This post was written by the Web Marketing Ninja—author of The Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing, and a professional online marketer who's sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Curious? So are we!
I tweeted a couple of days ago how wonderfully evolutionary sales page copy can be as it passes between the different people who are working on it. At the time, I likened it to Chinese whispers with a happy ending.
It's a tweet that culminated from the copywriting process for Darren's brand new book on DPS, Click! How to take Gorgeous Photos of your Kids. The book's sales page presented some interesting challenges for me and reminded me of some important lessons that I thought would be good to share with you all.
The process
This is how the sales page for Click! came into being.
1. Thinking before writing
All of Darren's sales page start with a semi-workshop, usually with Darren, Jasmin, and myself. We're not at this stage thinking about the specific words we'll use—we're thinking about the core message we're hoping to convey and how we'll present it. We weigh up the core benefits of the product and pick which one we're going to lead with. It normally starts with a bit of a brain dump and ends with us exploring more specific personas—the ones for which we created the product in the first place.
With Click!, we started with a simple audience definition: "those who wanted to take photos of kids," but soon realized that it needed to run a little deeper than that. We came up with four target personas: moms, dads, grandparents, and pro photographers. Whilst the book is perfect for all of them, the key benefits of buying the book were distinctly different for each group. We discussed options to create a page that conveyed a message to all, but settled for focusing on moms. We felt they were more likely to respond emotionally to the sales page.
2. Engaging the...
