What Sets You Apart?

Every ad must offer a specific and unique benefit. Something that sets you apart from others. It must make you different. Find a way to stand out from the rest. Depending on your target market, you may have a huge amount of competition so standing out is pretty tough. 

Often times people will confuse benefits with features.  Benefits are specific ways that your product or service can improve a client’s life such as save time, money, trouble, inconvenience, etc.

 Here’s a list USPs used by popular merchants:

 

• Kinkos – copies that save your business money
• Orbitz – Guaranteed lowest fare or cash back.
• Netflix – just $4.99 a month. No late fees.
• Rotto Rooter –“ away goes trouble down the drain”

 Imitation Is The Best Form of Flattery

 Your USP or Unique Selling Proposition highlights what differentiates you from your competition. Even one small difference can be promoted well enough to get others to notice. Do some research.  Look at your competition, what are their USPs?  Study their landing pages. Do they follow a formula?  Can you find a pattern?

 What single advantage can you offer that your customers won’t find elsewhere. Brainstorm and list as many as you can think of.  Highlight the best ones and focus your sales content on these.  Don’t ignore the others on your list, instead weave them in your copy as well. 

How To Create A Feeding Frenzy

Looking to boost sales? How do you motivate your visitors to act? The secret is, to entice your visitor to take one small baby step at a time. Baby steps can be in the form of your carefully crafted headlines. Make them interesting enough.

In fact, your headlines should pack a powerful punch each time. Most visitors are scanners. They simply scan the headlines and bold text before deciding whether to linger any longer and read the rest. Therefore, the total sum of your headlines and bold text should tell the story you are trying to get across in brief.

Go back, look at your landing page and read only the headlines and bold text. Do they relate your message in and of themselves? Headlines are one of your most powerful tools in …

Creating Critical Curiosity

The very first principle your site must utilize is to build your visitors curiosity. Human beings are naturally curious. You need to use enough bait to lead them further down your landing page. Utilize the concept of reciprocity. This works amazing well.

Marketing analysts say that giving free gifts builds a subtle sense of obligation towards you. Offer them good solid content, advice, helpful how-to’s, solid information in your e-zine and free e-book. The more you offer, the greater the sense of obligation they will have towards you. This also has the added benefit of building your credibility and trust in your visitor’s eyes. Trust is the one thing that clinches the deal.

What I see more often than not online are false leads. That is enticing descriptions in the search engine that lead you to believe you will get one thing, just to find out you’ve landed smack in the middle of a hardcore sales pitch.

There’s an old saying, “You’ll get more flies with honey than vinegar.” Don’t shove your product and pitch down your visitor’s throat. Think about it, what is better: the hard sell looking that goes after one-time customers or building a relationship that will bring in repeat customers?

Go slow but don’t introduce yourself too early in the page. Tell the truth be straightforward and honest. Online shoppers and surfers are not stupid. They know when they are being pitched and can recognize hype a mile away, click and their gone. Just because others are doing it, doesn’t necessarily mean it actually works.

The best approach is to build credibility. Start off identifying a common problem, back it up with factual evidence (statistics, etc.) build on the emotion (frustration) behind the problem. Then you can introduce yourself, all the while building credibility that translates into “I know what I’m talking about.” This is the best way to establish an emotional connection with your site visitor. During this time you are also eluding to a solution because you want to…

Build Anticipation That Sizzles

Resist the urge to shove your product in front of your visitor just yet. Talk about how your “wonderful” solution to this problem. Identify it’s benefits!

Talk about all the benefits without spilling the beans. This is how you build anticipation and it works very effectively. Want to really get them salivating? Incorporate the element of scarcity (limited quantity, provide a countdown if you can) or ‘limited time’ with an actual date, ‘limited offer to the first 10 customers’, etc. What this does in essence is utilize another very powerful motivator, namely….

Fear

No one wants to be left out. When you have a lot of people all vying for the same thing, you are generating a feeding frenzy! The time is ripe with anticipation and excitement, two very powerful emotions.

Remember, shopping is almost exclusively an emotional response to a stimulus. Two types of fear you can capitalize on are fear of loss and fear of being left out and are the most effective in marketing.  Limited quantities only, speaks to the “fear of loss”.

Whereas, limited membership or limited to the first 10 purchases speaks to the fear of missing out. If your selling memberships, it’s the later you want to speak directly to. Tell them what their missing by not signing up to your newsletter or e-zine. Oh, and one more thing I think you’ll appreciate is a little secret to…

Lead Them To Your Door

Did you notice something? Look at the way this blog is written. I used a simple method to get you to read the next headline using the last sentence as the lead-in to the next headline. Adapt this style in your body copy as an effective way to lead your visitor further down the page. It got you this far, didn’t it?

What Sets Your Online Business Apart?

How do you get a visitor to stay at your site, read what you have to offer, sign up to your newsletter and/or buy your product?  The key is to build emotional value.  Speak to their psyche.  But before you can do that you have to uncover every benefit your product or service has to offer.  These benefits will create the emotional value you need to motivate your site visitor.  Resist the urge to shove your product in front of your visitor right away. 

