If you are reading this article today, you are likely among those who are working an online business. Unfortunately, you have already learned that finding customers is not as easy as you once thought it would be. Many people have broken the bank and their dreams searching for that first customer or second customer.
Having discovered the challenge of finding customers has left you with a feeling of not knowing quite what to do. That is why you read ezines or visit websites like this one. You are searching for the knowledge that you feel you are lacking. You open each new issue of each ezine you subscribe to looking for the help you need to find your first customer or even to increase upon the customers you have already found.
THE GREATEST CHALLENGE WE FACE
See, the greatest challenge we all face is not finding people who need our products or services. Instead, our greatest challenge is actually building trust in the hearts and minds of the people who need our products or services. This is why most people have such difficulty in finding the customers we all need.
Online marketers cannot establish trust with one single advertisement! They cannot establish trust with one impression of their banner! One might get lucky and get the click-through on the advertisement or banner, but that click-through will only generate a sale for one in two hundred visitors. Scary, isn't it?
To stop and realize that the average on the Internet is five sales per thousand visitors can make it frightening to most beginners to online marketing. The term "beginner" in this area could apply to anyone who has been marketing online for less than 3 years. Yes, it is a steep learning curve on the web! Most people quit before they ever get to the three year mark --- quitting long before they have given themselves the chance to succeed.
Most marketing polls suggest that it will take you seven exposures before you will have earned enough trust to get a sale online or offline. What that means is that your potential customer must see your name and your ads a minimum of seven times before you can expect their interest to peak enough to give you a second look.
ASTRONOMICAL ODDS
That is what makes advertising online so very difficult. With more than 934 million people online as of September 2004,
( http://thephantomwriters.com/redir/peopleonline.html ) the chance of hitting the same person twice with your advertising is slim to none if you are advertising your wares the same as most people are.
Most people try to advertise with the scatter shot approach. They throw an ad out there hoping to hit as many people as possible and then move on to the next ad or next advertising medium. With this scatter shot approach, their chance of hitting one person twice is astronomical! The chance of hitting that person the required seven times is nearly impossible.
The "Rule of Seven" is why most marketers begin their own ezine. As a publisher, it is easy to meet your seven exposure requirement in the trust building process. The difficulty of this method is growing the mailing list size. As a publisher, it is fairly easy to keep subscribers --- getting the subscribers is the real difficulty.
While I do recommend for the marketer to start the ezine, the process of building a client base from an ezine is the slow boat to China approach. It could realistically take years to break the plateau of your first 1000 subscribers!
WHICH OF THESE NAMES DO YOU RECOGNIZE?
Let me suggest a few names to you:
Of these 65 people, how many of these names do your recognize? Of the names that you do recognize, how many of them can you tell me what kind of business they are in? Or what their website is? Or what they sell?
Further, of the people whose names you do recognize, what is your gut feeling about them? How many of them do you feel that you can trust?
Chances are really good that you have heard of at least one third of these people. I can almost guarantee that you have heard of at least one person on this list. How do I know this?
It is simple.
TWO COMMON AND SHARED TRAITS
These 65 people all share two common traits:
1. They are all people who publish free-reprint articles to be distributed to publishers the world over. Each of them provide top-notch content that appeals to a much larger audience.
2. All of these writer's and netpreneurs used the Phantom Writers Article Distribution Service to get their articles into the mailboxes of more than 12,000 publishers and webmasters looking for top-quality reprint content they can place into their ezines and their websites.
Ezine publishers and webmasters the world over are looking for free content that they can supply to their readers. They all understand what a past Yahoo! study emphasized. Content is King! Most site visitors are looking for information of some kind when they go to a site or subscribe to an ezine.
Publishers and webmasters understand that the best way to attract and keep traffic and readers is to provide folks on the web what they want. By using free-reprint articles, they are able to provide their readers and their site visitors with the high-quality content subscribers and surfers demand.
A POWERFUL TESTIMONY
If there is a single name on my list that you recognize and feel as if you can trust, then you have the strongest testimony available to the power of using free-reprint articles to build your business.
If you are not confident to strike out writing your own articles, there are several people who are willing to hire their own article writing skills out to folks just like you. Just visit your favorite search engine and type in the search terms "ghost written articles" or another similar terms.
What it boils down to is this, if you are in business on the web and are looking to find your first or your ten thousandth customer, you should seriously consider striking out into the free-reprint market. If you are not comfortable as a writer, then you should absolutely explore the possibility of hiring a ghost writer to write promotional articles for you and your business.
Copyright Bill Platt - All Rights Reserved. Reprints allowed with article and resource box unedited. If you post this article on a website, you must set the links up as hyperlinks.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Bill Platt is the owner of http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com
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