Not Just Another Internet Business Success Journey

Successful selling no longer requires “selling”

Thousands of hopeful webmasters continue to set up affiliate sales links, intense sales pages and buying pay-per-click advertising in order to make a few dollars from internet sales. Some are successful, many, it seems are failing to break even.

Two different viewpoints have emerged regarding online sales - “hard selling” versus “providing quality content”.

Hard selling is just that. Using slick sales copy, customer testimonials, pop-up gizmos, 436 free bonus products and a dozen different sets of dot points all on a seemingly endless page of diatribe. Each set of dot points seems to be different but they each say the same thing - your life will be miserable if you do not buy now. But hurry - there are only 375 124 left. The consumer is considered as not much more than a source of income.

Providing quality content is not a huge departure from traditional sales techniques. Sales people have used relationship and communication techniques for a long time in their bid to build trust with the customer. Once a customer trusts the salesperson a sale is much more likely. The consumer is treated as an intelligent living being with needs and desires. One such need is for quality information. By meeting this need, consumers appreciate more of what is being offered by that company.

In-your-face hard selling has had its day. Pushy sales copy, flashing banner ads, junk emails and desperate squeeze pages no longer pull in the same sales revenue as they did when the internet was still a big novelty. Hard sell has reached saturation point. In fact, the internet has been over-saturated with the technique.

Web surfers have learned that products behind such sales gimmicks are failing to deliver anywhere near the promised performance so blatantly gushed about on the endless sales pages.

Regardless of such a revelation, unscrupulous operators are still peddling products and services whose only function is to duplicate the hard sell sales techniques. The “product” which is poised to make everyone “$8,735 in less than 21 days” is often a collection of useless “Master Resale Rights” e-books. A quick search finds the same package of MRR e-books on eBay for less than $1, and often being offered by more than a dozen different sellers at the same time.

While all this has been taking place, a large number of webmasters have been quietly building successful businesses behind the scenes. What have they been building?

The products and services they sell have not changed much, the benefits are still the same, the price hasn’t moved. So what are they doing that is different?

They have met the consumer where she is at. They have discovered what the web surfer does when she needs a solution to a problem, a product or just everyday information. She searches for it. It might be “real estate investment advice” or a few tips on “cleaning patent leather”. Whatever the need, millions of consumers are turning to the Internet as a source of answers to their everyday questions and needs.

These webmasters are building sites packed with rich content. One site might deal exclusively with real estate investments. The next with tips on caring for patent leather. Search engines are greedily seeking out these content sites and offering them to web surfers in response to specific requests for information. Webmasters and search engines have discovered that quality content attracts customers, customers with a more open to buy attitude.

In turn, the web surfers are voting with their mice and clicking through to the content sites and remaining on the sites for longer periods of time. The search engines measure the visit times and figure that a longer visit correlates with the web surfer having found what she is looking for.

Consistently shorter visits to web sites will be seen by the search engines as a negative vote, indicating that the site does not offer very good answers to match the search query. That site slips down the search engine results page (SERP) and more relevant sites make their way to the top of the SERP.

What lessons are to be learned from this?

Lesson 1: More of the same does not translate into more sales dollars. Plastering more of the same hard sell sales techniques all over the Internet just turns off more web surfers.

Lesson 2: Much like lesson 1, what has worked in the past will not always work in the future.

Lesson 3: Consumers are back in control. They are demanding relevant search results in response to the specific queries. When they get what they are looking for they are in a better frame of mind and more open to make a purchase. Again - qualiy content attracts customers.
Lesson 4: The backlash against the hard sell is being felt at the cash register. Web surfing consumers have become more selective. They want information and free samples. They want to learn about a product or service first before they will decide to click on a buy button.

Quality Content Attracts Customers

The more a web surfer is able to search for information and find it by themselves the more credible the product or service becomes. Then, and only then, comes the sale. No hard sell, no banners, no urgent “you must buy this today before I am forced to raise the price”, just a natural progression from having found an informative article on a product to wanting to know more about it, to finally making the informed decision to buy.

Legitimate email and website marketing still have their place in the Internet marketplace however, the concept of “quality content attracts customers” is quietly and quickly gaining a foothold because it puts the power back into the hands of the consumer.

- Brendan