A couple of people have gotten in touch with me and are very determined to create their own products. One of the questions a few of these people have had is about professional writers of sales copy. First of all professional sales writters are very expensive. If someone is charging you less then $2000 I can almost gaurantee they are "starving" which means they are either very new (and you might get lucky and strike gold) or they suck. A good professional long copy writer is going to cost $5000 to $25,000, and the top names will also charge you a % of your sales as well. Is good copy really worth it? Well if you think increasing your sales by XXXX is worth the investment then yes. I'm a very good email copywriter, and short form copywriter (esp if you use spell check on my work

) . I've been paid for those and have a list of happy clients. However, I SUCK at long copy - and in the end if a person has no idea who you are, if it's the first time they have come across your site then long copy is the king. A good long copy sales page will pull at 3 to 5%, I've seen some pull as high as 11%. That's compared to an average page that does not have a professionally written letter which might bring 1 sale in 150/200 visitors. You do the math, with clicks costing upwards of $3.00 in a very competative market like Forex, and some companies spending over $50,000 per day on Google to get those keywords, getting any edge you can makes a lot of sense. Would you rather pay $600 per sale, or $90 per sale? When you look at it in that regard then $5000 for a good sales letter does not seem so unreasonable.
So, I'm not writting this in support of any particular copywritter coz I actually don't know any good ones who are taking new clients. One of the most respected long form financial copywriters in the world is actually Ken Calhoun. You could go look at how he puts his sales letters together to get an idea of what works. There are a lot of elements to it. The headline to grab your attention. Social Proof and more social proof, the offer, the gaurantee and much much more. Look at the letters from that point of view though, what objections of mine are they trying to overcome and how successful are they being with that? The best way to tell if something is good copy is to print it up and give it to 15 of your random friends. If 2 or 3 of them want to buy the product after having read the 8 to12 page sales letter you got something, if none of them do you may want to make some changes.
Why am I spending so much time on the sales letter? Because it's very important, in fact it might be the most important part of your site. Certainly the most important part of your site that most people will want to outsource.
At this point I really hope that those of you who are wanting to create your own products will hold on because your going to do so much better if you just follow a process here. Ultimatly doing affiliate marketing is all about finding out what the market wants and then releasing your own product, after someone else has spent the time and effort of creating a site, product and sales letter that you know people want to buy. You know they want to buy it coz you have been selling it. Once you see this, and you've made $5000 to $10,000 as an affiliate selling it yourself, then you have all the money you need to get your own site together and do it right and make 100% of the money - plus bring in extra that other people (affiliates) sell for you.
Brandon