Learn Copywriting Testing Secrets: How To Accurately And Quickly Test And Tweak Your Sales Page

By: Terry Brazil II
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:43:04
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Writing copy for your sales letter can be a very tedious and nerve wracking experience. There is nothing like the feeling that you just wrote a killer sales letter just to find out that it will not make one single sale.

This is why testing your copy is so important. Testing and tweaking your copy could make the difference between a sales letter that converts at .005% and one that converts at .05%. This may not look like a lot to some people, but if you are familiar with the world of marketing you will know this is a huge difference. Actually the second of the two will pull in ten times more sales for you.

This ultimately means that you are leaving huge sums of cash on the table if you do not optimize your sales letters. But still there are a large amount of marketers that don't even try tweaking their copy to pull in more sales. They simply leave it the way it was originally made hoping that it will start converting for them.

Unfortunately testing your sales letter to the point you are satisfied with it can take weeks if not months. You have to make a change and see if it has improved your conversion. Then you have to repeat this process the whole way through the sales letter changing only one thing at a time until you believe and hope that you hit every troubled spot that is turning your visitors off and causing them to exit the page. There is a lot of guess work involved in this process.

If you don't want to deal with all of the waiting and guess work that goes into this the only thing I can suggest is to check out Intra Trakker. It will cut your testing time down from weeks to virtually over night. But we will assume that you don't have a copy of this software. So instead I will show you an advanced way to manually test your copy.

The first thing you want to do is install a hit counter like what StatCounter offers on your sales copy page that will keep track of how long a visitor stays on any certain page. This is one thing that many people do not do. This will give us a general idea of where we are loosing the reader.

Since this will be your first run the counters information should be zeroed out and we can get a semi accurate estimate of where the readers stopped reading by seeing how long they stayed on the page. Use some sort of PPC site like AdWords or Overture to direct some traffic to your site. This will help speed up the process a little bit.

After you have received about one hundred visitors check and see how long they stayed on the page. Then you need to go and time yourself while reading your sales page. If most people exited your page between 0 seconds and 30 seconds then you focus on the copy just above where you where at about 30 seconds into reading your sales copy. If this happened it is obviously your headline or subhead.

Once you have made a single change to your copy go ahead and reset your counter so it clears the old information out. You have to do this after every change. The information on how long people where visiting your site will be way off. I know it is a pain but you have to do it.

Tip: Never change more than one item on your copy at a time unless it is a blatant error on you part. If you change more than one thing you will not know exactly what was responsible for the change in your conversion.

Now that you know how to check how long your visitors stayed you will not be changing things that are already working in your favor. Many people will jump and change their headline right away when it really was the body or the bullet points that where not working for them.

Most of the times the headline may have been perfectly fine and it was half way through that the sales copy was loosing people. This is another major waste of time when writing copy. It is vital to know where your sales page is loosing the customer.

After you have found the troubled areas in your copy. Make changes one at a time until your copy is like a wet slide that leads customers right down to your order button.

Once you have achieved that you can change little things here and there to get your copy to convert better. Try to make it so you can get as many people as possible to at least read through the whole sales letter and then try harder to get more people to buy. As long as you keep at it you will make your copy work.

Article source: Expert Articles