Brent Hodgson, Copywriter

When you go fishing, you attach two things to the end of your fishing line - the bait, and the hook.

Each serves a different purpose - and if you forget either of them, you’re unlikely to catch any fish.

If you’re running a successful online business, then chances are you’re also using some “bait” and a “hook” too.

You have some Traffic Generation Content - its purpose is to attract visitors to your web-site. It’s the bait on the end of your fishing line.

Then you have your Conversion Content, which is the the hook on the end of your fishing line - it’s there to “catch” visitors and get them to take an action (to buy, opt-in, etc).

Each serves a different, but necessary purpose.

A mistake I see a lot of people making is they try to make their bait into a hook, or their hook into bait.

They try to Search Engine Optimise long-form salesletters to get more visitors…

They might get a *good* ranking, but it won’t be anything like what they could get if they poured the same effort into SEO’ing good lead-generation content.

(Note: Do you have any idea how hard it is to get quality links to a salesletter page? No quality website owner in their right mind will give a good quality link to a sales page!)

OR… They try to get people to buy from the bottom of lead generation pages.

They’ll get *some* conversions - but nowhere near as many as they could get if they were sending those same leads to a purpose copywritten, conversion maximised sales page.

(This can also causes them a whole bunch of duplicate content issues too, especially if they’re using the same long-form conversion content on the bottom of each page.)

All of my most successful clients understand this.

In fact, it’s a principle I use myself too.

The reason I’m able to devote time to this blog is because it makes me money.

I write interesting content for my blog as Traffic Generation “Bait” to bring in visitors.

AND at the bottom of each blog post, I monetize that traffic by inviting people to find out about becoming a client of mine - that’s my Conversion “Hook” Page.

It’s really simple:

1. Create interesting content to attract people to your web-site. Make sure it’s information that potential customers want, which is relevant to the products or services you provide (a classic example is financiers creating mortgage calculators on their site);
2. Then, from the bottom of each page, invite your visitors to view another page - where you ask them for the sale (this is where the financier then asks people to contact them for a consultation);

Try it for yourself and see - nothing attracts more traffic than a purpose-built traffic generation page, and nothing converts better than a purpose-built conversion salesletter.

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