, which makes it like, oh, a real sales letter. The problem with Internet sales letters is that when you are not paying for the printing and the postage, you can get carried away with your own brilliance and just keep writing, and writing, and…

Will,

My design came in sixth last year in SEOmoz’s landing page competition. Interestingly, all the designs outperformed their own page’s previous stats by a very wide margin (mine outperformed by 330%). They’ve gone back to a page that closely resembles their old page, which is an odd thing to do, since they had such apparently great results, but the testing had flaws which they may have noticed upon longer use of the winner, including not separating for subscription levels (a purchase counted as a purchase, whether for a low or high level), returns (satisfaction guarantee), and several other issues. (IMHO the period of time was too short….)

It did prove that that long letter (which was delightfully written, if rather a yawn for design) worked best for sheer numbers of purchases. It was really cool to watch the competition unfold, because you do not usually have the chance to see such truly diverse designs “compete” against each other in the real world.

Because I love Caroline’s sales letter rants I have commented about this before here, wherein Caroline was completely honest and found herself in a hornet’s nest because of (or in spite of?) her honesty. No more now!

Regards,

Kelly

Kelly’s last blog post..Ever Think of Getting Over to the Gym?

The idea of BANS doesn’t really inspire me. Pardon my ignorance but I guess if you are a pro and know what to do you can always do better with your wp blog or static html site. Niche affiliate marketing sounds better than BANS to me.

TJ @ BareFly.Com’s last blog post..More On Bum Marketing and The Article Directory List

As a fellow long sales page hater I can see why you like the BANS landing page. It pretty much avoids all the main problems long sales pages typically have and meets all the criteria I specify a landing page should have.

Tom Beaton’s last blog post..Facebook Suffers its First Drop in Unique Monthly Visitors

Wow, thanks to all, especially to Will for the report on that contest and the useful links … I had not come across it before, it’s very interesting to get real-world results rather than just opinions.

A 9 or 10% conversion rate is literally quite amazing. Translating back to the real-world business I mentioned, if I had had a 10% conversion reat I would still be in that business, and in a much nicer office suite.m Interesting.

Dave Starr’s last blog post..Does An RV Cost Money or Make Money?

There is a vitally important point here that shouldn’t be missed.

It is irrelevant if we like or dislike anything on our websites or anyone elses.

It is about whether what is on a web site works. By that I mean has it been tested objectively so we know that long beats short or blue beats red. These long sales letters may just be clones of other sales letters but itf they have run and run and are paying for visitors then they convert and are therefore right in those circumstances.

Split testing results is what IM is all about. You can create two versions of a sales letter for free. You can now use Google split testing software for free. You can find the better result of your test and then go on to improve it again. And again. And Again.

Let me give you a real world example.

I know of a seller of the Big Issue who has problem in his life but who is smart.

He split tested his clothes, clean scruffy. Bright, dowdy. Dog, no dog. Smile, frown. Happy, Sad. etc, etc.

He made simple notes in his diary.

He increased his income 500% in a month. That was conversion.

Next we fixed his traffic. 2 traffic cones nicked off the street.
We put the cones one either side of the double doors he stands outside so nearly twice as many people came through his door as before. Income up 40% ( note not 100%, nothing is that simple)

This is it folks, traffic and conversion.

You want a cheap visitor to your site. Try to get 1-5% to buy what you have to offer and 20-30% to leave via a paid link such as Google Adsense.

You can work on getting those figures higher but you can start a new site much more easily. (80:20 rule applies here too)

Nothing else to it.