Have you ever received an email that started like this:
"I would like to apply for you're help I know my mail to you be suprising at all but it's not a mistake because I believe them seeking riches will find each other and I want to transfer the sum at $TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS immediately to a bank their in your name…"
The grammar is pretty bad and that makes it an obvious scam. Now what do your site visitors think when they read your sales page, or your information product? Have you proofread that PLR or MRR product before offering it for re-sale? It may be damaging your reputation or your sales letter could be costing you sales.
Even if the grammar errors on your sales material are not as bad as the example, a single serious error can cost you money.
I received an email recently with this subject from a well known marketer:
"Sell your products too there competitor's to make real money"
And, I asked myself what does that mean? It means nothing. Is the sender serious? Three major errors in the subject and they want me to buy their latest $47 product. They don't care enough to even proofread the email they are sending me so how much effort could they possibly have put into the product itself? Do you think I bought their product? I never even bothered to read the sales letter. If they put so little effort into the most important part of their sales campaign, the first point of contact, then I had no interest in anything else they had to say.
I purchased another product about making money using AdWords. The sales page sounded good so I bought their $47 eBook. Every paragraph had a grammatical error. I thought "this guy is a moron, I am never buying anything else from him." And I never did buy anything else from him. Any value the information may have had was tainted by the grammar errors that kept hitting me over the head. I still receive his emails trying to sell me his latest product but I simply don't care. I have already identified him as someone who has nothing intelligent to offer me so I will never give him another penny. It does not matter how good his offer is, how cheap his price is, I now question his understanding and knowledge. If he could not proofread his ebook before offering it for sale, then how reliable is the information in it? You see, this Internet marketer just lost a customer for life because he sent out an ebook, one I paid $47 for, filled with grammar errors. I don't trust him and nothing he says will change that.
People judge you by the grammar you use. If you sound like an idiot, people will assume you are an idiot.
Mistakes like that cost you money! One grammar mistake = $200 a day in lost profits. That is what one of my consulting clients found out the hard way. He had a site that had all the right information. It had a strong headline, all the benefits, testimonials, a call to action. He even had a good product, but no one was buying. He only had a trickle of sales coming in. He asked me to review his sales page and I immediately saw the problem. It had three major grammar errors in the first paragraph. I don't hold back when I give paid advice so I told him the truth. His page sucked! I would never buy from him and neither did anyone else when they saw those obvious errors. The ugly grammar errors on his page made him and his product look shady. No one trusted him and no one would buy from him. When he fixed those three big errors, and a few minor ones, his sales shot up.
There are some popular teleseminars going around from Dan Kennedy and Ron LeGrand. You may have heard these teleseminars. Dan and Ron are the old school leaders in marketing and mail order marketing. The methods they developed and promoted are used by most major marketers today. However there is one point in their advice that is wrong, DEAD WRONG! They repeatedly tell you not to worry about grammar. In more than one seminar, Ron LeGrand actually suggests using bad grammar because he thought it might help sales.
That was completely wrong.
Bad grammar will kill your sales. If you are selling a product to uneducated people, they may not know that you is using most bad grammar. But you cannot depend on those customers being your only audience. If you are selling a product to educated people, business professionals, anyone with enough sense to use the Internet, then you had better make sure you do not inadvertently make yourself look like a crook.
Today we receive emails daily from crooks in Nigeria and Romania promising to transfer millions of dollars to us, or saying we won some fictional lottery. These messages are filled with obvious grammar errors. Internet users associate bad grammar with scams and they do not trust sites that have bad grammar.
Using bad grammar in an ebay auction can cut your final bid price by 50% or it may not sell at all(Source: Don't Bid On It Until I Tell You How eBay Really Works, book published 2007).
Now we know that sales pages and products must have proper grammar. This is not to say they must have perfect grammar. You do not want your sales page to sound like a college English literature report. You still want it to be conversational and you want your reader to relate to what you are saying. You should never talk above your audience and at the same time you do not want to talk below them. You also do not want to alienate them. Taking some liberties is perfectly acceptable if you know that is what you are doing. Making mistakes is not acceptable.
Mixing up their/there/they're is unforgivable. If you do not know the difference between its and it's then you have a problem because I know the difference and more than half of your site visitors do too. Editing and re-editing often results in extra words or nonsense sentences like "The a great of marketing." You may not notice this editing error but, it will jump out at everyone who reads your page the first time. Saying "People that" instead of the correct "People who" may go unnoticed by most readers, but not all. It is better to use correct grammar rather than create such roadblocks to purchases. As your educated reader reads your page, they become more focused on counting grammar errors than in your product. By the end of the page they have tallied up your errors and every one is a strike against making a purchase.
There is an excellent book, only 45 pages long called the Elements of Style. If you took college English, then you should be familiar with it. This book has all of the basic grammar rules that you should follow.
It can be difficult to identify errors in your own writing, especially when you are proofreading a sales page for the 100th time at 2 A.M. Fortunately there are grammar correction software packages like RightWriter which you can use to automatically check your writing for errors. These tools make proofreading your sales letters quick and painless.
You should use such a tool before sending out any sales emails, and especially on your sales pages. Think of how many sales the above marketer lost when those who received his email deleted it without reading even the first line when they saw the major error in the subject.
You can find more information on the RightWriter Grammar Analysis Software and get a free copy of the Elements of Style book at
www.Right-Writer.com
By Michael Ford Author of Don't Bid On It Until I Tell You How eBay Really Works
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