Too many people get their panties in a wad over their blog article, website copy, letters and emails being grammatically correct and without one spelling mistake.

BE WARNED:

This article will offend some people . . . it’s meant to.

Blatant typos can and should be avoided due to having tools such as a spell checker however, even this is not 100% fool proof. I must admit, I am guilty of not running the Spell checker and having sales copy and email copy with errors and I do not give a toss to be honest.

Author’s manuscripts some times go through 10 different proof readers and still the final printed version, has errors.

As for grammar, punctuation – Forget what your ‘boring as bat poo’ English teacher taught you about being perfect all the time.

It’s pure Bullshit.

Give me a persuasive piece of copy with a few errors over a bland, grammatically perfect and lifeless piece of copy and I know which one will pull more sales . . . The one with the few errors.

Here’s 5 Myths about spelling and grammar which would make your English teacher have heart palpitations if they ever read them.

MYTH #1:

Typos are unprofessional and cost you sales.

Absolute crap! A few typos in anything will not cost you a sale from serious buyers. Yes, if a serious prospect is reading your sales letter, website, email or blog article and they give you a reason for not buying as spelling and punctuation . . . it’s lame as these tire kickers were NEVER going to buy in the first place.

MYTH #2:

Never use slang words.

Fair dinkum . . . the whole frigging world uses slang. Being an aussie, we are the world champions when it come to slang words. Even those bloody yanks (yep, we call Americans ‘yanks’) have a book titled: ‘The Dictionary of American Slang’ by Robert L Chapman.

Recently a subscriber from the U.K. wrote to me telling me my use of Gidday was wrong in an email I sent.

This is what he said:

G’day would be the proper contraction for the Australian spelling. Giddy would be correct if you expected me to be in a cheerful mood but gidday?

WTF would he know about aussie slang? Gidday is simply another version . . . my version of g’day which is already slang.

MYTH #3:

Perfect Spelling is Critical to your sales and your success.

Pure B.S.

Look around the internet. Websites such as www.digg.com instead of www.dig.com, www.soshable.com instead of www.socialable.com etc. etc.

Crikey, even one client when doing a keyword search, discovered ‘surgery’ was getting searched for as ‘surgury’ so he register the exact phrase as a domain and got free traffic.

This is becoming more common as people want a specific domain yet the correct spelling version is already taken.

I rest my case on this one.

MYTH # 4:

Everyone Can Spell:

Pure B.S. yet again.

The average literacy age across the world is of a 12 year old – as a guideline. So for all you people who want to use big fancy words to show how smart you are . . . quite frankly this is the mentality of a ‘dumb ass’ and you are costing yourself sales.

When you assume everyone in the world is as clever as you, can spell and knows perfect grammar, you are leaving money on the table by not catering to the masses.

People also come from different ethnic backgrounds and multi cultural background and quite simply have limited skills. You can see this in any good keyword search tool which allows you to include mis-spelled words.

You would be amazed at how many variations there are of certain words which are spelled incorrectly, based on how they sound.

When you ASSUME . . . you make an ass out of you and me!

MYTH # 5:

American English is the only version of English – the one to use all of the time.

This is the biggest load of elephant crap ever.

The English language was around centuries before America was even discovered. American wasn’t even a ‘wet dream’ when the English language was created. America has adapted it’s own version of ‘English’ and many words have one letter difference in how they are spelled.

AMERICA . . . ENGLISH

Color . . . Colour

Realize . . . Realize

Humor . . . Humour

Neighbor . . . Neighbour

There are many more like this.

People say as a writer, it’s unprofessional to have errors and while I agree in principle, it’s not going to cost you a genuine sale. I know of several high profile products where the sales letter has had a few typos for decades, it hasn’t cost them sales and they refuse to fix them.

I wrote a letter many years ago for a guy from the movie ‘THE SECRET’ which still had typo’s and pulled millions of dollars in sales.

I expect this article will get some heated comments and all I can say on ‘bring them on’!

Dedicated to kicking your ass until you succeed!

Warmly

Trevor ‘ToeCracker’ Crook

PS: I teach people to choose words which sell not teach them to spell.

When you are serious about getting more traffic, more conversions and more sales . . . I urge you to take part in my persuasive writing sells 30 day challenge and create $15,000 worth of persuasive sales copy for peanuts and take 13 easy payments and put it to the test.

Go to: www.PersuasiveWritingSells.com

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