I'm asked for advice often.  Usually, the request starts with: 'I get decent traffic' and ends with 'What do you thin?' by way of 'no sales.'

I've noticed 3 things people who ask me for my advice have in common.

1.  They have not decided whether the article/post on the site is a review, a sales letter, or an informational piece.

2. They target nobody or a very broad swath of the world population.

3. They think people buy features.

1. A review doesn't merely describe the features. What makes a review a review is the writer's opinion as to whether the product does or does not do what it is supposed to do.  Doesn't have to be the writer's opinion, could be a summary of the opinions of others.

A sales letter has to identify a problem, stir it, offer a solution.  And the solution has to be well matched to the problem, put to rest negative feelings the problem creates.  It requires a lot of getting into the buyer's frame of mind.

An article can be anything.  But the ones that offer solutions to problems, especially solutions the reader hasn't thought of yet are great, as in Lose Inner Thigh Fat - The 3 Secrets That Got Me My Slim, Sexy Legs Back.

Combining the three doesn't work.  Because they address a different phase in the buying process.

2 Sticking to the weight loss.  If you're promoting a product that gets rid of fat and gets you in shape, you'd emphasize that it gets you 6-pack abs if your buyers are young(ish) men.  You'd emphasize that it gets you a flat stomach and slimmer legs/smaller butt if your buyers were women.  To the 55-year old guy whose doctor told him he has to lose 40 LBS or go on meds, you'd talk about how it melts away fat and makes you feel vibrant.

 3. Features.  The monitor I'm using right now has 1200 by something pixels.  A number twice as large as the screens I had 4 or 5 years ago.  I bought it because of what this feature does for me.  I can read words better, easier, and the videos I watch on it are much better.  

Yes, without the feature, I could not have the benefits.  But as you noticed, I don't really know how many pixels, just that it's a lot more than I had before.  

The point, you never want something for the color, but because the color makes you think or feel something.  You never buy a cheap car because you want a cheap car.  You buy it because the cheap car save you money.  You never buy cigarettes because they burn slowly and make smoke.  Nor did you start smoking for that reason.

 Me, I started to smoke at 11 and quit at 12 because I couldn't make the strings of rings my friends could.  I started because I wanted to be cool not because any feature of the cigarette. 

When I bought this monitor I also bought a lap top.  From Best Buy.  Where 4 people came to help me make a decision.  The first 3 told me how many Hertz, RAM this one has, how many that one has.  The Hertz got to me. 

I understand that the more of them, the faster the computer.  But the more of them come with a bigger price tag.  I wanted to know if it was worth spending money to go from 660 to 820

I couldn't even make them understand me.  The 4th Best Buy employee told me what I needed to know without me even asking.  I asked him about 4 models.  And he told me things like: if you're watching movies, this one will load up almost twice as fast.  If you're downloading stuff, this one will do it...   Things like that.  Now I knew I wasn't going to use the computer for games or watching long movies, so I knew what to do.  

Don't assume your prospective customer is going to translate the features into benefits, or at least do it as well as you can.