Content Marketing Strategies for Smart Professionals

Advertorials: Step 3 Explain the Problem

By Patsi Krakoff in Email Marketing Tips, On Writing Better, Online Marketing, Writing Great Copy

I just wrote about steps 1 and 2 to crafting an advertorial that persuades readers to buy or register for your product or service over at Biz Tips Blog.

Just to review, those steps are:

1. Grab attention with a list of 3 or 5 horrible mistakes people make
2. Positioning: Why should anyone read or listen to you?
3. Explain the problem

Once you’ve got their attention, promised to deliver information that’s relevant, and shown that you know what their issues are, you are ready to explain the problem.

This means revealing the 3 or 5 items promised in your attention-grabbing title. In this sample case, it’s the 3 Worst Online Marketing Mistakes.

Here they are, as we propose to use them in our sample Blog Squad advertorial:

Step 3. Explain the problem –

The 3 Worst Online Marketing Mistakes

1. People aren’t finding you easily online – your website or blog is not updated frequently enough, there’s not enough content with keywords, or you may have poor website design that makes search engine indexing and capturing visitors difficult if not impossible.

2. There’s no way for people to try out your services or products for free before buying; no information products available; no way for you to capture email addresses for follow-up marketing. Even when you do have a system in place, you aren’t following up with leads like you should.

3. Your emails, web pages, blog posts, ezine and other content lack benefits-driven reasons why visitors or email recipients should read, care, and act on your messages. You’re not persuading anybody to do anything. You wish you could hire an expensive copywriter, but you’re the one in charge of your marketing and web writing.

Do these problems ring a bell for you?

I don’t mean to insult you either – you’ve probably mastered at least some of what’s required for successful Internet marketing. Maybe you fall down on just one of these items, or maybe it’s something else altogether.

What we’ve discovered in our years of work consulting with some pretty successful business people is that there is always something that can be improved when it comes to Internet marketing.

Where’s your Achilles’ heel?