How To Tweak And Change Your Web Copy For More Sales

Are you a commercial website owner who has been struggling to make sales? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one, but the good news is that by making a few tweaks and changes to your web copy you can expect to get better and better results in terms of sales and sign ups. It doesn’t matter whether you are selling your own product or service, or running an affiliate marketing website.
One mistake that a lot of inexperienced writers do when producing web copy is focus on their need to sell their products, and not on the needs and sensibilities of their target market. What you need to do is to try to see things from the perspective of one of your commercial website visitors, and also to understand the apparently contradictory feelings that people have about buying and selling.
In the rest of this article I will look at those feelings people have about the buying and selling process, and how you can respond to them and harness them to sell more goods on your commercial website.
The first thing to understand about buying and selling is that people are emotionally driven. People love shopping and they buy for emotional reasons and use logic to justify their decision to purchase. So people love to shop, but – and this is where life gets interesting for commercial website owners – people hate the feeling that they are being sold to where they have not first given their consent to the seller. Consent is only given in an atmosphere of trust.
So how can this knowledge be applied to writing web copy for a commercial website?
Probably the first thing you want to do is to stop thinking that you are writing “sales copy”. Too often website owners slip into hyped up sales talk when trying to push their products on visitors to their websites.
Selling Affiliate Products
If you are selling affiliate products for commission one option would be to offer a range of similar products and adopt an editorial style in which you write comparative product reviews and talk freely about the pros and cons of each of the product products. By writing truthfully about the weak points, as well as describing the benefits of each product, you’ll be giving the reader everything that is necessary for him or her to make an informed decision. They will feel in control of the buying process and the issue of being sold to is largely removed.
Make sure your writing is friendly, warm and open, as you want your readers to both like you and feel that you like them to. It will give your readers the impression that you are batting on their side, which creates an atmosphere in which trust can be allowed to develop. The combination of being trusted and being liked is a powerful device for demolishing sales resistance on the Internet.
Selling Your Own Product
If you are selling a product that you have developed yourself, think in terms of the kind of problem it will solve, and who it will solve the problem for. Now, instead of trying to sell the product, focus on the problem. Don’t take the problem for granted but hammer home to your readers the fact that they also have this problem.
Your next step should be to talk about why the problem persists and then paint a picture of what life would be like if the problem were removed and how that would be of benefit to the reader.
It is only at this stage, once you have set the scene, that you introduce yourself and your product and talk up the unique benefits that it offers as a solution to the problem have been discussing. Now that your readers have the solution to the problem, the time has come to tell them what action they need to take in order to purchase the product.
By taking things in this order, you avoid the mistake of hard selling the product from the beginning of your encounter with your prospective customers. This gives you space to educate them about the problem, the benefits of solving the problem, and then the unique benefits of your particular solution. You will have set the right emotional tone and then supplied the benefits that reinforce the positive emotions and justify the purchase with logic.
Writing editorials style product reviews, or problem-solution style articles is a much better way to reach out to your website visitors and provide them with both valuable content and positive emotional reinforcement to create an atmosphere conducive to generating sales on your commercial website.