Answer The Five Questions That Kill Your Sale

The Academy, the long version of every drill — This email is the five-minute field version. The Academy is where the page-craft gets worked slow, a real sales page taken apart line by line so you see exactly how it handles a doubt. Go there when the drill leaves you wanting the why underneath the moves.

A.R. Hampton’s grammar and editing guides — Those five FAQ answers only close if the sentences underneath them are clean. Hampton’s plain, cheap guides on grammar and proofreading tighten your lines until the honest answer reads honest instead of rushed. I keep a couple at the desk for exactly this kind of work. (Affiliate link, the building takes a cut.)

The FAQ That Closes

The reader is standing there with a reason to say no, and your page never once brings it up.

Open your best sales page right now, fam. Somewhere between the headline and the buy button a reader hits a doubt you never answered, and they close the tab. Quiet. You never find out why, because that doubt lived in their head and never once on your page. Today you drag those doubts into the light and answer them where the money changes hands, one flat line at a time.

1 // Pull the questions you already got

Open your reply folder, your DMs, and your refund notes, and read the last thirty. Skip the compliments. You’re hunting the sentence right before somebody bailed: ‘does this work if I’m brand new,’ ‘is this just the free stuff repackaged,’ ‘why’s it cost what a lunch costs.’ The gold sits in the refund reasons, because a refund is a doubt that already won the argument. Copy every real question into one list, their words, not yours (and yeah, yours are prettier as hell, doesn’t matter).

2 // Cut the list to five

Now count. The same doubt shows up over and over, worded ten different ways. Tally them and keep the five that hit most. Skip the clever one-off that nagged a single guy. You want the doubts that keep coming back and stall the buy, the ones with a body count. More than five and the reader quits reading before the button. Fewer and you leave a killer off the page.

3 // Answer each in one flat line

Write one line back at every one of the five. One honest line, the answer you’d give a buddy who asked over a beer, no marketing gloss on it. ‘New here? Start cold, it assumes nothing.’ ‘Yeah it’s cheap, here’s the reason.’ If the honest answer is the very thing that kills the sale, you’ve found a product problem, and no clever paragraph patches it. Fix the damn product, then write the line. Stack the five as a plain FAQ block right under the buy button, where the flinch happens.

Drag the five doubts onto the page today and answer them flat.

THE TIP. Read each FAQ answer out loud in a flat voice, the way you’d tell a buddy why the thing’s worth ten bucks. If a line needs a grin or a hype tone to land, it’s spin, and buyers read spin as a dodge. Go see how the store pages answer the money question straight, then steal the move. The store (see it live)

DEAD AIR · GZS RADIO / FIRST LIGHT

The overnight broadcast signs off at first light. The automation posts the same line every morning, THE TOWER IS WARM, then cuts the carrier. This morning it posted the line, cut the carrier, and posted it again forty minutes later. There was nobody on.

Reply with the one buyer question you dread, the one you keep hoping nobody asks out loud. That’s your first FAQ line, and I’ll help you word it right. ~ J.D.