Independent professionals often struggle to develop landing pages that converts browsers to buyers. Their biggest mistake: They want to display their creative talents here.

Professional copywriters are more concerned with results than creativity. They follow formulas that have been tested over and over again. They use very specific copywriting and design techniques. And they are completely open about their purpose: getting visitors to take one specific action before leaving the page.

A landing page (also known as a “sales page” or “squeeze page” has one purpose: to sell a product or service. By comparison, if you have a traditional website, your home page is designed to motivate readers to click away to other pages. The home page introduces you to your readers, but you present your services after they get to know you.

So in a traditional site, a service professional will want visitors to go to the “about” page and the “services” pages. Your landing page works the opposite way. You “squeeze” visitors. They have 2 choices. They can buy your product or leave completely.

Begin by deciding exactly what ONE action your visitors should take. Do you want them to sign up for your ezine? Buy a product? Call for a free sample consultation? Develop the page to motivate readers to take that one action.

And while you’re at it, help them resist temptation to click away to another page. Remove everything that doesn’t help sell your product or service. No menus, links off the page quotes from famous people or beautiful photos of your favorite vacation spot. Keep the reader’s attention focused entirely on on your copy, supporting graphics and your offer.

Create an invisible design, i.e., a design that readers won’t notice because they’re so busy reading the message. Choose black type on a white background. Use images to direct readers to follow the message you create in your text: arrows, underlines, big exclamation points. Handwritten marginal notes will be effective (if you don’t over-use them).

Make the copy — the words that sell your product or service — easy to read. Use bullets, lots of white space, colors and headlines. On the web, most readers will scan your copy. Some readers will just skim through the bold and highlighted copy, all the way to the end. So apply bold type to the phrases you want your readers to notice. Then read through the copy to see if your bold text makes sense without reading anything else.

And believe it or not, good copywriting is invisible. That means readers get the message. They don’t stop to think, “Wow…what a clever headline!” or, “Brilliant metaphor!” They don’t notice the copy at all.

What is copywriting? The preparation of text; (especially advertising material), for the purpose of publication. There are a multitude of topics to consider when writing text that is to be copy written. You should also take into consideration, certain marketing aspects of the article you are writing. Using specific guidelines for establishing your purpose of the writing is important. What you are preparing also has to have marketability behind it. A copy writer also needs to be a salesperson. There are several copywriting tips that can also be used as a guideline for developing your writing skills. The following copywriting tips may help in establishing these skills.

“Do Not limit yourself” – One of the first copywriting tips is; Use as much text as necessary to get your point across. The more descriptive you can be, the less room you leave for questions. Be as creative as humanly possible.

“Personalize” – The second, on the copywriting tips list, is important in many ways. When thinking in terms of marketing, remember to write as if your speaking to the reader one on one. Your readers will be more comfortable thinking that they are actually sitting there listening, while you tell them a story. Creating a sense of presence provides an unspoken confidence to your reader.

“Make your writing believable” – The third of the copywriting tips, involves making your writing believable. Lots of specifics and references will aide in accomplishing this. Although this creates an advanced level of difficulty, ultimately, it commands a resounding trust. Use these copywriting tips to your advantage.

“Become an Expert” – When taking on an assignment, always do your research. The fourth of the copywriting tips, involves “Due Diligence” in research. The more you know about your topic, the easier it will be to portray a convincing argument for your reader to sustain trust in your writing content. It also provides a means of creating content that is worthy of your readers time.

“Individualize your content” – The fifth, and most certainly, not the least of the copywriting tips, carries a responsibility to you as a copy writer to make your presentation individualized. Create your content as though you were presenting it to one person. It is far more convincing to the reader if you use a format that is based on communicating with one individual.

If you can master these 5 copywriting tips, your chances of making a more responsive audience of your readers, and creating more compelling sales tools, will become clear. Copywriting tips are more or less, some of your most reliable sources for creating attention grabbing, precise information.

Your top-of-page copy is what visitors — and search engines — read first. So these few pixels will influence your conversion rates, traffic, search engine visits and ultimately sales success.

