There have been some people who have asked me how to write a sales letter before, so I figured I’d try to help you guys by writing out a semi guideline on how to go about doing so. Though, I can’t promise it’ll be a “how to write a good sales letter.” Just joking!

I have only written a handful of sales letters for people (and for myself) before so I’m far from being a professional at it. Though, those people I have wrote something for have been happy with the writing with no complaints (maybe behind my back on the complaints but not to my face ) and someone told me their sales have been pretty damn good.

Hey, if I can impress those few, you guys should easily be able to do the same and more. I mean, there are a lot of people who are in need of people who write sales pages. Not necessarily because they can’t write it themselves but simply the fact that they are crunched for time. Those are the same people who outsource all their work (design, sales letter, traffic, etc) and I bet if you do a good enough job, you’ll get someone to keep you around for quite some time.

The reason why people come to me is simply the fact that they think I’m good at writing as well as good at persuading people. I think I’m okay but just as long as other people are happy with it, then that’s all that really matters to me!

Plus, it’s not that hard, you just have to cover and highlight the best qualities of whatever product you’re selling.

Anyways, below is a guideline on how to write a sales letter:

Create an Attention Grabbing Headline - This should be in big letters and should be the very first thing you see besides the header design. It should be somewhat short, snappy and something that sticks out. A lot of people tend to ask a question when doing this but you don’t have to.

Some people use quotes on it as well but it’s not necessary. But I would definitely suggest it. Also, you may want to use the headline format as well as change the color so it’s different from the rest of the body’s text.

Example:

“Who else wants a powerful online money making system that does 90% of the work for you?”

*This was taken from a sales letter I seen.

I tend to also write a couple of bullet points right below it just to back up the headline. It should only be a few lines that highlight your main selling points.

The Body Should be a in Formal Letter Format – If you know how to write a regular letter to someone, then that’s exactly what you should do here. The main body of your sales page should be this long letter.  I mean, it’s called a “sales letter” for a reason, right?

The reason why you’re writing in a letter style is you want to make it personal and ask questions that you already know the answer to.

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This is a guest post written by Bruce Hopkins of No Nonsense Internet Marketing. He has been a good friend and very knowledgeable in the online business. He’s also the one that made $2k in one day from my $100/day post.

Everyone is always interested in building the readership of their blogs. After all in the blogging world more is always better, correct? You need more subscribers, you need more visitors and pages views. This is normally all most bloggers worry about, but could there be more?

If you have done any type of Affiliate marketing where you built landing pages to promote a product then I’m sure you have heard about testing various landing pages even if you have not never actually performed any tests. But why does this same practice not apply to bloggers?

Don’t we all want conversions too? I’m sure if you are running a blog on any niche you have a method for your readers to subscribe to your feed. Perhaps you even have an option for allowing people to subscribe to an email list whether its the Feedburner list or Aweber ( you should really be using Aweber for this and not Feedburner, but that’s another post). The bottom line is you want people to stick around and read more of your content.

Perhaps you promote affiliate programs on your blog so you also want people occasionally purchase a product through one of your links. The more the better, correct? Well I’ll agree and disagree with you. I will agree that you want more conversions; in fact, that is the only thing that really matters at the end of the day if your goal is to make a little money from your blogging endeavors. If you have some other sort of goal, then this post is not really for you.

So how can we test a blog? Its hard to do split tests since the visitor funnel is not easy to control. The visitor could come from a variety of sources so split testing is a little harder. Its not impossible if you know a little PHP and can do an if statement. Perhaps I’ll write that up later as it will get a lot more technical than I want to present here. You don’t really need any technical skills for what I’m taking about.

If you want more subscribers then tweak how you get them. Try asking for them. Many people use the “What Would Seth Godin do” plugin on their blogs and it has been proven to increase the amount of people who subscribe, but its not enough alone. If you really want to improve this area of your blog, then figure out what your readers want and need. If a section of your readers find a specific blog post or yours through a particular search term then shouldn’t you provide them with a little extra something to get them to stick around.

For example: Lets say you have a blog on dog training and in that blog you have a single search term that has good position in the SE’s. You analyze the term and realize it is bringing you traffic for “How to Train your dog to sit”. Its apparent the person who typed in this phrase wants to teach their dog to sit and in the bigger picture is interested in training their dog. You could put an affiliate link in your post hoping some of the people would buy from you and this is definitely something you would want to do, but at the same time you could super charge this and convert that visitor into a subscriber if you gave them a little extra incentive.

You could put together a little ebook on “How to Train a Dog to Sit” and offer it to the visitor in exchange for their email address. This is a win-win situation as the visitor will get extra information and you will get a new subscriber who is definitely interested in your dog training tips. If you build a relationship with these people then you will develop a highly responsive list which can earn you money for years to come. You could even segment these people into different lists according to their interest, but for that you need to be using Aweber or one of the other email list management applications.

There are multiple ways to accomplish this task if you start analyzing your site with a testing mentality. Jay has done this with his 100 dollar a day Adsense post. He asked people, maybe you, to subscribe to see the post. Then every once in another post he will refer back to the original. People may not have read the original but they are definitely interested in reading it, so they subscribe. Its a win-win, the visitor gets something they want and Jay gets another subscriber.

Now at this time you may be saying but I can’t write an ebook. I don’t know how. Big deal, you know how to write a blog post and sometimes that is enough. If you do need an eBook to entice the visitor and don’t want to write it then just head on over to http://www.master-resale-rights.com/catalog/PLR_eBooks-75-1.html and buy one for a couple of bucks. Edit it to make it unique to your audience and then give it away( well as long as the rights allow it).

