The Internet is a tool, a highly effective tool for mass marketing. However, you have to understand the technology to make it work for you. Hopefully, you have had enough exposure to the Internet on your own to recognize some of the terms like forums, websites, blogs, and email. Every day new technologies arise that can be helpful to you in your marketing campaign, but these will be the pillars of your campaign. You are going to take various elements available to create a network of marketing that brings in people from various places on the Internet to your offers. To do that, you have to be aware of each of these elements and how they work. Then, in Chapter The Coveted Offer, you will be told how you can put them all together to make a system that continues to work 24/7 to churn money for you as long as your sites are up.
Niche Sites
The first thing you want to do is start to create niche sites. A niche site is one website that is targeting a particular product or market segment and is fully devoted to that enterprise. You don't want a site that sells everything to everyone because buyers will become confused with all the different offers. You want a website that is carefully built to target the type of audience that buys your products or services.
How do you do that? Can you control who ends up coming to visit your website?
Again, on the Internet, this is a whole lot easier than it sounds. You have to remember that the #1 way people get to sites is through the search engines. Search engines like Google also have immense resources to help you generate copy that targets your niche and will show up as a result in the search when someone is looking for that particular product or service. So, you don't have to control the person coming to visit your site at all! You just control the copy you put on your niche site and it will control the type of audience that shows up at your door. And, the nice thing about using copy that brings the right audience is that you can hook it up to Google's Adwords campaign and make money that way too.
Google Keyword Tool
This easy-to-use tool is available to anyone with an Internet connection, whether you have a Google Adwords account or not. It helps you to research different words to find similar and high-paying words and the amount of competition for exposure of those keywords. It is located here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal .
So, say you want to do a website on a niche you think will be highly profitable: stamp collecting. So, you put in “stamp collecting” as the keyword to find similar keywords that might be able to bring traffic from people interested in collecting stamps to your website. The tool will generate a list of words with the advertising competition and the approximate search volume for keyword in the current month. If you want to see how much that keyword is worth in a Google Adwords campaign, you can also click the drop-down list that says “Show/hide columns” and choose to show the estimated average CPC.
The first thing you will notice is that not that many people are interested in searching for stamp collecting on the Internet. There were only 33,100 searches for stamp collecting using those keywords in the month of June, 2008, that’s out of millions and millions of people who use Google and search the Internet. So, right there, you know that this niche is not a good idea. So, you change your mind and try scrap booking instead. By entering the term “scrapbook” you see that for the month of June, 2008, 1,220,000 searches were done on that keyword – a much better number than stamp collecting.
Now, you turn your attention to the list of keywords and see that there is some stiff competition for using these keywords. Your goal is to find some terms that have a high search volume and low competition OR a high CPC value. As you do the research, you will eventually build a list of keywords that suits your purposes and these will be what you can use to build your niche site. Don't forget, that you can do this with numerous words to find some great keywords. So, you might look up crafts too when targeting a scrap booking site.
Once you have a great list, you will start to create copy based on those keywords. Your entire site you have plenty of content to lure people into your site and rank higher in the search engines. That's why many people use blogs (web logs) to help keep content fresh and bring in new keywords so that the search engines will start to find their site quicker and bring traffic in to their sales funnel.
You will use the keywords in the categories in your web log to help place you higher in the search engine, and you will want to create a strategy where the keywords have a density of about 1 to 2% of the entire copy. There is debate on what is the best density, but don't make it too high or Google will actually penalize the ranking on the search engine for spamming keywords on your site.
If you don't have the time to write these articles or the inclination, don't be afraid to go to www.elance.com and hire writers who can do it for you. You can buy sets of articles in bulk and that will allow you to roll them out on your time schedule and always have fresh content on hand. And, if you sign up as a Google Adwords advertiser you can make income if you add Google advertising to your site or blog.
More About Blogs
Blogs that are hosted on your website make great marketing tools. You can create a blog on a third-party site, but that can limit your ability to add Google advertising to your entries and it gives the visitors one more hoop to jump to actually land on your website. You will also be limited in the types of affiliate advertising you can do if the blog is not hosted on your own domain and website.
If you have a website and want to add a blog, you can do it with products like Wordpress.org. This is a free product that allows you to add a blog to your site if you have the right platform. You can always check with your web host too, to see if they have a way to add a blog to your site.
So, when you build a website, you can build it just to have a sales page that leads directly to your products or you can build a more robust site with some content. A blog can provide the perfect foil for sales offers because you can market it as informational and the Google search engine will see content on your site, ranking it higher in search results and thus bringing more traffic.
Of course, a blog is not much good if no one reads it. So, you will have to market the blog as much as you market your products, so as to bring in visitors. You can do this by making your blog easy to bookmark with the bigger portals like Technorati, Digg, Stumbleupon, and more. See the Resource section for some good tools to help you market your blog on the Internet for a wider exposure. This includes adding information about your blog and website into relevant Internet directories. As with anything on the Internet, you want to set it up to be automatic so that when you publish a blog post, your subscribers are notified and major news feeds are updated.
Websites
A website can be a simple sales page with a way to capture people's emails if they are interested in your offer, or it can be a more complex membership site. It's really up to you what you choose to do to establish an Internet presence for a particular market niche. However, what you don't want is to include all your offers on one site. You want multiple sites that are all finely tuned to the audience that is showing up there. This will increase your advertising effectiveness and help you to build a network of sites across the Internet.
You can host your site on one host or on many hosts. You want to make sure you do have some sites operation should one host go down, or a section of the Internet black-out for whatever reason. If you have multiple sites and all networked to different areas on the network, you won't have to worry that all your income will go down at once. There will always be some offer up, regardless.
You websites should be simple to set up and you should make extensive use of templates and turn-key systems to help you set up a domain, a sales page, autoresponders for your offers, and even payment collection systems. The technology is there to make setting up an online business easy, but you don't want to be the one fussing with scripts or endlessly fiddling with the look of a site. Instead, focus on the copy, use the templates, set up the system, and let it run. If you have to pay someone occasionally to add some feature, that's fine, but try to keep your technology simple enough to implement over and over in rapid-fire succession to build an online empire.
Forums
More complicated sites can include memberships and forums. You don't have to be a geek to set these up either. You can buy a forum that has already been developed by someone else through various sites for developers. They just transfer the domain to you and the hosting fees too and you can become the proud owner of a forum without ever doing a single line of code.
Forums have some pros and cons to them. You do have a captive audience where you can promote your products without being accused of spamming anyone. However, forums require more maintenance than a typical website because people do attempt to spam forums for their own agendas. So, you may be left either facilitating discussions or blocking certain users who abuse the forum rules. The payback is that you do end up having a direct connection to your customers and they are usually willing to buy from someone whom they trust.
One of the truly wonderful things about a forum is that you can bypass some troubles that you might get with email autoresponders. If you send large emails to your members often, the email provider can block you as a spammer. If you send instant messages on the forum to all your members, they can get your message right away and you aren't competing with anyone else's email or fighting their email provider for a right to land in their inbox. That doesn't mean, however, that you can't use email but that building a social network is becoming more the norm than mass email campaigns.
Email
Email is still popular, but you have to use it with some additional caveats. You can't just send out a mass email to people who have not given you permission to correspond with them or sign-up to your email list. This is called spamming and, in some cases, you can end up in legal trouble over this practice.
So, on your website, you want a way to capture a person's email. This can be done by putting up forms that capture, not only the email of a person who wants a specific offer (usually a freebie incentive), but also the physical address too. If you currently do not have a way for people to get some instant offer in exchange for an email address, you are missing the first step in funneling them into your community or sales funnel. Without the email and permission to contact them, you won't be able to market them effectively online. So, it pays to get that email address somehow.
Long Term Business Ideas
Although we discussed a little about keywords, which is also known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you might think that this will be the wave of the future. This is really a snapshot of the present moment and anything that Google gives, Google can just as easily take away in the next moment. So, although you want to be familiar with strategies that can get you traffic from the current methods being used, you don't want to end up devoting all of your time to techniques that might not be viable tomorrow. Instead, you should look for ways to set up systems that will work, regardless of what happens in the future to any one company.
Target Hot Markets
Always develop your market niche with the bottom line in mind. Don't waste your time on dead markets. You want to be able to put up a website offer that gets instant return on the money, not something that may or may not be profitable in the future. You don't want to have to try and create desire, that never works. Instead, you want to go where the desire exists already and is waiting to be satisfied with your offers. As long as you continue to do the research on what markets are hottest and what is selling fast, you can make some good money now and in the future.
Once you target your copy to those markets and start generating traffic from people who are attracted to this market niche, the rest is simple. You want to create a system that starts making those visitors customers, as quickly as possible.
Create An Automated Sales System
The way to create an automated sales system that takes advantage of the great desire a segment of the population might have for some product or service, is to follow three easy steps.
