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SELF PROMOTION
How to Market Your Business Online
What’s the secret to a Web site with high sales? It’s not any one thing, but a combination of a lot of things.
First, prospective customers have to know you’re out there. That requires marketing your online presence. It also requires knowing how to play the online search game. Your Web site needs to be easy to navigate. Your home page needs to quickly engage the reader. Your photographs should load quickly since many consumers use much slower dial-up access to the Internet.
The copy needs to sing about relevance to the viewer. "What's in this for me?" Good copy quickly solves a problem or need through benefits, not overly relying on promoting features. Your product or service may be the latest, coolest, sexiest, with more features than any competitor, but unless you translate those features into benefits of what it will do for the prospective customer, you leave the translation to the reader and that connection often isn't made. Good copy on a Web site needs to be thorough, but as brief as possible. Bad copy talks about "me." Good copy talks about "you," your prospective customer. Bad grammar and misspellings hurt your credibility.
If you need inspiration about how to market your products or services, go to your competitor’s Web sites. Chances are you’ll have competition you didn't realize existed until you go to a search engine and search based on the words your prospective customers might use to find you. Note what you like about your competition, from a customer's perspective, and what you don't like.
Important to your success is having good flow. By that, you should construct your Web site so it follows a writer's formula that (1) demands attention, (2) provokes interest, (3) creates desire, and finally (4) calls the user to action. You demand attention by having a headline, with a photo or graphic, that makes a strong promise. You pay off that promise with benefit after benefit to provoke interest. You create a desire for your product or service by helping the reader see what it will do for them. And you call the reader to action, usually with a strong offer. If you're selling online, without a call to action, you risk losing sales.
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