Have you ever been surfing around trying to find a piece of software, ebook, certain type of service you need to promote your site, or whatever? Sure you have. Or at least many of you have. So you find something on Google that looks interesting and click on it. So what do you find more times than not? You find some sales page that goes on and on and on.
You my friend, have found somebodies super duper SALES LANDING PAGE!
Check this out!
A. This page is so long that your scroll control on the right of the browser looks like a dash.
B. Many of the key words are double the size of the surrounding text, bolded, and colored red, green, or blue.
C. Entire paragraphs are center justified. Now that’s just wrong and hard to read too!
D. Paragraphs or phrases are repeated over and over again.
E. One third of this 14 foot long page is testimonials that can’t even be verified as real people.
F. Entire Sentences In Some Places Have Every Word Capitalized. EVEN WORSE IS A SENTENCE THAT IS SCREAMING AT ME IN ALL CAPITOL LETTERS!
G. And then there are more “quotation marks” than an interview transcript with president “Clinton” after the impeachment hearings. To me that’s like someone speaking in a normal tone of voice, and then when they want to really get the point across, they grab a megaphone and yell it in my ear.
H. Finally when you get to the bottom of the page you don’t even find a price until after you click on the “Buy It” button.
Holy Smokes, if you are planning to make this type of sales page, I’ll have to be quite honest with you neighbor, I usually close the browser or hit the back button when they cross my path. My time is valuable and I really don’t want to waste it having someone trying to sell me something that most likely isn’t even one tenth as good as all the hype on the page. You guessed it, I even hang up on telemarketers after politely saying no thank you. For crying out loud, if I wanted to buy something, there’s a department store just around the corner from me.
Why? Well for one thing, it’s insulting to the average persons intelligence. When I buy something online, my interest is usually directed to the page that has a one or two paragraph description of the product and I can see the price within a small amount of scrolling down the page. When I’m looking for something, I usually have an idea of what I’m after and don’t really need to sold on buying it. I even like maybe a nice picture of whatever it is I’m buying to give me a sense of substantial.
Tim Davis is a Baptist pastor, trained Architectural Designer, and Web builder/programmer who has been building Architectural and Christian websites since 1995.
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