Do all Internet marketers write their sales pages with Microsoft Word?

A bit of an off-topic rant here. I like Affiliate “Project X” so much (hey, it has real content, so unusual for an e-book) that I signed up for the author's limited promotional offer where he gives affiliates a complete website to promote APX, including a new video with advanced tips not found in the e-book. The result is my Affiliate “Project X” site, which is what led to this rant, because I wanted to customize that page. This is not a rant about Project X, but a rant about sales pages in general. Why does every sales page looks as if it's been written with Microsoft Word and then converted to HTML?

Look at my APX sales page, the main APX page, or pretty much any sales page you see. View the source for the page. 9 out of 10 times you'll see this kind of HTML:

<p align="center"><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><strong>
<font color="#ff0000" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="4">
"On October 3rd, 2006, the affiliate marketing community went <u>bezerko</u>
over a product called Affiliate Project X. But was this all a smoke
screen. And did the product really follow-through? Since launch, the
results are in..." </font></strong></font></p>

Ugh, a <font> tag for each paragraph? Even better, two tags! It's so 1990's. But this is the kind of crappy HTML you get from tools like Microsoft Word and the many build-your-own-sales-page-automatically applications and scripts out there today.

People, don't you know that cascading style sheets (CSS) make this crud entirely unnecessary? I can live with using tables to guarantee positioning and such relatively painlessly across multiple browsers, but there's no excuse anymore to not use CSS to define things like font and color settings.

Do your affiliates a favor, please, and write a clean sales page that is easy to edit with an HTML editor or even a simple text editor.

P.S.: While you're at it, stop misspelling “AdWords” and “AdSense”. Capitalize the 3rd letter of each. Are you really that lazy? Thank you.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

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