BUILDING TRUST IN YOUR BUSINESS
Using Information as a Sales Tool
Affiliate Max Cash is focused on helping you succeed in affiliate marketing.
Whether you are a "newbie" or an experienced affiliate marketer, one
factor applies to you both: finding customers will not be easy.
There are many more stories of broken Internet business dreams than ones of
success. Many people have cleaned out their bank accounts in pursuit of the
"overnight riches" that is highly touted on the radio, television and
Internet, only to find that the overnight riches belonged to the one pitching
the program.
As a result of these types of experiences, the individuals who have decided
to change their method of operation are coming to terms with the fact that their
dreams can be realized by using methods that work in concert with factual
information, products and services that have market appeal and techniques that
address the way people make their purchase decisions.
If the challenge of finding customers has you wondering what to do, you have
done exactly what thousands of others had done: started to search for
information. This brings us to the point of this article: how to use information
as a marketing sales tool.
Article writing for the Internet is experiencing a huge boost of popularity.
Not because articles were not read before, but because for some reason, people
lost sight of the primary reason why people use the Internet: to find
information.
No matter what product or service you choose for your affiliate marketing
business, the fact still remains that you must give people information about it
so that they can make a purchase decision. No one is going to buy a product
without know how it works, what it will do for them and how much it costs.
And using graphic images and flashy headlines no longer satisfies the savvy
Internet shopper. For those individuals who shop online regularly, they have
long since come to understand the dynamics of the electronic marketplace.
Promoting a product or service by virtual of a low price alone won’t work
either, because the marketplace is global and the competition is such that some
merchants will sell an item at an incredibly low price because they know they
will sell huge quantities of the goods. If you are subscribing to every
newsletter, ezine and e-book in sight to find the magic formula to gain
customers, you might be in for a disappointment. The truth of the matter is that
it takes a combination of factors to find, retain and service customers.
Operating a business online has as many advantages and disadvantages, as a
brick and mortar business has to face. The challenge is to understand the
differences in the dynamics between these two ways of doing business and apply
the correct set of principles to make it work.
For example, in the physical world, a customer enters a store that has an
item they are interested in buying. There is a salesperson present to answer
their questions and demonstrate how the product works. If the person is
satisfied, with all that they have heard, seen and experienced to the point
where they are ready to purchase the product a sale takes place.
On the other hand, shopping on the Internet is a completely different
experience. And this is the first thing that many affiliate marketers lose sight
of. Shopping is a social experience. When a person visits your site, they are
greeted by text and images instead of a human being. Even if there is a picture
of a person on the site, the visitor has no way of knowing if that is really the
person who operates the site or a model.
This underscores the greatest challenge that everyone who is working online
has to face; how to build trust in the hearts and minds of the people who need
our products or services. This is the main reason why many online businesses
cannot find the customers that they desire.
Online marketing is a process that cannot be accomplished in one fell swoop.
It takes time to establish trust when we are face-to-face, why do we think it
will be easier to do this when we are on the Internet?
There are many methods you can use to promote your affiliate marketing
business, but none of them will work if they are only used one time. The rate of
information exchange on the Internet is as fast as lightning, if you expect
someone to remember your banner that flashed at them once last month and come to
your website and buy, you are in for a rude awakening.
You can spend hundreds of dollars on banner advertising and still not be any
closer to building the interest or the trust necessary to make them click their
mouse and visit your website.
The statistics for Internet shopping show that for every two hundred visitors
to a site, only 1 will result in a sale. But wait, the statistics gets even
better. On the average, there are only 5 sales per thousand visitors.
Obviously, you cannot rely on banner advertising to bring the customers you
need, so what CAN you do to get them to your site? Give them what they want:
Information. Not just information about your product or service, or information
about you, but gives them the information that they want by researching their
interests and addresses their concerns. Give them information on how to use the
product or service you have to offer to make their lives better.
Most marketing polls suggest that it will take you seven exposures before you
will have earned enough trust to get a sale online or offline. What that means
is that your potential customer must see your name and your ads a minimum of
seven times before you can expect their interest to peak enough to give you a
second look.
People are being bombarded by advertising images and messages all the time.
On the radio, the television, and the Internet. This is what makes marketing
through information more effective. If you construct your article in the same
tone as you would talk to a friend who has come to you for advice about a
problem they have, you will begin to gain the trust of whoever reads that
article.
There are more than 200 million people online; the chance of the same person
seeing the same advertising banner depends completely on the amount of money in
your marketing budget. But if a person needs to know the definition of a word,
they are more likely to go back to dictionary.com because they know they will
find the information they are looking for there.
