TRUE Results To REPLACE YOUR JOB

Archive for May, 2009

I’ve always believed in investing in high quality graphics when it comes to selling products or services, both online and offline. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words and having high quality graphics will “WOW” your prospects at the first point of contact, thereby leave a lasting, great impression.

Let’s take a look at the offline business. Product manufacturers couldn’t simply just sell their products and services without some form of accompanying graphics. They could, but it just wouldn’t convert that well.

Can you imagine going to the local grocery store and buying a bottle of milk that simply has an ugly “Fresh MILK” label on it without any kind of graphic ornaments on it? Would you buy this bottle of milk or would you buy the bottle beside it that is professionally packaged with its colorful and attractive graphic elements?

High Quality Graphics In Action

The automotive industry, food industry, telecommunications industry, and all other industries - they all have great quality graphics attached to their products. It makes perfect sense actually.

These huge companies with huge budget set aside a certain amount of money for graphic design purposes to “beautify” (so to speak) their products and services so that they attract more buyers.

You might argue that big name manufacturers don’t need to have those fancy-looking graphics because their brands are already famous and people will buy regardless of how ugly the graphics are. That may be true in certain cases; but the FACT is, there is not a single product and service out there by a big company that actually use poorly designed graphics - at least not that I know of.

Automotive industry - take a look at the high quality brochures car manufacturers have.

Food industry - those food pictures attached to the packaging of the product that are so “REAL” and juicy that make our mouth salivates uncontrollably.

I could go on and on…  but you get my point.

The power of these high quality graphics and the impact they have on your business is even more obvious when it comes to selling products and services on the Internet.

As we all know, anyone can sell on the Internet. And we also know that everyone is “hiding” behind a computer when they’re selling online.

Please note that the term “hiding” is not meant to discredit people selling online (Hey I sell products and services online too).

Think about when a prospect comes across your product/service when shopping online. Think about their thoughts and emotions just when they’re about to decide if they want to buy from you or not.

Since they don’t know who you are and they have no previous experience buying from you, they’re definitely afraid of being cheated of their money.

Scams are becoming more and more commonplace nowadays. Thus they have every right to be wary, especially when shopping online, since like I’ve said above everyone is literally “hiding” behind a computer.

The Disadvantage Of Running An Online Business

A lot of online marketers talk about how great it is to run an Internet business where you can profit almost 100% when selling digital goods. Very few of them, though, talk about the disadvantages of running an online business.

Everything else being equal, it is harder to convince a person to place their trust on you when it comes to buying online than offline since when buying online, they can’t see the real person behind that website and they perceive it would be harder for them to settle any dispute should there be any in the future. They perceive that the website owner can simply “run away” and not respond to emails, etc.

Another important point to note - unless you or your Internet business are already well-established and people have had a positive buying experience from you before, then convincing them to trust you when it comes to buying online is also going to be harder.

How To Lower The Barrier

For us Internet marketers, one very good way to alleviate this problem so that people trust us more and want to buy from us online is through the use of high quality graphics to demonstrate our products and services.

Why is this effective?

Because with high quality graphics on our products and services:

- You increase your credibility

- You are perceived as being serious in your business (a professional) as you wouldn’t have taken the trouble to have those high quality graphics designed if you weren’t serious about your business. People want to buy from professionals.

The above two points lower your prospects’ resistance to buy from you, which means higher conversions.

In short if you have any kind of product or service that you want to sell, especially if you want to sell online, then you really need to attach high quality, attention-grabbing, professional graphics to your products and services.

New Minisite Design Service For Internet Marketers

I bet you didn’t see this coming, but in conjunction with this, I want to make an announcement. Me and my partner, Adi Djohari, have just started a minisite and eCover design service specifically catered towards Internet marketers who sell their products and services online.

Our minisite design service is called WOW Minisites, and we’ll custom-design your minisite and eCover based on what YOU want (NOT what we want). Since we’re also Internet marketers who’re heavily involved in the IM niche, we really do know what YOU want from an Internet marketer’s perspective.

In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t design the minisites and eCover design. Adi along with our team do the design.

You may be wondering why I don’t take part in designing minisites?

Well it’s because I don’t know a thing about graphic design. Seriously. I’d be a lot of better off focusing on my strengths, which is marketing on the Internet.

