To Increase Sales, Don’t Be Yet Another Site with a List of Products!

Customers are overwhelmed with product selection on the internet. Your website can't be just another list of products. [Click Here to See a Larger Image]

Summary: Is your website just another of thousands of websites selling the same products? If so, instead of getting sales, you may just see yourself adding to the noise and confusion on the internet.

Yet Another Site with a List of Products

A golfer wants to buy a new set of Nike golf clubs, the ones Tiger Woods uses. He does a search on Google for ‘tiger wood’s golf clubs’. How many results do you think he’d find? No doubt he would find hundreds, if not thousands. Likely, the golfer can buy the clubs from Nike directly, from a website specializing in golf clubs, from eBay, from a sporting goods website, from Craigslist, and the list continues... Do you see the problem? Virtually any product you can think of is being sold by hundreds if not thousands of websites! Therefore, for you to get a sale, you must do more than offer just another product. You have to provide explanations and information that dispels confusion and helps the customer organize his product search.

Address Fears that Prevent a Purchase

To convince a customer to purchase you must address three customer fears that prevent him from making a decision. Customers fear…

1. Buying the wrong product (See #4 in this list).
   
2. Buying the right product at too high a price.
3. Being stuck with a disappointing product.

The last two are simple to address. Offer a good price and offer a good return policy. Most companies already do these two things well and I’m sure you are as well. But what can be done about the first fear?

Help the Customer Choose the Right Product

The other day I needed to buy paper for a direct mail campaign. I knew I wanted paper that would make a good impression but at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, I’m not a direct mail expert, nor am I a paper expert; so I was not sure which classification of paper would satisfy my goals. All of the paper and direct mail websites I visited gave me prices for different technical classifications of paper, but none explained, in layman terms, how the paper feels to the touch or how it might perform when used for direct mail. The options were overwhelming. Frustrated with all of these websites, I finally had to seek help from an expert at a local paper shop. A kind saleswoman pointed me to products that her direct mail clients use and explained how each paper is perceived psychologically by the recipient. Satisfied with her answers, I bought all of my paper from this paper shop.

What is the point of this story? I was not able to make my decision online because no website gave me the information I needed to help me choose the right product. Thus, every single one of those websites lost my business.

Are you losing business because you don’t help the customer choose the right product? On the internet, when the customer is faced with a bewildering variety of options, and he can’t sort out which product is right for him, he simply won’t buy any of them.

Don’t Just Explain Why to Buy a Product, also Explain Why Not To

To choose between options the customer needs to know why to buy a product and why not to buy a product. For instance, a car website may say, ‘buy a truck if you need to haul large loads, but don’t buy a truck if you need high fuel efficiency.’ This helps a customer narrow down his options depending on what is more important, fuel efficiency or payload hauling.

Drug companies have been doing this for years. Have you noticed how many drugs have one version that is ‘fast-acting’ and another version that is ‘long-lasting’? This increases sales by forcing the customer to choose one desired effect over the other, depending on how he feels.

Conclusion: Help Customers Select the Right Product

Your website is not the only source for any product on the internet. Therefore, to get the sale you have to do a better job of explaining your products than your competitor does. If a customer is confused, he would rather not buy any product, than take the risk of buying the wrong product. Thus, to generate sales, you need to do an excellent job of helping the customer buy the right product by offering informative product descriptions and information to help him decide between similar products.

Related Articles

Dmiracle.com. 2008. "Are Your Customers Sick & Tired of Choice?"

How Can Freely Sharing Articles You Author Help You Build Business?

Make friends with your customers, both potential and existing, by giving freely.

Summary: Customers ignore advertisements because advertisements saturate our lives and we've learned most of them can't be trusted. So how can you reach ad-weary customers? By freely educating them. If a customer can learn something valuable from you, they are more likely to respect you, trust you, remember you, and recommend you. This technique is often called "Content Marketing." To help you better understand what Content Marketing is and how it can help your company, I thought it would be helpful to share an excellent definition I found on Wikipedia today.

Which is a customer more likely to ignore, a helpful article or a traditional advertisement? Which is a customer more likely to show to colleagues, an educational video or a video advertisement?

Freely sharing helpful articles, videos, etc. to grow your business is an effective method called "Content Marketing." Below is a definition of Content Marketing from Wikipedia.org:

"Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases. In contrast to traditional marketing methods that aim to increase sales or awareness through interruption techniques, content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action.

