Thirteen Tips To Make Sure People CAN READ Your Damn Ad

You know what really crushes your ROI?

If no-one can read your ad. Or your landing page.

And this is a very common problem I see in affiliate campaigns, particularly for newer affiliates.

You can have the best, most persuasive, most selling copy in the world, but if your prospects can’t read it, you’ll be looking at an ROI apocalypse of Biblical proportions.

So – yes, typography is boring. For a lot of people, anyway – me included. But you know what aren’t boring? Large sums of money. And learning a bit about typography helps you get there.

Let’s get going!

Use Bigger Type.

If there’s one tip on this entire list that you follow, make it this one.

Almost everyone chooses font sizes for the Web that are too small. Bigger fonts are more readable, and whilst that’s important for all websites (I significantly dropped the bounce rate on one of my authority sites just by moving from 12pt to 16pt) it’s critical for advertisers, because the chances are our prospects aren’t highly invested in reading what we have to say. So if the physical act of reading is hard, they’ll just stop.

Smashing Magazine made the case for 16px fonts as an absolute bare minimum, and I agree. Indeed, as I said above, I’ve made money by simply making fonts that size in the past. That’s 16pt in Photoshop if you’re using 72 DPI (Dots Per Inch) images.

How does that look? Well, here’s a font-too-small ad:

and here’s one with an appropriate text size:

We see a little less of Miss Piggy in the latter image, but it’s clearl ...