Long or Short Copy?

Here’s a question that’s been debated ever since internet marketing was in it’s infancy – which is the best format of copy to use for promoting your product on your website?

The simple answer is that there is no simple answer.

There are statistics prove that long copy outperforms short copy. There is also a popular school of thought that most readers won’t bother to read long copy (the counter argument is that these readers were not going to be buyers anyway).

So which side of the arguments do you believe will be best for your business? There has to be a compromise, right?

To find that compromise you need to put yourself into the same mindset that your visitor is likely to be in when he lands on your site. Look at things through his eyes.

There are two things that happen when he visits your site.

1. On arrival he needs an instant quick overview of what your site offers, for example “an ebook about search engines which costs $27″

He does not want to wade through thousands of words to extract this information, so this is best dealt with by short copy.

2. At some point he begins to get interested and may consider a purchase. Now he wants to know everything about the product and how it can help him.

So now he wants to see all the detail − long copy.

So if it were possible you’d like to be able to switch from a summary to a full description.

You could start with short copy and at the end have a link to a second page with the instruction ‘For the full details click here’.

But a good alternative is to insert ‘more detail’ links throughout the body of the short copy and have them come up as pop ups which the reader can open and close while remaining on the main page.

On the subject of sales copy I would say that copywriting is one of the most profitable skills to acquire and here is one of the reasons why:

Suppose you spend the next 3 hours preparing an advertising campaign in a newsletter. You may produce successful results but these will appear as a one−off spike in the chart of your sales figures. You would need to continually repeat these campaigns to maintain the improved figure.

Instead let’s devote these 3 hours to revamping your sales copy. They say that simple improvements to a headline alone for example can see conversion rates multiply by 5, 10 or more. But let’s allow a modest increase − you are able just to double the conversion rate.

Then your sales figures will double from now on, and remain doubled without any further effort.

If you are serious about learning to write as the copywriters do, come and join me on a 5 day trial at www.incomeelite.com to share all of the resources you need to get to grips with this subject.

We’ve got a comprehensive copywriting guide waiting for you which has been written by our own Phil Coleman, a seasoned copywriter in his own right.

By: Steve Peirce