The trick to automating this entire process, however, is in how you set up the email system. You want to set up autoresponders to be able to send out products once a sale has been made. You don't want to have to check your email all the time, and manually respond to each one by attaching the report they've requested. Instead, you want the system to do it for you. You want your offer to send email to an autoresponder that replies with the free report. You don't even have to ever see that someone requested it. You can also set up your payment processor to send an email to a specific email autoresponder that can respond with any product you are selling, without having to constantly manage incoming and outgoing emails. This way, you can set up a site, set up the offers, set up the autoresponders, and then walk away. All you're interested in is the dollar signs that you make at end of each month that should be automatically deposited into your payment collection areas.
Create Self-Perpetuating Communities
Social networking is a great way to create self-perpetuating communities that create content and buzz for your products and services. You can do this by simply adding a forum to your site and signing up a few people to get the ball rolling. Some people even choose to pay a few contributors until the community takes hold, but it's really up to you. You can create multiple user names for yourself and just add multiple entries under your own name to build up the appearance of a larger community until more people join up.
Forums and networking sites are a great way to get other people to work for you. They are also a great place to sell online advertising to other people, if you want to make money that way. Or, if you want to concentrate on your own products, you still have a captive audience that will allow you to post any advertisement you want in front of them.
Get As Many Affiliates As Possible
You will want to sign up as many affiliates as possible to sell your products for you. The way to do this is to offer them a higher commission. It wouldn't be a bad thing if you gave them 60 to 70% of the sale, even if that sounds outrageous. The fact is that you want them to do the selling while you go off to create more sites. If you have 1000 people selling your ebooks for you and you don't have to do any of the sales, you are free to develop more streams of income while collecting on old ones. If you only have a few people selling your products though, it won't be worth it. You want to maximize the potential for income without having to do too much of the actual work.
And, remember that affiliates don't just make sales, but they also boost the traffic to your site. So, why wouldn't you want someone publicizing some of your offers for you? Each site itself will start to grow in value and you will eventually be able to sell the entire thing to someone else for quite a handsome profit, if you ever wanted to move on.
Offer Free Items Frequently
Okay, you're probably scratching your head at this one. How can you make money if you keep giving things away for free? Well, because the power of the Internet is about exposure and leveraging your paying offers within free items. So, even though you give away something for free, it doesn't mean you won't get something back. And, if you want something to go “viral” on the Internet, you have to give it away. Once something goes viral and propagates all over the Internet like a runaway meme, you have the potential to make BIG money on any embedded link offers that were within that free report or item. At the very least, you should have a URL in the free reports pointing back to your website so that if it goes viral you reap a huge amount of traffic.
Now, if you want to keep people coming back over and over, then you can offer free items on a regular basis as part of the sign up. Some people do this by offering a free monthly newsletter. The newsletter should have valuable information in it, but it should also include links to your offers so that you are marketing them yet again while appearing to be quite altruistic. Not only to people look forward to good newsletters, but sometimes they even forward them to their friends too. If you send out a paper newsletter, people have it in front of them all the time around the house and it can be a way to get some direct mail customers, however, the cost of mailing is higher.
Another popular way to generate interest and increase sales is to do contests for free things. These work very well on content sites with forums. Say you want to get people to contribute more content. You can either pay a bunch of people to write posts, or you can sponsor a contest with one of your products as the prize. Not only do you get a bunch of people competing and adding valuable content to your site, thus building your community, but you also get to advertise your product while you are doing. Those that don't win still know where they can buy your product.
Monthly Subscriptions
If you manage to build a community site, you will want to offer some membership subscriptions. There are several reasons for doing so. It goes back to the idea that you are creating a group with higher status than just the regular people who visit your site. You will let this elite group in on extra discounts, specials, tips, and goodies that the rest don't get. And, this will appeal to people.
The other reason is that you make a residual income with monthly subscriptions. You don't even have to charge much. If you just charge $5 for instance and offer a $25 discount for signing up, it will appear that the subscription pays for itself. The thing is though, that people often forget where they've signed up and that $5 a month may end up being deposited in your account for years because they won't take the trouble to unsubscribe. It's like the concept of the gym membership you never use. You don't cancel it because you think you might use it in the future, and besides (you reason), it's not that much to hold on to. Further, if you make it hard to find out how to unsubscribe people might just give up and forget the matter entirely. If only have 20 people do that each week, you have an additional income of $5,200/year for doing absolutely nothing.
Good Ol' Marketing
You've probably noticed that the strategies that are sure to work on the Internet are not new. They are time-tested ways of making money, just applied to your online business. Just because your business is now on the Internet doesn't mean that the basics of good marketing don't apply. They actually apply more and you need to always keep in mind that what works to sell your products and services is plain old advertising and creative offers.
You can have the fanciest website out there, but fail miserably to sell your products and services. You can spend a fortune to create a full-featured community website and never make a sale. You can even have a thoroughly innovative concept for the Internet that you think will go viral, and never does. Why? It's probably due to the lack of good ol' marketing common sense. This is what happened to the dot coms that thought that just because they spent a fortune to put up a complicated site that they would reap huge returns on their investments. They didn't and the investors to these sites lost money too. You cannot replace marketing common sense with technology. You can only make technology work to help you become a better marketer. Don't make the same mistake that people did during the dot com bust. Instead, focus on keeping things simple and falling back on marketing strategies that will remain classic no matter when they are implemented.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Once you come upon a strategy or technique that works for you, all you have to do to make more money is to wash, rinse, and repeat it. That's right. You will take the same type of offers and techniques and simply put them on all the other websites you created selling different product lines to diversity your income.
The Art Of Persuasion
Just as the Internet becomes more sophisticated, so do the buyers browsing online. What might have worked before doesn't have the same impact where visitors to your site have become more discriminating buyers. You will find that you need to hold your buyers hand a bit more these days and lead them to close the sale, despite their many resistances or how jaded they are about prior online relationships. In other words, you will need to seduce your visitors to convert them to customers.
Social networking also has had an impact on how people do business. It's interesting to note that ecommerce used to be something that only the daring did. People were aghast at putting their credit card numbers into an online payment form. It simply wasn't to be trusted, no matter how trusted the company or brand happened to be. Now, the opposite trend tends to be more true. People are more comfortable with the idea of online payment systems, but quite distrustful of who they will do agree to do business with online. They want to trust the site or the seller first before they agree to buy anything.
This is why social networking is becoming increasingly popular. Now, you don't have to rely on your gut instincts, as a buyer, to find out whether someone is trustworthy or not. You can get online into a social networking community and see what your friends are buying and what they are saying about it. That's why many of the larger companies have a way for buyers to offer feedback on their products that other visitors can view, it makes other people browsing more secure that they can trust the site to deliver what they say they are selling.
While it may be a little harder to get that first sale from someone, the good news is that subsequent sales are very easy because you've already gotten past the buyer's resistances. So, it is well worth taking the extra time to seduce your visitors and to learn the psychology of online sales seduction to increase your bottom line.
Learn The Art Of Attraction
To seduce anyone, you have to find out what they desire and then fulfill then offer yourself as the solution to fulfill that desire. This can be a little tricky because often the person themselves doesn't understand what they really want, only that at times some offers are more attractive to them than others. You can take a very general approach, when you first start, to learn what makes your sale copy attractive and what doesn't. Then, later, you can start to target the specific demographic traits of your primary audience to trigger them to buy even more than they might otherwise.
First off, to learn what is attractive, you will have to learn what kind of behavior will repel someone too. Then, choosing to avoid those behaviors is a step in the right direction. Now, think back to your own relationships and what is the number one turn-off in romantic relationships? It's when someone becomes desperate to be with you. That's about the time you lose total interest in the other person! Why is that? It's because you send out an energy of is so needy that it feels like it's sucking the energy right out of you. It becomes a demanding and draining experience to be around someone who think so little of themselves that they have to define themselves by their relationship to you.
The same thing is true with your sales copy. If you make your sales copy sound desperate to connect to the visitors to your site, they will be so completely turned off that you won't make a single sale. Sure, in the past, this type of “hard sell” approach might have worked, but these days the playing field is much different and people who browse the Internet know that you aren't the only potential lover on the game board. Why stick with someone who thinks so little of themselves that they must convince you to start a relationship with them? Nope, that's completely the wrong approach!
Instead, the art of seduction demands a little more confidence. Your sales letter shouldn't attempt to convince someone that you need them, rather that they need you. The way you can do this is by writing in a style that projects a degree of authority about your products and services. Instead of selling someone, you are just telling them the benefits of a relationship with you. Instead of convincing someone, you are educating them so they are better informed about their choices. You are going to build the case that your product is the best around because you believe it to be true. And, you will do it in an upbeat tone that is infectious and will want to make people approach you to make a sale, rather than you begging them to buy. Remember that all great seducers in history did not dominate their targets, they simply offered them a deal that was too hard to resist. The reason they were so successful with many people is because they understood that most people want to close that deal that will solve some heartfelt desire for them, they just need to trust you to do it with you.
