So, exactly what do I mean by SPARKLE?

For your sales copy to sparkle it must do several things:

• Grab Attention
• Engage
• Excite
• Entertain
• Justify The Purchase
• Create Urgency
• Prove Your Claims
• Show Uniqueness
• Have A “Call To Action”
• Make It Easy To Order
• Reiterate Or Add Another Benefit

So let’s go over these points one-by-one.

Grab Attention: To hit the ground running your headline and opening paragraph must get their attention or they won’t even read your message. It is like when you read or scan the newspaper you look at the headlines and read the opening paragraph of any headline that interests you. If they don’t satisfy you hunger you go on to the next headline.

Engage: For them to continue reading they must believe they are going to get something out of it. Something that will make their lives better must be stated for them to continue.

Excite: They must get excited about what they read. For this you should utilize imagery evoking statements. This will put them into the picture, create ownership and live the dream you develop.

Entertain: What TV programs do you watch and which ones do you turn off? The same is true with your sales copy. People will not read your message if it does NOT entertain them. This above everything else creates that sparkle that you want your sales copy to exude.

Justify The Purchase: Once you have tapped their emotions and have your prospect envisioning themselves in the picture you have created, you need to  help them justify the purchase. This is done with logic not emotions. They must decide that the purchase is the right thing to do.

Create Urgency: We are notorious procrastinators and the be-back bus has four flat tires. What this means is; once they have left your page they will not come back. If you create urgency then they will feel more compelled to make their purchase right then.

Prove Your Claims: The person reading must be convinced that what your telling them is the truth. If you don’t do this then you have lost any chance of making this or any other sales to this person. This creates trust in you and people buy from people they trust.

Show Uniqueness: Yours is not the only product or service available to them. If you can’t show why yours is better for them at this time then they probably won’t buy. Give them every reason to buy and don’t leave anything to chance.

Have A “Call To Action”: Once you have done all of the things listed above you need to direct them to the next step you want them to take. This is when you are going to ask for the sale. So many sales letters don’t effectively ask for the sale and leave the prospect hanging. Consequently they don’t have any direction to take next, so they leave.

Make It Easy To Order: Once you’ve got them pulling out their credit card don’t blow it by making them jump through a lot of hoops. The order form should be simple and straight forward, plus easy to access.

Reiterate Or Add A Benefit: After the salutation at the end of the letter insert a P. S. Many people will skip to the end of the letter and read the P. S. first. It also gives you another another chance to sell. You can state the main benefit again or introduce another benefit at this point.

If you can successfully implement all of these into your sales letter you will have an effective tool to convert prospects into paying customers. Skipping or not effectively doing any of these steps will seriously hinder the ability of your sales letter to accomplish what it was meant to do.

Well, your advertising plan is like your blueprint for your business. Without a good plan your business just will not get off the ground.

The overall marketing plan is going to give you the basis for your operation. It will spell out the direction you want to take with your business. It will help you to orchestrate your efforts by integrating the two primary marketing functions of branding and advertising.

1. How you are going to attract customers is the most important aspect of any business.
2. With a good marketing plan you will identify and accurately describes your market, your customers, your products and services, and your competition.
3. You will be able calculates the scope of your market.
4. This will make it possible for you to calculate you advertising budget.
5. It will provide your business with the focus it needs, the guidance required, and the direction for effective advertising and business practices.
6. A good marketing plan will positions your company in the marketplace.
7. It will provide guidelines to establish proper customer management and retention.
8. Most importantly it will outline your communications strategies by giving your entire company a clearly planned, comprehensive and consistent message to customers, employees, investors, and business partners.

Once you have a strong marketing plan you will have a guide on how you are going to advertise. If you do it the other way around you will just be backing in or making it up as you go along and this is no way to start a successful business.

Now, I’m not saying you need to write a fifty-page document detailing every aspect of your marketing to the slightest detail. What you want is a clear-cut, realistic picture of your business strategy, who you customers are and what your budget will be for both branding and advertising.

The next thing you need to figure out is your demographics. Are the people you sell to old or young, rich or poor, or maybe they belong to a special interest group. Here is a list of questions you can ask:

• Age
• Gender
• Education
• Income
• Marital status
• Ethnicity
• Religion
• Life Style

You can find this information locally at town hall, library, Chamber of Commerce or you can find information from polling past customers and of course using the internet.

The more detailed you can get the better you can target your sales message. Start by dividing your market into groups and you can narrow down exactly who your product and similar products appeal to. Then there is the most important question you must ask and that is why do they buy your product.