If you’re currently about to release your product or service, do seriously consider getting a professional minisite design done.

If you’re currently already selling a product or service but you don’t have great quality graphics to accompany it, also consider getting a professional minisite designed for you.

You don’t have to use my professional minisite design service if you don’t want to (though I highly recommend it because I’m sure you’ll be VERY satisfied with our top-notch quality design at a price much less than what other minisite design services are charging).

Whatever you decide, just get a professional minisite designed for your product or service okay?

In summing up, high quality, professional graphics that accompany your product or service will increase your credibility and lower your prospects’ resistance to buy, thereby increasing your conversion rate and and bring you more profits.

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In the last article we’ve learned that getting all the traffic in the world is useless if we do not know how to utilize it well. Specifically, if we don’t know how to convert our traffic into money, then our efforts to drive traffic to our sites will simply go down to waste.

In this article, I’m going to assume that you already have your goals laid out - what you want your visitors to do once they‘re on your site. If you still don’t have a clue what your goals are by having visitors to your site, then you need to sit down and take some time to think about it carefully.

This is VERY IMPORTANT!

Once you’ve identified your goals, DO NOT go out there and start implementing all the incredible driving traffic techniques you’ve learned.

Instead PREPARE first.

Since almost all of us are interested in building our lists, let’s say that your goal (when visitors land on your site) is to persuade them to subscribe to your newsletter.

Then in the preparation phase:

- Make sure that your opt-in box is above the fold so that they can spot it easily

- It’s better to use a bigger “subscribe” button to make your opt-in box more “eye-catching”

- Make sure you give them some kind of valuable Freebie (ebook, report, audio, video) and say it to them in their face what benefits they can get from your Freebie.

Simply asking them to join your newsletter will produce meager conversions as they can’t see the immediate benefit of joining your newsletter.

They’ll be thinking to themselves along these lines “Newsletter? So what? What good can it do for me? I’m already subscribed to dozens of other newsletters. How is this different? Nah… I’ll skip it for now.”

- Make sure that you have several autoresponder messages stored in your autoresponder account so that when subscribers opt-in to your list, they are automatically followed-up with valuable content PLUS sales messages to sell your products or affiliate products.

A note about following up with your subscribers:

There are basically 3 kinds of marketers who do things differently when it comes to following up with their subscribers…

The first one is the “I send you sales pitch email every day to squeeze every penny out of you”. I’ve made a post about this some time back. This kind of marketer is ON THE LIMIT, sending you sales pitch email every day (sometimes even 2 emails in a single day). He never bothers to send you valuable content, all he does is sell and sell all the time.

The second type of marketer is the complete opposite of the first one. He almost never sends out sales pitches to his subscribers. All he does is provide valuable content all the time. He is too afraid that if he tries to sell to his subscribers, they’ll unsubscribe from his list.

The third type of marketer is somewhere in the middle. He provides a balance of valuable content and sales pitches. He understands that building a beneficial and trusting relationship with his subscribers is VERY important.

That’s why he only sells or recommends high quality products that he knows will help his subscribers. He will never jeopardize his reputation by selling a crappy product or service just to earn a quick buck for the short term. He is in the business for the long term.

So which marketer are you?

For most people, I’d suggest you go for third type of marketer. Unless you’re a big name “guru”, you won’t survive belonging to the first type of marketer.

People will unsubscribe from your list so fast that you’ll lose your current subscribers faster than you gain new subscribers. Even if they don’t unsubscribe from your list, they’ll never open and read your emails.

The second type of marketer will not bring in any profit for you, since you’re always afraid of selling to your subscribers. What good is building relationship with them if you can’t make money out of them (sorry to blunt but let’s be realistic here from a business perspective).

This Preparation phase is VERY important. Because if you don’t prepare first, you’ll never achieve your desired goals. Even though it takes quite some time and effort to prepare, it’s very worthwhile.

In the example above, you might have to spend a few days to create your valuable Freebie (I suggest that you create your own unique Freebie instead of offering some low quality PLR or MRR stuff).Then you have to spend additional time to create your autoresponder messages.

However, if you do this correctly, your efforts will pay off multiple times!

Now that you have your opt-in box ready, and you have your valuable Freebie ready, and your autoresponder messages are all set up ready to go, you can then drive traffic to your site and watch some of your visitors being converted to subscribers.

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