The idea of sharing content as a means of persuading decision-making has driven content marketers to make their once-proprietary informational assets available to selected audiences. Alternatively, many content marketers choose to create new information and share it via any and all media. Content marketing products frequently take the form of custom magazines, print or online newsletters, digital content, websites or microsites, white papers, webcasts/webinars, podcasts, video portals or series, in-person roadshows, roundtables, interactive online, email, events. The purpose of this information is not to spout the virtues of the marketer’s own products or services, but to inform target customers and prospects about key industry issues, sometimes involving the marketer’s products. The motivation behind content marketing is the belief that educating the customer results in the brand’s recognition as a thought leader and industry expert.

Marketers may use content marketing as a means of achieving a variety of business goals, such as thought leadership, lead generation, increasing direct sales, improving retention and more.

Content marketing is the underlying philosophy driving techniques such as custom media, custom publishing, database marketing, brand marketing, branded entertainment and branded content." (Wikipedia, 2008.)

Put simply, Content Marketing allows you to build a closer relationship with the customer than mere advertising can provide by freely giving him with educational articles, audio, video, that address his problems and also demonstrate your company's value and expertise.

So do not delay. Start sharing your expertise with your existing and potential customers by writing articles with solutions to their problems and placing them prominently on your website, sending them out in email, and using any other reasonable method. If you share your expertise freely, you will generate goodwill and will gain the potential customer's attention, respect, and business. However, if you do not share your expertise freely, customers will incorrectly assume that you don't share information because you don't have their interests in mind, or worse you don't have the expertise you claim to have. As a result, they will take their business to a more convincing competitor. So apply this saying to your expertise, "Practice giving and people will give to you."

References

Wikepedia. 2008. "Content marketing."

This definition of Content Marketing was shared under the terms of the Wikipedia Licensing agreement.

Promotions:

Link building helps online businesses secure top positions on search results pages.
Vertical Measures provides link building services.

Guest Article: How can Patience Provide Rewarding Sales Growth?

What lessons can we learn from the success of LightningLabels.com?

Summary: Over a 2 year period, Peter Renton's blog has helped him grow his website, lightninglabels.com, from zero visitors to 22,000 visitors per month (Compete.com, 2008). This is impressive for a business with such a small niche. Today, Peter is going to discuss the rewards of patience as you build your website and how he benefited from writing a business blog. Recently, Peter estimated that his blog drives at least $2,000 per month of additional business to his website. I hope you enjoy this article.

I believe every business should have a blog, but to launch a successful blog you need to be patient and committed. You simply cannot judge the success of your blog for at least 12 months, so you need to continually update your blog even when few people are reading it. Unless you are very lucky or famous, building blog traffic is a slow and gradual process.

A blog can do a number of things for a business. First and foremost, it should provide a more personal face for your company. The blog author or authors should be visible and be allowed to write in a personal, conversational tone. A blog is not about telling the world how great you are; you should leave that to your main site. Instead, you should use your blog to educate and inform, and possibly entertain if it is appropriate.

When you start writing your blog you should do a handful of posts and then announce to the world that you have a blog. You can do online press releases, contact industry publications, email your customer list and get the word out any way you can. This should provide an initial bump in traffic for you which will hopefully result in a number of regular readers.

Our company blog is now two years old, and is the oldest blog in our industry. For many months, though, I would write blog posts and look at the traffic and be disappointed. Here is the breakdown of approximate number of daily visitors and how it has grown:

Month	Daily Visitors
3rd	25
6th	31
9th	45
12th	65
18th	114
24th	147

The numbers above are for unique visitors viewing pages on the blog web site, but with any blog you can subscribe to the content without visiting the site by using an RSS reader. Our growth in the number of subscribers has followed a similar curve to that of daily visitors, and today we have about the same number of subscribers, around 140.

These are not huge numbers but for a vertical market such as digital label printing you can’t expect to have thousands of readers. One important feature that every business blog should have is a prominent link back to the company’s main web site. We get more visitors to our main site from our blog than any other source other than the search engines. People find our blog go to our web site and become customers. I estimate that we get around four new customers a month resulting in around $2,000 in sales directly from the blog.

So how do you grow the number of visitors to your blog? Here are a number of ways we have done it:

1. Search engines – every new post is indexed by the search engines within a day or two and after two years we have over 170 posts and more than 50,000 words written about our industry. All these words are indexed and able to be searched with more words being added with every post.

