Selling products online isn’t the easiest thing in the world, especially if you plan on going up against giants like Amazon or eBay, but a small group of people discovered a simple method for selling niche products online that completely avoids the big Amazon boulder: sales letters. Instead of building an e-commerce website, smart marketers have taken to writing one-page sales letters devoted to selling one type of product or service.

A sales letter is, as the name implies, a letter (often several paragraphs in length) designed to sell a product or service. Obviously, it’s a bit more complicated than that, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. In order to write a sales letter you’ll need to know several things about your product:

• What problem the product solves.
• What it does.
• What it does better than the competition.
• How much it costs.

Once you have all of that information, you’re ready to write a sales letter. Instead of showing you paragraph-by-paragraph how to write a sales letter (this isn’t English 101), here are some tips for creating a killer sales letter:

• Create Hope - sales is a game of faith, and people buy hope. Your goal is to create hope for a person that their problem can be solved. Remember: we’re pretty simple mammals, and our entire existence is based on building or acquiring tools to deal with a problem. So, you need to create hope in the buyer than the product is the right tool to fix the problem.
• Be Personal - have you ever gone to a used car dealership only to feel dirty? That kind of feeling comes from knowing that you’re being sold something. While you are trying to sell something, you need to be more personal than just your average used car salesman. Don’t leave the customer with the impression that all you want is their money, instead leave them with the impression that your product has the ability to fix their problem, and all you’re asking in return is some compensation for helping them fix the problem.
• Create FUD - FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt - is a tactic several large companies have used in order keep people from switching over to competing products. FUD also works for making an initial sale, if you know what you are doing. Creating FUD in a sales letter can be done in several different ways, including pointing out flaws in competing products, warning of the dangers that could arise if they don’t purchase your product, etc… The trick to creating FUD is that you need to slowly integrate it into the rest of your sales letter: while a sudden “warning” section may get grandma to purchase that medication handbook, it may leave a bad taste in the mouths of more experienced buyer.
• Act Now - telling people they have to act now isn’t as easy as saying “act now before this offer expires” because that just screams “infomercial” - so, instead of running screaming that the offer is going to end (when, it in fact, will not) give them a hard cut-off date. instead of saying “this offer won’t last” explain to the customer the reasons the offer will not last (cost of distribution, low supply, whatever).

Whatever you do in your sales letter, remember that people are generally smart (or smarter than some companies give them credit for) and like to be treated as such. Telling someone to buy something “because i said so” won’t win you any favors. Alternatively, telling someone to buy something “because it has x,y,z” helps them make an informed decision.

Tags: sales letter, affiliate marketing