What Makes People Buy?
Note - I'm using the word 'buy' here, but for our purposes this is interchangeable with 'convert'. So what makes people buy something? People buy based on emotions, then justify with logic. Technically, there are multiple reasons people buy something, but to craft a great selling landing page, you must appeal to emotion.
If that short point above didn't make you question 90% of your LP's, go back and read it again. If you did, and aren't now questioning 99% of your LP's I should explain further. On virtually every landing page I see here and being used on traffic sources, affiliates are appealing to logic. Going back to whatever grade I was supposed to learn this in, there is the left side of your brain and the right. The left brain is the rational, logical, organized, and analytic side. The right side is the creative, emotional, and intuitive side. Since people buy on emotion, and last time I checked we want people to buy, we need to appeal to the right side of their brains.
A great resource to use is this site. Just put in an LP url, and it will show you the rational words highlighted in red followed by the suggested emotional word you could replace it with. That's a simple way to appeal more to people's emotional side, but there are other ways that are even more effective.
You can inject emotion to stir up fear or frustration:
"Does it frustrate you when..."
"Do you suffer from xyz, and worry that everyone around you is...?"
"Does xyz make you feel like a failure?"
Your visitors might not know/realize they are frustrated until you bring it to their attention.
You can also inject emotion to get them thinking about what is possible:
"Can you image if you had..."
"How would you like it if you could..."
"What would you do with all your free time...