All good copy is aimed at 11 year olds. No matter if you’re selling Tesco Financial Services, Proactol Fat Binder or a Playstation 3. This is because good copywriters understand that the majority of their potential customers have an average reading age of an 11 year old.

Famously marketer David Ogilvy realised that Dove’s high profile campaign ‘Dove makes soap obsolete’ was not understood by the companies target market, the housewife.

When changed to ‘Dove makes soap old-fashioned’, every single housewife in the study understood the message.

If you want your customers to understand what you are trying to say, you need to avoid words which an 11 year old can not understand. You need to also remove as much jargon as you can from your website. So if your trying to sell potential customers the idea of buying Proactol then please don’t take this approach:

”When Proactol™ non-soluble fibres come into contact with dietary fats they bind with them immediately to form a fluid gel around the fat this makes the fats complex too large to be absorbed by our body.”

A paragraph like this contains too much jargon. It also contains words that most 35 years will not understand, never mind an 11 year old! A sentence like this on your affiliate website will simply confuse the potential customer and make it less likely that they will purchase. If you do want to mention how the product works, then keep it very simple.

Jennifer Aniston demonstrates how keeping it simple is best:

Keep it simple and you will increase your conversions. Make it complicated and your visitors will quickly leave. Most affiliates/merchants will be thinking ‘nice post’, the successful ones will be opening up their site and editing their mistakes. Take action and change your copy today.