But so many websites have a meaningless graphic on the top of their pages. Sometimes we see a row of color or pattern without a word. Sometimes we see a picture of a sunset or a beautiful landscape. Sometimes we see a logo that’s doesn’t give us a clue about the business.

It’s like taking a piece of waterfront property and building a windowless shack. You’ve actually decreased your real estate values.

What goes up there? Ideally, use your most powerful headline.

For example, you might offer a promise. “Give me 3 weeks and you will feel more energized than you’ve been since you were a teenager.”

Some markets respond to a stronger pitch. “Are you losing $500 a year because you chose the wrong insurance company?”

For many markets, the news format works best. “New dog training technique ends jumping and pulling in 5 days — and your dog thinks it’s a game!”

These examples aren’t great (although I rather like the last one). But they’re better than a meaningless image or a beautiful sunset.

Sometimes you need images or before-and-after pictures to illustrate your services. A real estate agent sells houses so why not show photos of houses? A weight loss expert shows a person morphing from fat to thin – why not?

These images will help you promote your services but I wouldn’t put them right on top. Give readers a context first. When visitors land on your page, they need to know what you do. A photo of nice houses might mean you are a real estate agent, home stager, house painter, residential mortgage broker, or some category of service I’ve never heard of.

Use meaningful images that communicate messages immediately. Your logo or company name can go in the upper left corner — if it communicates your message. A business name like “Jane Smith Associates” won’t be helpful. A logo showing a collection of arrows pointing in multiple directions could be anything from a consulting firm promising a new vision to an archery store.

Include before-and-after photos in the text. But don’t use graphics that overpower the copy. Make sure your readers get the message you want to send them as they view the sequence.

In reality, every professional writer learns to distrust what we love most about our ideas and our first few drafts. We’ve all done it. As a copywriter, I often develop a metaphor or come up with a clever phrase. “Wow!” I tell myself. “You’ve done it this time.”

But as I write, I realize the metaphor really doesn’t work. I’m twisting everything around and losing sight of the real message my readers need to hear. And I remember the old adage: If you feel reluctant to toss it out, you probably should.

Sigh. Out it goes. Two minutes later I’ve forgotten the whole thing and my copy is much more effective.

The truth is, readers don’t care what we’re passionate about. They buy based on emotion. They buy faster when they’re responding to the emotion of fear.

When Tim’s biography page begins, “Tim is passionate about…” readers give him credit for enthusiasm, but they want to get to the nitty-gritty: “How does his passion translate into giving me what I want? Why is he the best person to help me solve my problem?”

Readers also turn away when you ask them to read your mind. One client I’ll call “Jeanne” created a program I’ll call “Maximize Your Motivation.” Her website domain name and headlines were all about motivation.

But Jeanne’s programs and coaching were not about motivation. She really focused on organization and time management. The benefits she offered were not consistent with the promise of motivation.

“But I am the Motivation Coach,” Jeanne insisted. “I use the word in a special way. I will teach my clients how to think about motivation the way I do.”

But your website visitors don’t have time to learn special definitions and special words. They bring their own meanings and their own contexts to a page.

To take another example, the phrase “safe relationship” can be interpreted half a dozen ways. So I wouldn’t use that term. I would use words that readers would grab immediately.

Finally, people buy what they want, not what they need (or what we marketers think they need). As a fitness expert, you might realize that children need programs to develop healthy eating and exercise routines, beginning in first grade.

But if your audience consists of time-starved executives, they may be asking you for ways to lose weight and gain energy when they have little control over their schedule.

When readers ask for something, you are lucky: you have what marketers like to call “low-hanging fruit.” It’s ripe, juicy and easy to pick. Why avoid temptation?

Originally, autoresponders were used for quickly responding to emails – automatically responding to incoming emails as soon as they are received.

However, over time, people came up with many other creative ways to use autoresponders. They can be used to send information about your services or products, or answering repeated questions asked across numbers of emails (FAQs).