Change Your Marketing Mindset
So, now you are not setting down to write sales copy because you need to convince someone to buy your product. Instead, you are projecting an aura of confidence and positivity that is difficult for people to ignore. That confidence should shine through in every word your write, from the hook in your title, to the list of benefits too. You have got to be able to project the confidence you have about this opportunity that you are offering other people to use to solve their problem, make their lives easier, make money, or any other motivation that you have targeted in your core audience. You don't just think they will benefit from it – you know it!
That's why you always endeavor to sell products and services that resonate with who you are. This is also much more important in the world of social networking where a dissonance between your online networking image and your products can provoke people to distrust anything you say or any offer you make. The key to really selling well in today's social networking sites is to be as authentic as you can be. The more your feelings, thoughts, words, and products match who you are, the more confidence you have that they are valuable to you and to others. If you are selling something to someone just to make a fast buck, you can bet that people will quickly figure it out and it can harm you in the long run even if you make that short-term fast buck. However, if you value what you are offering, others will sense that genuineness and it will give you an aura of confidence and trustworthiness.
How Much Are You Worth?
In romance, like in life, it isn't always about how rich you are, how beautiful you are, or how young you happen to be. You can still attract a beautiful man or woman solely by being someone worth being around. With enough confidence, even an ugly man can date beautiful women. As long as you believe in yourself and value yourself, that will come forward in your relationships as a calm, soothing, and attractive confidence that inspires other people to want to be with you.
Have you ever noticed that people who have the most self-confidence usually appraise their own worth much more than people with low self-esteem? This attitude of self-appreciation is noticeable and can produce a feedback loop of praise for you and your products that materializes as pure profit. Let's face it, you aren't reading this post just so that you can learn how to close any deal, you want the big bucks. Well, how much are you worth? How much do you value your products? Think about this when you begin to price your offerings. Are you pricing them to go viral (and thus giving them away) or are you pricing the value of your time (as in consulting)?
Obviously, your time and expertise are invaluable and should be priced higher than just your products. People have been known to make a living just offering seminars and workshops. There's no reason you can't do that online with today's technology and sell out far more seats than you can at a live venue. The more you value yourself and your offerings the more likelihood that attitude will creep into your sales copy and magnetize your offers and make them great sellers.
How Much Is Your Customer Worth?
This attitude of appreciation starts with self, but it doesn't end there. For a successful seduction, you should have an object of your desire too and that should be your customer. It doesn't mean that you have to be desperate to get their attention, it means that you also appreciate and value their business and relationship with you – regardless of what it ends up being. This open-ended allowance for room to grow a relationship can be a great way to foster deeper, and longer-lasting, love affairs with you and your products.
It's a well-known fact that waitresses who write the words “thank you” get better tips than waitresses who don't show their appreciation to their customers. How long does that take to write? Obviously, not long at all. The same can be done for your loyal customers – offer them your appreciation for their business by giving them things that create a mutual relationship of appreciation and trust.
Simple Things To Remember
Seduction, whether in romance or in business, demands a little understanding of the psychology of desire. The best approach for selling online uses the same path: approach indirectly, some occasional unexpected contact with your target, earn their trust, and then make the offer.
If you can't sell your product, how will you end up being able to tell your visitors about it in a way that enchants them? You will have to use the power of storytelling. If you aren't convinced of the power of storytelling, think of the story of the 1,001 Arabian Nights. This set of ancient stories are told by the protagonist, Scheherazade, who is married to a king who has vowed to kill every virgin he marries the next day. The king has been betrayed earlier by an unfaithful wife whom he loved very much. After having her executed, he declares all women unfaithful and begins to take only virgins to his marriage bed, whom he promptly executes the day after the wedding.
In order to spare her life, and the lives of the other women in the kingdom, Scheherazade volunteers to marry the king and then begins to tell a story, leaving it unended with a cliffhanger on the day she is to be executed. The king delays his intent to kill her so that he can hear the end of the story the following day, but the minute that story is ended another is began. And, it goes on thus, for 1,001 nights, after which the king repents of his murderous mission and lets his wife live. And, that's the way you can use stories to keep your customers coming back again and again, despite their desire to do otherwise.
The Elements Of A Good, Persuasive, Story
One of the classics of sales persuasion how-to books is “The Elements of Persuasion” by Maxwell and Dickman. In it, the authors discuss the five elements of a good story that will impact the psyche of your reader and burn itself into their consciousness. It makes use of the mythical hero's journey that is an archetypal pattern that everyone all over the world recognizes. The five elements are: passion, the hero, the antagonist, a moment of awareness, and finally, transformation. If you have each of these elements in your story, you will find that your as your reader goes through your sales page they will not even know they are being sold. Instead, the story will begin to mirror how they think and influence their actions subconsciously, helping you to close a deal.
Let's go over each of these elements separately, so you understand them:
After you write your hook title and list you main benefit, you can start the sales page that tells the story as to why your reader should buy your product or service. A good example of this is an ad the Wall Street Journal ran that went on to bring in over $1 billion dollars for them. It was simply titled:”Two Young Men.”
The story begins with two young men who graduate from the same college to go out into the world to make their name. After 25 years, their school has a reunion and they meet up. There, they find out both had very similar lives in that they both married, both had three children, and they even went to work for the same company after graduation. In all respects, except one, they appeared to have taken the exact same road. The difference? One was the president of the company and the other was a manager.
Of course, the telling of the story is done with more passion, but for the sake of brevity it has been condensed for this post. Here, we have two protagonists, each appearing to make the exact same choices, but one is highly successful and the other isn't so much so. What was the difference? According to the Wall Street Journal it was that one was a loyal reader of the Wall Street and the other didn't. That's the moment of awareness, not just for the protagonist who met the same set of challenges as his college buddy, but also for the reader of this story. That's what led one to be transformed from an ordinary life to an extraordinary life. And, of course, as the reader who has traveled along this road through the eyes of the hero, the hook is captivating. Who wouldn't want to invest in a copy of the Wall Street Journal with a payback that big? Who wouldn't want to be transformed overnight by using this easy solution? However, in order for them to envision how that transformation is possible in their own lives, you will need to activate their power of imagination to sell your products.
Use The Power Of Imagination To Sell
Our minds are primed to be carried away with our own imaginations. If you know how to plug into the fantastic power of your reader's minds you will be able to get them to imagine your product or services being far better than anything you can describe with simple words. Usually, people with problems are a little challenged to think up their own solutions. It's your task to help them visualize how your products or services are going to be the answer to their problems.
A good story doesn't just have a moral or an insight, it should also inspire your reader to imagine how they too can solve their problems by implementing the same strategy discussed in the sales letter. Remember that you will have to lead them by the hand because people who are experiencing difficulties often have a poor imagination. You will need to inspire them to stop focusing on the problem and instead imagine the solution – your product. How will their lives be better? What benefits do you see in their immediate future for taking action now?
If you've ever been to the free seminars to get rich quickly or to get government grants, you will notice that they try to inspire the crowd to get them to identify with the stories of people who used their products and turned their lives around. They get the crowd so pumped up that it is possible and they tap into the emotion of hope that people willing shell out thousands of dollars just to take courses to show them how to do it. Let's not forget that hope is a powerful motivator and is really central to the hero's journey. If the hero gives up, it's all over. He or she has to be inspired to get past the struggle to get to the moment of awareness that will lead to the final, dramatic, and transforming conclusion.
Drama And Controversy
You may think that your story has to come off as some Pollyanna version of the ideal utopia, if your reader would just buy your product. Your sales letter doesn't have to take this approach, and as we mentioned earlier, people are often motivated more by fear and curiosity than anything else. The thing that engages readers that will trigger fear and hope in your reader is drama and controversy. That's why news agencies always have powerful, dramatic, stories going on all over the world or human interest stories that spur interest for those that get tired of all the drama.
A good drama will engage the reader's emotions, just like a good controversy. Those emotions can be positive or they can be negative. Often, the stories that get the most attention on the Internet are those that are highly controversial and dramatic. They will either trigger fear, repulsion, anger, or hope. These powerful emotions will cause your message to stick more in the memory of your reader than any Pollyanna story ever will.
When you consider how to bring drama or controversy into your sales page, be careful. You don't want to risk offending your primary audience. You want something to be controversial enough to generate traffic and discussion (if you have a members site), but not so offending that you end up with death threats in your email inbox. You want to build excitement and interest, not hate.
And, remember that every controversy in business is also a business opportunity. When someone like eBay's makes a controversial decision to stop allow infoproduct marketers to use their auctions unless the product is delivered in physical format like a CD, that becomes a firestorm all over the Internet. Blogs discussed this controversial policy endlessly and only a few smart marketers took the opportunity to sell products that show business owners how to convert their business models from virtual to physical products for eBay. These are the people who made money due to a controversy that they didn't even start.
The Story Of Your Sales Page
You do want to tell a simple story to get your point across, but remember this is still a sales page. After you've hooked your reader, you want to start selling the benefits of your product or services. You want to make it easy for them to envision themselves as the hero on a hero's journey that ends at buying your products or services. You want to be entertaining, educational, and dramatic. You don't want to be too long-winded, but say as much as you need to in order to overcome any objections someone might have to buying your product. How long should your sales page be? It should be as long as it needs to be to close the deal. There's no set length. There are some people who say the longer the better, and there are others that suggest brevity and mystery work too. Try out both types and see what works on your audience.
