Getting somebody to buy your product is a challenge. And when your sales medium is nothing more than words on a web page, it’s even harder still.
When you ask somebody to buy, you’re asking him or her to…
- Believe the claims you make for your product
- Hand over money to a complete stranger
- Trust that you’ll deliver the product
As you might expect, most people are a little reluctant to do that right off the bat. Every one of us has been in this situation, haven’t we. We like the product, but we’re afraid to buy because we still have unanswered doubts.
In this article, you’ll find out how to combat doubt and discover new ways to boost your sales.
Familiarity
They say “familiarity breeds contempt.” Not in sales, it doesn’t. At least, not if you’re an honest trader.
The better you get to know somebody, the less doubt you experience. Of course, you may discover a person is untrustworthy, and so avoid them. For the purposes of this article, we’re talking about your sales page, so it’s safe to assume that finding ways to give your prospects more contact with you is a good thing.
Your goal must be to give people a reason to return to your site often. There are two reasons for this…
- You want them to get used to dealing with you (reduce doubt)
- You want more chances to make a sale
The question is, how do you get people to return often? Here are some ideas for you to consider…
- Start an ezine and give-away free subscriptions
- Start a members-only area
- Start a Blog and publish original content daily
- Compile a weekly Digest of your Blog and invite readers to subscribe
- Publish plenty of useful content on your website
Start an ezine
Your ezine should pick a subject, and specialize in it. If your site covers several different topics, create an ezine for each one. That way, you pick up highly focused subscribers. This will be invaluable to you when…
- You need to advertise a product to your subscribers
- You want to sell advertising to others
The main advantage of your ezine (from your perspective), is that you now have a way of attracting your subscribers back to your site.
TIP #1: Publish your ezine weekly, and mail the subscriber list at the same time on the same day each week.
TIP #2: Publish your ezine articles on your website. The ezine should simply describe the article in a paragraph, and link back to it on your site. This achieves two aims…
- It gets people back to your site
- It increases the amount of actual content on your site. If you link to these articles from within the site itself, your search engine ranking will start to improve
Don’t load up your ezine with ads. Your subscribers want content, so give it to them. This will ultimately deliver many more sales than a mailing that contains nothing but ads.
Start a members-only area
Do you have certain content that you don’t want to simply give away to anyone that visits your site? Then why not start a members-only area?
In other words, get visitors to register with you before they get access to the members-only part of your site. Make this registration free, and require that the person verify their email address. This is a great way to build a mailing list.
You should then mail all your members once per week, with a summary of everything you’ve added to the members-only area over the last week. Link to each new item in your email.
Start a Blog
A Blog can take many different forms. For example…
- A forum for publishing information
- A personal record
- A way for a group of people to publish information
This Blog (the one you’re reading right now) allows anybody to submit articles, but doesn’t guarantee publication. Other Blogs will publish every submission.
How you run your own Blog comes down to what you want to achieve. If you’re interested in building a large amount of information quickly, then you might want to open it up to everybody.
If you’re more interested in quality (a good idea), it’s best to first read a submission and reserve the right to edit it to suit your format.
Publish plenty of useful content
The web is awash with sites that do nothing more than link to other sites. Human beings don’t tend to find these sites all that interesting.
Neither do the major search-engines, which typically assign a low ranking to link-sites.
If your goal is to get people coming back to your site, you’re going to want to find a way to publish new content.
