In my last article, we discussed small factors that influences customer subconsciously. In this article, we’ll discuss factors that makes customer to buy something.

Are you marketing to prospects heart or to the mind?

When a customer comes to your website (webpage) to buy or research about a product, then she’s in a phase which will eventually leads to her buying it.

It completely depends on you to make the sale as easy as possible. For example, if you are selling a Widget A and there are 100 different websites selling Widget A then how are you going to influence her state?

Words create images and images creates emotion.

Tom Hopkins, top sales trainer uses this quote often in his seminars. Words create images and these images leads to emotion and these emotions leads to buying your product.

What words you use in your webpage is going to create the influence factor in your product description.

In Copywriting world, we have this quote.

Benefits appeal to emotions
Features appeal to logic
Logic justifies emotion and
Emotion justifies sales.

What does this tell you?

So the word you use have to include Benefits and Features.

You have to appeal to your customers login and emotion.

What you should do with your description?

Your goal to provide as much information about your product as possible. Most people who like to buy do their research and then decide what to buy. When you are writing description of your product, present a complete picture about your product.

Present all the benefits, features, guarantees and everything down to small detail. Remind them that they are making the right decision to buy with you.

Yes, Images Create Emotions too…

(Yummy, that picture creates salivating emotions by Pink Sherbet Photography)

Like the image, if you love food, you’ll love this image. Image of your product, or result will also help you.

That’s why most websites uses photos to show their product.

Again your goal is to make a sale. If you can include a mouth watering image for your product, you can increase the chances of the sales.

Remember – A single Picture can create effect of thousand words.

What You should do with your pictures?

If it’s possible, you should add demo in Picture or Movies. These days, adding a movie has become very simple and easy. You can do it in few minutes and present a complete new viewpoint to your customer with your movie presentation.

“I loved it, You should love it too…”

If you have testimonials for your product, then you should add them too. Customer often believes that their problem or issue is unique. They don’t want to be your guinea pig to test out your product. They want assurance that they are making the right choice.

There’s nothing like testimonials that can achieve that. If you are providing testimonials then they better should be from real people. Do not fabricate them.

Testimonials add credibility, assurance and customer feel safe.

Did you notice testimonials on Amazon.com website? Most of these testimonials are pretty much un-edited. The bring confidence in buyer about the product and the website.

Words, images, Videos, testimonials and guarantees are the simple factors that will help you sell more products.

Oh… I just realized, I didn’t even discussed price as major factor… Why? because it is not an important factor (I’ll tell you some other time why price doesn’t matter).

About The Author

Varun Pratap is Business Growth Specialist and SEO expert in India. His blog http://www.varunpratap.com provides tips, ideas and his thoughts on marketing your business, life and much more.

Does he starts talking about different car parts, plugs, wires, sections and what not? or does he give you a time limit or an idea when your car will get it fixed?

But that’s the same thing most SEO experts in India are doing.

It’s the real truth, when it comes to Search engine optimization. When you go to any website SEO consultant, they’ll dazzle you with talks about .htacess, google spiders, indexing, xml, html,css on page optimization, offpage optimization, link building and what not…

If you try to go on and check SEO forums then, you’ll start wondering where do start within all the mess of this information. That’s why In this article, I am going to rip out all the un-necessary junk from SEO and give you simple details.

Why You Only Need 2 things to optimize your website?

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization and building traffic, you only have to worry about 2 things.

1. Content

2. Back Links

The Real Naked Truth to Getting Rankings

Let’s discuss the back links first- The real truth about all the optimization is that it completely depends on getting back links to your website. You should be spending as much time as possible in this work. It’s boring, it’s BORING but it’s the only thing.

If you take a look at any traffic building tactic, you’ll see it’s all about getting a back link. If you take web 2.0, publishing articles, press-releases etc are all techniques to get links.

If you do nothing else but get back links to your website, you’ll start seeing results.

Of course there are bad way to get links and good way to get links…

How you’d know the links are good?

One of the simplest way to know about links is to check “nofollow” tag. If a link is Nofollow, it’ll not have any effects in your rankings. But can you still get traffic from it? Of course.

Lets imagine, you get a link from google’s home page with a no-follow. Will it carry any weight in your rankings? Technically No. Will you get traffic? Chances are Heck Yes.. Why? because Google gets so many eyeballs on that page is that it’s maddening.

Personally I believe every link that you can get to your website will help you regardless of their “weight” in their rankings.

But if you are linking back to bad neighborhood (spam sites for example), you’ll get your ranking penalized by search engines. So be careful to who you link towards.

What role does Content play in this?

The role of content is pretty much the same as the low cut dress which reveals all the right things.

It’s to attract readers to your website.

