Guide to make money online!

So you’ve just built a spanking new website with your company brochure recreated in pixel form. Now you’ve just got to wait for visitors to arrive before the sales start rolling in, right? Wrong. Selling your products and services online presents unique hurdles compared to the bricks and mortar world. Your website has to be able to build trust and confidence with visitors before they’re going to buy.

Make your website ‘sticky’

People search the web for information. Not advertising. And using the marketing language and sales spiel from your corporate brochure isn’t going to cut it online. Web users have the attention spans of goldfish, and will swim away in fright at the first sign of a sales message.

The average website visitor will leave within the first minute. They might have a browse around if you’ve got an attractive landing page. But they’ll quickly leave and look elsewhere if they can’t find the answers they’re looking for.

So for your website to be an effective sales generating machine it has to be ‘sticky’ and keep hold of visitors for as long as possible. Because the longer they’re in your store the more time you’ve got to prove why you’re the answer to their problem.

Provide ‘social proof’

The best way to engage attention is with content of value, rather than marketing messages. Before a visitor is going to place an order or pick up the phone you have to be able to answer any questions blocking a sale and earn their trust. You can achieve this through your content.

Providing case studies, customer reviews and testimonials will help to demonstrate the ‘social proof’ of your product or service. The social proof is the real world evidence that your product does what it says on the tin.

People are increasingly sceptical of marketing, but they do listen to each other. So make sure you’re providing plenty of content from third parties to give concrete to the claims on your landing page.

Build rapport with valuable content

The old adage ‘people like to do business with those they like and trust’ has never been truer than online. Until we’ve developed virtual salesmen to talk to prospects one-to-one, you can use your content to build rapport with prospects. A popular vehicle for doing this is to use a blog, which is in essence a content management system with added bells.

Rather than posting rants on who never gets the tea, provide useful articles commenting on industry news, offering advice on how to use your product or giving examples of how you’ve solved a customer’s problem.

If you’re providing information of value then prospects will either subscribe to your blog or keep returning for updates. Few people are ready to buy the first time they visit your site.

However, if you’re providing ongoing content of value then you can build trust and confidence in your expertise over time. And with the right strategy in place you can even try and position yourself as a knowledge leader in your industry.

Google loves regularly updated websites

If it’s regularly updated, Google and other search engines will love your blog as much as your readers. The search engines rate sites based on the frequency with which they’re updated and the links pointing to them from other sites.

If you’re content offers value, rather than shallow sales messages, then other websites will naturally link to you over time and boost your natural search engine ranking.

Valuable content is a competitive advantage

With broadband now in most UK homes and businesses, an effective sales generating website has never been more crucial.

So whilst your competitors struggle with their static online brochures, turn your web presence into a channel for engaging prospects with valuable content, and convert more browsers into buyers.

The last few decades have been a bumper time for brands and advertisers. In the evenings, they could rely on people being slumped in sofas around the TV, devouring advertising as hungrily as their microwave meals.

However, times have changed. People are now fast forwarding through the ads, or switching the TV off altogether. The days of entertainment only being found on the screen in the living room are over, because the screens in studies and bedrooms are now being used for a wider range of entertainment than just computer games.

Whether it’s watching music videos on YouTube, throwing sheep at their Facebook friends or saving the price of a paper by reading news online, people are finding entertainment that’s more engaging than that on the TV.

But the behaviour of most interest to brands is the manner in which people are forming into digital networks. They’re creating and sharing content in blogs, forums and networking sites strewn throughout the web on every topic imaginable.

People are adopting the tribal instinct to form groups based on shared passions and interests in the digital realm, which brands are desperate to become a part of.

A challenge and an opportunity

The challenge brands face is being able to follow the migration of their audiences from the TV and onto the web, and being able to engage with them in a manner that’s welcomed.

Adopting interruption style advertising tactics to force their way into people’s digital lives is a definite no, no. This will be at best ignored, and at the worst repelled if people feel their attention is being hijacked by an ignorant advertiser.

Instead brands need to find a way of becoming a valued part of social media. This means providing content people find entertaining, valuable or informative to barter for their time.

Whilst it presents a challenge, social media also presents an opportunity.

By providing people content they want to consume, interact with and share, brands can use social media to build positive responses, increase traffic to their websites and, ultimately, increase sales in the real world.

Social media marketing in action

Here are a few well known social media marketing campaigns:

Nike Running – rather than dazzle visitors with pop up discount offers and ads, this website enables visitors to create a profile, set a training schedule and interact with other members by organising runs or sharing maps of their favourite routes. As noted in Business Week, Nike’s website harnesses social networking to foster a positive association with the brand as a relevant, valued part of their lives.

Dell – perhaps the most infamous example of a brand that felt the dark side of the web when complaints on its customer service spread like wildfire. After getting its fingers burnt, Dell has embraced social media at every opportunity as a tool for engaging with its customers. It now has a range of blogs, Twitter feeds and even its own island in Second Life ticked off the list of social media tools.

Blendtec – its series of ‘Will it Blend?’ videos on YouTube has been watched by millions wanting to see the power of its blenders in action tearing through everyday objects such as a Nike shoe, golf balls and a Rubik’s cube. Has the campaign had any impact on sales? A 500% increase isn’t bad.