How do you do that?  Just ask yourself, “so what?” 

For instance, let’s say your selling an ebook on how to write good copy for your business. 

“So what?”  Well, learning these skills will save you money because you won’t have to hire a copywriter. 

“So what?”  These skills are critical to anyone running a business. 

“So what?”  When you become adept at copywriting, your sales will skyrocket and your online business could conceivably run itself.  Okay better, but let’s ask one more time,

“So what?”  Now you’ll have time on your hands to tend to other matters, less stress and more time to spend with your family.  Who can argue with that, right? 

Use this method to  identify the benefits you are offering. List them all out on paper.  No matter how big or small, list them all.  Put a star next to the ones that have the biggest appeal.  Those are the ones that will be the most prominent on your site.  Include all of the benefits you’ve listed.  Weave them all in until you feel you’ve successfully created anticipation.  Using this technique is like laying out the bread crumbs that your visitors will follow right to your purchase page.  Little by little, one step at a time will guarantee much better results.

Psychological Secrets That Turn Prospects Into Customers

When it comes to choosing from what you want versus what you need.  More often than not, “wants” wins out.  Shoppers are motivated by need but it is desire for more than just the basics that clinches the deal. 

Needs are meeting the basic essentials for our daily lives such as basic transportation, clothing, food and shelter.  Wants on the other hand, is a desire for things that improve our quality of life.  So, although it may be more practical to buy a used car to get to and from work, few of us would deny really wanting a new car instead.  This plays out in all of our decisions, do I get the basic plan that meets my needs or the upgrade with the nice extras I would really enjoy?

Online shoppers look for items only after they’ve decided to purchase.  The main motivating factor is convenience.  For most online shoppers, price is not the top motivating factor, thereby, placing greater value on saving time over money.  Often times, once a buyer has found the item they were searching for,  a well written sales copy can appeal to the desire to improve their quality of life with a little extra often in the form of an upgrade.

Why is wanting such a powerful motivator?  Advertising has done an excellent job in convincing us that the basics are not good enough.  It’s not enough to get by driving a used car.  What would your co-workers say?  What about your image? 

People are highly motivated by having the best or the newest gadget.  Think about the long lines of people who wait outside of retail stores to purchase a limited item such as a new laptop or video game. 

Take a cue from the large retailers and craft your sales copy to speak directly to a person’s wants.  Retailers understand this concept and know how to center their marketing and advertising campaigns to appeal to it. 

There is so much more to know about this topic.  I can’t possibly cover it here.  You can download the special report entitled, “7 Hidden Psychological Secrets to Maximum Sales” at www.buildmynetwork.org .

Top Affiliate Marketing Systems

Affiliate Marketing Systems are umbrellas for a slew of different affiliate programs.  Each one of these large directories offer a slew affiliate programs you can pick and choose from. Some of the smaller directories such as Millionaire Club offer more specialized types of affiliate programs. 

Choose only those programs that flow nicely with your existing online business thereby, adding quality to your content.  The more you can offer your visitors while focusing on your site’s theme, the better.

The Millionaire League

This directory focuses on specialized affiliate programs.  Offers a free e-book, “Licensed To Print Money”.  You also get new money making ideas, tips, strategies and techniques added EVERY MONTH! That means NEW ebooks, NEW reports, and NEW videos covering the hottest money making topics! Not to mention 24/7 Email & Video Support and an 60 Day Guarantee!  Lifetime memberships were $200 but new offer is $47 with the first 60 days free.

Clickbank is well known as one of the largest affiliate directories online.  With hundreds of different affiliate programs listed by category and search phrases.  It’s free to join and easy to incorporate your new “hoplink” into your site using simple html that is given to you to cut and paste.  However, please be aware that Clickbank does not make any guarantee regarding the legitimacy of it’s affiliate programs.  Anyone can list their program into Clickbanks directory.

 

There is a lot to learn about Clickbank, how it works, how are paid commissions, what are storefronts, what to avoid, what are hop links and much more.  Discover everything you need to know at in the FREE CLICKBANK GUIDE

The Spiderweb Marketing System  is an affiliate marketing system with its own list of affiliate programs.  The system takes you step-by-step on how to set up your own spiderweb site and how to sign on to each affiliate program via video training.  Going through the process does a good deal of time since you have to listen to each video and follow along. However, you only need to go through the process once.  You can also pick and choose which program your interested in joining.  The system tracks all your affiliate links and new affiliates that sign under you.  What makes it unique is how the system will skip over an inactive affiliate under you so to your benefit.  The “skipped” affiliate receives an email informing them that they just lost a commission and encourages them to sign-on to that program so as not to miss any more. <br>

The PepperJam Network  Is one of the fastest growing affiliate network directories online today.  It has had plenty of media attention and carefully selects which affiliate programs to offer.  Affiliate memberships are NOT guaranteed and require that you have a well established site with a respectable level of daily traffic.