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Chapter 2 - Your Web Site

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This conversation takes place daily for small businesses. I am sure you have heard it before. Whenever people get together and talk about business, I hear these comments. You need a cool website. I know a great web designer who can build a really phenomenal site for you. I saw a site they did for another company and it was amazing. I have never seen anything like it. The graphics and layout really stand out and it s easy to find out everything you need to know about them .

When businesses matures and they consider themselves web savvy, the topic changes slightly.

I ve got my Internet presence up, now I need to get my site selling for me. Do you know anyone who can get us set up for e-commerce? or We need a catalog system and shopping cart so we can do business online . The common reply is, Oh, you need a web developer then. A web developer can integrate backend systems, and tie accounting to the e-commerce engine and shopping cart system .

If the business has an existing marketing department, they will recommend a branding strategy with cool flash animations, and interactive tools to make the website sticky.

How much have they spent at this point? Who knows? The common theme is:

Selling Online Is Different

The first thing I noticed successful small businesses doing online confused me. It was different from what I was accustomed to in the corporate world and unheard of in the press or trade journals. What was it that had me confused? It was the number of websites that many of the small businesses had. The Internet Marketers that were doing well had multiple sites that seemed unrelated.

All of the successful Internet Marketers that I studied has multiple websites designed to sell single products.

Key Point
Ask your web designer if they will accept payment
from the sales on your small business website.
It doesn t matter what you sell or how great your website looks.
What works for established online businesses
never works for small business. Selling online is different!

One of the more adventurous of the successful Internet marketers that I researched wrote about a website that gave away $100.00 bills. It was not a hoax, they did everything right. They registered a domain name and had the site indexed by search engines. As matter of fact, they even advertised the site online. Guess how many bills they gave away?

Zero - No one took them up on their offer. They could not give the $100.00 bills away.

The purpose of the experiment was to determine how best to persuade and influence online shoppers. The offer was a failure, but the experiment was a success.

The most important fact they learned was that the number one reason online business is different is people do not trust you online.

Everyone lies online. With so many websites making outlandish claims online, buyers are generally afraid to believe anything they see online. It is that defense wall that we all use to protect our money and ourselves.

You have to earn the permission to sell before you even start.

A product such as free $100.00 bills will not sell if you have not earned the right to communicate to that individual online. Here are my Internet marketing minimum prerequisites.

You need all of these just to play the game:

1. Establish your credibility.
2. You have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you and your offer are believable and legitimate.
3. Most importantly, the customers need to know why. Why should they do business with you and why are you providing so much value in your offer.

Online persuasion and influence start with earning your customers trust and building business rapport. These are the minimum requirements for online business.

So if giving away $100.00 bills is not easy, how are you going to get people to pay money for your goods and services online?

Key Point
If you cannot sell something
in the real world what makes
you think you can sell it online?
Do you have a documented sales process
that outlines specifically how your
customers will decide to give you their money?

What can you sell on the Internet? To this point, we have looked at products, markets, customers and your business profile. It is time to make a final check and look at what is being sold online. What is it that actually sells online?

While I wrote this book for entrepreneurs and small business owners who already have a product or service to sell, you can certainly benefit by reviewing how you got here.

I am assuming that you are already passionate about what you do, and that activity is producing either products or services. As always, selling and marketing these goods and service online will leave you with four options.

1. You can Buy & Sell Existing Products
2. You can Sell the Products & Services of Others
3. You can Provide & Sell Your Own Service
4. You can Create & Sell Your Own Product

These options or a combination of options can be sold successfully online. Review the characteristics of a perfect web product:

1. A profit margin that makes business sense, the higher the better.
2. Exclusive rights to resell the product or provide the service.
3. A no or low cost non-physical product that can be downloaded directly by the customer.
4. The product or service is attractive to the customer online. It is easier or more effective for the customer to purchase it on the Internet instead of through a traditional offline method.
5. Appeals to an identifiable market of people that is online.
6. Must be repurchased or can provide a stream of income.

