You're selling snowboots, and you're doing reasonably well.
Suddenly you notice that the hits to your website are
dropping off, and your sales are following. It's winter; they
should be moving really well! What's happening?
Chances are good that a competitor is siphoning off your
customer pool. If your website isn't search-engine optimized
or if your content is stale, your customers may be going
somewhere else. Here's what happens: your website is
established, providing a nice catalog selection of snowboots
and accessories. Paul's Snowboots springs up out of
nowhere, and determines that the way to get a good
customer base is to make his website better than yours.
So Paul studies you. He figures out what keywords pull up
your site, and he uses those on his site. He figures out who's
linking to you, and he requests reciprocal links from these
vendors. And he discovers that you're not offering anything
to your customers but a nice place to buy snowboots at a
fair price.
Paul starts writing articles, one every month on different
aspects of snowboots. He posts articles on his website. He
submits them to article exchange databases, finding more
URLs to link to his site. He creates a regular newsletter, and
once he's captured a customer's attention with the
newsletter, he can continually remind them that he's there
and waiting whenever they're ready to buy snowboots.
There's a finite customer pool for snowboots; inevitably,
you're going to feel the pinch.
So how do you stop it?
Writing Articles To Capture and Keep Customers
Today's average web consumer is terribly spoiled. He or she
is used to getting a little something free. If your customers
have been coming to your site for months or years and
gotten nothing extra except a nice thank you note and a
good price, then they may be ready for a change.
And the best freebie you can give them is an informative
article. That's what Paul knows that you don't know.
So Paul has been writing articles: how to ensure your
snowboots are waterproof, why you should buy a size larger
than you think, what you can do to keep them smelling fresh
inside, everything he can think of. And customers have been
flocking to him, reading his articles, using his advice – and
buying his boots.
The only way to fight back is to provide your own great
article content, and even a newsletter.
But you don't know how to write.
Finding Articles to Keep the Customers
That's okay, believe it or not. It'll cost you a little extra
money, not much, to buy all rights to web-optimized content
from a professional writer. You can guide the writing of the
articles, or you can purchase them pre-written; whichever
way you go, your main task is going to be ensuring the
articles add value to your customer's trip to your website.
You can find articles to purchase from article brokers like
YourOwnArticles.com, or you can hire writers directly to
write for your website. Either way, be certain you can put
your own byline on the article; this makes it your own, no
matter who wrote it to begin with.
But don't stop there. Go ahead and start a newsletter, and
ask your customers to sign up for more great information.
And post some of your free articles to an article exchange
site; you can get people linking to your website for no more
work than sharing a single article.
And if you really want to one-up Paul, hire someone to write
an ebook for your site. You gain guru status, your customers
who have downloaded the book have a permanent reminder
that you're there, and Paul doesn't know what hit him.
And Another Thing
Articles are useful for income generation in another way. If
you have an emailed newsletter with a decent sized
audience, you can sell advertising space on it to other
vendors or to the companies that provide you with your
brands of snowboots. A one-line ad from Lands End, another
short ad from a startup making custom socks, and an ad
from a site that sells Eskimo-style parkas. If you start selling
advertising on your own newsletter, you can make back
enough to pay for the newsletter at minimum, and you may
even start to make a profit.
