One-Product Sales Sites: Avoid These Top Blunders

One product, one long web page: this kind of web site is
sometimes called a sales letter site or mini-site, and it
focuses on one and only one goal, as many sales of that one
product as possible. With a one-product sales site, no
distractions, no subsidiary goals, such as newsletter
signups, are allowed to interfere with that goal. So let's
look at some common mistakes and omissions for a sales
letter site.

Your headline serves as the key point of orientation for
the reader and should be as strongly worded and pointedly
targeted as you can manage. Do not use the name of your
product as the headline - that's a weak marketing message.

Instead, dramatize either the problem solved by your
product or the solution offered, or both. For instance:

Discover Your Family's Roots Through Easy, Fun Internet Research

You can often add a subhead after the headline for even
greater punch:

Turn Words into Money with Copy That Even a Skinflint Can't Resist!

Get a Juicier Return on Investment from Your Marketing With the Easy-to-Apply Secrets in This New Manual

Normally you want to start your sales page by building
rapport with the reader with respect to the problem or goal
at hand. Make sure, however, that you not only make your
case in a positive way for your product but also address
and head off each and every worry, objection or doubt the
reader might have about buying your product. For instance,
how can you know so much about knee injuries if you're not
a doctor? Or, do these money-saving strategies apply if I
live in Canada or Bermuda?

The biggest worry people have buying online from companies
or individuals they've never heard of is, are you
trustworthy? Am I going to get what I order and have some
recourse if it's a pile of crap? A money-back guarantee
goes part of the way toward assuaging this, as do
testimonials, but just as important, and much more often
neglected, is posting a mailing address and telephone
number for the vendor.

If it's a physical product that will be shipped, make sure
you explicitly say how and when it will be shipped and
whether you can ship it anywhere in the world for that
price. Don't make the reader click through to the order
form to learn how much your product costs, or how much it
costs with shipping.

As your copy builds toward its conclusion, remember to
include what marketers term the "call to action":
explicitly ask for the order. Do so prominently, so that
someone skipping down the page can quickly find the "order
now" button. Even better, insert an order button or link
near the top of the page so that someone who arrives
already wanting to buy can do so immediately.

When you've built the strongest possible case for your
product and orchestrated your pitch properly, consider the
formatting of your sales page. Since this sort of site
doesn't have a left navigation bar, the column of text
often ends up much too wide for comfortable reading.
Studies have shown that paragraphs wider than six or seven
inches are difficult to read on a computer screen. Add
blank columns to the left and right of your sales copy to
narrow it to that width.

Make sure too that paragraphs go on no more than seven
lines, and a long run of paragraphs is broken up by
subheads. And make those subheads interesting and meaty.
Someone who skims down the page should be able to get the
gist of your marketing message just from reading the
subheads.

Marcia Yudkin <marcia@yudkin.com> is the author of Web Site
Marketing Makeover and 10 other books. A four-time Webby
Awards judge and internationally famous marketing
consultant, she critiques web sites and performs web site
makeovers for clients. Learn more about her detailed
critique sessions on five different kinds of web sites
(including one-product sites) at
http://www.yudkin.com/websitequiz.htm .

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