At the point that someone becomes engaged in the story, you've already won half the battle. If the sales page then becomes less story and more of an offer, the shift may not even be noticed. Your reader will be so engaged, they will think it was their brilliance that led them to your page, their luck that they happened on some solution that is going to set them apart from their peers, and they will be thoroughly seduced into taking action by signing up for your free report or actually buying a product at that time. It's up to you what you want to build with that particular sales page. If you are confident the offer is so good that an instant sale can be made, ask your buyer to take action NOW in order to benefit from this stroke of luck.
You don't want them to go away and think about it. You don't want them to check out your competitor's products or prices. You want to have a sense of urgency in the sales letter that makes it imperative for them to take action right now, while the offer is still up or while it can do them some good. If you aren't sure how to set up a limited offer by now, you can go back to Chapter The Art Of Persuasion and read the suggestions there and implement at the end of your sales page.
The Coveted Offer
The mind is a magnificent tool that can be trained to work for you, even when you are sleeping. The mind works very much like a computer. Whatever you put in it, it will only too gladly crunch and return more of the same. As they say, “garbage in, garbage out.” However, in this case, you're going to be putting seeds of creativity into your mind and reaping imaginative and creative offers that will spur your business to a higher level.
When No Means Yes
If you understand how to set intentions you can get your overactive mind to come up with creative offer ideas out of thin air. The way you are going to capture that power is by setting up the right conditions to get the results you want. Then, you're going to go off to do something else and let the marvelous computer spit out the results when it's ready. To do this you have to remember one thing about your mind: It doesn't understand the word no.
The word no is ignored by your mind. That's why when you are wandering around saying, “no more of this” you get heaps more of whatever it is you are concentrating on. Your mind, like the universe, doesn't work with negative language. It only understands the positive intention behind the negative language. It only produces more of that which you concentrate on, even if what you are concentrating on is negativity.
If you don't believe that's true, why do you think people always think of pink elephants when they are expressedly told not to think of them? It's because the intention is set on pink elephants, not the negative affirmation. Now, that you understand that, you can use this information to start creating offers from thin air by using the mind's propensity to crunch whatever intention is put into it.
How Just ½ Hour Of Time Can Produce Results
If you are trying to gain muscles, you can't expect that one push-up will transform your body overnight. Exercise may be what gets you there, but without investing some time into your exercise routine, you'll never get the results you want. Well, the same is true of your brain. The good news is that you can start getting results with just ½ hour of your time.
When researchers studied the brain's memory capacity, they found out something interesting. College students that were asked to think of all the words that started with the letter C within 30 minutes and list them, still ended up thinking of new words at least 3 days after the experiment ended. From that, it can be surmised that it only takes ½ hour to set an intention and let the brain realize, “Hey, this guy is really serious! He really wants me to pay attention!” Once it gets that this isn't something that is a short-term fancy, the brain will store it in a space where it can continue to work on it – even after you're done concentrating on your intention!
Think about it. You spend just ½ hour thinking up different offers or marketing strategies to help boost your business and then you get up and do other things. For up to three days after that, your mind will be coming up with ideas at different times and tapping you on the shoulder to let you know that it's got yet another idea! Isn't that worth 30 minutes of your time?
Be Prepared At All Times
Okay, so you concentrate for ½ hour and then you decide to take a shower. There you are, singing the latest country song to the shower head in your hand and your brain taps you on the shoulder and whispers in your ear: “I got another fantastic idea!” And you say: “What?! Now?! Wait, wait...” Of course, that's what happens. The best ideas always come in the middle of the night or some other inconvenient time. Well, be prepared. You didn't spend 30 minutes of your time to get your brain to work for you and then decide you can't be bothered with the answer.
Audio Recording Devices
You can take advantage of those brainstorms by getting a small micro cassette audio recording device that can help you store that information for later use. These devices are highly portable, making it easy to take with you anywhere. An extension of this, for people who don't want to have to transcribe their thoughts into written format is to use voice recognition software to help with managing your brainstorms. Some good products are Dragon Naturally Speaking or IBM's ViaVoice.
Journals Or Notebooks
You can use a journal by the side of the bed to jot down ideas that come to you in the middle of the night. You can even use this method in the car, if you don't try to write while you're driving. Just have a small notepad available to jot down ideas that come forward from your subconscious after you've set your intention. This is a very inexpensive way to keep track of your ideas when you first start.
PDAs
Personal Digital Assistants are like an electronic notebook. They'll obviously cost more than just a pad of paper, but many people swear by them. They sort of bridge the gap between getting your words in a format that can't be transferred to your computer easily because you can synchronize and upload what you write in them to your computer. You will really have to justify paying for these fancy little toys as they can cost several hundred dollars. You won't be able to sketch any pictures for your ideas, but that may not be an issue.
Send Yourself Reminders
If you have voicemail or email you can send yourself reminders. Just open up your email program and send yourself and email. The nice thing about this is that you can later file it in an ideas folder. The same can be done with voicemail if you have a way to leave yourself a message. The problem with some of these solutions is that ideas don't normally show up just when you sit down to the computer or when your phone is handy.
Be A Copy Cat
Having trouble getting inspired for even 30 minutes? Why not check out what your competition is doing? If it is driving up their sales odds are the same strategy will also work for you. There are plenty of people who have made lots of money just copying other people. Japanese goods used to be mocked as cheap knock-offs until they started making copies that were even better than the originals! Then, they not only competed better in the market, but they made a ton of money. You can too. It doesn't take a genius to recognize a good idea when it shows up, even if it's not your own.
One word of caution here, though. You don't want to blatantly take someone else's product and put your name on it. This is copyright infringement and you could be sued. If you bought resell rights, you still need to make sure you stay within the terms of the agreement. You might be required to sell the product for a particular price or keep the original creator's links or information within the product. Always stick to the terms of the license so that you don't end up regretting it later.
Who To Copy
Don't just copy anyone, copy people who are successful marketers and networkers. This is easy to do if you join any of the social networking sites (some are listed in the resource section at the end of this post). All you have to do is see how many friends they have and if they are using their profile to promote their businesses. Then, you simply copy what they are doing.
You will find that these marketers all have on thing in common: They use the power of the Internet to spread news about their offerings to everyone and everywhere. When they put up a blog post, they link it in to several different areas where there are people who might read. They use newsfeeds. They bookmark their sites and content in various areas from digg.com to del.icio.us. Although it takes a few extra minutes of their time to do this, the reward for added exposure makes up for it in spades.
Keep visiting these people to see what new tricks they come up with. They may do all the research for you and you just simply copy what they do. They will probably be interested in learning what new applications work best for promotion and add them into their profiles. Your newsfeed will let you know what they are adding in Facebook and you can simply check out what they are adding and see if it will work for you. Odds are, it will.
Another great way to find out what kind of maneuvers to do is to copy your competitors. That's right. You visit their sites, you find out what they are doing, and then you simply emulate them and thank them for the wonderful ideas. You can do this online by doing a little research on your competitors through the Alexa search engine. Or, if you're really sneaky, you may wonder who is linking to your competitors sites and see if you can target them to become part of your network. That's not as hard to do as you'd think since there is a search engine called at www.backlinkwatch.com that will tell you who is linking to any url, including your own.
You can take this Internet spying a step further by finding out which keywords your competitors are copying in their campaigns and then using them on your websites too. That's easy enough to do on the Internet with keyword analyzing tools like available at www.webceo.com . If you don't want to download a tool, there are plenty of online website keyword analyzers that will give you results that may be a bit confusing at first, but also enlightening. Just plug into any search engine the words “keyword analyzer url” and you will get a good list. A good one to use might be www.submitexpress.com/analyzer.
Niche Sites
The first thing you want to do is start to create niche sites. A niche site is one website that is targeting a particular product or market segment and is fully devoted to that enterprise. You don't want a site that sells everything to everyone because buyers will become confused with all the different offers. You want a website that is carefully built to target the type of audience that buys your products or services.
How do you do that? Can you control who ends up coming to visit your website?
Again, on the Internet, this is a whole lot easier than it sounds. You have to remember that the #1 way people get to sites is through the search engines. Search engines like Google also have immense resources to help you generate copy that targets your niche and will show up as a result in the search when someone is looking for that particular product or service. So, you don't have to control the person coming to visit your site at all! You just control the copy you put on your niche site and it will control the type of audience that shows up at your door. And, the nice thing about using copy that brings the right audience is that you can hook it up to Google's Adwords campaign and make money that way too.
Google Keyword Tool
This easy-to-use tool is available to anyone with an Internet connection, whether you have a Google Adwords account or not. It helps you to research different words to find similar and high-paying words and the amount of competition for exposure of those keywords. It is located here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal .
