The Secrets of The Shriekers

I am constantly bombarded with all sorts of advertisements, single-page sites, and sites offering very little real content but some wonderful new "product" or "service" for sale that purports to make its customers wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.

For the purposes of this article, let's refer to Amazing Formula (http://www.amazingformula.com) as an example of such a site. (Note: I have never purchased this product and can make no claim, verification or guarantee one way or the other as to its effectiveness. The sole purpose of my mentioning this site is as a study of the ad copy within.)

There isn't very much in terms of "content"; the marketing of the "bribes" is confined to a single page, with a hyperlink to "testimonials" which may or may not be legitimate. Yet, this site has been around in some form for nearly four years, according to The Internet Wayback Machine http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.amazingformula.com, with the same basic "content" and no significant updates. Why? Because it works.

What makes this website and others like it profitable, even without a significant content update in 4 years? The sales copy. The sales copy of this page uses simple, but effective techniques to trigger the user into buying the product, in this case a CD-ROM indicating how to sell anything to anyone at any time. Let's look at some of these techniques now.

That's right, I, Adam Senour, am going to give away millions of dollars' worth of secrets to you and I'm going to do it WITHOUT CHARGING YOU A SINGLE RED CENT!!! No e-books to download, No expensive CD-ROMs to purchase, No courses to subscribe to, NOTHING! You too will be a website copy writing genius, able to sell your goods and services at will!

Short paragraphs. Users traditionally don't wish to read long blocks of text. They like information concise, simple, and to the point.

"You" words/second-person perspective. This is arguably the most misunderstood and underrated aspect of copy writing. When reading sales copy, users are looking not for general information on the product. They want the answer to one simple question: "What's in it for me?" Using words such as "you", "your", and "yourself", while being generic in nature, go a long way toward establishing a website rapport with your customers.

Bold, Underline, Italics. Highlighting important phrases with bold, underline, and italics allows your customer to quickly scan and decipher the nature of your copy and the key elements of it. Bold, underline, and italics can be used in conjunction with colour to further distinguish vital elements of your marketing message.

However, it is strongly advised that you use bold, underline, and italics sparingly in order to ensure that only your most important points are receiving the full attention of your customers. Use bold, italics, and underline sparingly.

The colour coding of important words, and the selection of those colours. "Cool" colours such as Blues and greens are traditionally used to relax the user and put him/her in a positive mood conducive to sales; and "hot" colours such as reds, yellows and oranges are meant to incite the user into making a purchasing decision.

Headings and subheadings. Headings and subheadings should be used to break up long blocks of text into shorter and easier-to-read sections. In the case of the Amazing Formula website, graphic headings are used to break up the content; however, for search engine reasons, you may wish to consider text-based headings to split up your content into sections.

Bullet lists. These lists can be numbered, as this one is, or they can be unordered, as the Amazing Formula ones are. There doesn?t seem to be much difference in either event, as long as the copy for each bullet remains concise and to the point as in point 2; although the unordered list bullets can be stylized with graphics, as the Amazing Formula website has done.

A call to action. What do you want your customer to do? Where would you like them to go next? Give your customer at least one clear and understandable path to follow to make the appropriate action.

In the case of the Amazing Formula site, there are not one, but 2 "Click to order via our secure server!" buttons as well as an order hyperlink in the menu on the top of the page. The garden path, albeit a very short one in this case, is clearly laid out for the customer to follow.

These are the seven secrets of The Shriekers. Implementing them on your website should lead to a significant increase in sales and profits.

About The Author

Adam Senour is the owner of ADAM Web Design, a leading web design and development company in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Visit http://www.adamwebdesign.ca for more information on ADAM Web Design products and services.

More Web Design Articles

How To Rescue Your Graphic Design Project When All Else Fails
Whether you're giving a critical sales presentation to a client, producing visuals for a meeting, event, trade show or seminar, or unveiling the new company logo before an audience of shareholders, top-notch graphics will help ensure that you, your products, and your message receive the attention they deserve.Yet when you decide to do the graphics in-house to reduce turnaround time or cut expenses, those logos, photos, charts, graphs, pictures, timelines, illustrations, etc.

Positive Design Attributes for a Successful Website
Designing a website is hard job, and requires you to think out a plan of action, and put in a lot of work to make it successful. There are many different kinds of websites on the Internet, but if you look at all the top performers with high traffic, you will notice that they all have similar design characteristics which place them as the best in the world.

Bad Design Characteristics For A Website
Making a poorly designed website is one of the easiest things you can do as a webmaster! You barely need to try! If you want to run a successful high traffic website there are many different elements of design that you need to implement, and ones you need to avoid.This article will describe some of the major design flaws in many new websites.

Make Artistic Graphic Designs
Are you a student of graphic design? If you have taken time in extra reviews and put ?graphic design? and ?drawing? into any search engines, you?ll get almost the same result = descriptions of graphic design programs at many design schools. Baffled? Well, it?s like this: As a student interested in graphic design, you have to take drawing and not actually a degree in fine art.

Creating Your First Website
Building your first website can be very frustrating. It looks fairly easy, but almost always turns out to be more complicated than you expected.

Ten Fatal Mistakes That Make Web Sites Stink
Since you?ll spend lots of time and money to create your web site, don?t you want to make sure you?re not making mistakes that at best irritate users, and at worst make you lose customers?After all, when you alienate users, you lose potential revenue. Who can afford that?Dr.

The Top 8 Website Sins Part Two
Sin #5Poor Spelling And GrammarWe all make mistakes when we write things down or type things out. Nobody is 100% perfect but a huge number of website owners completely ignore the basics of spelling and grammar.

The Top 8 Website Sins Part One
They say the eyes are the window to the soul. Your website then is the window to your business.

A Web Site That Sells Is All One Needs To Have A Successful Online Business!
There are more than billions of Web Sites, running Online Businesses, offering products and services. But only a few Web Sites manage to make any sale.

10 seconds is all it takes? (How to grab the attention of your audience with your web site)
FACT: 30 to 60% of visitors tend to drop off and click to another site when they are forced to click their mouse more often than necessary.FACT: People who use the internet are usually those who are always on-the-go and don?t want to spend time figuring out how to navigate any web site.