Agencies, Freelancers, Design, Copywriting & more.: [Copyblogger] The Harpoon or the Net: What’s the Right Copy Approach for Your Prospects?

The Harpoon or the Net: What's the Right Copy Approach for Your Prospects?

The Harpoon or the Net: What's the Right Copy Approach for Your Prospects?

Harpoon

Once you decide to learn more about online copywriting, you quickly find out there are two schools of thought.

One school hammers the reader with red headlines, yellow highlighting, and aggressive copy that grips the reader like a terrier shaking a squirrel. The other school develops a compelling personal voice, nurtures a relationship with the reader, and uses soft-sell techniques to nudge the reader down the path to purchase.

So which one is right?

They both are.

How to harpoon a customer

It’s easy to make fun of traditional sales pages, but they’re widely used because they work. Like infomercials and Cosmo headlines, they may look dopey, but they convince millions of people to take action and spend money.

Traditional sales pages are ugly because they’re designed to hold and keep attention. Attractive design is completely secondary.

Readers for these pages typically arrive from an ad or an affiliate referral. The prospect tends to make up his mind in a split second about whether or not he’s in the right place. He then spends another three or four seconds deciding if this offer is going to meet his needs.

Red headlines, yellow highlighting, irritating pop-ups and pop-overs, fake handwriting and the other tricks of the trade are all ways to grab a stranger and focus his attention on what you have to offer.

Sure, long sales pages can be cheesy, but if you only have one shot at the prospect, they can work very well. A traditional sales page acts like a harpoon. When a likely prospect swims along, if the writer’s aim is good and she gets enough power behind that harpoon, she can make the sale.

Is a harpoon always the right tool?

Harpoons work great when you need to strike quickly. But they have a few problems.

First, they can convey shoddiness and a lack of ethics. That impression isn’t always accurate–long sales pages are used for great stuff as well as junk. But unless you’ve already established credibility with your audience, the prospect can’t tell the difference. If the reader doesn’t urgently need what you’re selling, she’ll hit the back button as fast as she can.

Second, it’s not as easy as it looks to write a good long-form sales page. The difference between effective sales letters and miserable failures can be surprisingly subtle. If you aren’t already Clayton Makepeace, you may find that although your letters look like his (to your untrained eye), they don’t work like his.

Third, cheap traffic is getting hard to come by. With competitive keywords going for a few dollars instead of a few cents on Adwords, most long sales pages are becoming less and less effective. The masters can still pull it off, and do, but you have to be a master.

If you’re still inspired to learn this strange and fascinating form, study the crusty old guys who developed the original techniques. Gary Bencivenga, Joseph Sugarman, Gary Halbert, Clayton Makepeace, and Dan Kennedy all have low-cost resources out there that can start you on your apprenticeship.

You could also use a net

There’s an alternative approach you might want to consider. Instead of hurling your single-pointed communication as forcefully as you can, consider encouraging your prospect to wrap himself in a friendly, supportive net.

In other words, rather than trying to harpoon customers with single-shot sales letters, snare them in a net of useful, relevant content.

Strong content will keep luring your prospect back for regular bites. Each bite builds a little more trust. Each bite builds your reputation as a friendly authority.

Whether it’s a freeform stream like a blog or the organized sequence of an email autoresponder, a well-crafted content net not only snags your prospect for this sale, it keeps him fat and happy for the next one.

Great single-shot copywriting is usually the result of many years of work and study. Creating a net of great content, on the other hand, is a lot easier to master. You don’t have to get every word perfect. You don’t need an arsenal of sales tricks. It’s mostly a matter of figuring out what your customer wants and needs, then getting out of your own way.

Copyblogger’s the best resource on the Web for writers looking to create sticky, persuasive, engaging content. (And I said that long before I ever wrote a post here.) If your harpoon’s a little rusty and your net’s full of holes, go ahead and subscribe now so you never miss a post.

About the Author: Get more online marketing advice from Sonia Simone by subscribing to her blog today.