How To Write Awful Testimonials-Part II

Last week I gave you four tips on writing a profitable testimonial. Those tips were meant for customers/reviewers who giveaway testimonials, and I hope that it has helped you a little. Today's lesson is for webmasters, or site owners. Just like many reviewers write awful testimonials, there are several webmasters who make a lot of stupid mistakes (or maybe, honest mistakes) while putting the testimonials on their web sites, or hunting for them. Today's article will help those webmasters, if only a little!

1. Don't always run for the guru: In fact, if you are in the internet marketing niche, there is hardly any reason for trying to get testimonials from gurus (unless, the guru is someone like Allen Says or John Delavera who don't give testimonials too often and hence people trust them by heart), for it will have exactly the opposite effect on your product! People in IM niche tend to look down upon the 'gurus'.

There are some gurus who provide goody-goody testimonials even for crappy products, and if you get testimonials from these gurus for your products, well you know what is going to happen! :D Remember Google's rule: you are a bad webmaster not only if you indulge in black hat SEO tactics, but also if you simply link to such sites that indulge in such practices. If you get testimonials from 'insincere' gurus, people won't even blink their eyes before they add two and two and make four! After all, a man is judged by the company he keeps! :) Like I said in the previous issue of the newsletter, whenever I see the testimonials of any of those gurus on a sales letter, I am quick to back off!

A far better way of getting testimonials is to provide free review copies of your product to Warriors whom people are likely to trust, and then running a short WSO and asking for testimonials from your customers as well. Those testimonials will appear far more credible to your future customers than what a guru will offer you!

2. Don't be link-stupid: Some webmasters make the mistake of providing a live link to the website of the customer. While it may benefit the customer a lot, it ruins the webmaster totally. I seldom provide a live link to the website of the reviewer; instead, I simply write down the domain name just below the name of my reviewer, such as:

Peter
www.petersdomain.com

This way, I am able to provide full credit to the person, while at the same time, keeping the domain un-hyperlinked! If people are really interested in learning more about the reviewer, they can simply copy and paste the URL in a new browser and hit 'Go'; this way, I won't lose my sales (see below for clarification). At other times, when I do put live links to third-party sites, I make them open in a new window. Now, you may be wondering that what the harm is in giving out a live link!

First of all, the more outbound links your site has, the more it will lose in pagerank (and the other site(s) will gain in pagerank). This is called "pagerank bleeding", and this is the reason why some webmasters indulge in 'no-follow' linking tactics. I however, don't use it because I hate to be sneaky. I will either give a linkback or won't!

The other downside is that when you give a live linkback to the reviewer's website, people will simply click away from your sales letter and there you have lost one potential sale! If you really want to provide a link back to the website of the reviewer as a token of appreciation, just make the link open in a new window (for that, you will need to code your link this way:  http://domain.com" target="_blank"). This way, people will remain on your sales letter instead of going away from it!

3. Don't put too many testimonials on a sales page: Testimonials are good, but when you put too much of them on a one-page sales letter, their effect is nullified! As a rule, don't put more than three or four testimonials on a single web page! If you have got more testimonials for your product, you can make a separate page containing the testimonials and provide link to it from the main sales letter, just like I did with my NuttieZine newsletter page. Too many testimonials not only make a sales page unnecessarily lengthy, it also dilutes the credibility of your product. People are conditioned to believe that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is! In the same vein, when they see a testimonial at every point of your sales letter, they become suspicious – you will come across to them as someone who is not confident of his/her product enough to hold it on your own, and that's why you have splattered so many testimonials across the sales page. In fact, one of the best selling products in the weight loss niche contains ZERO testimonials; just visit: Fatloss4idiots.com!

This completes our series of 'testimonial lessons". Others would have sold you this information for at least 7 bucks. But I, being a 'nuttie' guru, am giving it all for free. If you think someone else might benefit from these lessons, feel free to forward the PDF files to them. Just in case you missed it, you can download part 1 of this lesson here.