What Attracts People To Your Site?
For eCommerce sites that sell physical goods such as poker chips, sofas and rugs, most of your traffic will come from visitors searching for your products by name or type, such as “WPT poker chips” or “persian rug”. For those of you (myself included) who sell intangible items (such as software or eBooks), where does most of your traffic come from?
I’m sure you get some traffic from search engines, but the majority of people will arrive at your site looking for free information, not your product. Consider this portion of text from SiteSell’s web site (http://ctpm.sitesell.com):
Let’s review C=>T=>P=>M, the proven way to build any business online.
Content Web users search for information, for solutions. They are not looking for you - they don’t know you (yet!). They seek what you know. Give it to them. Convert your knowledge into in-demand Content. To succeed online, start where they start - at “the search.”
Traffic Your topical content ranks high at the Search Engines (ex., Google, Yahoo!, MSN), attracting free, targeted (i.e., interested), open-to-you visitors. Basically, these future customers “meet you” at your site. These visitors are known as “Traffic.”
PREsell Complete strangers develop trust and confidence in you. Why? You “PREsell” by OVERdelivering what they seek… relevant, original, information. Deliver it in your own voice, in your own way. Go beyond merely instilling confidence… your visitors will like you. (Immediate “selling” on Web sites is ineffective unless you have a brand like Amazon.)
Monetize Convert warm, willing-to-buy (”PREsold”) visitors into income. Called “Monetizing,” this is the easy part. But “M” cannot happen if you fail to first execute C=>T=>P. This is where 99% of small businesses fail.
So in summary, people come to your site looking first for information, and once you’ve earned their trust by providing them with free articles that they find useful they will they begin looking at your product and seriously consider purchasing it.
If this sounds strange to you, consider how you look for information online. I was recently after information on building a set of stairs, so I search for “build a set of stairs” on Google. I ended up at a builder’s web site (AskTheBuilder.com) that contained hundreds of articles on everything you could possibly want to build out of wood. Only after reading about 5 of his free articles did I stumble across his paid eBook that promised I could build a set of stairs in a weekend.
Because he had already earned my trust from his free articles, I decided to buy his eBook for a few dollars and spent that weekend building the set of stairs.
If you aren’t providing your visitors with a way to gain your trust, you could be hurting your web sites conversion rate. Now is the best time to start writing articles, start a useful blog or even start a newsletter relating to topics that people might search for to find your site.
