First, tell me something:

Do you own an internet business?

Do you want to make money out of your website?

Are you selling a product online?

Silly questions, right? I can hear the resounding “ Duh ” all the way over here. But let's see if you can get the next question right:

What is the single most important factor that determines the success or failure of your online business?

• Your search engine rankings
• Your subscribers' list
• The quality of your product/service
• After-sales support

Actually, none of the above .

Instead , the one thing that convinces your visitors to buy from you and converts aimless browsers into enthusiastic, paying prospects is... (drum roll) …

Amazing sales copy.

I cannot emphasize this more – your website's copy will be the critical factor in converting those hordes of visitors. You can jazz up your website with Flash menus, hire the best designer in the world to get a captivating, goddess-like site design, and use the best SEO services and tools to guarantee your #1 spot in all the search engines for all your keywords, but if you don't pay attention to your sales copy…

You might as well be pissing away all the money down the drain.

Sales copy, good sales copy, can mean the difference between lukewarm interest and raging hordes clamoring for your product. It can turn around a flagging product and revive your website faster than you can throw visitors at it.

In a nutshell, copywriting is all about selling . It's that simple. But before I go any further, I'll make one thing clear:

I usually don't give much time to copywriting skills because my focus here is to teach you how to blast your website through the roof in your search engine rankings, not how to convert that traffic. However, most of that traffic is no good if you don't know how to use it. A lot of the websites I've recently reviewed (skimmed over, rather) suffer from a variation of the same problem:

The sales copy needed a LOT of improving.

Here's a truth in marketing – whatever you have, whether its market share or monthly profits or conversion rates, it can always be improved.

Now whether you are pulling in your weight in gold every week or your copy really, really needs to be improved, read on ahead because you will always find room for improvement in your sales writing.

But like I said, this is an SEO newsletter and as such, I will compress a LOT of strategies, little tips and grand principles into as small a space as I can. So pay close attention as we dive headfirst into arguably the most important aspect of selling online.

Copywriting, like selling, is all about selling to the prospect's wants. In this, you, as the business owner, have to identify your audience as well as profile them – once you begin to understand what your targeted audience wants, how they think and most importantly, how they feel about certain issues, you will have much more powerful copy.

What they want, how they think, how they feel. Pretty basic. Identify your audience, and then get inside your prospect's head, figure out how they tick so you can build a rough profile and most importantly, write down everything you learn about your prospect. This may seem like a tiring mental exercise, and it is in the beginning, but the key here is to know why this is important (I'll get to that in a minute).

Have you noticed how I've not mentioned the features of the product you might be selling? Do you want to know the reason why?

They don't really matter.

Of course, they matter to you, because you've worked really hard and/or spent a lot of time and money towards creating your product. But they don't matter to your prospect.

Your audience doesn't care about features – let me give you an example:

• Great user interface on your latest software release.
• The biggest French fries in the city.
• Pizza delivery to your doorstep inside 10 minutes.

Blah. Don't beat yourself up asking again and again why no one looks twice at that list.

Instead (and here comes the punch line), your prospects are always asking:

What's in it for me?

How can this help me do this?

And the best question you need to remember every single time…

How will this solve my problem?

So the next time you sit down to prepare your sales pitch / sales copy, take your list of features, and your new list on which you have profiled your potential audience, and start brainstorming. Find the links that connect the dots from what your prospects are asking (how can this help me?) and what you are offering (the features).

Tell your prospects exactly how your product can help them overcome a particular problem.

Sell the solution, not the product.

Too many sales letters or websites that I've seen ask the visitor to do far too much – you'll find a newsletter signup box, a paragraph talking about all the wonderful articles on the site, maybe another bit about affiliate products and then something about selling them a product.

And when the average business owner gets to the part where he has to convince the prospect to pull out their wallet and hand over some hard-earned cash, what do they do?

Umm…how about nothing?

More precisely, their sales copy is trying to do too much – like multi-tasking a 100 things at the same time. Possible, yes, but not where selling is concerned and you have just a few seconds to grab the prospect's attention and only a few more seconds to turn that attention into genuine interest.

A common mistake is trying to be everything to everyone – either through promoting the product to a generic audience or worse, writing for a generic audience.

There are usually two reasons why a business owner would do that.

• One , they probably forgot to do any serious research on their market and they don't know who their audience really is (and why are you in business again?)

• Two , they are scared (or greedy) about the product not pulling in enough money and they want to widen the net so they can “earn more”.

Either way, your sales copy is going to be the same stale, dull pile of boring “copy” that graces most websites on the Internet. The sole reason?

It lacks focus .

Get inside your prospect's head. FOCUS on their needs, their wants, their problems. Focus on providing a solution to those problems.

And focus on writing directly to that prospect. Sell your solution to him personally , as if you were sitting right across the table from your prospect and had to make your best sales pitch.

Don't try to be all things to your prospects. Your website is in front of them for a single purpose – to offer them a solution to a particular problem. If you cannot convince them that you have the best answer, they'll walk away with no remorse. And if they don't have the problem you are solving, they'll still walk away.

In your writing and in your research, focus on your prospect, and what you have to do in order to convince them to buy from you. Everything else is more or less pointless, and at the best, secondary.

Here's another question for you:

What makes people buy?

Yes, it's sales copy. And yes, it's because you are selling them a solution and not the features.

But have you ever thought about what goes on inside a prospect's mind , from the time she sees your sales copy till the time the she has an “aha!” moment and decides to buy your brand of detergent (or whatever you want to sell)?

Sales copy is a static medium . You can't use your positive body language, your disarming smile and a confident voice to sell – all you've got is words. Jumbles of alphabets.

How the hell do you sell from that?

The key is NOT what you say - even the most focused and ingenious copy can fall flat if it doesn't have “what it takes” to create that desire, that spark inside your prospect's head.

It's all about delivery. Not visual delivery of your sales pitch but…

The words you use to deliver your sales pitch.

Michael Fortin calls them UPWORDS. Joe Vitale, another great copywriter, tagged the whole process as hypnotic marketing. Famous marketers of an older era such as David Ogilvy and Joe Sugarman swore by the principle.

It's dead simple. You have to translate all that positive body language, all your confidence, all your energy, into a tightly written, powerful, visually stimulating sales copy.

Visual stimulation. Painting pictures for your prospects to imagine . This is what separates the great from the merely good in marketing and copywriting. If you want your prospect to be fully convinced that you are the best deal in town, use your words not only to sell the solution, but to paint that solution as a powerful, eyeball-grabbing picture in their minds.

And once you're inside their heads, you just have to connect the dots and show them (once again using words as a visual tool ) how they can use your product to erase that particular problem that had plagued them until that very moment.

Build your sales copy using your words as visual aids – to support, represent and ultimately sell your solution the prospect.

That's it for now. Go back to your website and take a good, hard look at your sales copy. Are you missing the whole point? Does your copy lack focus? Are you just selling the features and assuming that the prospect will do the mental legwork for you and become motivated by herself?

Are you selling to her emotions or are you selling to her mind?

Coming up in the next issue…you'll get the most intensive crash course in writing a sales letter using exactly the principles we've talked about today.

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
SEO Elite: SEO Software