The Birth of a Better Salesletter

Some mar­keters “get it.”

When I wrote my free white paper, “The Death of The Saleslet­ter,” I men­tioned that the web is chang­ing, whether we agree with it or not. Long-​​copy, text-​​only, sta­tic saleslet­ters are slowly being replaced by more dynamic, cleaner, pithier, multimedia-​​based, content-​​driven sales messages.

One case in point is my friend Jack Humphey and his Author­ity Site Cen­ter. His lat­est prod­uct, launched today, is a mem­ber­ship site that teaches peo­ple how to cre­ate “author­ity sites” that drive traf­fic and sell prod­ucts through con­tent, in par­tic­u­lar with the help of Web 2.0 web­sites, com­mu­ni­ties, and applications.

Jack actu­ally offers a free report him­self on this lat­est trend. You can down­load it for free — there’s a mini-​​video intro­duc­tion that leads to an opt-​​in page, where Jack offers his free report, the “Author­ity Site Black­book,” after you sign up.

But let me bring your atten­tion to the saleslet­ter for his new prod­uct, which is what I really want to focus on and what’s pretty amazing…

Granted, the spe­cial report is loaded with great infor­ma­tion on the lat­est trends in cre­at­ing author­ity sites, and how Web 2.0 is chang­ing things — from RSS mar­ket­ing and social media, to video mar­ket­ing and blogging.

(I highly rec­om­mend that you at least down­load it and read it. It’s pretty good stuff.)

Before I tell you about some of the lat­est strate­gies used in this saleslet­ter, let me give you a bit of a preamble.

Accord­ing to Jack, “As Web 2.0 becomes less of just a buzz­word and more of a real­ity, cookie-​​cutter arti­cle sites are on the way out. Web surfers will become more value-​​focused and web com­pa­nies will become larger.”

He adds, “Over the next few years, expect larger con­glom­er­ates to be buy­ing up prof­itable web­sites in their cho­sen mar­kets. Expect smaller sites to either be bought or dri­ven out of busi­ness. My inten­tion is not to scare you, but this out­come is inevitable.”

As a result, the trends are point­ing to an increas­ing pop­u­lar­ity — and demand — for what Jack calls “author­ity sites.”

This is not a new term. Accord­ing to Jason Dowdell of Global Pro­moter, “Author­ity sites are sites that have been linked to and ref­er­enced on other web sites cov­er­ing the same sub­ject mat­ter and they also will have hun­dreds if not thou­sands of pages cov­er­ing that sub­ject mat­ter and nearly every facet of it.”

With Google slap­ping sites like crazy, and the emer­gence of their brand-​​new Pay-​​Per-​​Action pro­gram just launched this week, pager­anks are increas­ingly favor­ing sites that are linked to, talked about, and regarded as use­ful resources — with author­i­ta­tive con­tent, links, tools, and discussions.

But the key ques­tion is, what do 99.9% of author­ity sites provide?

In a sen­tence, an incred­i­ble amount of orig­i­nal con­tent and a superb vis­i­tor expe­ri­ence. That’s what the search engines want, and as a result they are penal­iz­ing the con­verse — think splogs, link farms, and content-​​less sites.

Accord­ing to Jack, “The search engines want you to suc­ceed and they want you to make money, but you have to play by their rules.” To that end, he adds, “In the future, focus your efforts on vis­i­tor opti­miza­tion and con­tent opti­miza­tion, instead of search engine optimization.”

The rest will work itself out in the end. (I agree.)

Fur­ther­more, “You want to cre­ate a site that gen­er­ates thou­sands of vis­i­tors a day mainly through the major search engines, and would ulti­mately be the one-​​stop source for infor­ma­tion in that par­tic­u­lar market.”

In fact, Jack defines three types of author­ity sites: 1) Dynamic, 2) Inter­ac­tive, and 3) Con­sis­tent. He even offers some exam­ples of each one.

I’m a big pro­po­nent of niche mar­ket­ing for many other rea­sons, beyond traf­fic gen­er­a­tion. I’ve writ­ten about this many times in the past, so I’ll stop here.

Just keep in mind that Jack offers some incred­i­bly insight­ful con­tent on the mat­ter. You’re bet­ter off get­ting the free report for more details.

Granted, it does pro­mote a prod­uct in the end. But it’s the saleslet­ter that pro­motes this prod­uct that I want to show you, where Jack applied many of the strate­gies I cover in my Death of The Saleslet­ter report.

In my esti­ma­tion, there’s still a bit of work needed. It’s not per­fect by any stretch. But it’s def­i­nitely sev­eral steps ahead of most clunky-​​looking, long-​​scrolling, ugly saleslet­ters we see so much of these days.

For exam­ple, you’ll notice sev­eral video snip­pets strate­gi­cally located through­out the page. There’s even a dynamic count­down alert at the top telling you how many spots are left.

The let­ter offers tons of proof, and even pro­vides a video tour. Plus, Jack offers a video show­ing actual exam­ples of author­ity sites — so you can imme­di­ately grasp what the con­cept is all about, from both visual and audi­tory standpoints.

Scroll down a bit more and you will see the first-​​ever, dynam­i­cally loaded, “tes­ti­mo­nial tag cloud.” This is pretty cool: you click on any name in the tag cloud, and the tes­ti­mo­nial opens up on the page, on the fly.

Next, and after a few video tes­ti­mo­ni­als, there’s the order form. It’s like most order forms you see on these types of saleslet­ters. But the neat part is, you have a list of com­monly asked ques­tions that follows.

At first glance, these seem to be just reg­u­lar links. But when you click on them, the answers “fly in” auto­mat­i­cally on the same page. (Peo­ple are not dri­ven away and get only the answers they need, and there­fore they are not dis­tracted and fol­low the flow of the pitch.)

There are a cou­ple of other items on this saleslet­ter that makes it very appeal­ing, easy to nav­i­gate, visitor-​​driven, and dynamic. I still find the let­ter a bit long and clunky, but it’s a lot bet­ter than most saleslet­ters I’ve seen.

Bot­tom line, we’re get­ting there.

The ques­tion is, does it work? When I first saw this let­ter, I knew it would do well does because my find­ings were based on actual test results.

But I was curi­ous, so I called Jack on the phone a few days ago. And he told me that, in pre­lim­i­nary “pre-​​launch tests,” the let­ter is con­vert­ing at a pretty impres­sive rate. (A lot bet­ter than I anticipated.)

I can’t dis­close the actual con­ver­sion rate because Jack didn’t give me per­mis­sion. But let me just say that the let­ter is suc­cess­fully con­vert­ing more sales than 80–90% of web­sites out there.

Bravo, Jack, for an awe­some saleslet­ter. To me, being an author­ity also means “lead­ing the way.” And Jack Humphrey is def­i­nitely some­one you should watch out for.

About the Author

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