2. Promoting the blog – we promote the blog at every opportunity. We provide a link to the blog in our customer emails, press releases, articles, even in my email signature.

3. Commenting on other blogs – I subscribe to dozens of blogs and I regularly make comments on these blogs. These comments usually provide a link back to our company blog. One word of warning: be careful to make the comment meaningful otherwise it will be deleted as spam.

4. Blogrolls – Develop a relationship with other bloggers and you can get your blog placed on what is called a blogroll. This is a list of blogs (with links) that a blogger publishes on their blog.

5. Your main web site – a link to your blog should be prominently featured on your main company web site.

We get many people who visit our own main site, then go and check out our blog and place an order. We have no way of measuring the actual impact that our blog has on these people but I know the blog helps create the impression that we are an industry leader. Our blog is also mentioned in trade publications now and has resulted in speaking and writing engagements for me that increases our exposure in our industry. But this all took time and perseverance.

Peter Renton is the founder of Lightning Labels, Inc., the leaders in digital label printing and custom labels. He writes regularly about the label printing industry on his company blog at http://blog.lightninglabels.com.

References

Compete.com. 2008. "Snapshot of LightningLabels.com"

What is a blog and do I need one?

Screen capture from Blogger.com as I use Blogger to create this blog post. Tools such as blogger can save you time if you frequently write articles for your customers to read.

Summary: The technology world tends to get excited about new products and new ideas, blogging just being the example we’re going to discuss today. However, the average businessperson wisely views the technology world with some skepticism. We have learned that technology is never the magic pill to solve business problems. Blogs are no different. In themselves, they have no special power to solve business problems. Nevertheless, it is wise to ask, “What is a blog?” and “Do I need one?” This article will help answer those questions.

So, what is a blog? To start, this article that you’re reading is a blog. Put simply, a blog is a column, similar to a daily newspaper column, which is published on a website instead of in print. Just as a newspaper column can be a Dear Abbey, a column about sports, or a political opinions column, a blog can also be about any topic. Just like columns are a series of regularly published articles, blogs are a series of regularly published posts. Newspaper columns are typically read in print. Blogs are typically read online.

However, blogs are not exactly like newspaper columns. Whereas a newspaper column is published at most once per day, a blog can be published as often as you want. That’s because it’s cheaper to update a blog on a website than it is to print a newspaper. Some blogs are updated every hour. For example, just recently, a blogger published one post every hour for 24 hours straight about Kobe Bryant. Even the New York Times could not afford to print twenty four updates to their sports column in a single day. And who would buy all twenty-four copies?

Another difference between blogs and newspaper columns is that, while newspaper columns are controlled by the newspaper, a blog is controlled by you. You are the author, or someone you hire is.

As I mentioned earlier, this article you’re reading on my website right now is an example of a blog post. But what makes blogs so special? How is this blog post any different from any other article on a website? The reality is that to most people there is no major difference.

From the reader’s perspective, blog posts may look no different than any other article on a website. If this is the case, then why is there so much buzz about blogging in the technology world?

This brings us to our next question, “Do you need a blog?”

The easy answer to that question is, No. A business can operate perfectly fine without a blog. However, blogging provides some advantages that make it a powerful tool for publishing communications to your customers.

It is best to think of blogging as using a writing tool just like one uses Microsoft Word. Word let’s you quickly write what you have to say, save your document to a file, and print it or email it for someone else to read. Similarly, a blogging tool let’s you write your thoughts into an article, automatically applies a standard blog layout and format, and automatically uploads the blog article to your website to share with your visitors. The tool builds the web page for you so that you don't have to be a programmer to put articles on your website.

In summary, if you plan to write lots of articles for your customers to read, then a blog can save you time. A blog helps make authoring and publishing articles on your website faster.

Blogs have a lot of other powerful features that also help you. However, there are so many features that they can’t be covered in just one article. But you wisely don't start blogging merely because blogs provide cool features. Instead it is wise to start blogging because you have something of value you want to say to customers on a regular basis and you want to do that as efficiently and effectively as possible. If your goal is the latter, then the features provided by blogging might be just what you need.

