Re: Looking for some feedback on this offer

Hi Mel,

> Serious question: Would you consider ditching the "long sales
> letter" format?

Thanks for your response. I didn't try to make it overly wordy, but I agree, some people won't read it to the end.

> Yes, I know it's recommended everywhere... but that's really for folks who
> are trained to thinking that "long sales letter format = Great
> Info." If you're dealing with your friends and neighbors, they may
> hit that logjam of text and go, "Oh I don't want to waste my
> time."

True enough. I guess this might be worth testing. Well... everything is worth testing.

> One of the things that I've learned while doing my research for my current
> degree (Masters' of Anthropology in Internet Studies) is that people
> "expect" a certain look out of sites. Just as romance books have
> to have a hunky guy on the cover (half-dressed) and scifi novels have to
> have spaceships or aliens on them, people expect different looks from
> different types of sites.

Just about my whole site uses the same template. I understand that not everyone has the same tastes. Several people have told me they like the look of mine, and several people have told me they didn't. In all reality, I could probably re-design the site 100 times and still have people who didn't like the look of it.

> One of the basic rules in marketing is "look at what your competition
> is doing." Now, you've got a site that is competitive with all the
> Packaged Business In A Box sites... but it doesn't look like a web
> designer's site.

Thanks for sharing those links. From the quick look I saw, I noted they all used different colors and designs. Sorry, I guessed I missed your point on this one.

> Look at what your competition is doing:

> There's a certain consistant style (even among the less successful ones)
> and certain preferred colors (***note*** an original piece of research
> I've done suggests that these colors are VERY strongly tied to cultural
> and regional/country location!!) There's a preferred layout and for the
> best of them, good use of the "hot spots" (the areas of an image
> we tend to read first.)

No doubt you could be shooting over my head here. Dark shades of blue, brown tan, navy are all professional colors, and my site is made up of dark blues... dark blues have always been a favorite of mine.

> So ask yourself what you're selling: packages for someone like the little
> restaurant a mile away, packages for a little local comics shop, or for
> people used to the long letter format and who want to find a Package Of
> Stuff.

This particular offer I asked you to evaluate was a 2 hour consultation bundled with my "Build your first website" eBook. It doesn't have anything to do with trying to sell my development service.

It's for the person who would like to earn some extra cash with their own products on their own website to help supplement their income. Perhaps I used too many of the wrong words? I assume you didn't get this from what I had written? Perhaps I need to write it over.

> It'll work if you're only targeting the Long Letter people.

Thanks -- but like you say... for those who it might be too long for, after I run the ad for a few days to see what kind of results I get, I can always re-do it to make it shorter.

> If you're passing out flyers and advertising in newspapers that you're a
> web designer, the long letter format is just going to be a waste of your
> advertising dollars.

If I was advertising my design services I would probably just point them to my homepage at: http://homebusiness-websites.com Perhaps that is the shorter version of what you expected this local offer to look like?

Thanks for your feedback Mel. I appreciate it.