Converting Website Visitors To Sales Leads - Series Part 1a

How To Improve Online Sales Copy
Part 1a - Proper Font Usage

This is the first article in a several part series that I'm going to be running on improving your visitor conversion rate. The first thing will focus on in this series is improving your sales copy (or sales letter) so that it motivates visitors to completely read your copy and then fill out your auto responder form.

Choosing Your Fonts:

Before you even begin writ ting your sales copy, you need to figure out the "look" of the letter.Your website should have designated fonts to use in the following situations:

• A logo font - Your logo font should NOT be a font that comes standard with Microsoft Windows / Office, it should be something that is fancy and unique. Fonts.com is a great source of custom fonts, and they can even help you design an entire font set for your business.
• A secondary font - Your secondary font will be used for text that you want to standout such as headlines, sub-headlines, tag lines, graphics labels, and decorative text such as pull quotes, which are the large quotes that are used decoratively in articles and documents.
• A sans-serif font on-screen use. Text on a computer monitor is easier to read in a sans-serif font than in a serif font.
• A website font, which may be the same font as is used as the main sans-serif text font, depending on how that font translates for online viewing.

All of these fonts should have similar or contrasting characteristics.

Choosing fonts with similar characteristics will make your fonts match and create consistency throughout your documents.

Choosing fonts with contrasting characteristics will build visual texture and interest into your materials.

For example, you could pick all thin, sans-serif fonts such as Arial and Frutiger to create a harmonious, matching suite of fonts.

Or you could pick fonts with contrasting characteristics to create greater interest, such as using a serif font like Palatino for the headlines and then using a sans-serif font like Verdana for the text.

Each piece of marketing material or document created should have a maximum of three or four families of fonts on them. (A font family includes all of the bold and italic variations of a particular font, so using bold or italic effects does not count as additional fonts.) Using more than three or four fonts is confusing, and it looks unprofessional.

Practical Font Usage Guidelines
Fonts can require special consideration when you send materials to a professional printer for reproduction, use them on your website, or send Word documents to others. Here are some basics on using fonts and preserving their appearance in these cases.
In printed materials, it's easier to read long blocks of copy that is set in a serif font. Sans-serif fonts are usually used in print for short blocks of information, like headlines, pull quotes, or bulleted lists.

• Online, in websites, emails, and HTML newsletters, sans-serif fonts look the best: they're clean, clear, and easy to read. There is one other trick to online font use: you have to make sure that you use fonts that will be installed on the computers of people reading your site. Otherwise, your text will appear in the default font selected by their browser, which is often Courier, a very plain font. That limitation does leave you with several fonts to choose from, though, including Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, and Trebuchet MS.

• In order to insert a small amount of customized text - such as your logo, tag line, or address information - create an image of that information and place it in the header and footer of the page.
  

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The Internet Marketing Guide They Don't Want You to Read: Part II

In Part I of this article we took a look at 2 scams that new internet marketers might now be aware of.

Here in part II, we'll examine Guaranteed Signups.

Online Marketing Mind Game – Guaranteed Sign-ups

As you sit there and read the beginning of this report you’ll start to feel the overwhelming sense that making money on the internet can be a virtual land mine. This next scam might just be THE most appealing of all.

Do a search on Google for guaranteed sign up and you will see over 37 million results. The way guaranteed sign up systems work is very simple. You go to a web site that offers them, choose the number of people who you want to sign up for your program, and pay for the package. As long as your website is free to join, they will guarantee the number of sign ups that you purchase.

The typical cost is about U.S. $1.00 – U.S. $3.00 (I’ve seen and tried others that are over $20 per lead). Now, you are probably thinking wait a minute, I can get someone to sign up for my free program for only $1.00, this has to work right? And, if you’re at all like me (are you? You’re still reading my article) logic has kicked in and you’re probably thinking “well, my program converts 20% of free members into paying members, so if I buy 100 of these guaranteed sign-ups, the very worst I could do is get 10 – 20 paid subscribers right?”

Sorry, once again your logic is sound, but They are playing mind games with you. As you’ll begin to see, not all sign-ups are created equal (if you’ve read part 1 of this article, are you beginning to see a reoccurring theme here?).

Imagine this, one day you’re surfing around the internet when you see an ad that says, “Get a Free iPhone.” A free iPhone, WOW. So you click on the link and start following the instructions. Basically they say “check out these XXX number of offers from our sponsors, and at the end we’ll give you instructions to get your FREE iPhone.” So you start checking out these offers, and rapidly skip through them because you just want your free phone.

Eventually, you get to a page that says “you must sign up for at least XXX number of offers from our sponsor to receive your free gift.” Now, I will tell you that this process lasts almost forever, AND the programs you must join only start out free. What ends up happening is that you have to join 3 free programs, 3 “bronze” programs, 3 “silver” programs, 2 “gold” programs, and 1 “platinum” program.

Have you noticed yet how they get people to sign up for the free programs. The Guaranteed Sign up programs know that 99.99% of people will complete the free offers, but drop out when they get to the paid programs they must join. And, you’re intelligent enough to know that the people who signed up for your free program on their offers page have absolutely no interest in the product that you are offering.

In Part III

We'll take a look at re-branding.