All-Podcast-Secrets

Best Internet marketing newsletter yet !✓ November 8, 2006 8:06 AM Perry Marshall must read

All the marketers of the world have been arguing about this for… oh, about a hundred years now: Is it better to write big long sales pages and spend 10 or 20 or 30 pages telling your story, or is it better to be brief and to the point?

Guys who charge fifteen grand to write 46 page direct mail packages say their results undoubtedly prove long copy is better. Madison Avenue people who work for (obviously successful) Fortune 500 companies would remind you that Coke’s “The Real Thing” and Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop plop fizz fizz” slogans stuck in hundreds of millions of peoples’ heads.

They would also remind you that even Apple’s iPod was sold not with long copy, but with U2 and shots of hip dancers wearing those white headphones on buses and trains and billboards.

Well they’re both right. And I know the answer to this ‘long copy-short copy’ question, because I’ve seen enough things and tested enough things to know what the real answer is.

The real answer is:

*The right amount of copy is just the amount that gets a person to take the next step that you want them to take.*

No more, no less.

If all you’re asking is for the person to try a no-cost 30 day software demo, then all you need is enough copy to convince them to sign up, install it and try it out. That might only be a couple hundred words.

Or, to twist around an example John Carlton likes to use, if you were giving away Marilyn Monroe’s phone number, all the copy you’d need is:

To get Marilyn Monroe’s phone number, please fill in the form below:

Name ________
Email Address _________
Checking Account Routing Number ______
Button: “Access to Marilyn Monroe’s Phone Number”

On the other hand if you’re selling a $5,000 workshop and the readers don’t even know who you are, you might need 60 pages of copy.

In either case you can test whatever you want to test and you’ll eventually get an answer. Having said that, you can’t test everything, if you could do that you wouldn’t need any marketing advice, only a big testing machine. But on the web, this isn’t something people need to sit around and argue about. What I’ve found from using live chat to watch visitors come into my website and look around, you need two paths:

-One that conveys the highlights quickly
-One that tells the whole story

Traditional copywriters (myself included) accomplish this partly by building a “dual readership path” with headlines, sub-heads and font changes, so a skimmer quickly gets what he wants. And more than any other media, the web gives you unlimited ability to build multiple paths so a person can stick around and look as long as they want and keep learning more.

Stay tuned, more to come later this week.

Perry Marshall

P.S. Get over $500 of stuff for $29.95, just for taking my Renaissance Club for a test drive:
http://perrymarshall.com/club

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