Testimonials are one of the most powerful ways to drive new business. The reason is to do with trust: trust, or lack of it, is one of the big barriers to doing business, especially online where not only are identity-theft and other scams a real (if over-exaggerated) fear for many people, but in the vast majority of cases you never even know the name of the person you’re buying from, let alone meet them, see them, or even speak to them.
If there’s one thing you should learn and take to heart when it comes to increasing profits in your business, it’s that email marketing works. If you use email marketing you’ll make more sales and make more money. It’s that simple. But (and it’s a big but) email marketing works only if you do it and do it regularly.
Here’s what I mean.
There’s an old story about an advertising agency getting ready to pitch for the account with British Rail, the company which ran the UK railways before privatisation and which was famous for late-running and cancelled trains, filthy stations and awful food. The agency was a small one as these things go, and knew it would be pitching against some of the bigger firms, and so knew in turn it had to come up with a pitch to really grab the attention of the British rail management. And it came up with a corker.
One of the problems with having a site ranking highly in the SERPs or being popular because of your activity and exposure on the various Social Media platforms is you get loads of traffic… but while it’s relevant to the overall theme of your site it’s not well matched in any specific way with your home page. In other words it’s trying to be all things to all visitors and so ends up being not particularly compelling for anyone.
Just recently I’ve been doing a lot of work with the new Gold Mastermind group, including looking at many of the Members’ websites — layout, design, content and so on. And while there are many simple mistakes I see over and over again, perhaps the least obvious to the untrained eye is in the content — specifically the copy. Now, copywriting isn’t the sexiest of topics and you’ll probably be glad to learn I’m not going to get into it deeply now. Because instead I want to look at the content from a different angle and talk about the style.
Most websites simply are not fit for purpose. They’re designed from the wrong premise, that the site needs to have a certain “look” that ties in with the company’s “brand”.
The correct premise is to first decide what you want the website to do. Once you have the answer to that, it will tell you what your site needs to look like to achieve its purpose.
Form follows function, after all. So here’s a simple seven-point checklist, to make sure you’re up to speed on the Internet Marketing basics.
Of late you’ll no doubt be aware I’ve quite forcefully been putting people off the idea of SEO and a very unhealthy reliance on so-called free traffic. While my arguments are sound and have been borne out over and over again, there’s still a lot of resistance to them from many, if not most, business owners.