This will only take you a few minutes to set up and you have improved the usefulness of your blog immensely from this one little tweak.

Now what would happen if you analyzed all your best search terms and changed each post to give the reader a little something extra. Would it not seem logical that these actions would help grow your blog?

Of course search terms are not the only place you should be looking. Try to think like a random reader, what would make you want to stick around and subscribe to a blog. Think of those things and then modify your design to meet those needs. Try out things. Move your subscribe icon to another location on the page and see if your subscriber count goes up. Add multiple methods to subscribe. Ask the visitor at the end of every post. If you test the placement and color of your subscribe button, over time you will understand what works best for your readership. If you understand what the visitor wants and then give it to them you will not be able to stop your conversion factors from improving.

Well, I told Jay I would do a single blog post, but this one is going to get really long if I continue. I guess I’ll have to do another one on the email subscriber box. but I will leave one thought with you on this area. Which has a better connotation “Subscribe to our list” or “Join our team”? Which would you be more apt to enter your email address into? This is a new tip of mine and I just changed it on my site a week or two ago, but since I got rid of the Subscribe and list words around my subscription box, my opt in conversions have nearly quadrupled. There may be something to this testing and understanding your visitors.

For more of Bruce’s ramblings check out his No Nonsense Internet Marketing Blog

A lot of people ask me how to pick a niche or that they need to narrow it down to something really specific before they start anything. Although, it is good to have a niche, it’s also not extremely necessary to make money. But for those that are interested in trying to figure out how to pick a niche, let me give you guys a few ideas.

Steal Someone Elses’ Niche Idea

I know some of you guys may think stealing is unethical so let’s just replace the word steal with borrow. See, there are a lot of people with ideas and of course, with a good idea, people want to copy it, right? I mean, how many people do you know who took someone elses’ idea and just made it that much better?

Let me give you an example. Myspace. Facebook. Twitter. Do you think those were the first social networking sites? Definitely not. I’m sure they saw other sites that were similar and just wanted to create something even better. And as far as I know, those are the biggest social networking sites on the internet today.

See? They basically took an idea and just made it even better. So, that’s what we can all do. Though, sometimes it gets too competitive. *cough* Make Money Online niche *cough*

Finding Trends

I know trends are things that are “in”… now. And most of the time they run out and people move on from that trend. But believe it or not, there are a lot of trend niches that will be successful for a long time to come. Of course, you have to find the right one.

If you have no clue on what I’m talking about, try creating a site on American Idol. Technically, that’s a trend. Though, it’s a recurring trend. So, the niche will probably have its down months when the show isn’t on but ask anyone that has an American Idol site or blogs about it and they will tell you they see drastic spikes in traffic as well as earnings.

Plus, you would only have to work on the site for those couple of months the show is on.

Do Your Own Research and Test

Of course, the hardest thing to do is lots and lots of research, especially keyword research. The ultimate goal is to find something hot that people are continually searching for or are extremely interested in with low competition. If people aren’t interested or aren’t searching for it then is the niche really worth it?

There are a lot of exceptions especially if its a unique niche. But then that would require lots of promotion to get people interested in it to begin with.

Pick Something of Interest

John actually brought this up in the comments so I figured I’d add it on here as well. I forgot to mention it but picking a niche that you have knowledge in or are extremely interested in will get you by. Personally, I don’t create a site unless it’s something that interests me.

I have a entrepreneur blog, a movie site, a sex education type site, celebrity sites, I talk about sports, poker, etc. See? All my interests.

Thanks John for bringing it up!

Those are just a few ways on how to pick a niche. A lot of people mention they need to pick a niche before they do anything… well, I’d say just jump into it and see what happens!

Remember when I wrote how to get more Twitter followers quickly and I wanted it all to be automated? Well, after a little over a month we’ve had some progress but the only downfall was my lack of commitment to the project. Lol

I’m not a huge fan of Twitter especially the fact that a lot of spammers are on there and everything is virtually automated. That was one of the main reasons why I created that Twitter account for @DatMoneyDotCom. I actually wanted to show you guys how a lot of people just inflate their followers with all these automatic bots and programs. Targeted or not, spammers and automated systems will be just that.

Let’s check on my progression…

Currently, I am following 837 people and I have 349 followers. That may not be saying much but I don’t think I’ve added one single person by myself. In addition, I haven’t promoted it like I should have and if you look at my updates, I have only updated it seven times… with the last update coming more than two weeks ago.

Obviously, there has been a lack of commitment to this project on my end, yet, I’m still following people and getting followers for doing absolutely nothing at all. Just imagine if I actually put some effort and work on my end, I could probably have thousands of followers by now.

Matter of fact, I know some people who implemented the same strategy I used and after one month, some even ended up with 2,000-4,000. Though, you’ve been warned. Twitter can track stuff like this, I think, and possibly delete your account if you spam too much.

The only thing I didn’t do was use this tool to unfollow people that are not following me. Again, I wasn’t fully committed to this project so I didn’t bother doing that aspect of it.

Like I said, this was just testing out one of the many methods you can do to get Twitter followers. I wrote a basic description on how to get more Twitter followers but doesn’t include the specific tools used. And honestly, it’s been so long that I can’t even remember what I used exactly. But I’ll post it here (or start a new post) when I have time to retrace my steps and tell you step-by-step on exactly what I did and which sites/tools I used.