Author: Bryan Eisenberg and Jeffrey Eisenberg
Publisher: Wizard Academy Press
Year Published: 2002
Rating: 
Web content is the heart and soul of your website. If it isn’t interesting, engaging, and informative, your visitors have no reason to stick around. Believe me – they won’t.
All too often, people think they can put up generic content, use content from their offline brochures, or just throw something together once their website is completed. Unfortunately, this approach to website content management leads to less than stellar results.
If you’d like your website to do more – generate leads or convert browsers into buyers – Bryan Eisenberg’s book will lead you in the right direction. The book is broken into short vignettes, each not more than 4 pages, focused around a specific topic in your customers’ buying process.
To persuade your visitor to take action, you must be able to see the world from his or her buying point of view. Ideally, while you maintain your sales perspective, you conduct your sales process so that it is in tune with how customers decide to buy.
The first part focuses on writing persuasive online copywriting – what words to use, how to develop a perspective, stressing benefits, how different personality types make decisions, and appealing to emotions.
When humans make personal decisions, they put themselves in the picture and evaluate the emotional risks or benefits of making that decision. If they can’t grab onto the emotional image, they can’t make the decision. That’s why you ALWAYS have to appeal to emotions.
It’s the words on your website that convince people that you can provide a solution to their problems. Technology is only a tool. Words make the sale.
The second part gives an easy to understand overview of online conversion. No, it’s not enough to “drive traffic” to your website. If they don’t take the next step, chances are, they’ll forget about you and you’ve just wasted your money.
At the same time, many people are uncomfortable with the words “selling” and “persuasion.” These words are viewed very negatively – no one likes to be sold or feel manipulated – and they certainly don’t want people to feel that way before contacting them. Eisenberg clarifies:
In short, sales – a word we use for the sake of simplicity – is all about persuading people to take the action you want them to take. Persuasion is a transactional process resulting in a change in beliefs, attitudes, and/or behaviors; it is the mechanism by which you motivate conversion.
You’re not going to change anyone’s mind; in truth, people don’t change their minds. Instead, we reexamine old beliefs and decisions in light of new information that affects how we think or feel, and make decisions based on our reactions to that information. If we ever ‘changed’ our minds, we simply reconsidered what we knew to be true and how we felt about it.
Overall, Eisenberg does a great job of walking his readers through the buying and selling process from a copywriting standpoint in easy to swallow nuggets of information. This is a must read book for anyone looking to build a website or to generate more leads or sales from their existing website, and a great introduction to writing for the web.
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