Writing…. Marketing Style
So I’m working on my custom home page, rearranging things, adding links and buttons, playing with the copy… and I started thinking. Can specific words and phrases cause more people to purchase? Seems hard to believe, but there has to be a method to the madness.
Writing marketing copy is not my expertise. I could guess and test and play around, but I really don’t want to take the time. I need to get sales NOW! Fortunately for me, I have experts available to help. For this topic, I called on Pete. Now this guy – he’s an expert on marketing copy. Here’s what he has to say on writing copy for my custom home page….
"Writing marketing copy doesn’t need to be difficult and sure doesn’t need to be lengthy. Don’t make it harder or more complicated than it needs to be. In fact, keep a few things in mind and it’ll practically write itself:
Benefits, benefits, benefits
Don’t simply tell the customer you’ve got a great product for a great price. Tell them what that product will do to make their lives better. If it can save them time, tell them how. If it’s going to save them money or make their lives easier, tell them.
Four motivators
People are moved to purchase based on four basic motivators: fear, guilt, greed and exclusivity. Play off these motivators in your copy and let them work their magic. Tap into a customer’s fear of identity theft when selling a Turbo SSL®; the guilt of losing a domain name when pitching auto-renew; the greed that can come hand-in-hand with making a bundle with Quick Shopping Cart®; or the exclusivity of owning one of our award-winning hosting plans. If you can write any one of these into your marketing copy, good for you. If you can tap into two or more, GREAT!
Tell the truth
You can say anything in your marketing copy, BUT if you’re not being truthful, your profits and your business are going to be shortlived. Make it sizzle, make it sell, but most importantly make it honest.
All about “your”
It might not seem like much, but if you can drop “your” into your copy, it’s sure to draw the customer in, whether they realize it or not. And isn’t that what you want for your business?
Accuracy
Before you consider your copy final, read it, read it again out loud, and even have a business partner take a look. Nothing’s worse than writing really great copy that’s tarnished with typos."
Thanks, Pete. Good stuff. I’ll definitely take your advice and apply it to my home page. Fellow resellers, good luck writing your own marketing copy.
Hint: To help you get started writing your own marketing copy, you may want to take some of the copy from the product page in your storefront that was written by our in-house experts. You definitely don’t want to use it exactly as it appears on your storefront because one of the reasons you’re creating a custom home page is to have unique content. If you take all the copy, exactly like it is on the storefront, it won’t be unique. So just snag a snippet here and there, maybe a couple bullet points, to help get you started. Let your creativity and Pete’s tips above help you complete the copy.
As always, I wish you success and sales!
Stace
I can say that copy writing is also very important when placing text ads on any PPC providers (such as Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing). The copy can dramatically influence CTR (Click Through Rate) and CPC (Cost per Conversion).
There is tons of literature out there giving info on how to write a good ad copy and how to measure it.
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Excellent point!
Thanks,
Stace
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Speaking about writing... marketing style. You may find this links helpful:
http://www.google.com/analytics/cu/cv_tips_for_writing.html
http://www.google.com/analytics/cu/cv_preaching_to_converted.html
Just my $0.02
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Thanks, Pavel. Great info at those links!
Stace
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While we're in the subject. Does anyone know how to track individual pages with Google Analytics?
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Log into the Reseller Control Center. Under Marketing Tooks, click Google Analytics/AdWords. You can enter your Analytics id there and all the pages of your storefront will be tracked.
Stace
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Stace,
Wonderful advice! Thanks a mil, I just started my reseller and find info like this invaluable. Thanks!
Andre'
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Hi All,
I think its time that you have to change the homepage templates.
The choice we have got now is all the same look, but in different colours.
I have been searching around on google for quite along time and noticed that there is plenty Resellers out there that are using the Ad Words advertising.
From seller point of view i think this doesnt look good for most of us perhaps as a potential customer might search around for a domain site on google and find all this similar looking websites which i think its not a postive selling point.
With perhaps more tools to work on our reseller site and the ability to make each of our reseller sites different to the other would be a great gain.
That way we wont look like a punch of reseller with a same looking site.
Please let me know if any of you have the same or similar thoughts!
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Yes, I think a lot of resellers have that same thought! It's great idea.
Do you have your own custom home page? I strongly encourage you to create your own home page so it's completely customized for your business. Many resellers don't even use the 'template' home page. You can create a page from scratch, or use your WebSite Tonight credit. Just link your home page to your storefront product pages.
Stace
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No, I have not got my own custom homepage, can you guys give me any URLs that got custom homepages?
I am might try that in the future or perhaps the company has come up with a better option then.
I wish we could trade in multi currency, well i would love to trade in AUD as a option aswell!
