I have found that biggest challenge in marketing my ebusiness is to write effective ads. In a lot of articles I have read on ad writing, I have come across term "sell sizzle." Can you tell me what they mean?

And tell me if this is really important to writing good effective ads or if it's not all that important.

Signed,

John in Tulsa

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Dear John in Tulsa,

Selling "sizzle" is very important in field of advertising. It's not only way to sell effectively, but I have found it to be one of best advertising techniques.

Many people who have been around Internet for awhile, have seen this grow to big business. But like any new industry, it is going through growing pains, and basic mistakes are being made. Until these mistakes are corrected, if you use it, like a ship without a rudder, you will eventually founder.

The first mistake being made is sending multiple copies of same ad to same person. When you get five or ten copies of same email, one right after other, it is immediately recognized as spam, and relegated to trash bin.

Why do they send so many copies? They get their email addresses usually by harvesting them from Internet. They have software with search capabilities, much like Search Engines, that can target specific types of web sites. They collect every email address they find at a site, and move on to next.

The problem is that most people who own their own domain, have all email delivered to their main domain address. Example - my main domain address is "adv-marketing@adv-marketing.com. Anything sent to anybody@adv-marketing.com will come to my mailbox . So they find a "bunch" of addresses at a web site and consider them all "fair game". Until they solve this problem, you are wasting your money if you contract with them.

Misrepresentation is also high on list. You get same email with a different title in subject each time. Many times title has absolutely nothing to do with contents of email. It is simply their way of trying to get your attention, and entice you to open email.