No! No! No!

I see this mistake a lot among prospects new to online marketing. (The headline came from a buyer looking for ‘SEO Sales copy’ on one of the freelancing sites.)

Many are confused on the fundamental difference between content pages and sales pages.

Then they read about the need to SEO this and SEM that…

… and end up jumbling together techniques that should mostly be kept separate.

“ON-PAGE SEO DOES NOT A CONVERTING SALES MESSAGE MAKE”

It can be a pleasant day dream to imagine sales pages cleverly constructed with keywords that drive them to the top of Google…

…where searchers hungry for solutions to their problems, have credit cards in hand as they squeal with delight at having found your masterpieces.

Wake up! Wake up!

The reality is:

• On-Page SEO does NOT compute on a direct response sales page.
• Off-page SEO (linking with relevant use of anchor text) works.
• Content pages teach/educate/entertain. Sales pages sell.

The solution is simple:

• Write some content pages from an SEO-perspective.
• Link these content pages to your sales (or squeeze) page.
• Forget about SEO for the sales page - focus on the copy!

SAME THING FOR EMAIL COPY?

You don’t need SEO when it comes to email copywriting (or autoresponder messages). The search engines aren’t ranking your emails.

And, in most cases, drop the idea that an email should be selling or converting. (This is another mistake I see business owners making - they want an email or two that will “make the sale.”)

The days are long gone when people viewed emails with doe-eyed delight.

Relentless spam has killed that particular e-Bambi

Instead, see your email marketing as a way to connect and communicate with your prospects and customers on a regular basis.

And where EVERY email is designed to ‘get the click’.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you take readers to a sales page EVERY time - especially if you have an email newsletter as part of your marketing efforts.

(But for some email marketing campaigns that’s exactly the purpose - get the prospect interested enough to click through to the sales page.)

However you do want to ‘train’ them to take some sort of action every time.

Why?

Because it’s in their best interests!

The information or product or service you have to share has been carefully chosen to help them. They’d be crazy not to click on your link.

That’s the type of ‘training’ I’m referring to.

(The alternative’s a response like - “Yawn, Y-a-w-n. Another useless email from markie sparkie.”

Result? They archive, delete or worse, unsubscribe from your list.)

Of course, you gotta deliver… trick people to click thru to crap-filled garbage and you’ll lose them forever.

DO THIS NOW!

Go look over your email messages and sales pages.

Have they been electronically lobotomized using SEM twaddle and clogged up with keyword cholesterol? Fix that and see your response rates rocket!

- Mark McClure

Author: Mark McClure - A freelance b2b case study and white paper writer to the computer networking industry. Based in Tokyo, Japan. Mark McClure Google + Profile About Mark