Sales, especially sales on the web, are based on trust. There are thousands upon thousands of sites like yours on the Internet. How do stand out in the crowd? How do you drive customers to your site over all the rest? What can you do that the huge, multinational chains cannot? The answer to all of these questions is that you can have a personal relationship with your customers. Through your site and through your use of the web, you can communicate with your customers and build up a trust relationship.
If your customers know that they can come to your site and find information that they value and if they know that the value that you provide for them is coming from you, a salesperson that they can trust, they will be much more willing to give you their sensitive information and more importantly much more willing to purchase products from your inventory.
How do you build trust and drive traffic? Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Create Content
By providing your customers with value that is completely disconnected from what you are selling, you can work to establish a trust relationship with them. The single most important aspect of writing content that will attract visitors to your site is to write about something that excites you. If you are motivated to write, then your best work will shine through. If you are providing your best work, it is much more likely that others will find it interesting enough to read every time they come to your site.
If you ask anyone who has worked in sales what the secret to closing a deal, one of the top answers they will give you is “keeping them on the lot.” If you can provide your users with a reason to not only come to your site but to come back, you are one step closer to making a sale. Here are a few examples of subjects that you could choose from:
Focus
No one goes to a store to buy everything on the shelf.
No one will come to your website because you sell everything in the world (unless you’re Amazon). Instead of trying to sell any and every product available to you — why not specialize? You might not be able to beat Wal*Mart in terms of brand recognition, but maybe you can become better known than they are in a particular niche.
An example would be Dog Collars.
If people know that when they come to your page they can learn everything they ever wanted to know about Dog Collars, if they know that you are an expert in Dog Collars and also that you happen to offer a wide selection of Dog Collars for sale then they will be much more likely to purchase those Dog Collars from you. By providing them with a focused experience, you can much more easily provide your customers with value that will position you heads above your competition.
Develop Your Expertise
Customers on the web purchase product from people, not from sites. Use search engines like Google to find discussion boards where people are talking about pet topics that interest you. Sign up for one or two of these boards and start talking about your experiences. Often, the best way to “sell” someone on your idea is to not sell them at all. If you keep the discussion relevant, after a while, members of the discussion board will begin to look to you for information. When they learn that you also run a website, they are much more likely to visit it and actively participate.
Post your “value” prominently on your site
Before you can hope to make a sale, you are going to need to provide value for your customer. Be certain to place the “information” you are interested in people looking at on the front page of your site in an area that is easy for your customers to see immediately.
The typical attention span of one of your users will be under a minute. If they don’t find what they are looking for in under a minute then you have lost them.
Think about the last time you were buying a product online, how patient were you?
You simply can’t assume that your customers will give your site more credit than you give to a website that you visit.
You want people to understand that they are purchasing products from a real person and not from a cold, uncaring machine. If you write an article, post a picture or otherwise generate content on the web, post it prominently on your site.
Advertise
Put your website everywhere.
Put links to it in the email signature of your emails, put it on your business cards, talk about it with your friends, in short, get it out there! How can you expect people to find your site if you are not willing to tell them about it?
You can never be sure who will find your site compelling, so always take the time to make it easy for people to give it a test drive. Anything that you do online that gives you an opportunity to post a link should contain a link to your site. Not only does it increase the chance of people stumbling upon your little patch of land on the web, but it is also another link on the web for search engines to find.
Since search engine traffic will make up the vast majority of your unsolicited visitors, you should make it as easy for them to find you as possible.
Be consistent
Whatever you decide to do to market your site online, the most important thing for you to keep in mind is that you need to do it consistently. If you write one set of tips a week, you need to make sure that every week those tips are written. If you participate in a discussion forum, you need to make certain that you visit that forum regularly. If you find new areas of your life where you can advertise, you need to make certain that your advertisements are high quality and coherent.
You don’t need to do everything but whatever you do, do it well. The Internet is a momentum game where drive and consistency are rewarded. Ideally, you would much prefer for your traffic to go up slowly and steadily than to deal with spikes and valleys from month to month. The only way to do that is to make certain that all of your marketing efforts follow an established strategy. If there is one guiding principal in web marketing it is consistency.
Closing Remarks
There are as many ways to market on the web as there are websites to market. The best strategy for anyone trying to build trust and traffic is to find a strategy that works for you and to do it as much as time allows. Building up a website can be a long, arduous and often times frustrating process; however, the happiness you will feel as your site becomes more popular month after month makes the entire thing worthwhile.