So, say you want to do a website on a niche you think will be highly profitable: stamp collecting. So, you put in “stamp collecting” as the keyword to find similar keywords that might be able to bring traffic from people interested in collecting stamps to your website. The tool will generate a list of words with the advertising competition and the approximate search volume for keyword in the current month. If you want to see how much that keyword is worth in a Google Adwords campaign, you can also click the drop-down list that says “Show/hide columns” and choose to show the estimated average CPC.
The first thing you will notice is that not that many people are interested in searching for stamp collecting on the Internet. There were only 33,100 searches for stamp collecting using those keywords in the month of June, 2008, that’s out of millions and millions of people who use Google and search the Internet. So, right there, you know that this niche is not a good idea. So, you change your mind and try scrap booking instead. By entering the term “scrapbook” you see that for the month of June, 2008, 1,220,000 searches were done on that keyword – a much better number than stamp collecting.
Now, you turn your attention to the list of keywords and see that there is some stiff competition for using these keywords. Your goal is to find some terms that have a high search volume and low competition OR a high CPC value. As you do the research, you will eventually build a list of keywords that suits your purposes and these will be what you can use to build your niche site. Don't forget, that you can do this with numerous words to find some great keywords. So, you might look up crafts too when targeting a scrap booking site.
Once you have a great list, you will start to create copy based on those keywords. Your entire site you have plenty of content to lure people into your site and rank higher in the search engines. That's why many people use blogs (web logs) to help keep content fresh and bring in new keywords so that the search engines will start to find their site quicker and bring traffic in to their sales funnel.
You will use the keywords in the categories in your web log to help place you higher in the search engine, and you will want to create a strategy where the keywords have a density of about 1 to 2% of the entire copy. There is debate on what is the best density, but don't make it too high or Google will actually penalize the ranking on the search engine for spamming keywords on your site.
If you don't have the time to write these articles or the inclination, don't be afraid to go to www.elance.com and hire writers who can do it for you. You can buy sets of articles in bulk and that will allow you to roll them out on your time schedule and always have fresh content on hand. And, if you sign up as a Google Adwords advertiser you can make income if you add Google advertising to your site or blog.
More About Blogs
Blogs that are hosted on your website make great marketing tools. You can create a blog on a third-party site, but that can limit your ability to add Google advertising to your entries and it gives the visitors one more hoop to jump to actually land on your website. You will also be limited in the types of affiliate advertising you can do if the blog is not hosted on your own domain and website.
If you have a website and want to add a blog, you can do it with products like Wordpress.org. This is a free product that allows you to add a blog to your site if you have the right platform. You can always check with your web host too, to see if they have a way to add a blog to your site.
So, when you build a website, you can build it just to have a sales page that leads directly to your products or you can build a more robust site with some content. A blog can provide the perfect foil for sales offers because you can market it as informational and the Google search engine will see content on your site, ranking it higher in search results and thus bringing more traffic.
Of course, a blog is not much good if no one reads it. So, you will have to market the blog as much as you market your products, so as to bring in visitors. You can do this by making your blog easy to bookmark with the bigger portals like Technorati, Digg, Stumbleupon, and more. See the Resource section for some good tools to help you market your blog on the Internet for a wider exposure. This includes adding information about your blog and website into relevant Internet directories. As with anything on the Internet, you want to set it up to be automatic so that when you publish a blog post, your subscribers are notified and major news feeds are updated.
Websites
A website can be a simple sales page with a way to capture people's emails if they are interested in your offer, or it can be a more complex membership site. It's really up to you what you choose to do to establish an Internet presence for a particular market niche. However, what you don't want is to include all your offers on one site. You want multiple sites that are all finely tuned to the audience that is showing up there. This will increase your advertising effectiveness and help you to build a network of sites across the Internet.
You can host your site on one host or on many hosts. You want to make sure you do have some sites operation should one host go down, or a section of the Internet black-out for whatever reason. If you have multiple sites and all networked to different areas on the network, you won't have to worry that all your income will go down at once. There will always be some offer up, regardless.
You websites should be simple to set up and you should make extensive use of templates and turn-key systems to help you set up a domain, a sales page, autoresponders for your offers, and even payment collection systems. The technology is there to make setting up an online business easy, but you don't want to be the one fussing with scripts or endlessly fiddling with the look of a site. Instead, focus on the copy, use the templates, set up the system, and let it run. If you have to pay someone occasionally to add some feature, that's fine, but try to keep your technology simple enough to implement over and over in rapid-fire succession to build an online empire.
Forums
More complicated sites can include memberships and forums. You don't have to be a geek to set these up either. You can buy a forum that has already been developed by someone else through various sites for developers. They just transfer the domain to you and the hosting fees too and you can become the proud owner of a forum without ever doing a single line of code.
Forums have some pros and cons to them. You do have a captive audience where you can promote your products without being accused of spamming anyone. However, forums require more maintenance than a typical website because people do attempt to spam forums for their own agendas. So, you may be left either facilitating discussions or blocking certain users who abuse the forum rules. The payback is that you do end up having a direct connection to your customers and they are usually willing to buy from someone whom they trust.
One of the truly wonderful things about a forum is that you can bypass some troubles that you might get with email autoresponders. If you send large emails to your members often, the email provider can block you as a spammer. If you send instant messages on the forum to all your members, they can get your message right away and you aren't competing with anyone else's email or fighting their email provider for a right to land in their inbox. That doesn't mean, however, that you can't use email but that building a social network is becoming more the norm than mass email campaigns.
Email is still popular, but you have to use it with some additional caveats. You can't just send out a mass email to people who have not given you permission to correspond with them or sign-up to your email list. This is called spamming and, in some cases, you can end up in legal trouble over this practice.
So, on your website, you want a way to capture a person's email. This can be done by putting up forms that capture, not only the email of a person who wants a specific offer (usually a freebie incentive), but also the physical address too. If you currently do not have a way for people to get some instant offer in exchange for an email address, you are missing the first step in funneling them into your community or sales funnel. Without the email and permission to contact them, you won't be able to market them effectively online. So, it pays to get that email address somehow.
Long Term Business Ideas
Although we discussed a little about keywords, which is also known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you might think that this will be the wave of the future. This is really a snapshot of the present moment and anything that Google gives, Google can just as easily take away in the next moment. So, although you want to be familiar with strategies that can get you traffic from the current methods being used, you don't want to end up devoting all of your time to techniques that might not be viable tomorrow. Instead, you should look for ways to set up systems that will work, regardless of what happens in the future to any one company.
Target Hot Markets
Always develop your market niche with the bottom line in mind. Don't waste your time on dead markets. You want to be able to put up a website offer that gets instant return on the money, not something that may or may not be profitable in the future. You don't want to have to try and create desire, that never works. Instead, you want to go where the desire exists already and is waiting to be satisfied with your offers. As long as you continue to do the research on what markets are hottest and what is selling fast, you can make some good money now and in the future.
Once you target your copy to those markets and start generating traffic from people who are attracted to this market niche, the rest is simple. You want to create a system that starts making those visitors customers, as quickly as possible.
Create An Automated Sales System
The way to create an automated sales system that takes advantage of the great desire a segment of the population might have for some product or service, is to follow three easy steps.
- Make A Great Offer – This is the first powerful hook for the people who happen on your website. The ad can be for something like a free report that will be provided for adding their email to your list. Or, it can be for a discount coupon code available for those that sign up their email address. The whole point is to get that email address as quickly as possible while providing some incentive to purchase in step 2.
- Fabulous Sales Letter – If you are giving away the free report, this should actually be your sales letter in disguise. Include great information about the topic, but also include information that sells your products and services through the report copy.
- Add Affiliate Offers – Just in case they don't buy your products, that doesn't mean you still can't make a sale. Include information on affiliate offers that can provide a stream of income for you, whether they choose your product or not.
The trick to automating this entire process, however, is in how you set up the email system. You want to set up autoresponders to be able to send out products once a sale has been made. You don't want to have to check your email all the time, and manually respond to each one by attaching the report they've requested. Instead, you want the system to do it for you. You want your offer to send email to an autoresponder that replies with the free report. You don't even have to ever see that someone requested it. You can also set up your payment processor to send an email to a specific email autoresponder that can respond with any product you are selling, without having to constantly manage incoming and outgoing emails. This way, you can set up a site, set up the offers, set up the autoresponders, and then walk away. All you're interested in is the dollar signs that you make at end of each month that should be automatically deposited into your payment collection areas.
Create Self-Perpetuating Communities
Social networking is a great way to create self-perpetuating communities that create content and buzz for your products and services. You can do this by simply adding a forum to your site and signing up a few people to get the ball rolling. Some people even choose to pay a few contributors until the community takes hold, but it's really up to you. You can create multiple user names for yourself and just add multiple entries under your own name to build up the appearance of a larger community until more people join up.
Forums and networking sites are a great way to get other people to work for you. They are also a great place to sell online advertising to other people, if you want to make money that way. Or, if you want to concentrate on your own products, you still have a captive audience that will allow you to post any advertisement you want in front of them.