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Look at my custom page. http://www.hfbadvertising.com/ems.htm if you need something like this let me know I will be glad to help you out for a small fee. And you could even piggy back from my hosting service and just forward and mask your domain name. Later.
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G'day again! ..i forgot something!
Do i need to host my custom home seperatley
Can someone please walk me thru how to to this?
I know in your "Design Wizard (Menu Bar) its says :
Custom Home Tab Link
If you are not planning on using the provided home page, and would like to link your "Home" tab somewhere else,
please provide the url here. Otherwise, leave this section blank to use the default URL.
For me that means home page hosted elsewhere!
Thanx!
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Hi Ray,
A custom home page is a must. Custom product pages are encouraged as well.
When you purchased your reseller plan you received a credit for a 1-Page WebSite Tonight account. You can use that to create your custom home page. If you are more technical, you can also create the page from scratch. For this option you will need to purchase a hosting account from your storefront to host the page.
Stace
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Stacey,
you write that custom product pages are also encouraged. In principal I agree but the problem is that all the menu links in your storefront point back to the default product pages. So the end customer will very quickly end up at the default pages. This can get very confusing to the end customer.
The only way to accomplish a true "custom storefront" would be to allow the reseller to maintain their own individual product pages and maintain the URLs for these in the RCC. The menu in the storefront would then use these URLs. You would also have to provide special "Buy now" buttons so that items can be added to the cart from the custom product pages.
The way it is now, I don't think it is possible to create custom product pages and keep the page navigation intuitive.
Regards.
Karl
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Hi Karl,
For custom product pages, I would keep the navigation similar to the template pages. This will avoid confusing your customers and allow you to have a custom product page.
I like your idea of allowing custom links in the Reseller Control Center that would allow you customize the navigation, too.
Stace
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What is needed is a listing of links we can use and/or generate for each product to ADD TO THE CART. I would also like to be able to put together "packages" of several items to market as ONE solution and when a customer chooses the "package" all the items in the "package" are added at one time to the cart (I will have already priced them as a package. Hmmm maybe add ability to construct packages inside RCC and price items within seperately to apply ONLY to that package? Give package a name & save package?). This way, any custom site/pages we create will truly be custom. The customer is just taken to the cart to purchase the items or "package" we just sold them on our custom site/pages. Similar yes to "buy now" buttons or PayPal buttons, or even Miva Merchant where you can generate these links within the program. I know there is multi-item add to cart already built into the supplied storefront. This should not be all that difficult to implement. At least that is my take on it. I have to hunt down and construct the links now, this would really speed things up and I believe increase sales all around! Flexibility = Creativity = Uniqueness = More Sales = Everyone a happy camper :O
Cheers!
Russell
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Great ideas! Thanks for writing in!
Stace
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Actually, this is not something new as the company are doing it for almost an year.
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I am actually very relunctant to add things to the cart from my custom pages. For example, I did that on the Reseller Storefront (the page where I can sell the Basic and Super Reseller Package), but customers would get charged for the "WebSite Tonight" on top of the regular price.
Support told me this was because I was "hacking" into the code and adding things to the cart from my own page. They said they were using special logic to create the free items included with the reseller accounts. Actually, they made me look like a hacker for using a custom page that would put something in the cart.
Therefore, until the company does not officially publish and support links to add products into the cart, I am not doing it because I don't know if it will work correctly with all the pricing options.
(This is another reason why I think it is currently not possible / practical to built your custom product pages).
So I agree with Russel, having "official" links to add items into the cart would help.
Cheers.
Karl
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Hi Karl,
Sorry you were made to feel like a "hacker". That's just unacceptable. We encourage our resellers to create custom pages because it WILL help your business. I'm working on putting some custom code snippets together that will work for all custom pages.
Stace
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Well, you really can't build tru custom product pages per se. You have to link to the product page on your rs site to eliminate what you are talking about. This is what I am talking about in my posts, making this a true "RESELLER" business. You MUST have more flexibility in order to truly target your sales efforts. Not saying it's the ONLY way, I know there are others using different methods and I dare say they are all bringing traffic to their storefront thru other sites they own. If you ONLY try to use the storefront you have, you will never get anywhere!
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BTW, I was expecting this blog to be a more crowded place and a lot more uneasy questions to be asked, especially if we look at what Enom or Directi are offering to their resellers? For instance, Enom are totally branding reseller services - up to the credit card statement of reseller's customer having the reseller brand! Directi are offering a true reseller web hosting, not just a plain commission on per sale basis. Thus, resellers can optimize what they pay for the wholesale package depending on what their customers use as disk space, bandwidth, RAM or processor load. Not to mention that Directi, through their resellerclub, are offering the whole range of services to their resellers - up to the point to assist them in achieving ICANN accreditation if they want to.
