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Global Village International Consortium
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WELCOME BACK! Global Village International Consortium is an extention of Mentors In Motion Marketing Team. A group of successful Internet Entrepreneurs’ dedicated to teaching the art and craft of Internet marketing. Your Bio or Company Profile If you're selling a product that relies on your professional expertise, consider putting your bio online (don't forget to add a picture to this bio). Through a biography you can build your credibility by highlighting your experience and key achievements. It's a condensed version of your career history that will give your potential customers insight into the person you are. What should the bio or company profile contain? 1. Any piece of information that makes the visitor LIKE you. One of the first principles of sales is that people buy from people they LIKE. What's likeable about you? It could be a unique hobby, the fact that you have grandkids, or that you love your pets. Share yourself online and don't be shy. For an example of someone who runs a successful site (in this case selling Australian dogs) check out Family-Pets.com. On the "About Kate" page the owner not only sums up her qualifications as a dog breeder, she also includes pictures of her husband, children and pets. Seeing someone share their family pictures like this builds a lot of trust. 2. Information that makes the visitor RELATE to you. If your site sells gardening tools, talk about your experience as a garderner, tool manufacturer or simply talk about your passion for landscaping. Tell the customer the story of why you started the site. Another principle of sales is that people buy from people who are SIMILAR to them. Your gardening site likely attracts a lot of gardeners, so create a bond with them by sharing information on yourself so they can see just how similar you are. 3. Information that shows your EXPERTISE. If you're an expert on the topic your site is devoted to - share this. People respect experts. If you happen to not just sell karate equipment but also have a black belt in karate, let your audience know this. This will build your credibility significantly. If you happen to run a larger web business and do not wish to create a single face for your company, write about your business story instead. Talk about how the business was started, your vision, goals, the early hardship you encountered, the joy of running the business and the way it was growing. These all make for excellent stories. And these, honest, personal stories build trust. Watch Your Language The internet is a conversational medium so talk like a real person and avoid annoying corporate-speak. In fact, one of the surest ways we've found to identify incompetent businesses and experts is by observing the language they use on the web. When a website opens with "our goal is to optimize the client-business relationship by strategically aligning core elements of your web infrastructure to create a highly convergent....." we know this company knows little about the web business. On the Web - speak like a Human Being! On the internet you're selling directly to people so refrain from corporate speak and sound human. If you're good at what you do you should be able to explain it plain and simple. Take the following blurb: "Our company delivers Information Technology Services or IT Services focused on helping customers realize their business goals by delivering tangible and best in class solutions. We offer our existing software packages and their customized versions. Along with this we provide system and requirement analysis, as-is to-be analysis data conversion, and other implementation services. All these software programs have multiple installations." Can you understand what the site above is trying to say? We can read that paragraph several times and still not understand what they mean by phrases like "requirement analysis, as-is to-be analysis data conversions." If you have a genuine product, refrain from corporate-speak and tell your audience what your product is about without high-level language or big words. When you write for the web - pretend you're talking to someone face-to-face and use the same words and dialogue style you would use in a personal conversation. We recommend you read Nick Usborne's fantastic book, Net Words, available from Amazon.com for around $12. Nick is a British marketer who does a wonderful job of explaining just how you should write online. The description includes the following: Finally, keep your grammar and spelling in check. Spelling and grammar mistakes turn off many visitors. Hire a proofreader. It's well worth the money. One thing we like to do is add a little link at the bottom of our site that says "Feedback." We've found that a very large number of internet users will take the trouble to point out mistakes on your site. When found, we then correct these mistakes immediately. Method 2: Add the Human Touch People trust other people more than websites. One of the biggest things that turn off people from buying online is the lack of human interaction and personality. As said before, pictures of the author behind an ebook, the manager of the online store or the friendly faces of customer service staffers all help promote trust and increase sales. Other ways to create trust using human presence online is to add testimonials to your site or include a discussion board. Testimonials show that your site and product have active customers that endorse it. A discussion community, if active, shows that you have customers and fans actively discussing your product. Both these elements not only promote trust but help you bring in the "social acceptance" factor of sales. This simply means that people prefer to buy products that they know others are interested in - it's also called "following the crowd." Lets take a look at how to use these human elements to build trust. Using Images of Real People Revealing the face behind the website is a great way to build trust. You can reveal: • your own face if you manage the website and have a solid interest in the website's topic • faces of the people handling customer support • the face of the creator of the product you're selling Think strategically when you are placing these images. According to eye tracking studies conducted by Marketing Sherpa, a human face on the web is a major attention drawer. Marketing Sherpa suggests that you should be very careful with where you place a picture of a human face. Faces added randomly can be detrimental as they draw attention away from important copy points like headlines. Use faces to draw attention to important site elements like sign up boxes, order forms or testimonials - anything you WANT the visitor to look at. Marketing Guru Alex Mandossian loves using the human face around sign-up forms. He believes that the combination of a virtual entity like a sign-up form combined with a real human face creates a powerful draw. He calls this the "Sesame Street Effect" after the popular children's TV show. On Sesame Street, the producers found that young children were most drawn to the TV screen when they saw shots with real live actors and virtual puppets together. Shots with just puppets or just live actors created less of an attention draw. Mandossian uses this same principle when designing sign-up forms. You'll notice that his sign-up forms always include a picture of himself interacting with the sign up form. Take a look at the example below: For a further boost of trust, include anecdotes about employees or bios of the site founders. If you can see the personalities - names or some biographical data - you can develop a greater sense of reliance and trust in the site. This also applies to email interactions with the site. It's more comfortable for a customer to deal with salley@mindvalley.com than with orders@mindvalley.com. Use photos of smiling people. If a person looks confident and happy it will be easier for the shoppers to relate to them and will lesson any natural distrust. And if for any reason you don't want to use photos of your own staff you can buy web-ready pictures of smiling people from iStockPhoto.com for only $1 each. Use Endorsements and Testimonials Busy online communities help build trust through the principle of "social acceptance." In a nutshell, humans have a tendency to follow the crowd. If you observe a lot of people talking about a product or using it, you conclude the product must be good. If you have an active newsletter with over 10,000 subscribers (or any other impressive number) state this on your site. On the sign up form for your newsletter add text like "10,000 subscribers and growing." A simple statement like that builds trust. If you have an online community, share recent community posts on your site. An active community tells a visitor that your site has a following and a product worth talking about. If you don't currently have a community, you can create one for free on APSense.com. Yahoo! Groups provides an excellent email based discussion list. Make sure to make the list Public (this means people can view messages without having to sign up). With a Public list you can syndicate the latest discussions on the Yahoo! community on your own site using a technology called RSS. It's easy to do and Yahoo! provides step-by-step instructions. You can sign up for here yahoogroups.com Free Scholarships Now Avialable When You Join MIM |
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Comments (2)
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| Another great post Dr. Billi.
Your have brought out some great points about relationship marketing. And this wonderful place called APSense allows us to build those realtionships. 200 Blue Print FREE Report |
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I am so impressed with so much good information. Marketing is about building relationships and only through building trust can you establish a relationship. You underscore the importance of being human. It's hard to relate to faceless mechanical dialogue. I salute you, Billi for taking the time and effort to make this information available.
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