The same holds true for your affiliate marketing website. If you focus your
attention on defining your niche on the Internet, and then work toward becoming
the source of information that is relevant to all of the people in that niche,
you are now in the position to obtain some bona fide paying customers for your
affiliate marketing products and services.
Focusing your attention this way will bring you completely different results
than the scatter shot advertising approach. The marketers who throw an ad on the
Internet hoping to reach as many people as possible and then move on to the next
ad or next advertising medium, do not seem to realize the impression that they
are making in the minds of those who witness their methods.
It is not possible to build trust with this type of approach, because the
chances of the same person seeing their advertising more than one is
astronomical and for that same person to see the same ad seven times nearly
impossible.
The written word is the best way to implement the "Rule of Seven".
Your affiliate marketing website is your primary vehicle to deliver information
to a group of visitors consistently.
Newsletters and ezines delivered by email is the second most popular method
of building trust n your affiliate products and services. As a publisher, with
just seven newsletters you have delivered your message seven different ways,
talked about seven different uses or features of your product.
But the challenge is to first get the subscribers or website visitors and
then to deliver informative content that is different every time. Once you begin
to build a mailing list of subscribers, it is fairly easy to keep them.
Installing a subscription box on your site is definitely worthwhile. In
addition to the subscribers from your site, there are newsletters and ezines you
can submite your copy to for publication.
A recent Yahoo has underscored the importance of quality content! The study
stated: Content is King! Most site visitors are looking for information of some
kind when they go to a site or subscribe to an ezine.
Building trust does indeed take time and these publishers and webmasters
understand that the best way to attract and keep visitor traffic is to provide
them with what they want. By using free-reprint articles, they are able to
provide their readers and their site visitors with the high-quality content
subscribers and surfers demand. And in the process you are establishing a
familiarity with your product or service and how it can help your visitors to
accomplish their goals.
Writing about your product or service does not have to be difficult, as we
mentioned before, the best style of writing these types of articles is in a
friendly, conversational tone. You are addressing a specific problem, giving a
recommendation to the person that you feel confident will provide the solution
for them.
There are also hundreds of articles that are available to use as content for
your website, newsletter or ezine and if you want to hire someone to writer
articles for you, there are several agencies that you can contact for this
service.
It all adds up the same: it doesn’t matter whether you have been operating
an online business for 1 month or 10 years, or you are looking to find your
first customer or your hundredth customer, you have to give people the
information that they need to establish a level of trust in you.
The choice of methods is up to you; of writing yourself, obtaining free
reprint content or hiring a writer for yourself can all provide the same result
– quality information about the subject that interests your prospective
customer the most.
Operating an affiliate marketing website means that you have to incorporate
your information in a format that will help you convert visitors into sales.
You want as many people as possible to click your affiliate links, so the
best strategy to accomplish this goal is to make it very easy for them to do
that. Using phrases like "have a click here" within your content about
your product or service can work wonders.
For the real estate industry it is Location, Location, Location, but for
Internet businesses it is Content. Content. Content! The evidence has been
reviewed and the verdict is in. Visitors want good quality content and lots of
it. So give them what they want. It can be in a variety of forms; articles,
tips, newsletter archives and details of each product or service on your site.
And now for a word about images. They are pretty, some of them even dance,
but here is a clue; the fewer images on your website the better. Don’t worry,
your visitors will not miss them, they have seen plenty of graphics on their way
to your site.
In addition, too many graphics will make your site load slowly. As an
affiliate you want your visitor to click your affiliate link, but if your web
site takes forever to load, you may lose that visitor to your competition and
they may never return.
Make sure that your website design uses a simple layout with a prominent,
easy to find link to each major page on your site. When your visitor comes to
your site, show respect for their time; make the experience as enjoyable and
uncomplicated as possible.
If you offer a newsletter, make it very easy for people to sign up by having
the subscription details on every page of your site. As you publish your
newsletters, offer your visitors a newsletter archives section on your site.
The content on your affiliate marketing website should all be focused on a
theme: if you are an affiliate for a beauty company, your website content can be
supplied by 10 different writers – as long as the articles are all beauty
related. For the articles you write, include your affiliate links at the bottom
of each page your articles appear on.
Tell people about yourself through a ‘Contact’ page. Remember that you
have to take every opportunity to build trust with your visitors. Make yourself
accessible and they will instantly feel more comfortable and more likely to
click your affiliate links!
Stay alert to the Internet technology changes, particularly the search
engines and web hosting. Take time and research the different incentive that you
can use to persuade your visitors to click your affiliate links.
Review your affiliate marketing website design every six months. Incorporate
new design elements on a regular basis, visitors like to see new things, and
updating your site regularly will encourage them to come to your site more
often.
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