The more people who need and want what you are selling, the better. In the case of the established small business owner, it might be best to start by only marketing a subset or category of your traditional business online. If your business is already successful offline, it is easy to test only a portion of your business and make sure that you understand the unique dynamics involved in marketing online.

There is a final hurdle. We are not out of the woods yet. Whatever it is that you decide to sell, continue to test! Understand that if you cannot sell it offline you cannot sell it online.

Do You Have a Proven Sales Process?

If the product exists in the real world and you sell it today, document the existing sales process. When I consult with any company, the first question that I ask is, Do you have a documented sales process ? Can you tell me what the sales process is? Less than 10% of ANY business can produce an accurate, documented sales process. The result of not knowing how things are sold in any business is evident in the websites that you visit and the e-mails that you receive.

The biggest obstacles are trying to sell a product that no one wants or the absence of a real sales process! The business owner who does not know which is broken will have a hard time fixing it.

A low-demand product and poor sales process with no strong benefits will not sell online or offline. Make sure that if you cannot sell it on the net, you could sell *SOMEWHERE!*

Internet marketing and the sale of products and services online is a science. It requires that every step be followed. It is too easy to forget this, because the methods of Internet marketing are so much more interesting than the basic premise of how to sell a product or service. Remember I asked you to decide on pleasing methods or pleasing results earlier? If you know anything about me, you know I base all of my sales training on process.

So do not pour your passion and your small business into: 1. A no demand product or service. 2. Really bad sales collateral with no benefits. 3. A non-existent and inaccurate sales process.

Key Point 99.99% of small businesses online suffer from no existing demand for their product, no compelling benefits and no sales process. Without these, the right technology and unlimited traffic will not guarantee sales online.

According to some Internet marketers anything can be (or probably already has) been sold on the Internet. If you have been online for any time now, and have an e-mail address, you will know that someone has attempted to sell just about everything.

Finding Saleable Products

When it comes to Internet marketing and selling for small business, there are two options. You can sell your own products and services directly or you can market someone else s products on their behalf and share in the profits.

Often this relationship is called an affiliate relationship. You use your e-mails and websites to send people (traffic) to another person s website that is selling the product or service that you are marketing. Special software takes care of tracking who was sent to the site and where they came from. If the traffic you sent ends up making a purchase, you will receive a portion of the sale amount.

Both small businesses and large traditional businesses have affiliate programs. For example, I have an affiliate program and so does Amazon.com.

Are You Serious About Internet Marketing?

Selling for someone else leaves you with no control and a lot less money. If you are going to be in business, be in business with your own products and services. At some point, to be really successful online, you have to share your own products and services.

Having your own product lines is like owning your own house. You can rent the same house and have the same place to live but in the end, you are left with no real investment in your future. Choose to be a landlord, not a tenant.

All of the strategies and tactics that we talk about can be used if it s your product or someone else s. However, if you are really in business, you are going to have to have your own product or service to sell online.

This does not mean that you shouldn t sell anyone else s product. However, I am suggesting that you have at least one of your own products to sell.

Key Point
If you are really serious about
earning money online you have
to have your own products and
services to market.

It does not mean that the product has to be finished before you start. You can start and test the ideas on other people s products first and continue to build your website and add members to your customer and prospect e-mail lists.

What kind of products can be sold on the Internet? High priced items, low priced items, products and services from all sorts of industries can all and have all been sold online.

Test Before You Take Your Next Step

What did your testing and research reveal? Is there a market for what you want to sell? Is there a problem that people are willing to pay to fix? How much are they willing to pay? How do you know?

What problem are you solving? If you could produce a product or service that fixes that problem or need, could you produce it at a point that you could earn a profit? Have you checked for any competitors? How are they set up online?

Do you have accurate estimates on the market size and makeup?
 - Is the product or service something that can be promoted online?
 - Is there any exclusivity?
 - Are there any copyright issues that need to be addressed?
 - Can you turn a profit?
 - Are there any legal issues that you should be aware of if you sell the product or service?