In conclusion, blogs are just a way to publish articles on a website. Blogs consist of a series of posts published at a regular time interval on a website just as newspaper columns consist of a series of articles printed in a newspaper at a regular time interval. Blogs, in and of themselves, do not solve business problems. Nevertheless, if you wish to communicate with your customers through regularly published articles, then a blog is often the easiest way to do this. That's why I write articles such as this through a blogging tool. Using blogging as a tool can save time and make it easier to share your articles with customers and partners.

Additional articles:

Blogger.com: "What’s a blog?", PBS.org: "What Exactly is a Blog?", WordPress.org: "What is a blog?"

[Video] Site Review: Music Instruments Website

Summary: Today I review a music instruments website. This website does an excellent job of providing visitors with articles, encyclopedia links, pictures and more about hundreds of instruments around the world. By educating customers, this website will satisfy visitors and get more Google search visitors. However, the site lacks a method for speaking directly to the customer, like I am with this blog. Blogs give a visitor incentive to come back to your website for further education. Watch the video to see the full review.

Is your website useful?

Google is the number one website on the internet. What can we learn from them?

Summary: A useful website generates sales because it convinces the customer that your product or service is likely to also be useful. Google is the quintessential useful website. Therefore, we do well to analyze our website to see if the website is really useful or if it is nothing more than a glorified business card.

Why is Google the number one website in the United States? Is it because Google has the prettiest colors? Is it because Google has the coolest logo? Or is it perhaps because Google is a great name for a website?

No. It's because Google is very useful to the people that use it. And what do those users do? They use Google over, and over, and over again.

We then should be seeking to do the same with our websites. Just like Google, our website needs to be useful if the customer is going to use it and tell his colleagues to use it.

What constitutes a useful website?

First, we must keep in mind why people use the internet. The average person uses the internet to get information. When a customer is on your website, remember he or she is likely looking for a specific piece of information. He may not be ready to buy just yet. So if you don't have the information he needs, the customer is going to leave in frustration and may never come back.

Therefore, what are some types of information you can and should provide on your website?

1. Detailed specifications for your products and services. Make sure to include prices and price or fee structure.
2. Articles, audio, and video to educate the customer about when your product or service should be used and when it should not be used.
3. Interviews with company executives, employees, and customers.
4. Case studies showing how your product or service has benefited previous customers.
5. Presentations demonstrating pertinent research your company has done in your field.
6. Data to help keep the customer informed about his competitors use of your industry's product or service.

No doubt there are many other valuable pieces of information you can give to your customers. Don't say, "Well, I sell a boring product and thus, I can't provide an abundance of helpful information to the customer." Can your customers benefit by understanding more about your products, your industry, and their own needs? If you answered, "Yes," then start sharing that information now.

What will be the result?

A useful website increases sales. When your website helps the customer, the customer is more likely to believe that your product or service will also help him. Therefore, he is more likely to give your product or service a try. However, if your website is useless and frustrating, the customer will doubt your entire company and your sales will be scanty.

That being the case, your goal should be to show the customer how valuable your company really is. Prove your value with a useful website that addresses his needs. Educate the customer, become an expert, and build the trust that generates sales.

Increase Site Traffic By Giving Customers a Reason to Visit Your Site Frequently

Midtownlunch.com generates $1,000 per month merely from regularly posting experiences at eateries in Midtown Manhattan.

Summary: To increase site traffic, post entertaining or educational content (whichever is appropriate for your business) to your website at least once per week.

If a customer visits your site once, do they have a reason to ever come back again? Take a good look at your website and ask yourself that question.

Most salesmen will tell you that you almost never win a customer on the first phone call. A good sales person builds a relationship with his customer. Your website must do the same.

Building relationships takes time. At first, a visitor to your website is going to eye you with skepticism, especially if they've never heard of you and just chanced upon your website through a Google search. Chances are, most customers will look at two pages on your site and then leave.

However, if you can give the user a reason to come back to your website then perhaps on their 2nd, 3rd, or 49th visit they will buy from you. This long term engagement is critical to increasing your site conversion rate.

How do you keep customers coming back? The best way is through entertaining or educational content. Try some of the following:

1. Put a blog on your website and teach a lesson in each post.
2. Post training videos on how to use your products or services.
3. Conduct your own audio talk show, and place the MP3 files on your website.

Any of these ideas will get users to regularly return to your website, and eventually these users will become paying customers.

The key though is regularity. You need to post new content at least weekly, but at best daily. The truth is you can never post too much, but of course time is limited. So put something new on your website at least every week and stick with it for at least six months. If you do so, you will see an increase in site traffic.