Get As Many Affiliates As Possible
You will want to sign up as many affiliates as possible to sell your products for you. The way to do this is to offer them a higher commission. It wouldn't be a bad thing if you gave them 60 to 70% of the sale, even if that sounds outrageous. The fact is that you want them to do the selling while you go off to create more sites. If you have 1000 people selling your ebooks for you and you don't have to do any of the sales, you are free to develop more streams of income while collecting on old ones. If you only have a few people selling your products though, it won't be worth it. You want to maximize the potential for income without having to do too much of the actual work.
And, remember that affiliates don't just make sales, but they also boost the traffic to your site. So, why wouldn't you want someone publicizing some of your offers for you? Each site itself will start to grow in value and you will eventually be able to sell the entire thing to someone else for quite a handsome profit, if you ever wanted to move on.
Offer Free Items Frequently
Okay, you're probably scratching your head at this one. How can you make money if you keep giving things away for free? Well, because the power of the Internet is about exposure and leveraging your paying offers within free items. So, even though you give away something for free, it doesn't mean you won't get something back. And, if you want something to go “viral” on the Internet, you have to give it away. Once something goes viral and propagates all over the Internet like a runaway meme, you have the potential to make BIG money on any embedded link offers that were within that free report or item. At the very least, you should have a URL in the free reports pointing back to your website so that if it goes viral you reap a huge amount of traffic.
Now, if you want to keep people coming back over and over, then you can offer free items on a regular basis as part of the sign up. Some people do this by offering a free monthly newsletter. The newsletter should have valuable information in it, but it should also include links to your offers so that you are marketing them yet again while appearing to be quite altruistic. Not only to people look forward to good newsletters, but sometimes they even forward them to their friends too. If you send out a paper newsletter, people have it in front of them all the time around the house and it can be a way to get some direct mail customers, however, the cost of mailing is higher.
Another popular way to generate interest and increase sales is to do contests for free things. These work very well on content sites with forums. Say you want to get people to contribute more content. You can either pay a bunch of people to write posts, or you can sponsor a contest with one of your products as the prize. Not only do you get a bunch of people competing and adding valuable content to your site, thus building your community, but you also get to advertise your product while you are doing. Those that don't win still know where they can buy your product.
Monthly Subscriptions
If you manage to build a community site, you will want to offer some membership subscriptions. There are several reasons for doing so. It goes back to the idea that you are creating a group with higher status than just the regular people who visit your site. You will let this elite group in on extra discounts, specials, tips, and goodies that the rest don't get. And, this will appeal to people.
The other reason is that you make a residual income with monthly subscriptions. You don't even have to charge much. If you just charge $5 for instance and offer a $25 discount for signing up, it will appear that the subscription pays for itself. The thing is though, that people often forget where they've signed up and that $5 a month may end up being deposited in your account for years because they won't take the trouble to unsubscribe. It's like the concept of the gym membership you never use. You don't cancel it because you think you might use it in the future, and besides (you reason), it's not that much to hold on to. Further, if you make it hard to find out how to unsubscribe people might just give up and forget the matter entirely. If only have 20 people do that each week, you have an additional income of $5,200/year for doing absolutely nothing.
Good Ol' Marketing
You've probably noticed that the strategies that are sure to work on the Internet are not new. They are time-tested ways of making money, just applied to your online business. Just because your business is now on the Internet doesn't mean that the basics of good marketing don't apply. They actually apply more and you need to always keep in mind that what works to sell your products and services is plain old advertising and creative offers.
You can have the fanciest website out there, but fail miserably to sell your products and services. You can spend a fortune to create a full-featured community website and never make a sale. You can even have a thoroughly innovative concept for the Internet that you think will go viral, and never does. Why? It's probably due to the lack of good ol' marketing common sense. This is what happened to the dot coms that thought that just because they spent a fortune to put up a complicated site that they would reap huge returns on their investments. They didn't and the investors to these sites lost money too. You cannot replace marketing common sense with technology. You can only make technology work to help you become a better marketer. Don't make the same mistake that people did during the dot com bust. Instead, focus on keeping things simple and falling back on marketing strategies that will remain classic no matter when they are implemented.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Once you come upon a strategy or technique that works for you, all you have to do to make more money is to wash, rinse, and repeat it. That's right. You will take the same type of offers and techniques and simply put them on all the other websites you created selling different product lines to diversity your income.
The Art Of Persuasion
Just as the Internet becomes more sophisticated, so do the buyers browsing online. What might have worked before doesn't have the same impact where visitors to your site have become more discriminating buyers. You will find that you need to hold your buyers hand a bit more these days and lead them to close the sale, despite their many resistances or how jaded they are about prior online relationships. In other words, you will need to seduce your visitors to convert them to customers.
Social networking also has had an impact on how people do business. It's interesting to note that ecommerce used to be something that only the daring did. People were aghast at putting their credit card numbers into an online payment form. It simply wasn't to be trusted, no matter how trusted the company or brand happened to be. Now, the opposite trend tends to be more true. People are more comfortable with the idea of online payment systems, but quite distrustful of who they will do agree to do business with online. They want to trust the site or the seller first before they agree to buy anything.
This is why social networking is becoming increasingly popular. Now, you don't have to rely on your gut instincts, as a buyer, to find out whether someone is trustworthy or not. You can get online into a social networking community and see what your friends are buying and what they are saying about it. That's why many of the larger companies have a way for buyers to offer feedback on their products that other visitors can view, it makes other people browsing more secure that they can trust the site to deliver what they say they are selling.
While it may be a little harder to get that first sale from someone, the good news is that subsequent sales are very easy because you've already gotten past the buyer's resistances. So, it is well worth taking the extra time to seduce your visitors and to learn the psychology of online sales seduction to increase your bottom line.
Learn The Art Of Attraction
To seduce anyone, you have to find out what they desire and then fulfill then offer yourself as the solution to fulfill that desire. This can be a little tricky because often the person themselves doesn't understand what they really want, only that at times some offers are more attractive to them than others. You can take a very general approach, when you first start, to learn what makes your sale copy attractive and what doesn't. Then, later, you can start to target the specific demographic traits of your primary audience to trigger them to buy even more than they might otherwise.
First off, to learn what is attractive, you will have to learn what kind of behavior will repel someone too. Then, choosing to avoid those behaviors is a step in the right direction. Now, think back to your own relationships and what is the number one turn-off in romantic relationships? It's when someone becomes desperate to be with you. That's about the time you lose total interest in the other person! Why is that? It's because you send out an energy of is so needy that it feels like it's sucking the energy right out of you. It becomes a demanding and draining experience to be around someone who think so little of themselves that they have to define themselves by their relationship to you.
The same thing is true with your sales copy. If you make your sales copy sound desperate to connect to the visitors to your site, they will be so completely turned off that you won't make a single sale. Sure, in the past, this type of “hard sell” approach might have worked, but these days the playing field is much different and people who browse the Internet know that you aren't the only potential lover on the game board. Why stick with someone who thinks so little of themselves that they must convince you to start a relationship with them? Nope, that's completely the wrong approach!
Instead, the art of seduction demands a little more confidence. Your sales letter shouldn't attempt to convince someone that you need them, rather that they need you. The way you can do this is by writing in a style that projects a degree of authority about your products and services. Instead of selling someone, you are just telling them the benefits of a relationship with you. Instead of convincing someone, you are educating them so they are better informed about their choices. You are going to build the case that your product is the best around because you believe it to be true. And, you will do it in an upbeat tone that is infectious and will want to make people approach you to make a sale, rather than you begging them to buy. Remember that all great seducers in history did not dominate their targets, they simply offered them a deal that was too hard to resist. The reason they were so successful with many people is because they understood that most people want to close that deal that will solve some heartfelt desire for them, they just need to trust you to do it with you.
Change Your Marketing Mindset
So, now you are not setting down to write sales copy because you need to convince someone to buy your product. Instead, you are projecting an aura of confidence and positivity that is difficult for people to ignore. That confidence should shine through in every word your write, from the hook in your title, to the list of benefits too. You have got to be able to project the confidence you have about this opportunity that you are offering other people to use to solve their problem, make their lives easier, make money, or any other motivation that you have targeted in your core audience. You don't just think they will benefit from it – you know it!
That's why you always endeavor to sell products and services that resonate with who you are. This is also much more important in the world of social networking where a dissonance between your online networking image and your products can provoke people to distrust anything you say or any offer you make. The key to really selling well in today's social networking sites is to be as authentic as you can be. The more your feelings, thoughts, words, and products match who you are, the more confidence you have that they are valuable to you and to others. If you are selling something to someone just to make a fast buck, you can bet that people will quickly figure it out and it can harm you in the long run even if you make that short-term fast buck. However, if you value what you are offering, others will sense that genuineness and it will give you an aura of confidence and trustworthiness.
How Much Are You Worth?
In romance, like in life, it isn't always about how rich you are, how beautiful you are, or how young you happen to be. You can still attract a beautiful man or woman solely by being someone worth being around. With enough confidence, even an ugly man can date beautiful women. As long as you believe in yourself and value yourself, that will come forward in your relationships as a calm, soothing, and attractive confidence that inspires other people to want to be with you.
