Writing copy for your sales letter can be a very tedious and nerve wracking experience. There is nothing like the feeling that you just wrote a killer sales letter just to find out that it will not make one single sale.

This is why testing your copy is so important. Testing and tweaking your copy could make the difference between a sales letter that converts at .005% and one that converts at .05%. This may not look like a lot to some people, but if you are familiar with the world of marketing you will know this is a huge difference. Actually the second of the two will pull in ten times more sales for you.

This ultimately means that you are leaving huge sums of cash on the table if you do not optimize your sales letters. But still there are a large amount of marketers that don't even try tweaking their copy to pull in more sales. They simply leave it the way it was originally made hoping that it will start converting for them.

Unfortunately testing your sales letter to the point you are satisfied with it can take weeks if not months. You have to make a change and see if it has improved your conversion. Then you have to repeat this process the whole way through the sales letter changing only one thing at a time until you believe and hope that you hit every troubled spot that is turning your visitors off and causing them to exit the page. There is a lot of guess work involved in this process.

If you don't want to deal with all of the waiting and guess work that goes into this the only thing I can suggest is to check out Intra Trakker. It will cut your testing time down from weeks to virtually over night. But we will assume that you don't have a copy of this software. So instead I will show you an advanced way to manually test your copy.

The first thing you want to do is install a hit counter like what StatCounter offers on your sales copy page that will keep track of how long a visitor stays on any certain page. This is one thing that many people do not do. This will give us a general idea of where we are loosing the reader.

Since this will be your first run the counters information should be zeroed out and we can get a semi accurate estimate of where the readers stopped reading by seeing how long they stayed on the page. Use some sort of PPC site like AdWords or Overture to direct some traffic to your site. This will help speed up the process a little bit.

After you have received about one hundred visitors check and see how long they stayed on the page. Then you need to go and time yourself while reading your sales page. If most people exited your page between 0 seconds and 30 seconds then you focus on the copy just above where you where at about 30 seconds into reading your sales copy. If this happened it is obviously your headline or subhead.

Once you have made a single change to your copy go ahead and reset your counter so it clears the old information out. You have to do this after every change. The information on how long people where visiting your site will be way off. I know it is a pain but you have to do it.

Tip: Never change more than one item on your copy at a time unless it is a blatant error on you part. If you change more than one thing you will not know exactly what was responsible for the changes in your conversion.

Now that you know how to check how long your visitors stayed you will not be changing things that are already working in your favor. Many people will jump and change their headline right away when it really was the body or the bullet points that where not working for them.

Most of the times the headline may have been perfectly fine and it was half way through that the sales copy was loosing people. This is another major waste of time when writing copy. It is vital to know where your sales page is loosing the customer.

After you have found the troubled areas in your copy. Make changes one at a time until your copy is like a wet slide that leads customers right down to your order button.

Once you have achieved that you can change little things here and there to get your copy to convert better. Try to make it so you can get as many people as possible to at least read through the whole sales letter and then try harder to get more people to buy. As long as you keep at it you will make your copy work.



Here is more information on Intra Trakker - Write Sales Copy That Sells Like Wild!

Excellent post, Terry! Very well said!

Dale King

Terry - doing that is what was driving me up the wall two years ago! ie changing the headline when I later found out that the problem was a screen and a half down the sales letter.

Cheers,
Mathew

Hi Terry,

I've actually been thinking about writing something like Intra Trakker myself for a while for personal use. I have never used the software myself, but based on the online video, I have some idea of how it works.

So I sat down for a hour and manged to whip up a simple javascript that makes a call every 10 seconds to my google analytics page, passing a parameter with the current height in pixels of how far a person has scrolled down the page.

UPDATE:
I've edited my code since I've realized that it's of little value as is. More of a proof of concept.

There isn't anything else like this out there, and I don't feel like spending a couple of months programming something as
advanced as Intra Trakker.

Of course Intra Trakker seems to do much more than this, and being a programmer, I can tell it's worth the $147 he's asking for it.

- Ophir

Thanks, prutwo. I am actually the programmer who wrote it. (to deal with my own frustrations)

Like most ideas it is simple in priciple, but complicated in the details. Lot of hassle in presenting the information in a useful form, and dealing with unexpected browser bugs, and not just hammering the server.

Cheers,
Mathew

Terry,
I will agree with Dale that this was definitely an excellent, excellent post, but only one thing bothers me...

it's this:

If you are reading every word of the copy and you stop reading when the clock runs out, this will not give you an accurate reading.

You already know that more times than not, people don't usually read an entire sales copy piece...

they skim!

So how can you tell where someone stopped reading your sales letter using this technique?

To me this is a very inaccurate test.

Not trying to discredit your post... like I said it was very well done and I encourage you to give us more... feed my head!

primoquest:
You have picked up on the most important wrinkle. That and what do you do when somebody opens your page, reads down a bit, then leaves the computer till tomorrow morning, then reads a couple more lines and leaves. I had to deal with issues like that or it would be entirely useless. The reader did NOT after all spend 24Hours reading your copy - more like looked at it a bit, thought it was crud and left.

Those issues were a chalenge to deal with.

Cheers,
Mathew

there really are several kinds of readers that I saw in my testing/development:

• top-bottom linear - VERY RARE
• skip to PS, then read backwards
• fanatical skimmers
• look at pictures only, then read a bit more if the copy catches their attention.
• skim the copy, then come back for a second round

Cheers,
Mathew

Hahaha! Mathew... how in the heck am I "ever" going to make any money from your affiliate program if you keep posting your rants on this board and leaving your sig tag all over God's green Earth?

BTW Mathew, I think you have an excellent program and will be looking into making a purchase over the next week or so... awesome tool my friend... wish I would have invented it!

It sounds fascinating and extremely useful. Intratrakker that is.

I think this thing would be most valuable for the matter of market targetting. What I mean by that is that as a trained copywriter, you certainly know about all the various types of psychological triggers to use that work in general with all humans, but there's all kinds of freak X-factors that you can't account for from market to market.

After-all, I've heard from many different sources that a page with plain old copy that looks simple and is easy to read will convert more people. However, it seems that some of the younger generations don't buy it. They prefer websites that have flashy graphics, animations, and lots of colours. They also don't usually have as much spending cash, or credit cards to buy online (Perhaps why marketers found that they aren't the best target market).

Anyways, my point here is that every specific market is different, and things are always changing. Therefore, even though we learn all these general psychology tactics to write good copy, the X-factor is still there. The best way I can see to be on top of the X-factor, is to actually see what our website visitors are looking at and interested in. Feedback from the market itself is the only way to identify what the variable X equals.

I think intra trakker and similar tools are the kind of thing that we need to follow the ebb and flow of the market waves. I think I'll buy it and see what I can glean from these fancy heat graph stats.

Thanks Mathew