All Entries Tagged With: "sales"

Is It Really Possible To Increase Sales By Talking Down To Your Audience?

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As sellers, we always have to walk a fine-line when we are talking to our prospective customers.

If we did not know more about a topic than our customers, most of our customers would not be using our services.

Yet, there is a right way and a wrong way to show your prospects and customers how much more you know than they do.

That is a lesson that is lost on some people.

There is a fellow by the name of Dr. Harlan D. Kilstein Ed.D., who is one such person.

His attitude towards the less informed seem to be just dripping with condescension. Even when he tries to make right with his audience, his words are delivered with an air of superiority. (If you have a few hours to spend, you might want to read this thread in a forum. If you only read the first post, you will miss the point, so if you start reading, I recommend you keep reading.)

While I might be better informed than you are on some topics, that gives me no right to talk to you as if you were a child. And the same principle should apply to Doctor Kilstein.

He is a professional copy writer, so some people have suggested that his attempts in this thread were merely aimed at evoking an emotion in the reader that would lead the reader to hang on his every word.

And while that may have been possible in the beginning, at a certain point in the process, the average reader needs something more than patronization to take something positive from the conversation.

When you have such contempt for your audience as to insult them and their intelligence at every opportunity, you end up burning more bridges than you could ever build. And many of those bridges will be forever burned to the ground.

The challenge is to teach our audience something they do not know, without resorting to making them take offense at your delivery of the information.

You would think that I would not need to demonstrate this idea by talking about a man with a doctorate in education, but the good doctor seems to have let his ego get in front of his mission.

There are only two things to avoid in your writing to avoid coming across as an equal to the arrogant Dr. Kilstein:

• Don’t talk about how wonderful you are; and
• Don’t remind people of how little they actually know.

So, is it really possible to increase your sales by talking down to your audience? I doubt it, because hell will freeze over before I every buy anything from that man. You may see things a bit different than I, and that is fine… You are entitled to decide these things for yourself.

Bill Platt

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Article Marketing: Should You Promote Your Blog Or Website?

You might be wondering whether you should spend your article marketing efforts promoting your website or your blog. It’s a good question to ask. My philosophy is to always send people to your landing page, if possible, or as close to it as possible. The further away from the actual Buy button that you send potential visitors, the less likely you will see the money. You have to think about visitor attrition.

Visitor attrition is the natural drop off of traffic that you can expect based on how many links they’ll have to go through to get to the final destination. If you have 100 visitors on a page and they are two steps away from your Buy button, you can expect that only 20% of your visitors will click through to the next page. That’s 20 visitors to the page that is one step away from the Buy button then 4 visitors to click through the actual page where the Buy button exists and possibly one sale. Is that what you want?

On the other hand, if you send your visitors directly to your landing page then you can expect to receive 20 sales conversions based on the 20% attrition rate.

This is not a guarantee. It’s an estimate. But it illustrates a very important principle where article marketing is concerned. Send people to your landing page. You’ll get more traffic and more sales.

Use Articles To Promote Your Blog, Website, Or Both?

If you have a blog and a website, which one should you promote with your articles? It’s a good question and one for which there is no easy answer. Rather than answer it outright, I’m going to take a more principled approach.

What you should really promote with your articles is the page where you want your customers to go to make a purchase. If that is your blog then promote your blog. If it is your website then send your traffic to your website. But you should make it easy for your customers to buy something and cut down on the number of clicks that get them to the end goal.

If you are using articles for lead generation purposes then send your readers to your opt-in page or the page where you capture their contact information. If you selling a product and you want to use articles to drive traffic to your sales page, landing page, or order form then send them directly to the place you want them to go to close the sale. If you are a service business and you use your blog as a marketing tool while your website closes sales, you have to decide whether you want article readers to go straight to your sales closing page or your blog for more information. Bottom line: You need to create a marketing funnel and get your article readers into the loop the quickest way possible. Define the funnel first, then start pouring traffic through the top of it.

How To Promote Affiliate Products With Articles

Did you know you can promote other people’s products with articles? You can do this even if you don’t have a website.

First, pick a product. Learn everything you can about that product. I mean, everything. Buy the product and use it so that you can talk intelligently about it. After your product knowledge is at a comfortable level then you can start marketing the product through articles.

Next, decide if you want a website. I recommend using a website for a number of reasons:

• You can also use SEO to rank in the search engines for keywords related to your product
• You can use the website to take opt-ins for a newsletter that you use to market your affiliate products
• You can add a blog to your website for better and more effective marketing
• Your articles can be used to build links to your website to increase its SEO benefits
• A website establishes you as an authority and increases your credibility with your target audience
• You can include contact information on your website

There are numerous benefits to owning a website, but even if you don’t own a website you can use articles to market affiliate products.

Make a list of topics related to your product. Brainstorm as many topics as you can. You should compile a list of at least 100 topics, 200 or more is even better. Make sure these topics are distinctive and easily defined. Also, try to make your topics related to keywords associated with your product, but I’m talking about general industry-related keywords, not product branding keywords.

Next, write an article for each topic, using your primary and secondary keywords several times throughout the article.

Write an author resource box that includes a link to your website if you are using a website. If you are not using a website then include a link to your affiliate product’s sales page using your affiliate ID. Note that some article directories don’t allow this, but some do so focus only on those.

After you’ve written your articles, begin to distribute them to article directories, but don’t do it all at once. In other words, don’t distribute 100 articles to 25 directories in one day. Instead, distribute one article per day for 100 straight days. That will do you a lot better in the long run.

Find out more about making the best use of article marketing for your affiliate products sales.

Article Marketing Isn’t Free

I hear (and read) people saying article marketing is free all the time. I’ve said it myself. But it really isn’t true. There is an expense.

Even if you write and submit all of your own articles, there is a cost. It might take you 10 minutes to write an article and 10 minutes to submit it to a handful of directories, but that 20 minutes of your time is an expense. How much is one hour of your time worth? Have you narrowed it down? You should. And if your time is worth $60 per hour then you’ve spent $20 on article marketing.

When it becomes more costly to spend your time on article marketing than it is to pay a ghostwriter and article submitter to do it for you, that’s when you should consider outsourcing. $20 a day for article marketing is $600 a month. Are you spending that much of your time on article marketing? If so then it might be time to consider outsourcing that work to a professional who knows how to get results.

Judging the cost is more than just crunching numbers and converting your time to dollars. There is also the opportunity expense of effectiveness. Are you getting results from your articles?

By results, I am not talking about sales. That isn’t the purpose of article marketing. Your purpose is to drive traffic so that your website closes sales. Are you doing that? Are publishers picking up your articles? If not, you should find out why not. An article that sits in the article directory for five years and is never published by anyone else isn’t doing its job. Maybe you need to figure out what you’re doing wrong.

Sometimes article marketing is most costly than not doing it because the business owner is doing it wrong. With the proper consulting you can turn your business around and get the article marketing you deserve. Why not take the right steps to do that today?