How many of you are sick of the long sales letter? Man o man, when ever I go to a site that has the LARGEST FONT EVER (in red of course), with some cheesy testimonial telling me “I made $54,239.45 in 2 months and here’s how” and uses some canned template site with all the highlighting on stuff like “This is the first of its kind” …I hit the back button faster then my optical mouse will allow me to.

7 Reasons Why I’m a Hater?

1. Underhand tactics. The latest sales letter I read involved, incredibly I thought, a guy using the fact that he’s just become a father to sell what is essentially an explanation of how to blog and try to make money. Of course, though, he had to include a picture of himself with the baby.

2. Fake testimonials. OK, I’m sorry, they might not be fake. But it’s clear that they’re all fellow internet marketers or connected with the business somehow, and probably benefitting from the exposure (and in return a future testimonial for their own products, no doubt). It’s hardly as convincing as a “real life” person telling how fantastic the product is; though it would be as easy to make up some words for them too.

2. Scarcity value. Your product doesn’t have any. You’d sell a million copies if there were that many idiots waiting to be parted with their money. So why are you telling me I must act now before I miss out?

3. I’m not stupid. I can read normal writing you know - like in books and magazines. So why am I being bombarded with red headlines, yellow highlighting, bullet points and general unnecessary hyperbole? And what is the need for fancy 3D graphics, when I know it’s a downloadable PDF on offer?

4. Free bonuses. It annoys me just writing the words. Most free bonuses are worthless. (And please tell me how the author calculated that their bonus was worth exactly $147.77?)

5. You haven’t slashed any prices. You always intended to launch at that price, and you’re not doing me any big favours by doing so.

6.It’s all lies. Or if not lies, then exaggeration, deception and downright dishonesty. Is your product really guaranteed to raise $1800 per day? Does it really require no effort whatsoever? Am I really only going to succeed if I read your e-book?

7. Overblown hype. And that’s the polite way of putting it. The way these sales letters are written implies they’re a revolution in online marketing and that the “secrets” within are guaranteed to make you an instant millionaire. Yet there’s a new life-changing product comes out every week. Can they all be so revolutionary?

What does the research suggest?

So i decided to research if the long sales letter is dead, and here is what I found.

Then it came to me. Without spending the hours I usually do for one of these studies, I thought of a way to validate it with a different dataset.
Clickbank has just such a dataset! They know the profitability of the sites in their network and they show them (loosely and not completely documented) in that order in the marketplace.

I immediately went to check it out. I used the Money & Employment category first since it is also the most profitable category in the Clickbank marketplace. I went to each of the first 10 sites and did a “Print Preview” and shoved the page count into a spreadsheet. At the end, I graphed those 10 data points and then superimposed a linear line on the graph.

The original study data was confirmed. As we went down the list in order of receding profitability, we also increased in number of pages of sales copy on average.

Then I quickly went to the Marketing & Ads category. This is the category that many of us who sometimes sell to each other (the incestuous market) use. I repeated the study once again. The graph showed the same linear slope.

Want a good laugh?

This person has it nailed: http://www.clickhereyouidiot.com/

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“You Americans, you treat the Third World in the way an Iraqi peasant treats his new bride. Three days of honeymoon, and then it’s off to the fields.” - Saddam Hussein