This can be narrowed down to three things:

1. It makes them feel better.
2. It solves a problem.
3. It satisfies a basic need.

Once you have weighed the data and search through data bases you should be able to get a clear picture of who your customer is. If you can you may even be able to picture this person. Maybe you even know someone that would fit the bill.

If so this is great because you want to target that person. You want to write your sales copy as if you’re talking, one-on-one with that person. The next thing you will need to do is decide what direction your message is going to take. In other words what emotion are you going to target.

Some say there are only a few but in actuality there are many emotions you can appeal to get someone compelled to buy your product or service. What emotion is most likely to work is part of targeting your audience. Once you know this person then you will also be able to know what will move them.

Knowing your customer will tell you what benefit to focus on as well. This person buying will buy because of some special reason most generally. Being able to identify this benefit will give your sales copy a better chance of succeeding.

Knowing your customer is imperative for your overall success and research is the key to knowing that customer and what spurs them to buy. So before you write anything find out who you are selling. Then sit down and write like you are talking directly to that person, telling them about some new product or service that you found and are excited about because of the benefits you received.

The first option is artwork. A picture of the product or some other relative artwork will work fine. A note to remember is that most newspaper print ads are in black and white and you will have an advantage because you can use full color. If you look at magazines you will see many more examples of full color ads.

When choosing your artwork make sure it is relative to your subject. It should be esthetically pleasing to the eye and draw the reader into the rest of the copy. You may want to use your logo on your website to begin branding recognition.

You’ll want to start out with the overall look of the website. There are many free templates you can use and they are easy enough to find on the search engines. You will need to decide right off the bat if you want your website to be glitzy or plain. This will depend on personal taste, the purpose of the website and what you are selling.

Keep in mind your personal taste should also reflect your customers taste. For that you will need to do some research if you haven’t already done so. If you haven’t done this research begin to do so immediately. Otherwise how else are you going to know if your product is in demand, who your target market is, how best to reach that target market, are they highly educated and so on and so forth.

Once you decided on the overall look of your website you will want to decide if more artwork is needed. If you’re selling a product or products you will want to have a picture or pictures. If you’re selling a service you may still want a picture or artwork to grab attention.

The next element is the headline. The right headline can really get your reader’s attention and begin the preselling process for you. Headline writing can be tricky, but generally speaking the shorter the better. If you can say what you want to say in a few words say it. If you want to expand on the thought in the headline ad a sub headline. Think about it, when you take up a newspaper you scan the headlines on the page and if one of them is interesting to you, you read the article or at least scan it.

The third element is white space. Now white space is a general term used for the space that is not filled with copy or images. If your website has a black background the obviously the white space is going to be black. At any rate the copy should not look cramped or crowded.

The reason for this is that in many cases people scan and don’t read the content word for word. For these people you will want to make your important points stand out from the rest of the copy. Using artwork such as check marks or arrows is effective. Boxes with the important point broken out and placed near the text or as a sub head will also help to get your point across.

The bottom line is planning. Plan what you want to say, plan who you are going to say it to and plan the best way to get results. Your website is your business, make it as effective as you can and use every tool available to you.

Where do you begin advertising your new online business, is the question most new owners ask themselves and others. It can be a real dilemma and can sometimes even become overwhelming to say the least. The Internet is a wonderful place to find out all kinds of things, but it very scary place for the novice wanting to advertise.

Most online businesses are run out of the home, but should be treated like any brick and mortar business. It will only work if you work at it, so don’t believe all the hype you see. You know the ones I mean, where they are telling that you can make a fortune and only work an hour a day. Not only do you need to work at, but also you must persevere even if you don’t see results at first.

There are many ways to advertise on and off the Internet to get your business off the ground. Some of these methods are free while others cost money. The ones that you pay for can range from a dollar a day to hundreds, even thousands of dollars. So going this route can sometimes mean having deep pockets. Then there are the free advertising options. Like so many things, if it doesn’t cost you money it cost you time and this is no exception.

So let’s get on with the subject at hand and start off with some advertising methods:

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
There are as many PPC programs available, but the 3 most used are Google, Yahoo and MSN. With PPC you bid on keywords and write ads that will appear on the search engine pages when anyone searches for the keywords you have selected. This can be very lucrative yet can be expensive to begin with. The risk you are taking is that the clicks you have to pay for will result in enough sales to more than offset the amount you pay for them.

Article Marketing
There are many sites that cater to online business owners that want to get traffic to their sites through article marketing. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement for both parties. The idea is that you write articles that you submit to their site, which keeps them supplied with fresh, new content and in return you get to put a link in your bio or profile to any site you choose.

Remember the article needs to be relevant to the site you are pointing to or you lose points with the search engines and certainly won’t get any sales. After all if someone comes looking for a way to grow great tomatoes and find a site about building a deck they’re going to be very put out.

