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I'm seeing a big return to L-O-N-G web site sales letters. Many are 3,000 to 6,000 words long (that's 10 to 20 pages on a word processor).

Site after site are featuring these long sales letters on their home pages. Most follow the same formula and some appear to be turned out by a fill-in-the-blank letter generation program.

Of course the big question is, do they work? In the days before the Internet, regular direct mail sales letters were often six pages or more. These longer letters tended to produce better results.

You have to figure that anyone who reads that much copy must be truly interested. And giving a truly interested prospect ALL the info they desire can't be a bad thing.

But do these long sales letters work on the Net? For most people, reading on a computer screen isn't as comfortable as reading a printed page. For those of us who learned to read before the Internet, reading a long newspaper article or a book is OK, but long letters on a computer screen leave us a little cold.

Most of us are in a big hurry and want to get through the information as quickly as possible.

I've tried different lengths of copy and the results are interesting. The longer the copy gets, the easier it is to sell many products and services. The increase in results rises until 900 to 1,000 words, then response starts to drop back.

Your results may vary depending on what you're selling and who you're selling it to. One site sells accessories for sports cars and trucks. Their customers like to see lots of photos of the products, but don't want to read more than a few lines of description.

The same goes for very inexpensive products or services that can be an impulse buy. Shorter copy can work far better than longer copy.

On the other hand, a $200 course or a $1,000 service may require a much longer web site sales letter. The longer you can get prospects to stay on your site and read the copy, the more committed they will become toward making a purchase.

The trend toward longer web sites sales letters started in the late 90s when several savvy Internet entrepreneurs noticed that 12 page sales letters work well for regular mail advertising, so why no put a long letter on their web site?

That worked great for some, but it is working less and less for others. Just about every day I hear from someone with a long web site letter that isn't selling anything for them.

The average web site visitor checks your headline to get a basic understanding of what the page has to offer. Then they read the first few paragraphs. If that bit of copy doesn't make it clear that you've got what they need, the customer will click away.

If the customer IS interested, they'll skim down through your copy to catch your major points. If that tells him or her that this really IS something to consider, they'll go back to the top and read the whole page carefully.

We've found that most people read the headline, the first few paragraphs, then skip down to the next several paragraphs that include a bold font. Highlight your key benefits and features for quick reading.

Most of your sales will come from the 17% or so who decide right away that they want to buy the product and don't particularly care about all the details. You might want to put order links at the top, middle, and end of the page, to cater to those customers.