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First when Website Tonight was launched, I thought "Now we have a very suitable tool to build a real, fully personalized reseller store, not just domain+securepaynet.net! We're just a step away from the Website Tonight version for resellers". Alas, one year after that we still have the modest 1- page offered to resellers to build a custom storefront - with a modest disk space and modest bandwidth. If you have more than 100 visitors to your storefront per day, you're at risk of being penalized for going over the allotted bandwidth limit! What does that mean? It means, resellers "by default" are not supposed to do real business!
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Compared to Enom and Directi as competitors, the gap is growing in terms of quality and extend of branding reseller sites and the services they offer to their customers. The gap is also growing in terms of variety of tools and reports offered to resellers. With the huge technical and financial potential of the company behind, with every month passed it's getting even harder for me to understand why this happens? And I'm slowly coming to a grim conclusion. It is not a matter of technicalities or finances. It is a matter of development strategy. "You're welcome as a reseller, but only to the point where you start to compete with the company for the business customers"! Prove I'm wrong!
Thanks for your comments.
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I tested out eNom a while ago and I did not like it at all for a few reasons: There interface was very difficult to understand, you had to prepay your account and they also do not offer support to the reseller end customers. For me that is a killer since I am not targeting a niche but the masses and cannot provide support myself.
I have not tried to use DirectI, so I cannot comment here.
Karl
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I also checked in with DirectI. They will not support the reseller's end customers. You will need to provide support yourself.
I think this support model is the key difference between this program and other reseller programs.
The other programs may give you more control of your customer base, but it comes at the cost of having to provide your own support. For me that is not possible with a customer base of several thousand and growing.
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I agree that more flexible layout would be great. However, I also think this would be a huge development effort and also a huge maintenance effort. They would probably also have to offer flexible product landing pages to fit the home pages.
There are a number of other features higher on my wishlist, such as flexible reporting and foreign languages.
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What I would like to see is a direct order entry area in the RCC. I want to be able to register and place orders for customers myself. All some of my customers need is to hit a login page for whatever I sell them. Links to these login pages in the RCC will help. I prefer to do TARGETED marketing & sales and provide direct support. I am building all of this now for my other products & services, but it's hard to incorporate my reseller program items without the customer ending up at the default site we are given. Again, see my earlier post regarding features that will benefit resellers in their efforts. Flexibility for us is the key. The company has the wherewithall to do this! It will give the programmers some more to do
Just some more rambling on this...
Russell
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Got a question for you, Russel: if we allowed you to purchase products for your customers through the Reseller Control Center, would it be acceptable to have that order complete the checkout process on your storefront? Example: you select several products via a checkbox from a listing of all your product offerings in the RCC. When you click Add To Cart, can we take you to your storefront shopping cart to complete the purchase, or do you need the entire process to be contained within the RCC?
Thanks,
Stace
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That would be good. The idea I had is to be able to construct a "package", lets say, "Marketer's Choice" Package:
1 - Premium Hosting Account
1 - Express Email Marketing Premium Account w/surveys
1 - TrafficBlazer Premium
1 - Domain Name Registration
Get all this for an ENTIRE YEAR for only $387.41* Regularly $xxx.xx if purchased separately....
The * would of course be linked to terms & conditions etc.
We could NAME the package also, and maybe have the option to even enable a link to the package info page (Ours)to be shown on the storefront? Do this from inside the Design Wizard?
Also the option of the reseller simply paying for products themselves in the RCC and collecting from the customer themselves. Then providing login links to any applications purchased and to the domain management panel. A domain / product management panel to assign to customers for their use without everything else there would be excellent! Just tic off the items you want the customer to be able to manage based on their purchases and their panel would only show those items inside but of course will all features relating to managing them. Am I making any sense here? Too complicated? I really don't think so because I see the technology already built in to what is there to accomplish this. Any thoughts folks?
To our success!
Russell
Infolife Marketing
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Got it, Russell. Thanks. That's a great idea. Stace
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Questions, i've been online for about 6 months and have had no traffic what so ever- any suggestions on marketing! I just wrote a press release, but how do I get the newspapers or online media to put it up and where do I go-
Desperate help is needed!
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Hi Niki,
What do you have a great deal of knowledge about? Is there a particular subject you are able to write about?
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Hi Niki - Log in to the Reseller Control Center, under Marketing Tools, click Press Releases. You will find a couple links to web sites that will publish your press release on the internet.
Other marketing ideas: do you have a custom home page? If not, build one and then register it with search engines.
What is your niche market? Provide additional content on your web page specific to that market.
Check out the Tips & Advice article. There are some great ideas there.
Good luck!
Stace
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