Have you ever noticed that people who have the most self-confidence usually appraise their own worth much more than people with low self-esteem? This attitude of self-appreciation is noticeable and can produce a feedback loop of praise for you and your products that materializes as pure profit. Let's face it, you aren't reading this post just so that you can learn how to close any deal, you want the big bucks. Well, how much are you worth? How much do you value your products? Think about this when you begin to price your offerings. Are you pricing them to go viral (and thus giving them away) or are you pricing the value of your time (as in consulting)?
Obviously, your time and expertise are invaluable and should be priced higher than just your products. People have been known to make a living just offering seminars and workshops. There's no reason you can't do that online with today's technology and sell out far more seats than you can at a live venue. The more you value yourself and your offerings the more likelihood that attitude will creep into your sales copy and magnetize your offers and make them great sellers.
How Much Is Your Customer Worth?
This attitude of appreciation starts with self, but it doesn't end there. For a successful seduction, you should have an object of your desire too and that should be your customer. It doesn't mean that you have to be desperate to get their attention, it means that you also appreciate and value their business and relationship with you – regardless of what it ends up being. This open-ended allowance for room to grow a relationship can be a great way to foster deeper, and longer-lasting, love affairs with you and your products.
It's a well-known fact that waitresses who write the words “thank you” get better tips than waitresses who don't show their appreciation to their customers. How long does that take to write? Obviously, not long at all. The same can be done for your loyal customers – offer them your appreciation for their business by giving them things that create a mutual relationship of appreciation and trust.
Simple Things To Remember
Seduction, whether in romance or in business, demands a little understanding of the psychology of desire. The best approach for selling online uses the same path: approach indirectly, some occasional unexpected contact with your target, earn their trust, and then make the offer.
- Approach Indirectly - Even though your final goal may be a direct email campaign, you don't want to be that direct about your goals. People don't like feeling manipulated and even they believe you are manipulating them, you will raise a resistance that will be difficult to ever overcome. That's why your copy should not appear needy or attempting to convince. It should be like a Don Juan that is confident in their performance without being aware that they have anyone in their sights, when they are actually interested in the visitor whole-heartedly. If you tip your hand too early, you will never have a change to get to the second step.
- Occasional Unexpected Contact – Once you have made your entrance and have managed to reel in the person's attention, you can set up a campaign designed to contact them with entertaining, surprising, or even helpful things that will make them welcome your short visits. Don't stay too long, and don't over do it. This is achieved in business with email campaigns that are well-spaced out and not too overbearing. Eventually, the visitor will be consider whether you are trustworthy or not.
- Earn Their Trust – You can do this indirectly through occasional contact or by way of the circle of friends you both share. If they ask for a free report and get it right away, you have started your road to earning their trust. The more you are able to meet their needs consistently without appearing to be selling when you are, the more contact you will be allowed with your target.
- Make The Offer – Now is the time to be creative about how you will close a deal, whether it is selling a report or a full week seminar. By this time you should know your target's desire and be able to craft a skillful offer that is something irresistible to refuse.
If you can't sell your product, how will you end up being able to tell your visitors about it in a way that enchants them? You will have to use the power of storytelling. If you aren't convinced of the power of storytelling, think of the story of the 1,001 Arabian Nights. This set of ancient stories are told by the protagonist, Scheherazade, who is married to a king who has vowed to kill every virgin he marries the next day. The king has been betrayed earlier by an unfaithful wife whom he loved very much. After having her executed, he declares all women unfaithful and begins to take only virgins to his marriage bed, whom he promptly executes the day after the wedding.
In order to spare her life, and the lives of the other women in the kingdom, Scheherazade volunteers to marry the king and then begins to tell a story, leaving it unended with a cliffhanger on the day she is to be executed. The king delays his intent to kill her so that he can hear the end of the story the following day, but the minute that story is ended another is began. And, it goes on thus, for 1,001 nights, after which the king repents of his murderous mission and lets his wife live. And, that's the way you can use stories to keep your customers coming back again and again, despite their desire to do otherwise.
The Elements Of A Good, Persuasive, Story
One of the classics of sales persuasion how-to books is “The Elements of Persuasion” by Maxwell and Dickman. In it, the authors discuss the five elements of a good story that will impact the psyche of your reader and burn itself into their consciousness. It makes use of the mythical hero's journey that is an archetypal pattern that everyone all over the world recognizes. The five elements are: passion, the hero, the antagonist, a moment of awareness, and finally, transformation. If you have each of these elements in your story, you will find that your as your reader goes through your sales page they will not even know they are being sold. Instead, the story will begin to mirror how they think and influence their actions subconsciously, helping you to close a deal.
Let's go over each of these elements separately, so you understand them:
- Passion – This element refers to the way the story is told. Are you confident and assured that story has value? Or are you trying to convince your reader that this might be something they're interested in? Remember, the passion and belief you have when you sit down to write will be reflected in the words that eventually land on the page.
- Hero – Every good story has a protagonist who takes on on his journey and allows us to see things through his or her eyes. It is through their struggle that we get involved in the story and root for their eventual victory.
- Antagonist – In order for the mythic hero's journey to take place there has to be some obstacle or antagonist who stands in the way. This is the person or thing that provides the risk and the potential for failure. It is the thing that brings the hero to his or her knees and exploits their weakness.
- A Moment of Awareness – This is the moment when the hero realizes that they have a choice and they become aware of a greater destiny. They resolve the dilemma of the hero's journey and any paradoxes that may have caused them undue pain in order to bring forth something new and exciting into the world.
- Transformation – This is the result of the successful struggle, where the hero is transformed and/or the world is transformed due to the hero's journey. It is the solution that will transform someone's world from something ordinary to something mythical and extraordinary.
After you write your hook title and list you main benefit, you can start the sales page that tells the story as to why your reader should buy your product or service. A good example of this is an ad the Wall Street Journal ran that went on to bring in over $1 billion dollars for them. It was simply titled:”Two Young Men.”
The story begins with two young men who graduate from the same college to go out into the world to make their name. After 25 years, their school has a reunion and they meet up. There, they find out both had very similar lives in that they both married, both had three children, and they even went to work for the same company after graduation. In all respects, except one, they appeared to have taken the exact same road. The difference? One was the president of the company and the other was a manager.
Of course, the telling of the story is done with more passion, but for the sake of brevity it has been condensed for this post. Here, we have two protagonists, each appearing to make the exact same choices, but one is highly successful and the other isn't so much so. What was the difference? According to the Wall Street Journal it was that one was a loyal reader of the Wall Street and the other didn't. That's the moment of awareness, not just for the protagonist who met the same set of challenges as his college buddy, but also for the reader of this story. That's what led one to be transformed from an ordinary life to an extraordinary life. And, of course, as the reader who has traveled along this road through the eyes of the hero, the hook is captivating. Who wouldn't want to invest in a copy of the Wall Street Journal with a payback that big? Who wouldn't want to be transformed overnight by using this easy solution? However, in order for them to envision how that transformation is possible in their own lives, you will need to activate their power of imagination to sell your products.
Use The Power Of Imagination To Sell
Our minds are primed to be carried away with our own imaginations. If you know how to plug into the fantastic power of your reader's minds you will be able to get them to imagine your product or services being far better than anything you can describe with simple words. Usually, people with problems are a little challenged to think up their own solutions. It's your task to help them visualize how your products or services are going to be the answer to their problems.
A good story doesn't just have a moral or an insight, it should also inspire your reader to imagine how they too can solve their problems by implementing the same strategy discussed in the sales letter. Remember that you will have to lead them by the hand because people who are experiencing difficulties often have a poor imagination. You will need to inspire them to stop focusing on the problem and instead imagine the solution – your product. How will their lives be better? What benefits do you see in their immediate future for taking action now?
If you've ever been to the free seminars to get rich quickly or to get government grants, you will notice that they try to inspire the crowd to get them to identify with the stories of people who used their products and turned their lives around. They get the crowd so pumped up that it is possible and they tap into the emotion of hope that people willing shell out thousands of dollars just to take courses to show them how to do it. Let's not forget that hope is a powerful motivator and is really central to the hero's journey. If the hero gives up, it's all over. He or she has to be inspired to get past the struggle to get to the moment of awareness that will lead to the final, dramatic, and transforming conclusion.
Drama And Controversy
You may think that your story has to come off as some Pollyanna version of the ideal utopia, if your reader would just buy your product. Your sales letter doesn't have to take this approach, and as we mentioned earlier, people are often motivated more by fear and curiosity than anything else. The thing that engages readers that will trigger fear and hope in your reader is drama and controversy. That's why news agencies always have powerful, dramatic, stories going on all over the world or human interest stories that spur interest for those that get tired of all the drama.
A good drama will engage the reader's emotions, just like a good controversy. Those emotions can be positive or they can be negative. Often, the stories that get the most attention on the Internet are those that are highly controversial and dramatic. They will either trigger fear, repulsion, anger, or hope. These powerful emotions will cause your message to stick more in the memory of your reader than any Pollyanna story ever will.
