They're an Itchy Bunch of People

Your "audience" on the Internet are an unusual sector of people. They're ideal for Internet sales, but you must understand the way they live, surf, and perceive the Internet overall.

Many Internet marketers say the Internet is impossible ground to break, a place where only the really tough survive.  It is estimated that only about 2% of all websites are making any kind of profit!  Yikes! Even if this is true, you can turn your site around.  Don't feel bad if you're one of them. We were too, for quite awhile, though it is an embarrassing thing to admit. Go ahead, you can do it. Stand in front of your bathroom mirror tomorrow morning, look yourself in the eye and say: "My website is NOT MAKING JACK! It doesn't even pay for its own web hosting fees!"

Ok, now that you have that over with, how do you turn this completely around? Facing the truth about your website's profitability is the first step. Do I sound like a psychiatrist yet? Well, by the time you get finished with this chapter, you're going to become a website psychiatrist. You will be able to see your website in a completely microscopic, unique way. It's easy to turn the profitability of your website around! Well, not easy as in you don't have to do anything, but it is easy to understand how to change the future of your website.  I know you're just itching to know what makes powerful websites with sales in the thousands or even millions a month so powerful.
By the way, don't assume that because a big company does well in the "offline" market that they're going to just jump on the Net and sell, sell, sell! Does everyone remember the nightmare of trying to get to Toys R Us last Christmas?  Poor planning.  They had something that everyone wanted - Pokemon, but they did a lousy job of fulfilling orders.  We know because we ordered
some toys from them for a Pokemon promotion for our website and had an impossible time getting them to fulfill it. That was probably the opposite of the problems you may be facing, but it is just as bad to be caught with your pants down as it is to get no one on the Internet to even notice you at all!

Many companies get lost in the excitement of actually having a website, then the CEO one day wakes up and wonders why the site is not getting very many hits or very many sales if the hits are 2,000 or more a month. The problem is a lot like that famous word: Paradigm. When
the Total Quality Management "fad" was making its way around the business world in order to improve the quality of products businesses were producing, paradigm was a word used a lot to describe the way you perceive the way you've always done things.  The theory went that if you changed the way you saw your everyday processes, you could change the productivity of your workforce. 

Ok, so its a long explanation of what I am getting at here, but it makes a lot of sense if you understand the average Internet user.  Businesses have always perceived marketing in one way.  They get the brand recognition they want through expensive advertising in radio, television, and other media.  The Internet has changed all of that, and the target market of visitors is why.

If you were somewhat coherent in the early 1980s, you probably remember something called a BBS. Most BBSs have since migrated to the Internet and started offering telnet sessions into their boards instead of the old dialup. My first learning experience with computers was
this absolutely astonishing electronic bulletin board system that allowed me to dial into a BBS phone number and log on, putting me in instantaneous contact with tons of other people. What was unique about the BBS if you never saw one? It was FREE. Why? That's just how it started out. Some boards charged you after 30 days, but they were the rare situation. Who cares?  You should!

If you are to be worth anything in the Internet marketing arena, you must learn this word. FREE. FREE. FREE. You have probably seen it on literally hundreds of the high sales sites. You just may not have noticed it. What does the BBS have to do with this? It was a lot of people's hobby to run the BBS, and they (most of the time)- the sysops- paid for everything and just offered it for free. You could play games, send mail, and just do all kinds of fun stuff.  Then Arpanet came to the surface, and the Defense Dept ran it. It was created as a symposium of shared information by all kinds of technical types. The information was free! FREE something on your site is the key to this sales problem. Don't fight what the Internet stands for. Work with it. FREEdom of Speech. Give your website visitors something they would value FREE. One really great thing to offer
if you have a site on animals, for example, is to have a full history and background set of pages that tell people all kinds !of neat stuff about animals.

How fast do they leave? We'll discuss, in this chapter, what keeps the itchy ones around and what doesn't. Let's discuss first what makes them leave your site in droves.

How you can REALLY drive them away in droves:

1. It's not clear what the focus of your site really is. If you have a website that has affiliate links pasted all over it, it is going to be difficult for your visitors to figure out what your particular niche is, and it often drives them away from your site if one of your affiliate links is more appealing than the actual content of your site. If you have any affiliate links, put them sparingly on your pages. Your content should be central to the niche you've selected for your website sales. If you're selling information, give some away first, then direct them carefully to the online location where they can purchase.

2. You promise them something, and then you don't deliver. I recently visited a site where they said they were offering free reports and software. All I had to do was to put in my email address and they'd send me the URL or link where I could go to download my free reports.
When I got there, there were no links to any free anything. There were only links where I could buy their program. Now, whether or not this was intentional, I'll never know because I'll probably
never return. If their website was in construction and did not yet have the links for the downloads, they probably should not have led anyone there yet. As I have mentioned before, people will come to your site for free information that tempts them to buy your product. They will leave just as fast if you promise them something free, but you deceive them by throwing in an obvious sales pitch instead.

3. Your site is really slow and it does all kinds of annoying crap. YOU know what I am talking about here. Less than 40K on your initial web page is recommended. We like to keep ours under 20K, even for Flash pages. There's no bigger turnoff than a page that loads really slow because it is doing all sorts of crap that annoys you, like opening up little windows in front of the main page. If you have a message like this, put it in the main content of your page. The ones that are worse are the little windows that keep opening up to try to keep you at their site for just a moment more. Some of them make it so that I cannot even leave. I have to close down my browser to get rid of them, and they still try to hang around on my desktop if I don't slap them around a little! If the visitor is at this point of leaving, let them go! They have already turned their back on you. The sale is gone. Ever notice how car salesmen fight to keep you in the showroom? Uh, huh. That is the reason.  If you have fresh content every week (at least), and you write lots of articles (or syndicate others), you will get them to keep coming back. 

4. In many cases, the first page they see is just a sales letter. It lists no benefits, it offers no free information, it has no guarantees. Your sales letter should be carefully written, with benefits of
your product listed first, along with what might happen if they don't have your product. You can then move into testimonials and other proof of the product's value (perhaps excerpts if it is an
information product). Be honest, but subtle at the same time. Offer them free stuff for ordering. The first page they see in many cases should be a page with the words FREE or something similiar written all over it. Offer free articles.

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You can see the rest of this article as a chapter of my upcoming book "The Little Website That Could",  due out in stores soon,  by Lynne Schlumpf http://www.r66cci.com
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