"Sales Letter"... that's your web site's sales page. The page with the carefully written copy designed to convince a visitor that they will benefit from buying what you are selling.

I began direct marketing before the internet and learned the basics of mail order marketing. I am glad to say that many webmaster have adopted the teachings of the old time, direct mail copy writers. They learned the hard way what would sell and what would not.

Mail order means spending thousands of dollars on every mailing. If that mailing doesn't produce sales there is hell to pay. Copywriters learn fast or they were out of work.

No, much of the writing on the internet is good. The problem is most have not learned about basic layout.

Notice how often you see a good sales message delivered in a very small, gray font. It's hard to read even when your nose is almost touching your computer screen.

Many people don't have perfect vision... plus our population is growing older and seeing well can be a challenge for seniors. Why obscure your sales message?

People will not work to understand what you are saying. It's hard enough to capture a visitor's eyeballs with a great headline... don't lose them because they have to strain to read the copy. One click and they're gone!

Use a font like Arial... large and black, so it jumps off the page.

Your page is too wide! Your lines too long!

If your sales letter fills the most screen your sentences will be way to long to read comfortably.

The eye likes to scan a few words and then move down to another line. That's what it has been trained to do with newspapers. Newspapers have their text in easy to scan columns.

Even hard cover books have very readable pages... and that's about as long as you would want a sentence to be.

Please, no more small fonts and long, long sentences.

Finally, white only for your background... black type on a white background.

And, please, never...ever put white type on a black background. If you run a split test you will learn it just does not sell!

Short sentences and paragraphs always. Seldom should a paragraph be longer than two or three sentences.

Paragraphs must be indented. Testing mail order letters proved that indenting helped to draw the eye from the end of one paragraph to the first line of the next

and increased sales.

All words, including headlines, in upper and lower case. Why, because that is what the eye is accustomed to seeing. It's not nice to confuse eyeballs!

Everything concerning your sales letter must capture and hold your visitor's interest and attention or your brilliant writing will fail.

The details discussed here can increase your sales by 3% to 10% or more... so just stop screwing up your sales letter!