Yesterday I received an email with a link to a sales page touting a copywriting product launch.  Reading that sales page got me back up  on one of my soap boxes.

Now I have no knowledge of the content of this product, good or bad, but I do know one thing – the grammar on the sales page was so poor that I never got past the third paragraph.  I spent most of my time reading the headline with morbid fascination.  I never really did make sense of it.

The only reason I gave the sales page as much attention as I did was because I am interested in copywriting and like to get as much information on the subject as I can.  But I can tell you it would be a cold day in Hell before I would ever consider spending my money with someone who wrote as poorly as this.  The actual structuring of the argument in the copy may have been good, I don’t know. I never got engaged enough find out.

Which brings me to my point.  If you are selling stuff on the internet, physical or digital, for the forseeable future the biggest market for your products will likely be the English speaking market.  If your English skills aren’t at least adequate, you will be leaving money on the table.

That’s not to say that you need to have a degree in composition, lord knows I don’t, but that your writing needs to be at least good enough to communicate effectively.  You want to engage your readers, and that is impossible if they have to spend any amount of time trying to figure out what you are saying.  Even if they stick around, and they probably won’t, their reading will become less about what you are trying to say and more about the exercise of deciphering.

Facility with the English language is even more vital when it comes to sales copy.  Sales pages are by their very nature designed to “suck” people in and drag them down the page.  Anything that interrupts this process reduces it’s effectiveness, and stopping to figure out what a word or sentence means is guaranteed to interrupt your potential customer’s journey to the Buy button.

I could go on and on, but it comes down to this.  If you are marketing to the English language market and your skills are lacking, don’t ignore it.  Even if you are doing OK, you could be doing much better.  Trust me.  I have seen examples where I am positive that fixing this one thing could have put thousands of dollars in a marketer’s pocket.

Why take all the time and effort required to have a presence on the internet and then waste it?  Somehow, some way, find someone who can look over your stuff and make it scan. If you can afford it, pay someone.  It’ll be worth it.

This is not a breakthrough SEO discovery BUT with an ever changing Google search algorithm, it is important to remember the simple things that simply work.

Is content really still king? You bet it is!

At the beginning of this year I put up about a dozen brand new “sniper blogs” (as outlined in Google Sniper 2.0). Every one of the domain names consisted of a longtail keyword and each one of those keywords were (more or less) equally as hard to rank for.

I put the exact same wordpress theme on each of the blogs and optimized them all the same way. I also did the exact same backlinking for each of the sites.

The only thing I did differently was: I put no new content on some of the blogs, put one post on a couple of them, and put 3 posts on some of the other ones (all unique posts – just to be clear).

I really did not do a whole lot with those blogs for MONTHS. All of a sudden a couple of those sites started generating me sales for an affiliate product I was promoting.

Of course I was super excited. Few things in life excite me more than making affiliate sales.

A long story short, I started to analyze the stats on each of the sites and here is what I found: the blogs with the most posts were getting the most traffic and as a result were also generating me the most sales.

This reconfirmed a philosophy I had adopted to my “best SEO” practices over a year ago which basically says: One should always post at least 5 articles on a sniper site.

In this example I only had up to 3 posts but 5 would have been even better.

Generally speaking, when I commit to making a successful sniper site, I usually have a link in the first 4 posts pointing to the main page where I have the “sales” post. The idea here is to push as much linkjuice to the sales post as possible.

Anyways, I could go on and on about the importance of having a handful of quality posts on each site but I think it is common sense – at least for the most part. I just wanted to share my quick case study to let you know that – despite many theories – content is still king!

I would love to hear your experiences in this regard,

Konrad

PS: – I keep getting asked where I get my content from. I write all content on this blog myself and for the most part also write all “sales posts” on my sniper blogs myself. All other content I almost always get done at GLA.

The last few days I’ve had to think a lot about the quality of the content I put on my sites, and the main reason probably is just seeing how big G (Google) is cracking down on sites that have nothing but junk content.

It’s a funny thing… even the famous EzineArticles got slapped by Google recently which resulted in EzineArticles getting half the traffic it used to get. I guess Google finally caught on to the fact that the content on some of these article directories are nothing more than advertisements for thousands and thousands of sites.

Nothing against EzineArticles or content marketing – I believe content marketing is still very powerful if spread out over many sites, but as far as depending on article directories for traffic or linkjuice… I will say I have not had a good experience with it.

Anyways… here is my short video. I sounds and look a little sick… am getting over a cold.

Let me know what you think or what your experience in this regard has been.  Also make sure to like and retweet this post if you found the information valuable.

Konrad Braun

PS: – The guide I was referring to in the video can be found by clicking here!