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03.16.07
Selling That Thing That You Sell
 By
Stoney deGeyter
The other day I went to a local seminar on “internet marketing”. I honestly didn’t expect a whole lot; it was one of those “how to make money on the internet” things, which promised to tell you tips on how to use the search engines to your advantage, yada, yada, yada. But I have to say I was surprised, at least from the first 30 minutes of the 90 minute seminar.
What surprised me was that the seminar on “how to make money on the internet” that was really nothing more than a sales pitch for an all day seminar they would be holding several weeks later. And boy, did they have that pitch down!
I left after the first 30 minutes. It felt like we were still in the introduction stage of the presentation. Kind of like they kept making promises of all the things they’ll be covering but never really covering them. I think that was just the point. This presentation wasn’t about providing information on how to make money from the internet, it was about how you can learn everything you need to know about how to make money from the internet by coming to the NEXT seminar.
The presenter was professional and he didn’t come off as a hack. He was actually very engaging. And interestingly they covered the “get rich quick schemes are a scheme” ground too. It was a very effective 30 minutes. I almost wanted to sign up for the next seminar. Maybe I would had if I had not left!
Pre-Selling Is A Legitimate (And Effective) Sales Technique
While I don’t care for this type of pre-sales schtick, it got me thinking about how we go about selling those things that we sell. In fact, any good website uses some kind of pre-selling technique regularly. Think about it, rarely does our home page actually sell the products or service we offer. That page is just an overview, an introduction, a flowery summary of what we or our products are all about.
As we click further into the site we get closer and closer to the actual selling, but depending on the breadth and depth of the site, we are often just pre-selling as visitors click deeper and deeper in. This pre-selling, regardless of what page it is on, does the job of routing each visitor closer to the destination which is the sales page while continuing to build expectations as they move through the site.
And how does all this pre-selling happen? Text. Content. Words.
The Product Should Not Have To Sell Itself
Many sites, especially e-commerce sites, feel that words are unnecessary and that the product should sell it self. They’ll throw the specifications onto the product page and believe that tells the visitor all they’ll ever want or need to know. Okay, fine, lets say the product does sell itself. But what about the pages that lead to the product? Surely you have pages that lead to the product pages, no? If your site has any kind of depth visitors generally hit the home page first (provided they didn’t enter via a search that dropped them right on the product page). From there they have to (want) to click to a category of their choosing, and then they can click on individual products. That’s two whole pages before the “sales” page, at best. For some sites there are more.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Stoney deGeyter leads a spectacular team of seasoned marketing experts at Pole Position Marketing and has built a wildly successful website marketing company that succeeds through both personal and professional integrity. You can read Stoney's blog posts at the E-Marketing Performance blog and more of his work on several well-known SEO and marketing news sources including Search Engine Guide and WebProNews. Stoney has authored two website marketing books: E-Marketing Performance: Effective strategies for building, optimizing, and marketing your website online and Keyword Research and Selection: The definitive guide to gathering, sorting and organizing your keywords into a high-performance SEO campaign.
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