Articles

Welcome to direct response writing a course in embedded commands... The objective of direct-response (web copy) writing is to generate some kind of response. These responses could range from getting your readers to pick up the phone and call your business, to buy your product or service, to sign up for your mailing list, or simply to subscribe to your newsletter. The use of embedded commands entails formulating the action you want your reader to take and placing it innocently inside your casual sentence. Take a look at the following sentence: It won't be long till you will buy...

Dear Business-Builder, I tell folks I live so far up in the boonies, my Zip code is E-I-E-I-O. We’re in North Carolina, which was named in honor of England’s King Charles I … about 30 miles west of Asheville, which was named in honor of Governor Samuel Ashe. Asheville is located on the beautiful, curvaceous French Broad river, which I’m pretty sure was named in honor of Brigitte Bardot. When you think of our hometown, think “Mayberry.” This is the very heart of Appalachia: The land of mountains and moonshine … Bluegrass and the Blue Ridge Parkway … black bears, Baptists and B...

Have you ever been on a webpage and noticed a highlighted word? You click the word or underlined words and it takes you to a different webpage. That webpage you are redirected to is called a landing page. A landing page is used for a variety of reasons depending on what the end goal of the webpage designer is trying to accomplish. Advertising copywriting uses landing pages as a way to promote their products. You read an article and then a link is used to direct you to the webpage. If the landing page is through an affiliate of the company, a record is kept of the number of visitors. This is...

Three Immutable laws of sales letters: - People never read anything at first. Your job is to get people to start. - People never believe anything at first. You must create the believability and prove that what you're offering is genuine. - People never do anything at first. Your goal is to get them to do something, with the ultimate goal of ordering your product. You need to tell them exactly what to do. This translates to three steps of web copy: Pull them in; prove your case and push them back. Pull Them In. The headline is the first thing people see. It's vital. Ofte...

By Karon Thackston It's funny how we, as website owners, don't always think like our visitors. A course of action that might seem perfectly obvious to us may stop our visitors right in the middle of their buying process. Take, for instance, e-commerce–type copy. Do you realize that what happens after your customers read your copy could make or break your sale? I'm not talking about shopping cart abandonment. I'm talking about good communication that keeps the buying cycle moving forward. Let me give you a real-world example. One website offered custom-designed gift bags. The photos ...