Advertising Tips - Long Or Short Copy?

I get a lot of questions from people asking me if they should use long or short copy for their sales copy. Well, the answer is, it depends. There is no hard and fast rule for this. The article you're about to read is going to give you some guidelines to follow when writing your sales copy. Please keep in mind that these are not hard and fast rules, just guidelines. Hopefully, after you are done reading, you'll have an idea of how you want to approach this.

Let's talk about sales copy in general and then we can get to some specifics. This may sound like a smart answer, but in general you want your sales copy to be as long as it has to be in order to make the sale. A great copywriter once said, "Sales copy can't be too long, only too boring." This is so true. You can put your reader to sleep in two paragraphs if you don't write compelling copy. So focus more on the quality of your sales copy than how long or short it is.

Now, let's get to some specifics. In these cases, these rules do apply most of the time. If you're writing sales copy for an email ad that is going to direct the potential customer to a sales page, then you want that email ad copy to be as short as possible. It's up to the sales page to close the sale, not the email ad. The purpose of the email ad is simply to get the prospect emotionally pumped up to want to go to the sales page. A long ad is not necessary in order to accomplish this.

Now, let's get to the sales page itself. In this case, again, as I said, it's not the length of the copy but how interesting it is. However, many studies have been done on this and all of them show conclusively that longer sales copy, when written well, pulls better and converts better than shorter copy, especially if you are selling a high end product. Think about it. If you're looking to buy something and it's a couple of hundred dollars, you're going to want as much information about that product as you can get. A short sales page probably isn't going to give you all the info that you need. However, if you're buying a $7 report, most likely a short sales page is all that is needed.

So, when you go to create your sales copy, keep these guidelines in mind. Again, they are not hard and fast rules, but if you stay as close to these guidelines as possible, you'll find that your conversions will probably be a lot higher.