Maybe you want to offer your site visitors a special bonus of some kind, such as advice, or relevant articles. All of this can be handled by an autoresponder. Additionally, you can advertise your business and then build stable relationships with your customers by using autoresponders with useful information.

Some autoresponders can do more than simply send out standardized messages. They can send out an unlimited number of follow-up messages, sent at predetermined intervals of time. For example, you can set your autoresponder to send out a new message every day for as long as you desire.

Website hosting companies often provide autoresponders as a free service. Free web mail accounts, like Yahoo Mail, also have a built in autoresponder, though their options are pretty limited.

If your current email account doesn’t offer an autoresponder, or if you need more options, there are numerous companies who offer this service for a monthly fee. Aweber.com is a good one to check out.

To personalize your autoresponder messages, you can attach a signature. Signatures in this case are much like business cards. You can include your name, company, all your contact info, and a brief message.

It’s a good idea to attach a signature to every email that is sent out. This works as a repeated reminder of your business identity, every time a customer sees it. The more they look at your signature, the more likely your company will spring to mind when your particular service or product is needed.

Another specialized use of autoresponders is to create courses that you can then offer your site visitors for free. You can choose a topic in which you are an expert, and that precisely targets your potential customers.

Once you have carefully chosen your subject, divide it into a number of different sub-topics. Then offer your site visitor a free 10 or 15 day course, each day offering a different sub-topic.

The first topic should always be a welcome message to your site visitor, and an explanation about what is to follow. Your explanation should be enticing, getting the point across that you are offering free, quality information that will be of great value to your target audience.

Make sure each topic is packed with essential and valuable information, and leaves the visitor lusting to know more. Otherwise, you may lose them in the very beginning.

Of course, you have to write up your course before you can offer it. Once you have done this, and gone over the material carefully, you’re ready to transfer your text to your autoresponder.

If you have an opt-in email list, set up an autoresponder with a welcome message, and any other information or bonus promised in your opt-in box.

Autoresponders are an effective and powerful marketing tool, allowing you to make contact with thousands of potential customers. Their use is limited only by your imagination.

So what does this mean for your website and your web audience? I think it’s simple, less is more. The survey of about 4,000 web users found that cluttered sites not only annoy their audience, but they also diminish the effectiveness of ads. They sited lower recall, click-throughs, and overall poor performance. If you’re trying to earn a monthly income on Google AdSense, then take note.

The more you crowd your site with tons of affiliate offers, ads, content, etc., the more difficult it becomes for browsers to know where to navigate. Worse yet is that browsers are leaving sites when they cannot quickly and easily find what they’re looking for. If you want to optimize ad revenue, take a new look at your website.

Is it cluttered? Does is have a simple navigational path? Can you easily find what you’re looking for? If your answer to any of these questions is “yes”, then perhaps you need to rethink your layout.

More specifically, respondents to this particular survey said they accept that advertising will appear on websites but have low tolerance for any more than two advertising units per page. Keep this in mind when trying to overload your ads per page. Keep your ad units to a maximum of two and no more.

Clutter can affect perception of advertisers too. The survey also found that ad clutter has a negative impact on consumers’ perceptions of an advertiser’s products and services. Although many of us know this is true intuitively, it’s now verified by research. In fact:

One out of two respondents has a less favorable opinion of an advertiser when their advertising appears on a web page they perceive as cluttered.

One-half of women claim clutter negatively impacts their opinion of an advertiser.

Additionally, the survey showed that women are more likely than men to abandon a site that appears cluttered (about one third vs. twenty percent).

Ad clutter has a negative impact on how browsers respond to your website and their behavior. Don’t chase your audience away, engage them. Keep your design and layout simple, easy to follow and intuitive. This will keep users on your site longer and allow them to find what they’re looking for.

Some simple guidelines to follow include having a visual priority on your web page. What do you want users to do first, second, and third. Are they currently following this process? If not, the reason could very well be clutter. Have some objective view your site and watch them navigate. Are their obstacles to achieving a particular outcome? Remove these obstacles and continually revise your site to make it simpler, easier, and more helpful. Your web site visitors will appreciate the change and so will you.