How To Be A Customer For Your Own Articles
Internet marketers are constantly concerned with this question -
how to get more visitors, subscribers, customers. Like many
internet business owners I have tried many tricks of the trade
to attract people to my offer. In the initial stages I hardly
got any visitors to my web site. This was very frustrating.
After spending so much time, money and offering really good
business proposals I could not find enough takers.
I often felt like shouting - "Hey, look here. I have everything
you are looking for. I have schemes to make your life. I am
there to help you all along. Why don't you come to me?" But it
was I who needed help. I learned the basic lesson the hard way -
wishful thinking is not enough.
It's a weird thought but I often feel like entering the minds of
the people to find out what exactly they want. What is it in my
presentation that upsets them? And what will retain them?
There is a way to enter the minds of your prospects - become
your own customer. Think like your customer. As a customer of
your product where will you go looking for it? Most obvious
choice is search engines. Your customers may be able to find
your website if it is ranked high by the search engines.
Attaining a high rank for your website can take considerable
time. You would like to find your prospects much sooner.
What are the other places where you, as a customer, will go
looking for your product? Ezines are one of the options. You
will look in the ezines which are related to product you are
interested in. You will look at the ads and articles which give
useful information. Articles are one of the best means of
promotion. My own experience is that visits to my website
increased dramatically after I started writing articles. The
resource box of the article really seems to attract people. When
people read your articles they know that there is a real person
who can be contacted. By reading the article readers develop a
faith in the author and tend to follow his advice. By the time
they click on the link given in the resource box they are
already pre-sold to some extent. This I think is a unique
feature which you can rarely find in other promotional methods
such as classified ads, FFA pages or banner exchange schemes.
In addition your articles give you additional coverage when they
are picked up by other publishers and website owners to publish
them in their ezines and websites. Articles are generally stored
in archives and are accessible to interested persons for a long
time. Therefore, your articles can give you publicity weeks,
months or even years after they were first published.
Your article gives you a head start in finding your prospects.
It definitely improves click-thru rate for your website or the
landing page which is linked to your resource box. This should
be considered only as the first step towards finding your
prospects. Your articles put the odds of finding prospects
strongly in your favor.
How do you retain your prospects when they arrive at your
landing page? Well, I am not discussing this aspect here, but I
will only mention that it would help you again to become your
own customer. Look at your landing page as a customer, keep
modifying it until you find positive answers to these three
vital questions:
1)What are my concerns which have brought me to this page? (Your
visitors were led to believe thru your promotions that their
particular concerns would be addressed.)
2)What is it in the presentation which tells me at a glance that
I might find solutions to my problems? Do I need to look further
in this presentation or should I move on?
3)Does the presentation address my concerns? Does it help me? If
yes, in what way?
You need to be ruthless with yourself as a customer and answer
these questions as honestly as possible. There is no end to
improvement and this exercise of thinking like a customer should
get better with practice resulting in better conversion rate.