Can you use a blog as a salesletter? If you do, will blog salesletters work as well as a more traditional salesletter?
When is comes down to it, a blog platform like Wordpress is simply a CMS (content management system). This means it’s just a way for you to put your information on the web.
Using a blog as a full fledged storefront with a system like Datafeedr will turn your default Wordpress installation into a rich user experience filled with products from multiple merchants and multiple affiliate networks. (Keith Baxter discusses this in the Wordpress Project).
Using a blog to display copy selling a product makes it easier to manage changes in your copy and provide a uniform presentation on your site thoughout the sales process. Your blog salesletters will look the same as your “thank you” page, for exxample, because they’re all on the same platform. And when changes need doing, you simply edit one file and your whole site is updated.
In either situation, you have to remember what your goal for the people that land on your website is. You want to sell them something, and as such, you do not want your blog cluttered up with the default Wordpress “Meta” and “Links” info, for example. Take away everything that is an obstacle to buying.
For a Datafeedr site, you may want to encourage your visitors to browse your site so they find exactly what they’re looking for before clicking through to the merchant’s site to buy the product. So the breadcrumb navigation and “Featured Products” widgets Datafeedr sites offer are options to consider using. For a one-off blog salesletter, you’ll want to remove any extraneous information (”Categories,” “Recent Posts,” and “Comments” are some examples) so that the “Buy” link is the most attractive option for readers to click.
I do use blogs as a platform for salesletters, and just tweak the template and widgets to fit the type of site I’m working with, the mindset of the visitor and my end goal in serving my visitors.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Good point about removing the Wordpress clutter links, which I did not do, and was probably why visitors clicked 43 times on the Wordpress.org link at the bottom!, my copy skills must be top notch!, after all that sales pitching they would rather go to the Wordpress site!. McDonald’s here I come!!..;)
Great points. I have used blogs for sales copy before.. when I started out I used highly modified free Blogger blogs to test sales copy.. I was studying the Gary Halbert letters and some Dan Kennedy stuff at that time and wanted a low-risk way to implement and test the things that I learned.
Nice resource, I’ll have to do some more investigation on DataFeedr. I’ve used WP for years to do everything from sales letters, membership sites, social media sites and everything in between.
Here’s an interesting example I did for a non-profit to build a social media style site into WordPress.
http://WorldSmileProject.com
Most people would never be able to tell that this is built with WP, but with a few tweaks under the hood it’s quite a nice platform foundation for any site.
Another great tool for building eCommerce style WP sites is “My-Affiliate-Store” which now goes by the name of Traffic Genesis.
Hi Michelle
Thankyou for this post. I am pretty new to selling via a blog and just having a sales page with no bells and whistles makes sense, I am guessing I could do this to send traffic to my website pages as well??? Will definitely check out Datafeedr.