Forum Advertising
This is a very good way to get traffic to your site and it’s free, but it is time consuming. However, there is a side benefit. If you find the right forum you will find a lot of useful information that you can use to promote your business. If you get into the spirit of things you will also find some new like-minded individuals that you can communicate with and bounce ideas off.

All of the advertising will work, some better than others depending on what you say and how you go about it. Some of the free methods also have an upgrading option that you will cost money. Many times these upgrades will get you faster results, but they can get costly. Upgrading is an option you can always take when you’ve seen results for free.

There are many other methods of advertising such as safe lists, and FFAs, even the old stand by, classified ads both in the paper and online. Be sure to track your advertising methods whenever possible to see if they are working or not. Another couple of pointers is to get backlinks to your site and built a list by capturing your visitor’s names and email addresses so you can keep in touch. Some visitors take a little more convincing and others will be prime subjects to sell new products to.

You will see their names plastered all over the Internet known as gurus. Some actual and some professed. Nevertheless, marketing is how they have amassed a fortune. If you are to realize your own financial success you must learn to utilize the tactics used by those gurus.

To become you successful you need 2 things a product and a vehicle used to announce that product to those that wish to buy your product. In fact there are many methods in which to accomplish your objective.

1.    Article Marketing
There are many sites that will allow you to post articles for free. How this helps you is they will let you put a link to your site. This creates targeted traffic, which gives you a better chance of converting those visitors into paying customers.
2.    Forum Marketing
No matter what your niche there is a forum that caters to it. Find them, join them and lurk around for a while to get the hang of how things work. Then begin posting to threads to offer advice or to thank someone for their words of wisdom. These are also a good way to find out useful information that will actually help you in your endeavors. Again you can place links to your site to get traffic.
3.    Free Classified Ads
These are just like what they seem. You can go to these sites and put up classified ads for free to get traffic to your site. The secret here is being able to write effective ads. Of course they need to go under the proper category and should be written so they give the reader enough information to make them want more.
4.    Search Engine Optimization
Volumes have been written on this subject but what it really boils down to is using keywords in your HTML source code (<meta name=”keywords” content=”your keywords go here”>) and in your content. But that is nowhere near all there is to it. There are other factors involved, such as the age of the website, the amount of traffic, the quantity and quality of competition. I understand that you have no control over these factors except the amount of traffic, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention them. Some would say that this isn’t marketing, but anything that brings traffic to your site is marketing.
5.    Press Releases
These are another real good source of free advertising just because the public views them as news stories. The trick here is to make it sound like a news story while you sell. It can be done and when it is done right it can be very successful.
6.    Social Marketing
Many marketers have turned their focus or at least a portion of it to marketing through social sites like myspace, facebook or one of the many others. It seems as though these are not just a place where little Jenny can put up her pictures and talk about what one friend said about another. Serious money is being made through marketing efforts through these sites. So, go, make friends, get a following and market your brains out.
7.    Networking and Master Mind Groups
In your area you can find people that meet regularly to discuss things of like interest. You may get some business from it, but you will mostly benefit because you will get ideas that can really help propel your business.

1. Write what they are interested in.
2. Write like you are talking to a friend.

The format is as follows:

1. A catchy headline that immediately grabs their attention.
2. The opening paragraph should be short and to the point.
3. Next a sub headline featuring a main benefit
4. After that another paragraph of benefits.
5. Then another headline about a benefit.
6. Then another paragraph a benefit.

I’m sure by now you have gotten the point, if not, it is ALL ABOUT THEM. Write descriptive phrases that help them to envision living the life they can have using your product or services. The sales letter has to be fast hitting and entertaining or they will quit reading it.

There is way too much competition out there and once you have gotten someone to your landing page or to open your direct mail sales letter you have very little time to gain his or her interest. You must, also in a very short time get them to trust you. The use of testimonials will help here, but what you are saying has to ring true.

Appealing to their desires is something else that will keep them reading. Using their basic drives to sell you product is something you will need to learn how to do. Learn the psychological reasons why people would want to buy your product or service.

Now that all that has been said they probably won’t read your sales letter word for word. Therefore you need to format it so that it is scannable. Use subheads to make points periodically. Highlight areas you want them to notice. Make boxes around important parts. Use quotes, underlines, italics and bold fonts to make your special points. Pull out important parts and put them in a colored box and repeat it.

Separate your testimonials and put a picture of the person making the testimonial along with the quote. Give their full name if allowed and where they reside. All of this just gives more credence to your sales letter. I personally would never buy something from somebody if it didn’t have credence.

