There are three steps for successful selling on the internet. In a “real” store, the ones that people get out of their car and walk into, the rules are clear: they have their wallet, you have the goods. Step 1 and 2 are in sync in a virtual store, there’s always a third step. You have to make firm but natural transition to your sales pitch.
1. What are you selling? What are they buying? Rarely are you asking for cash when they walk through your door. Getting to the financial transaction is a process with pitfalls.
2. What are your attractions? What’s the reason your readers are coming to your site? It’s easy to delude yourself into thinking they came to give you money.
3. How do you direct people to your sales pitch? It’s important that this is designed and not an accident caused by the previous delusion.
Lets handle these steps one after the other this way:
What are you selling? What are they buying?
If you are “Deck Cleaning Services” the whole world knows that you are selling specialized cleaning services. There is nothing ambiguous about it. That’s why you are there, that is what they can buy there. Of course, they keep coming back to read Deck’s opinion about cleaning services, to be part of this elite community, but everyone understand the rules.
If you are jude@vinegarlsTheGreatest.com, what are you selling? Perhaps you are giving away recipes? More likely is that you are using people’s love of vinegar as an attraction to bring people to your site. At the site, you are selling the same thing to vinegar.
If you are Yahoo, you are giving away information and selling advertising. The people who come to your site, come for information. They leave, either via the information or via the banner ads for which Yahoo charges. No disrespect, but what Yahoo is selling is you, the audience.
What are your Attractions?
You have to offer potential customers benefits before they buy. That is the way of the web. It is the good news because you have lots to say around your topic…but it is also the bad news because it obscures your financial objective. Your presentation and freebies may be terrific. People may love and cherish you and come back every day, but if you lose sight of what you are selling, you’re a philanthropist giving stuff away. The attraction is the set of benefits you offer someone for entering your website.
How do you direct people to your Sales Pitch?
How do you make it pleasurable for your visitors to browse your site without selling yourself short? Your site has to effectively guide the customer over to the sales pitch.
The soft sales pitch: Give me your e-mail address. It’s perfectly reasonable that the focus of your website is address harvesting. Once you have the reader’s address (naturally, you give them something worthwhile in exchange). Your sales pitch happens in your e-zine! RECEIVE VALUABLE INTERNET INFORMATION BY EMAIL! You choose the topics: Internet Technology, Web Development, Internet Marketing, Internet Stocks, ISPs, Internet Shopping, Internet News, Computing and Internet Resources. Subscribe to my email list today and you’ll receive targeted mailing that will notify you of products and services that meet your interest. Email me at makemoneyfast@yourwebsite.com with the word “Subscribe” only in the subject line. Harder sales pitch: Let’s say you invented a vinegar press that extracts all the juice. Naturally, your web is full of recipes, every other vinegar site in the universe. You hope to become the vinegar portal of the web. All this is designed to keep the readers coming back and to create a good impression. All well and good, but how do you make money?
· You have to provide a natural, powerful transition from attraction to sales pitch. If you simply have a link on your main menu, “Order here”, 95% of your readers will never notice it.
· Here are two better ways to do it: First have a link on every page (e.g. at the bottom) that says “Click Here to Order”. It’s clear, direct and all present. The second way is to create a transition page. Again, you have a link on every page. This one says “Click here to read 10 reasons why everyone should buy this product”. That’s partly informational. It maintains the attract position and it alerts the reader that you are making a sales pitch. Of course, the transitional page depends on the product: “5 reasons why other people have bought his product”, “6 benefits of owning my product” might work in your case. But all of them combine two things: (1) They continue to provide information and (2) they invite the reader to hear a sales pitch. Most often, if they are not well constructed, the reader completely misses the point that you were actually trying to make money; these sites can be improved fairly easily and will then show a dramatic increase in sales.
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