Active, stimulating words and phrases keep your prospect involved and interested in reading your sales copy. Look for dull passive words and phrases you can eliminate or replace with active ones. For example, change a phrase like "...it's practical and inexpensive" to "...it's fast, easy and you'll save $99"

4. GET RID OF HUMOROUS REMARKS

Humor can be effective in some media -- but not in written sales messages. It distracts your prospects by interrupting their mental focus on your message. This distraction can cause you to lose some sales. Get rid of any humorous remarks in your web pages and sales letters.

SUGGESTION: Replace your humorous remarks with real life stories from customers describing how they benefited by using your product or service. Real life stories add human interest and draw prospects into your message. Humor distracts their attention away from your message.

5. INCLUDE A MOTIVATING "P.S."

Most prospects glance at beginning of your web page or sales letter then jump to end before reading anything in between. Take advantage of this and put something at end of your message to stimulate their interest. Create it as a "P.S."

For example, use a "P.S." to emphasize your offer, highlight a deadline or to dramatize a significant benefit. All of these will pull prospect into your message.

Use these 5 proven copywriting tactics to energize your sales copy. Your web pages, sales letters and other promotional messages will immediately start producing more sales for you.

Another Parallel

Newspapers are written for people in a hurry. So is a website. Thus pattern of turning to an inner page to finish an article begun on first page, compares in some ways to clicking off your home page to another for further information. Then clicking back.

And Another

If your home page is cluttered with graphics and/or ads, ponder some before deciding to leave them. The front page of a newspaper is all about easy reading and drawing people into inner pages. There are no ads and photos are minimal. This is a great formula for your home page as well.

Inner Pages

As with a newspaper, you fire your biggest guns on your home page. Thus your inner pages will have to make do with lesser benefits, unless a neat way can be found to restate originals. Newspapers to a very good job with their inner pages. We would all do well to follow suit.

Print And Competition

Competition in print media is awesome. Of all forms, newspapers seem to face greatest challenge. All find it difficult to make profits. And indirect competition through books and magazines adds to woes. Television steals newspaper readers by millions.

Publishers struggle with this burden every day. They must continue to beat competition or go broke. There is no option but to seek to put out a better paper today than was produced yesterday.

Is The Web Less Competitive?

There are some who would argue it is less competitive, but I'm not one of them. With flood of existing business expanding to Web, I feel competition is increasing at an awesome and increasing rate. And I see no end in sight.

As webmasters, though, we do have one distinct advantage over newspapers - We don't have to do it every day. A newspaper is history tomorrow. We hope our websites have a somewhat longer span. On other hand, we best get it right, and make some changes now and then to keep it that way.

Every time I see a newspaper headline that grabs at me, it reminds of my website. Mentally I begin yet another review of my headlines, content and format. I continue to learn a lot from newspapers about grabbing and holding attention. It might work for you as well.