If you have done your homework and research, you will be left with a great corporate profile and niche definition. You can honestly say you are the premier maker of widgets in the world.

There still might be a problem. Why are your customers going to buy? You cannot afford to forget the basics of persuasion and selling. What people really buy is the feeling that they have when they use what it is that you sell. They may justify a purchase later by reciting technical and logical details. However, it is an emotional relationship with your customers online that persuades and influences their decisions.

Always Selling To One Person
Your audience is always a unique individual.

How many times do you check your e-mail and browse web pages with someone else? Think about it, next time you check your e-mail or visit websites. You are usually by yourself.

Key Point
There can only be one person on
your website at any time. There
is only one person online. Write
all of your marketing messages to
that one unique person.

Now take a look at how most websites are written. They are usually written in the third person plural. What this means is that you were talking at someone not to someone.

No matter what anyone says and no matter how many people are on the Internet, direct your Internet marketing towards a single person. You have to assume that every word and every frame and every sentence is for a specific individual.

Your job when it comes to your website, to your newsletter, to your e-mails, and every bit of marketing collateral your customer sees, reads, hears about for use should have come from you. It should be your unique voice and your own personality.

All selling is the transference of emotions. You may be a small business owner, an independent professional or a website owner. If you want to persuade and influence another person online, you will do it with your personality. Internet marketing can be a feeling that you bring to everything that you do online. By allowing your personality to show up in an e-mail or a web page, you are in a position to transfer your emotions and really influence the behavior of the reader.

Your online persona arouses the emotions of that unique person that is visiting your site. Internet marketing success comes when a visitor reads your e-mails and they feel you speak directly to them, in your own voice. The better you are at telling it like it is, the more effective all of your Internet marketing will be.

If you use focus on features, technical jargon, industry terms, or slang words that don t portray who you are, your online business will fail.

The vocabularies of the Internet should always be for a single person. It is that individual that you must persuade and influence. Build trust and rapport as a first step to your customer giving you an e-mail address, filling in a form or purchasing a product or service.

Step 1 is about writing for, building for and designing for an audience of one person. Look again at your plans. Are these products, markets, customers and strategies going to work? Does it make sense for you and your business?

The goal is to match all of your marketing materials (online and offline) to this niche market and tested market.

What Customers Really Want Big business websites suffer from a common problem. They cannot pass the we-we test. The only people that want to know about you or your company are the employers and competitors. The people that count are the customers and they only have two questions. In every buying instance, retail, business or personal, people make choices on a number of personal criteria. However, before they even weigh the criteria you have to answer two questions.

Key Point
Visitors to your website only have
two questions. Before you sell
anything to them, you have to
answer the questions. If you do
not answer them in the first 30
seconds, you have lost them
forever.

The two questions every customer has are:
  1. What does this mean to me?
  2. What should I do?
That s it, that s all. After they can answer these two questions, they will start to evaluate a choice and make decision.
  3. Can I trust this person?
  4. Can I trust this company?
  5. Do they have my best interest in mind?
  6. If I do buy, will it really give me what I want and need?
  7. If I do make a decision to buy what will other people think?
  8. Finally, can I afford it right now?

Key Point
Online customers only buy from
you if they trust you. A big
business buys trust with online and
offline advertising and branding.
A small business earns trust over
time by creating a conversation
with a person!

Let us go back to questions 1 and 2. Surf to a business website (especially high-tech) and count the number of times you see the word we on the first couple of pages that you visit.

We do this. We are that. We can help you. We can fix things.

Add them up. If there is more than a couple, they have failed the we-we test. The royal we does not answer the first of my two questions.

What does this mean to me?

A benefit is what it means to the visitor of the site. Every page you create needs benefits that are applicable to the purpose and the unique visitor of that page.

In fact, there are a number of sites that track the number of we s in a site. Try one now at www.futurenowinc.com/wewe.htm

Making sure everything is working and in place allows you to finalize Step 1. You should be in a position to make a Big Fat Claim.