PrintEmail

Most business owners are disappointed by the poor results their websites achieve in generating sales. They get little traffic and visitors don't stay around long enough to buy.

Some business owners go down the route of trying to write persuasive sales copy in the hope of making their websites more profitable and while this can be effective to some extent, it still fails to tap the full potential of the Internet. Web browsers tend to be suspicious of hype.

One of the world's top Web marketing experts, Ken Evoy, has developed a radical new approach to selling on the Net, which appears to be generating good

results for businesses that try it.

Evoy calls this approach "pre-selling" and stresses businesses must first "pre-sell" on their websites before they can sell effectively.

What this means, is you must first build a relationship with your prospective customers over a period of time, by providing then with interesting, relevant content on your site.

It's often said that on the Net "content is King". In other words, people surf the Net looking for information, so that's what your website needs to provide, to attract visitors.
Evoy explains: "Pre-selling warms up your visitor by providing them with high-value information that builds trust and credibility."

He points out in the offline world, businesses build relationships with their customers over time by adopting a friendly, personal approach. People do business with those they know and trust.

So how to you build that kind of trust with visitors to your website, when they don't know you and can't see you?

It's much harder to develop trust and credibility online because there are so many shonky Web businesses and people are naturally wary.

This is why you need to provide lots of free information that is relevant to your line of business - perhaps helpful hints, or just useful information your prospective customers are likely to be looking for via search engines.

Evoy believes business sites should ideally contain 50 or more pages of such free content. This gives the search engine "spiders" a lot of pages to list in their search results and increases your chances of being found online.

The downside of Evoy's approach is that it does require time to write several pages of website content. And your website doesn't build a huge amount of traffic overnight.

It's a slow, steady approach but in the long run, Evoy claims, it's the best way to build a credible online presence for your business.

When it comes to writing your website content, you can tackle it bit by bit. Just add one page a week. Over a year, you'll have more than 50 pages. That's 50 pages packed with information your prospective customers will be searching for the Net and may find through the search engines. It's content that will build your credibility for prospective customers.

It's effectively free advertising - apart from the small monthly fee for your website hosting, which is the same whether you have an effective site or an ineffective one.

So how do you write all this content?
Before you write your first word … know your customer. Picture your customer in your mind. Then write as if you're talking to your customer. Simple. Common sense. So why do so few business websites do it?