Trust has to be instilled for a sales letter to be effective. There needs to be a lot of truth in what you are saying or you will not make sales. Evident truth will build the trust you need to write a successful sales letter. Otherwise you might as well not write it.

Target your sales letter to people that have shown signs of wanting your product. If you send it to people that don’t want whatever it is your selling you are just wasting your time and money.

Writing a successful sales letter takes a lot of creative talent and should also be entertaining to keep it from being discarded. Take to heart that it is all about what they need. Your message must leave them knowing that your product will make their life better. It must fulfill their desires and give them hope that it will solve whatever their problem is.

People go to the Internet for information on how they can solve a problem or get an answer to their question. Your sales letter needs to address this and provide a perceived solution. Give them what they are asking for and they will buy.

Of course not everyone will buy, but you are looking for a good conversion rate. A really great conversion rate is 3-5 percent, so that means you need to get a lot of traffic or send out a lot of promotional material. Presell when you can and following up is necessary for your success.

There are several headline themes that work. When you sit down to write a headline, first decide which theme would work best for the campaign you have in mind. If you’re not sure which method will work it is best to try writing a headline using several strategies. Once you have them written test them out on yourself, friends and family to see which one grabbed their attention most effectively.

Since the headline is the most important part of your campaign it will be responsible for about 80% of your success. Here are eight headline themes to get you started on the right track.

Getting Right To The Point – Just basically say it. Don’t try to be clever or amusing. Don’t use puns; just say it in a straightforward way. Most often used when the offer is a clear solution to the problem or if you have a very strong offer. It also works well when you have a well-known product or service or if you are promoting a brand name that is very recognized.

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Main Benefit – Starting off telling the reader about the main benefit will give you a more targeted audience. They will only continue to read if this benefit appeals to them. This is your chance to use excitement and to start preselling your product or service.

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Make It Newsy – Instead of the typical headlines you see make it appear like a news story headline you see in your daily paper. Some often-used words used by newspapers are: Announcing, Exposed, Discover, Introducing. To find more headline just look at the headlines in any newspaper or tabloid. Don’t laugh tabloids have some of the greatest headlines you’ll ever find.

• New Weight Loss Method Exposed
• Discover The Newest Way To Grow Tomatoes
• Introducing The Latest Techniques To Improve Your Credit Rating

The How-To Headline – One of the most used techniques for writing headlines is the HOW-TO method. The idea here is promising to fill a need that the reader wants to be able to do.

• How To Lose 40 Pounds In 40 Days
• How To Build The Deck You’ll Love To Use
• How To Find The Perfect Home

The Question Headline – This ploy gets the reader involved right off the bat. Pose your question so that it stems off the main benefit of your product or service. The reader should automatically agree with the question and want to know how they can solve the problem posed.

• Are You’re Marketing Efforts Paying Off?
• Do You Sleep Well Through The Night?
• Can You Really Grow New Hair?

Make A Demand – Right off the bat you are leading the customer, telling them exactly what you want them to do. The thought here is if you start off telling them what to do they will continue to do what you want through the entire process. That way when they get to the buy now button they will do that, too.

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Information – People come to the Internet for information. It’s what we crave. Information is power. So we want to know the secrets, the tips, the hints, the laws, the rules and the systems that will give us the upper hand.

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Testimonial – Having a testimonial in your headline gives credence to your product by giving an unbiased opinion from a third party. It also lets the reader know that someone else has already bought the product and like the results enough to tell others.

• “Easy to learn software. I was up and running in 10 minutes”
• “I lost 20 pounds in 2 weeks on this diet”
• “It was the best product I ever bought”

In professional usage the term has a wider meaning of the practice and science of trading. The HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Marketing_Association”American Marketing Association (AMA) states, “Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”

Marketing practice tends to be seen as a creative industry, which includes advertising, distribution and selling. It is also concerned with anticipating the customers’ future needs and wants, which are often discovered through market research.

The scientific study of marketing is a wide and heavily interconnected subject with extensive academic publications. Marketing methods are also informed by many of the social sciences, particularly psychology, sociology, and economics. Anthropology is also a small, but growing influence. Market research underpins these activities. Through advertising, it is also related to many of the creative arts. The marketing literature is also infamous for re-inventing itself and its vocabulary according to the times and the culture.

So as you can see marketing is a very complex subject that is linked with advertising and branding. It is ever evolving because human wants and needs are ever changing. Technology is the main reason we change what we buy, but there are other reasons, too. Fads and trends also dictate what we buy. It is the task for marketing experts to discover what these trends will be. One of the primary sources for discovering this is market testing.

