One of the most valuable things you can get online is traffic
directed from another website with a similar customer base
to your website. This means you can take advantage of the
trust built up by another vendor when he recommends you.
Trust As an Online Commodity
The Internet is a relatively impersonal, completely faceless
entity. You don't know who you're talking to on the other
end, you have no idea what your salespeople look like, and
you can only hope that you're being told the truth about
things. How in the world could something like this work?
The same way business has worked for thousands of years:
it runs on trust. You trust that the person on the other end
is telling the truth, and that they have your best interests at
heart. And you invest a little money in that trust. When the
sales person on the other end rewards that trust by getting
you an excellent product, you're ready to trust them with a
little more. And so on.
Part of gaining trust is establishing a repeat business
relationship with your customers. Those who continue to
come back to you time and again are those who have
decided you are worthy of their trust. But when you are
trying to establish your customer base, or when you're
working on growing your business more rapidly than you
have been, it helps if you can pick up a little extra trustcommodity
on the way.
And that's where directed traffic comes in.
Trust From Other Sites
Trust is a commodity, and you can barter in it. One thing
you can do to get a little extra trust for yourself is have
other webmasters and other vendors give you a little of
theirs. To do this, you must trade for it. And the other major
commodity online (besides actual cash money) is
information.
If you write articles (or have them written for you) with
good and unique information in them, then place them
online as free downloads, people are going to pick them up
and use them. There are dozens of article directories online
today taking advantage of that very fact. You can go to
these directories, browse through thousands of articles, and
take those you want to post to your own website or
newsletter.
The hitch is that you agree, if you use an article, to include
the author's resource box. This is a graphic box containing,
at minimum, the name of the author and a linked URL of the
author's choice.
By giving away articles in this manner, you can get extra
trust that you can leverage into sales.
Using Your Extra Trust
Here's what happens. A webmaster posts your article, with
your resource box. His customers and readers, who trust
him enough to keep coming back for information and to buy
stuff, read your article. Since the other webmaster trusts
your information enough to post it on his own website, this
imbues you with instant temporary trust.
It's temporary because once the customer clicks on your
URL link to see your website, they will be judging your site
on its own merits. If they don't like what they see, they'll
click away and not come back.
But that first click should be all you need to get a new
customer to visit you. Once they're on your site, they'll
spend a little more time here than a casual browser would –
you still have that temporary trust working for you – and
they are likely to start reading other articles you have
written and posted to your website. They may even
download an ebook or report you have up here for free.
At this point, you probably have them hooked. But to make
certain, you should be ready to sign them up to your
newsletter. Make certain, when you've posted an article to
another website that will direct traffic to you, that your site
is in top condition, your signup is working and easily
accessible from every page, and that you have sales and
specials available right away for new customers who may
need that extra hook to stay with you.
Getting them to your website is only the first step. After
that, it's up to you to keep them there.
