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[Seb Brantigan Company: Numis Network Contribution Level: 2]

Rather frequently, I visit numerous capture pages, sales letters etc. that often are created by marketers who make some of these three classic mistakes that could end up labelling them as ‘Rookie Copywriters’, and I’m quite sure nobody wants that title.

Therefore to aid with this, I’m going to share with you what these mistakes are…they’re easily avoidable and will take only a few minutes of your time to check before copywriting.

After all, are you a Rookie or a Professional copywriter?

So here they are:

1) Spelling & Grammatical Errors – it’s very offputting and extremely unprofessional to see this and if people won’t even take the time to spellcheck, you’d be surprised at how many people pick up on this.

2) Excessive Text - this is especially in a capture page or sales letter. You want to warm your prospects up, not to go on and on until their eyes go red either with rage or from reading your essay-like sales page for hours. Keep it short and to the point, that’s what I will be doing.

3) Features Over Benefits - I see this too many times; marketers mention the price and why they should buy from them before any real desire has been created. This is important: create an EXPERIENCE for your prospects.

Share the benefits and creare that desire with your prospects, they don’t care for the features if they don’t know how they can benefit from them.

Visit http://sebbrantigan.net/mistakes-label- ... opywriter/ for the original blog post.

[Art Lovell Contribution Level: 3]

Hmmm interesting, but I see many of these mistakes made in powerful story-based sales letters, written by pros too. I think it's most important to get your point across persuasively. I do agree with benefits over features but I know I have personally failed to imaginatively describe the benefits at times! I'll add, paint a picture, people will read if it speaks to them.

[Seb Brantigan Company: Numis Network Contribution Level: 2]

Hmmm interesting, but I see many of these mistakes made in powerful story-based sales letters, written by pros too. I think it's most important to get your point across persuasively. I do agree with benefits over features but I know I have personally failed to imaginatively describe the benefits at times! I'll add, paint a picture, people will read if it speaks to them.

I totally agree with you...although even the best copywriters sometimes make silly errors that will only decrease conversions (I've seen it happen), as long as you can fix them later right?

[Joyce Penner Company: Life Force International Contribution Level: 8]

I agree with you 100% on utilizing a feature everyone has on their computer - the spell checker !

Nothing speaks of a lack of professional more than spelling errors (and I'm not talking about the odd one that slips in) or the lack of punctuation or capitalizing words in the middle of a sentence.

It would be similar to walking into a restaurant for the first time and the chef doesn't care about what the meal looks like because after all what is important is the taste of the food. Therefore the sauce can be dripping off the plate, the potato is partially covered by the meat and the waiter has his thumb on top of the sprig of parsley. Yuck. Chances are no matter how good the food tasted I probably wouldn't return to that particular restaurant.

[Michael B Wilbraham Contribution Level: 4]

2) Excessive Text - this is especially in a capture page or sales letter. You want to warm your prospects up, not to go on and on until their eyes go red either with rage or from reading your essay-like sales page for hours. Keep it short and to the point, that’s what I will be doing.

3) Features Over Benefits - I see this too many times; marketers mention the price and why they should buy from them before any real desire has been created. This is important: create an EXPERIENCE for your prospects.

It's a bit of an oxymoron - to create real benefits & illustrate those to the reader, you would need to create interesting text - so when do you call it "excessive"? How do you create an EXPERIENCE for your prospects without having enough text? When does "enough" become "excessive"?

I think it all goes about what it is you're selling or trying to achieve with your lead capture page or sales page. A lead capture page should have all the "guts" above the fold - it should contain enough information for the reader to make a decision to "opt-in" without having to scroll, that's why a video on a lead capture page can be very effective.

A sales page, on the other hand, is designed to make a sale - the reader will need enough information & will need to be exposed to enough benefits before the buying decision is made. Depending on what is being sold, this could require quite a lot of text.

It's all relative...

But yes, there can be NO excuse for spelling & grammatical errors!

[Seb Brantigan Company: Numis Network Contribution Level: 2]

@Joyce wow you got it right there - if I got that kind of service at my favourite restaurant I wouldn't be very happy either...and I'd still be quite hungry

It's a bit of an oxymoron - to create real benefits & illustrate those to the reader, you would need to create interesting text - so when do you call it "excessive"? How do you create an EXPERIENCE for your prospects without having enough text? When does "enough" become "excessive"?

You may or may not be aware that video sales letters outperform long form print sales letters by 300%...so text in a video probably will be different.

In all cases I would say that it shouldn't take your prospects longer than 20 minutes to read through your page or watch the video sales letter to feel the experence, and to get the feeling of 'buyer's buzz'.

[Universal Media Online Contribution Level: 2]

So true.
It really is the biggest turnoff...
The question of 'Too Wordy" is subjective though.....
most people use the quote "long sales copy sells"
Any thoughts on that??

[Seb Brantigan Company: Numis Network Contribution Level: 2]

So true.
It really is the biggest turnoff...
The question of 'Too Wordy" is subjective though.....
most people use the quote "long sales copy sells"
Any thoughts on that??

Correction...long form sales letters USED to sell. They still do work. However video sales letters outperform them x3 (as seen above), and a fact just to reiterate this, Google won't even let you buy traffic to a long form sales page via Adwords.

Point being...you can compress your entire sales letter into a 10-15 min video for higher conversion rates, or stay behind on the times

[Matt Cassity Contribution Level: 2]

Actually...I have heard that if the grammatical errors play into your story it can actually increase conversions.

Also if you write really well and there is a reason for you to keep writing a sales letter It can go on for a while. There have been copywriters that have written a novel of a sales letter just to sell something.

Matt Cassity

[Ilka Flood Company: SendOutCards Contribution Level: 4]

Seb,

I wouldn't call anyone a "Rookie Copywriter" just because of a few spelling errors in their copy.

Isn't content so much more important?? I mean even the great Mike Dillard occasionally has some spelling errors in his copy. I would never call him a "Rookie Copywriter" because of it. Au contraire, he's an EXCELLENT copywriter.

Paraphrasing Mark Twain ... "I despise any man who knows how to spell a word only one way."