Sales conversion online – the rate at which site viewers turn
into customers – is estimated to be about one percent most
of the time. This means if you have a hundred views per day
of your website, only one of them is likely to buy anything
from you.
That's actually not that bad, if you think about it. You have a
site up there that's not costing you much outside of hosting
(since overhead does not exist online), and if you have one
conversion a day, you have a pretty good income from an
unmanned website. Several of these gives you a healthy
business.
But it's always better to convert more of your viewers into
customers. If you have the mentioned 100-views website,
just one more customer per day doubles your rate of sale,
and your income. Tripling it is not unheard of for web sites
that are sales-optimized.
Using Articles to Sell Your Product
The worst thing you can do though, is hard-sell your
product. Like mules, consumers don't like to have their
heads forced to look in any given direction and they are
likely to balk.
However, you can use free information to coax them to look
your way.
Though the Internet is today's most useful and productive
marketing engine, it was originally developed as a method
for sharing information. And that's what it's best at today,
too. Even though millions of people use it for images,
movies, and sound, it's really optimized for text-based data.
And if you share clearly-written, easy to follow information
with your customers on the products you know they want to
buy anyway, you're much more likely to convert viewers into
buyers.
It's the difference between having an online catalog you loan
someone, and taking a friend by the hand to talk to them
about a specific product you personally know and trust.
Trust
Sales and information on the Internet are really all about
trust. You trust that the information you read is correct –
and, interestingly, the Internet tends to be self-correcting.
The information disseminated on it gradually tends toward
being the truth.
This gives you a huge edge. People subconsciously trust the
Internet before they trust a late-night sales pitch. This has
changed from five years ago, when few sales were made
online. Ideally, what you want to do is capture some of that
trust for your own website and convert it into sales.
The best way to do that is to give away truthful, valuable
information in articles on the things your customers are
obsessed with. In addition, these articles should be written
in a friendly, non-pushy way so that your customers can see
that you're just sharing information with them, not trying to
get them to buy stuff.
Articles are NOT sales letters or sales pitches. That's where
a lot of online business owners mess up. Instead, articles on
your website are a method for educating your consumers
while simultaneously building up a bank of trust that will
ultimately be converted into sales.
If You Can't Write
If you can't write, that's okay too. You know your products,
and you know what you want to communicate to your
customers. There are dozens of places online you can go to
hire writers or purchase blocks of well-written articles that
you can post to your website. Once you've evaluated the
article for accuracy and purchased the rights, you can post it
as yours.
Also Remember
When you're sharing articles with your customers, you're
building a relationship. Relationships, by definition, cover a
fair expanse of time. You should never dump a bunch of
articles onto your website and then sit down to wait for the
sales to roll in.
Instead, new articles should be put online over time. You
want your customers to keep returning. Ideally, you should
aim your articles toward your customers' changing needs
and desires. Encourage your customers to talk to you about
what they want to see and change the content of your
website to reflect these needs.
Whether you use articles, a newsletter, blogs, ebooks, or
reports, or a combination to spread the information your
viewers are hungry for, over time your information will start
to convert your viewers into sales. You should be patient
and responsive, building up your trust bank with your
audience and not pushing them until at last, they start to
buy your products on their own.
