I recently designed a site for Selling gold, silver and platinum on the web. The majority of the business is generated from phone calls coming in. Selling precious metals is not as sexy as selling iPods or Cialis, but I think the right copy can go far, once I begin PPC, SEO and Blogging. I need to get some good sales copy for my site gold101.com. Specifically for the sections called gold101, silver 101, platinum and palladium 101 on the left hand side of the site. I feel like I have the world's best site full of random industry data, but very few calls to action that are compelling. Anyone that could help or offer advice as to how to get my site more sales ready, please help. Thanks. By the way I am currently developing my Yahoo store and Blog, so know I am getting that ready as we speak.
Hi larrylarr, I looked at the Silver 101 section of your site, just to get an idea of what you had to offer. I found the article to be fascinating, but i wonder how many potential clients will feel the same way. Perhaps moving the conclusion closer to the top, or even making "The History of Silver", "Why Choose Silver?", and "Invest Wisely With Silver" as separate articles - each with a call to action at the end would make sense here. Just my two cents, Michael Oksa
Have you defined your target audience? Who are they? You need to really, really figure out who they are in order to get them to follow through with a call to action. Don't just say "it's people who want to buy precious metal." You can market your site like a madman on crack but if you are hauling them to a generic site with no target market focus, it won't convert. So you need to think of it as a sales and marketing tool. You need to speak to this audience so therefore you need a profile of who they are. What you are offering is a little vague. It needs to be more obvious. You don't have much time, 8 seconds max. "Building wealth you can touch with someone you trust" is a nice tag line but it looks like you have too many trademarked tag lines in the Flash banner. And they are in keyword jail in a flash file, too. That is SEO suicide so key phrases need to be in the subheads and text. You do have a site design for credibility which is a key component here. But it is missing the target market focus it needs to have in order to start inspiring conversions. I see you have google analytics so that's good you can oversee the surfing patterns and bounce rates.
It all depends on your perspective. Many people are just SEO crazy nowadays and sometimes coin wrongly worded phrases just to increase the SEO value of the article. I suggest you catch their attention with a catchy phrase. The one recommended by webgal was pretty good.
I beg to differ. Selling gold and precious metals can be far sexier than those products. It has amazing potential.
Hi Larry, Jay Abraham has done some wonderful sales copy over the years for precious metals and coins. I have a huge ebook full of his sales letters if you go to my website and drop me a line. The main key to your site is to have more enticing headlines and to sell one product at a time. Most of the copy on your site is a waste of time. If you want people to spend money with you on precious metals you need to give them specific information on why they should do it. What is the value of precious metals as an investment. Tell real stories of people who've done well in precious metals and people who've lost their shirts in other investments. And give them a little education on HOW to invest in precious metals perhaps leading to a free consultation with one of your experts to get some personalized advice on how to make the most out of this vital part of their investment portfolio. Kindest regards, Andrew Cavanagh
That is a great idea, I will install that with my new copy. My concern is trying to balance important information from an industry perspective versus writing copy that can be digested by the "average person newbie" that knows very little about precious metals. I think it would be good to find how "foreigners" learn about the NFL through the internet as an example.
Webgal, Thanks for the insights. As I have some experience with internet marketing I agree with your insights. The main issue I am coming against is the director of marketing asked for a website, like most businesses do and expects the magic of the web to reel in the customers like a fish net in the ocean. Problem is I have no idea who the target customer is so I have to do all of this ground work myself. I have a began a database of clients that request free info, so I intend to write them. My question, is it better to define my target customer and pursue them or should I allow the visitors that land on my site dictate who is my target customer and adjust my sales pitch to who is viewing? Any insight would be appreciated.
Thank you Andrew, I appreciate the fact that you dont mix words. You say the content is a complete waste. Hard to swallow but I agree. I am at a point where I think the site could do well with a less is more approach. As I am working with the marketing director I was hoping to try this approach and I think incorporating your ideas would produce a lot more than I am currently getting. Using a lead generation model in regards to compensation, setting up a couple of other websites that are much more lean with killer copy. Upon creating results that are far and away better than current results, redo the current site so that it is much more informative and call to action clear.
I think you need to do some initial investigation as to who the target market is. Look at investment community forums, investment sites etc. What group would be especially interested in a more touchable investment? The stock market is very ethereal to some. Are they over 40? Are they the investors coming into the market right now when it looks bleak? I know how it is when a marketing director is involved and is less savvy than you'd think a marketing director should be. They should be the ones defining a target market. If you were to give them a document that asks specific target questions, do you think they'd be able to define the market better? I did this recently. I sort of made a brief of questions and low and behold they did know. They just didn't know they knew and I got what I needed. This would be the cheapest way. And if they've been working in this type of investment, I don't know why they would not know. If you think it would help, I could send you the hand-holding target market document I made for this client that actually worked in terms of getting the info I needed. You could adapt it for your purposes. (In fact, I should post a template of one on my blog.) You might run some pay per click ads to see which ones BRING in a specific target. You can write several in several categories. They might not convert well once they get there but you can at least see which ones are clicking. As to whether they are the market that will convert, that's hard to say. A brief site survey, the kind with the question right there, you click on the radio button and they see how others have answered. The code for this is http://www.proxy2.de/scripts.php Go to > advanced poll (http://www.proxy2.de/poll/index.php) I'm not sure how this would work since I think you are working with a template. But if you have fantastico, installation is easy. I would start with the tag line and identify the market that will respond to it. I would focus everything on the site around this. At the very least you could remove that .jpg "Welcome to the Superior Gold Group" and replace it with this tag line because it SAYS something. "Building wealth you can touch with someone you trust"
One other secret...talk to your past clients. Find out what persuaded them to do business with you. What key pieces of information did they need to make a buying decision? What did they like about your sales process? What did they dislike about your sales process? If you want to sell products from your website it needs to mimic an effective live sales process. And in many cases you should use the website as just part of the process completing your sales with real live consultants. Kindest regards, Andrew Cavanagh