The article was talking about how a guest at a home shopping network shattered a 20 year sales record by changing one sentence in the “call to action”. Here’s what the article says:
Colleen Szot, a very well known woman in the infomercial industry, shattered a 20-year-record at a home shopping channel when she changed the standard infomercial call-to-action, “Operators are waiting, please call now” to:
“If operators are busy, please call again”.
Callers imagined lines of busy operators going from one call to another without a break and concluded, “If operators are really busy, it means lots of people want this product. Therefore, it must be really good”.
The comments for this article posed a question that really peaked my interest. What they asked was, “how can this phrase be reworded to be applied to the Internet”.
Let me offer my thoughts on a phrase that might work:
If my site crashes because of too much traffic, please try again!
Now, using the same logic at the sales rep at the home shopping channel used, people may be flocking to my site because they think, “hmm… if this site has so much traffic that it’s going to crash, I better go see what’s so popular about it!”
What do you think? Do you like my rendering of the phrase?
What about you – how could you rewrite this phrase to be applicable to the Internet?