MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

I was lis­ten­ing to one of Yanik Silver’s CDs from his excel­lent copy­writ­ing course today and came across this inter­est­ing nugget.

A lot of peo­ple still don’t under­stand that long copy tends to usu­ally out­per­form short copy. They rea­son that long copy usu­ally turns peo­ple off.

This is true. In the study quoted in Yanik’s course, the major­ity of peo­ple on a site will drop off after the first 300 words.

So short copy wins?

Not true. The peo­ple who do con­tinue past 300 words will usu­ally stay on. There is no more sig­nif­i­cant drop off again until 3000 words!

But here’s the impor­tant thing. The most inter­ested buy­ers are the ones that will stay. That major­ity that dropped off after 300 words, well you were not going to sell to them any­way. Let them bounce off.

The minor­ity that stayed on past 300 are the hot buy­ers. And these guys want as much info as you can dish out. So give them the long copy they need.

Long copy trumps short copy.

PS: Yanik Silver’s Course is described here.

Last 5 posts by

• The Enlight­ened Entre­pre­neur Expe­ri­ence: How To Expe­ri­ence The “Turn­ing Point” And Com­plete Free­dom In Your Busi­ness — Jan­u­ary 25th, 2010
• Tribal Mar­ket­ing: Sur­pris­ingly Eth­i­cal Ways to Sig­nif­i­cantly Reduce Your Unsub­scribe Rate And Eas­ily Boost Prof­its — Jan­u­ary 19th, 2010
• Break­ing the Silence — August 7th, 2009
• How Rela­tion­ship Mar­ket­ing Trumps Tra­di­tional Direct Mar­ket­ing (and Why the Social Media Craze Is Mostly Hype) — March 31st, 2009
• MindValley’s Social Media Mar­ket­ing Unveiled — Decem­ber 2nd, 2008

About the Author

Vishen is a co-founder of MindValley. Before MindValley, he was an exec in Silicon Valley and New York for several internet and technology firms. He turned bedroom entrepreneur at 27 and by the time he was 31 had founded 6 web businesses and never had to work a conventional job again.

Check out other posts by Vishen Lakhiani

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