When you consider how to bring drama or controversy into your sales page, be careful. You don't want to risk offending your primary audience. You want something to be controversial enough to generate traffic and discussion (if you have a members site), but not so offending that you end up with death threats in your email inbox. You want to build excitement and interest, not hate.
And, remember that every controversy in business is also a business opportunity. When someone like eBay's makes a controversial decision to stop allow infoproduct marketers to use their auctions unless the product is delivered in physical format like a CD, that becomes a firestorm all over the Internet. Blogs discussed this controversial policy endlessly and only a few smart marketers took the opportunity to sell products that show business owners how to convert their business models from virtual to physical products for eBay. These are the people who made money due to a controversy that they didn't even start.
The Story Of Your Sales Page
You do want to tell a simple story to get your point across, but remember this is still a sales page. After you've hooked your reader, you want to start selling the benefits of your product or services. You want to make it easy for them to envision themselves as the hero on a hero's journey that ends at buying your products or services. You want to be entertaining, educational, and dramatic. You don't want to be too long-winded, but say as much as you need to in order to overcome any objections someone might have to buying your product. How long should your sales page be? It should be as long as it needs to be to close the deal. There's no set length. There are some people who say the longer the better, and there are others that suggest brevity and mystery work too. Try out both types and see what works on your audience.
At the point that someone becomes engaged in the story, you've already won half the battle. If the sales page then becomes less story and more of an offer, the shift may not even be noticed. Your reader will be so engaged, they will think it was their brilliance that led them to your page, their luck that they happened on some solution that is going to set them apart from their peers, and they will be thoroughly seduced into taking action by signing up for your free report or actually buying a product at that time. It's up to you what you want to build with that particular sales page. If you are confident the offer is so good that an instant sale can be made, ask your buyer to take action NOW in order to benefit from this stroke of luck.
You don't want them to go away and think about it. You don't want them to check out your competitor's products or prices. You want to have a sense of urgency in the sales letter that makes it imperative for them to take action right now, while the offer is still up or while it can do them some good. If you aren't sure how to set up a limited offer by now, you can go back to Chapter The Art Of Persuasion and read the suggestions there and implement at the end of your sales page.
The Coveted Offer
The mind is a magnificent tool that can be trained to work for you, even when you are sleeping. The mind works very much like a computer. Whatever you put in it, it will only too gladly crunch and return more of the same. As they say, “garbage in, garbage out.” However, in this case, you're going to be putting seeds of creativity into your mind and reaping imaginative and creative offers that will spur your business to a higher level.
When No Means Yes
If you understand how to set intentions you can get your overactive mind to come up with creative offer ideas out of thin air. The way you are going to capture that power is by setting up the right conditions to get the results you want. Then, you're going to go off to do something else and let the marvelous computer spit out the results when it's ready. To do this you have to remember one thing about your mind: It doesn't understand the word no.
The word no is ignored by your mind. That's why when you are wandering around saying, “no more of this” you get heaps more of whatever it is you are concentrating on. Your mind, like the universe, doesn't work with negative language. It only understands the positive intention behind the negative language. It only produces more of that which you concentrate on, even if what you are concentrating on is negativity.
If you don't believe that's true, why do you think people always think of pink elephants when they are expressedly told not to think of them? It's because the intention is set on pink elephants, not the negative affirmation. Now, that you understand that, you can use this information to start creating offers from thin air by using the mind's propensity to crunch whatever intention is put into it.
How Just ½ Hour Of Time Can Produce Results
If you are trying to gain muscles, you can't expect that one push-up will transform your body overnight. Exercise may be what gets you there, but without investing some time into your exercise routine, you'll never get the results you want. Well, the same is true of your brain. The good news is that you can start getting results with just ½ hour of your time.
When researchers studied the brain's memory capacity, they found out something interesting. College students that were asked to think of all the words that started with the letter C within 30 minutes and list them, still ended up thinking of new words at least 3 days after the experiment ended. From that, it can be surmised that it only takes ½ hour to set an intention and let the brain realize, “Hey, this guy is really serious! He really wants me to pay attention!” Once it gets that this isn't something that is a short-term fancy, the brain will store it in a space where it can continue to work on it – even after you're done concentrating on your intention!
Think about it. You spend just ½ hour thinking up different offers or marketing strategies to help boost your business and then you get up and do other things. For up to three days after that, your mind will be coming up with ideas at different times and tapping you on the shoulder to let you know that it's got yet another idea! Isn't that worth 30 minutes of your time?
Be Prepared At All Times
Okay, so you concentrate for ½ hour and then you decide to take a shower. There you are, singing the latest country song to the shower head in your hand and your brain taps you on the shoulder and whispers in your ear: “I got another fantastic idea!” And you say: “What?! Now?! Wait, wait...” Of course, that's what happens. The best ideas always come in the middle of the night or some other inconvenient time. Well, be prepared. You didn't spend 30 minutes of your time to get your brain to work for you and then decide you can't be bothered with the answer.
Audio Recording Devices
You can take advantage of those brainstorms by getting a small micro cassette audio recording device that can help you store that information for later use. These devices are highly portable, making it easy to take with you anywhere. An extension of this, for people who don't want to have to transcribe their thoughts into written format is to use voice recognition software to help with managing your brainstorms. Some good products are Dragon Naturally Speaking or IBM's ViaVoice.
Journals Or Notebooks
You can use a journal by the side of the bed to jot down ideas that come to you in the middle of the night. You can even use this method in the car, if you don't try to write while you're driving. Just have a small notepad available to jot down ideas that come forward from your subconscious after you've set your intention. This is a very inexpensive way to keep track of your ideas when you first start.
PDAs
Personal Digital Assistants are like an electronic notebook. They'll obviously cost more than just a pad of paper, but many people swear by them. They sort of bridge the gap between getting your words in a format that can't be transferred to your computer easily because you can synchronize and upload what you write in them to your computer. You will really have to justify paying for these fancy little toys as they can cost several hundred dollars. You won't be able to sketch any pictures for your ideas, but that may not be an issue.
Send Yourself Reminders
If you have voicemail or email you can send yourself reminders. Just open up your email program and send yourself and email. The nice thing about this is that you can later file it in an ideas folder. The same can be done with voicemail if you have a way to leave yourself a message. The problem with some of these solutions is that ideas don't normally show up just when you sit down to the computer or when your phone is handy.
Be A Copy Cat
Having trouble getting inspired for even 30 minutes? Why not check out what your competition is doing? If it is driving up their sales odds are the same strategy will also work for you. There are plenty of people who have made lots of money just copying other people. Japanese goods used to be mocked as cheap knock-offs until they started making copies that were even better than the originals! Then, they not only competed better in the market, but they made a ton of money. You can too. It doesn't take a genius to recognize a good idea when it shows up, even if it's not your own.
One word of caution here, though. You don't want to blatantly take someone else's product and put your name on it. This is copyright infringement and you could be sued. If you bought resell rights, you still need to make sure you stay within the terms of the agreement. You might be required to sell the product for a particular price or keep the original creator's links or information within the product. Always stick to the terms of the license so that you don't end up regretting it later.
Who To Copy
Don't just copy anyone, copy people who are successful marketers and networkers. This is easy to do if you join any of the social networking sites (some are listed in the resource section at the end of this post). All you have to do is see how many friends they have and if they are using their profile to promote their businesses. Then, you simply copy what they are doing.
You will find that these marketers all have on thing in common: They use the power of the Internet to spread news about their offerings to everyone and everywhere. When they put up a blog post, they link it in to several different areas where there are people who might read. They use newsfeeds. They bookmark their sites and content in various areas from digg.com to del.icio.us. Although it takes a few extra minutes of their time to do this, the reward for added exposure makes up for it in spades.
Keep visiting these people to see what new tricks they come up with. They may do all the research for you and you just simply copy what they do. They will probably be interested in learning what new applications work best for promotion and add them into their profiles. Your newsfeed will let you know what they are adding in Facebook and you can simply check out what they are adding and see if it will work for you. Odds are, it will.
Another great way to find out what kind of maneuvers to do is to copy your competitors. That's right. You visit their sites, you find out what they are doing, and then you simply emulate them and thank them for the wonderful ideas. You can do this online by doing a little research on your competitors through the Alexa search engine. Or, if you're really sneaky, you may wonder who is linking to your competitors sites and see if you can target them to become part of your network. That's not as hard to do as you'd think since there is a search engine called at www.backlinkwatch.com that will tell you who is linking to any url, including your own.
You can take this Internet spying a step further by finding out which keywords your competitors are copying in their campaigns and then using them on your websites too. That's easy enough to do on the Internet with keyword analyzing tools like available at www.webceo.com . If you don't want to download a tool, there are plenty of online website keyword analyzers that will give you results that may be a bit confusing at first, but also enlightening. Just plug into any search engine the words “keyword analyzer url” and you will get a good list. A good one to use might be www.submitexpress.com/analyzer.