Behold…
The widely-wondered, hotly-debated question:
“How long should my copy be?”
…because as you may have noticed, some sales pages are 50+ pages long. And sell crazy amounts of stuff. But then some sales pages are half a page long… and ALSO sell crazy amounts of stuff. So how on earth are you supposed to judge whether your copy should be .5 pages or 50 pages long?
I’m going to give you two answers. The first is the answer that all the pros give:
The usual “Pro” answer: Your copy should be just long to enough to say everything you need to say in order to make the sale.
But see…
While this answer makes sense (and is 100% true)…
I’ve always been a bit unsatisfied with it. Even though it’s what all the pros say.
Why?
Because it’s impractical. For the beginner, whose ‘selling sensibilities’ aren’t honed enough to know how much they have to say… in order to make the sale. It doesn’t help that person much at all.
So in an attempt to be more helpful to the beginner…
I offer another answer to the question:
Sam’s answer: the more expensive your product, the longer your copy should be.
If you’re “selling” a free download… or a $1 ‘mini-product’… you can sell that in a page. Or half a page. Or less. If you’re selling $100-$400 product… that’s going to take a lot of copy. To make the sale. If you’re selling a high-ticket $2,000+ product… that’s going to take a *lot* of copy. Lots of emails, and a long sales page. And if you’re trying to sell a $5,000+ product… that’ll probably take more than just copy. That’ll probably take a phone call, or a live event.
Okay.
That being said.
There are some important qualifications I have to make… before you take this principle and run with it.
Qualification 1: You have to take into account how inclined your reader already is to buying your product.
For example: I recently wrote an email for a client who was selling a $2,500 product. That’s an expensive product! And yet the email I wrote was only 1.5 pages long. So what’s up with that?
Here’s what’s up with that: the people who were reading my email had already attended a 1.5 hour webinar selling them on the product. And presumably, this webinar made many of those attendees *very* inclined to buy the product. So here they were, sitting on the fence. Already mostly convinced to buy the product… but not quite there yet. And knowing this, I knew they only needed a little push. And so that’s all I did in the email. I gave them a little push. Because it would’ve been unnecessary… and even counterproductive… if I had tried to ‘resell’ them and ‘retell’ them everything they’d already heard on the webinar.
Make sense?
Great.
There’s another really important qualification… that you have to consider, before you take my “expensive product –> longer copy” principle and run with it.
You can read about it my next post.
