9 Important Areas Of Focus
Here is a list of 9 elements of effective ad copy which are generally accepted by the industry to be of fundamental importance. I thought I’d share these elements with you with a bit of perspective on how they may apply to our work. Some of these are things I’ve talked about before, and some others may require further discussion, but here is the list:
We only have so much room to work with, so we have to make it count
1. Be Brief
For us this is more a matter of the room we have to work with, and we have a lot more room than an ad would, but we could still say that this does pertain to our introductory messages, the ones that people see first, like the first screen on our home pages in particular.
I would change this to don’t be too long winded in these situations, and what we’re looking for here is hard hitting phrases and content, and impact is generally greatest with brevity.
2. Be Precise
This is a very good one and a very important one for us. The more accurately we can match our words with our intended message, the better. If we want to tell them that they will improve their poker results with our advice, we don’t want them to have to do too much reasoning to arrive at this conclusion, we must instead tell them directly.
The reasoning we do provide must be used to support our statements, but we have to make our statements to them as precisely as we can in order for this all to work properly.
3. Aim To Sell
I would say that among these 7 principles this is by far the most important one for us, and the one that gets botched up the most as well. Often we can even forget that this is what we are trying to do here, the goal of our sites, the single reason they exist.
The better we sell, the more successful we will be. The first step in selling is to aim to sell though. This one is about the proper mindset, and it is a mindset that is absolutely required.
4. Be Sincere
I’ve spoken about the benefits and the need of creating trust in our affiliate sites, so this one is obviously a very important one to us and one that I’ve already spoken about at length, although it’s hard to say too much about this critical element.
I really like putting this one as being sincere, as sincerity is certainly a big part of creating trust and a focus that can certainly serve us very well if we do it right.
5. Be Concise
Like being brief, this applies more to our hooks than our main content, where this is less important. However it’s a good idea to look to be pretty concise as well throughout your site.
Sometimes less is more and more is less. This is certainly true with ad copy, and some extremely effective ad copy contains very few words indeed.
Now our sites will contain a great deal of words on the other hand, by necessity, although we don’t necessarily want them to run on too long either, or we will risk losing the interest of our readers.
6. Be Clear
While some of these will apply to certain parts of our sites more than others, being as clear as possible is something we need to focus on throughout the entire site.
The clearer our messages are, the more effective they will be. It’s as simple and as clear as that.
7. Be Apt
This might not seem to be one that really matters much to us, as we know that people come to us wanting to read about poker, so our topics should be seen as apt indeed.
What we have to say though needs to be as apt as possible insofar as it can be seen to align with the needs and wants of the readers. We will therefore need to propose this and flesh this out, as in we know you want to get better results at poker so here’s how we’re going to help you do that.
8. Be Interesting
Needless to say, if we don’t capture their interest well enough they will be gone in a flash. The more interesting we can make our sites the more likely people will read our content.
So making both our sites and our content more interesting is a worthy pursuit, so long as we don’t overdo it with a bunch of side content that may erode the impact of our main message.
9. Be Personal
I’ve written quite a bit already about how important I feel that this is to poker affiliate websites. In general we fail here miserably. Even a modest amount of personalization can go a long way.
I don’t have that much of an idea why you see virtually no personalization in our business but when you do add some of this it can really make your sites stand out a lot as well as make them more effective. Not when this is done, when you do it, and not making sites effective in general, making your site more effective.
I’m sure you don’t really care that much about sites in general but I know that you do care about yours. Can you see how the personalization here works better?