Online market testing is done all the time, typically for one product at a time. Checking the search engine tools we can discover what people are searching for online. The frequency that a keyword or key phrase is used gives us an indication of just exactly what people were searching for during the previous month and the same is true of trends.

In the early 1960s Professor E. Jerome McCarthy of the Harvard Business School established the four Ps to be:

1. Product
2. Price
3. Placement and
4. Promotion

Product is the process of marketing that establishes the wants and needs of consumers or to be more precise the benefits that the product will produce for the end user.
Price is simply determining the cost of an item done usually through comparison-shopping like-products.

Placement is only concerned with the distribution of the product or how it will be delivered to the consumer.
Promotion includes advertising, public awareness, and branding and speaks of the various ways get the word out about the product or company.

So although advertising is a part of marketing, marketing is also a part of advertising, and mixed up in there is branding as well. To market a product you need to advertise it, but the advertisement needs to include some aspects of marketing to be effective. Branding on the other hand is how a company or product is recognized. It also utilizes marketing, but is used in advertising. Branding is simply establishing something unique or exceptional about a product or company.

Branding recognition is accomplished many times by a logo such as the McDonald’s arches or the Nike swoosh. You know when you see them what to expect. In the case of McDonald’s, you think of one of their sandwiches or meals. This instant recognition is what you want, but in some cases it has been taken to far and refers to any product of that kind. To sight an example Kleenex has lost their branding because many people refer to all facial tissues as Kleenex.

Marketing and advertising are the means by which we get branding to work for us, but that is not their only function and certainly not their main function. Their main function is to promote a product or service to potential customers. How this is done is where the problems begins. First off you need to grab the potential customer’s attention. This is done in a variety of ways. Using artwork or having a catchy headline are two ways to accomplish this.

Once you have grabbed their attention, you need to keep it by telling them how they will benefit by using your product or service. This is best done by helping them to envision themselves benefiting from whatever it is you’re selling. One way is to tell a story, another way is to give examples and yet another way is to list the benefits descriptively.

I have been studying marketing, advertising and branding for more than 20 years and I’m still learning. For you to learn more you will need to study more and test the ads and other marketing pieces you come up with to see how well they work. The best advice I can give you is to keep trying, because you will never have 100% success. Just when you think you have it down you will come up with a marketing piece that bombs.

Perhaps there is a hobby you enjoy or there is something you have picked up along the way explore that as a means of something you may do that you would enjoy more than what you are doing now.

The Internet is one way that you can begin a business of your own very inexpensively. If you know anything about anything you can sell that information to other that wish to know it. Begin by writing down what you know and you will be surprised at the knowledge you have amassed.

Once you have this list look over the Internet and I bet you will find someone out there already selling it. If there is a lot of somebody’s selling it then you may have just stumbled onto you niche. Don’t be scared off if you see that you would have a lot of competition, just make your better, cheaper and/or easier to find.

Imagine not having to commute to work through rush hour traffic. Having time off whenever you want without having to okay it with your boss. Then there is the potential for making more money than you have ever deemed possible.

Of course you have to have a plan. There is much to learn before going into business for yourself online. Luckily for you there is loads of free information to be found on the Internet.

The first thing you will need to learn is how to make a website. This is a task you can learn with an HTML editor I suggest you download a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) HTML editor.

Next you will need to have a name for your website and some artwork that will make it attractive. To do this will probably not make you any money, but it will make your site more attractive to your visitors.

Content is going to be very important on your site and you will need to have something professionally written to get the most visitors you can to convert into customers. You should also have free content available on your site. This and the product you are offering need to be of value. The free information you give is there to build trust, make you appear to be an expert and to give them a reason to come back.

The best way to get them to come back is to offer something like a newsletter on a regular basis that they can sign up to get. Write them an immediate personal email (automated of course) so they will know that they are going to receive emails from you from time to time. In this way those customers that did not buy from you in the first may buy from you later.

Study the keywords that people will use to find you and try to get as high a ranking as you can, using them. It is best to have links from other sites to yours, but make sure they are related sites or else it will count against you. Have an about page, a privacy statement page and a contact page on your site as well to score high on the search engines.

You will undoubtedly get discouraged from time to time, but remember the reason for all the hard work and sacrifice. There is a pot of gold waiting for you if you persevere. Keep studying and learning at whatever pace you can stand. It is true that 96% of all the businesses started on the Internet will fail, but those that fail are the ones that failed to plan and did not learn what they needed to make theirs a success.

I would wish you the best of luck in your endeavor, but it is not luck that will see you through. I know if you just keep to your task and continue to learn all that you can about the business you begin you will eventually become successful. And when it is all said and done you too will be saying, “Let the good times roll”.