Getting links are good, getting ranked in top 10 is good too.. But will it help you if people look at your website and pass it by?

That’s why you need content to attract people. Now of course there are always some exception. But majority of the websites need content. For example, amazon.com has millions of webpages and content on it’s site and we know how crazy business amazon.com does?

Same goes for about.com which is nothing but a HUGE content site. The content there is massive and it gets lots of traffic.

So How does it relates to your website? What can you do with this information?

It’s simple. Follow the 2 step process and get traffic.

1. Create content which attracts reader regularly.

2. Get as much back links as possible.

3. Rinse and repeat.

Next step –

If you are looking for natural SEO company which only utilize techniques that are recommended by google, then you should contact me ASAP.

My method or simplified idea is based on 3 sub ideas.

1. Attracting Traffic, leads and clients.

2. Building Relationship with your prospects.

3. Selling to your prospects and make them keep coming to you.

No matter what techniques you use, they’ll come under the above 3 points. Now what I highly recommend you to pick a simple technique that you can follow (for each steps). You should focus on ONE technique and master it.

For example, If I am good with using blogs to build, attract traffic, then I should spend as much time as possible with blogs. When I’ve master one technique, I’ll move on to learn new ways to generate traffic.

This is how you should attempt to learn internet marketing. Otherwise, you’ll end up with plethoras of techniques and won’t have any idea what to do with them. In last 6 years, though I know tons of techniques, but I’ve mastered 5–6 different ways to do it. 

Selling is all about building relationship with your prospect. If they don’t know you or about your product/service. They’ll never buy from you. In any case, if they do buy, chances are they’ll shop somewhere else for next time.

That’s why my 2^nd step is about Building relationship. And that’s before we start selling to them.

3^rd step you have to worry about is selling them and make them keep coming to you again and again. If you are able to follow the 2^nd step, then you won’t have problem with selling.

Again, the idea of using one technique work wonder in this step. I can write powerful emails and sell my products. It took me about 6–8 months of experimenting before I succeeded in using emails as tool to sell.

So, Of course there is a learning curve as you can see. But it’s worth every second.

So what you can do now?

Simplify your marketing plan and implement it. No need to find out 100 different techniques to build traffic or sneaky little tricks to sell your products. Be Authentic, Be Yourself.

If you need any help with any of the steps above, you can always ask. I can help you with marketing strategies or may be guide you in building relationships or write your sales copy.

With practice of 6–8 months, I was reading at comfortable 1000 words per minute. Later I stopped using speed reading strategies. But my speed still hovered around 700 words per minute.

That’s at least 450 words per minute more than average reader. Average reader don’t read faster than 250 words per minute. And this was my simple secret to getting a leg up on others.

If your speed is about average you can almost double your reading speed in one or two sessions. Provided you are serious about making a change in it.

There’s a lot of benefit of learning it.

You’ll read faster, get rid of your assignments and word load faster. Don’t forget, you’ll also improve on your concentration and comprehension skills.

And you’ll have lot of free time.

That’s why I am suggesting it to you to get into speed reading course. Spend next 30 days learning speed reading course and it’ll help you for long time.

I had a habit of writing a journal which help me be accountable to the things I did. It was like a mirror which always showed me the truth.

I don’t know when I stopped writing into my journal but I know from experience that it was not in my best interest.

One of the things I had to learn while learning internet marketing (and building business) is to be accountable to my own success.

While writing down, I wrote my success, my failures and my learnings which all helped me gain much knowledge along with new experience to forge through in the world of business.

So far I’ve used journal successfully when

1. I wanted to lose weight and needed to write down what I was eating and what kind of workout I was following.

2. I wanted to know which of my blog were successful and which were failure

3. I wanted to know which of my advertising campaigns were doing good.

4. I wanted to make a commitment to learn a new skill like copywriting or Hypnosis.

5. I wanted to be accountable for my own success and failures.

Someone once said, “Own yourself, you own the world”. It can be understood in many ways. And this is one of the way you can start understanding yourself.

I don’t mean in technical terms. You can hire anyone to get a website in a week or less. No I meant in terms of Marketing, Producing, it’s like giving a birth to website.

1. What’s Your Goal?  – When I am starting out, I ask myself a very simple question. What’s my goal? Now of course, your goal can be, saving the world, making money, just plain old vanilla putting your business offline.

But in this phase, you have to find out how you are going to achieve your end goal.

For example, this website http://www.varunpratap.com/ went through many phases (from a personal website to fitness blog to again a personal website to professional website to phew… tooo many). I ended up scraping all of these earlier versions just because I wasn’t satisfied.

I am a creative person and I need an outlet where I can speak, shout, rant or just be darn creative.

Currently my slogan “Desire. Commit. Succeed” is something I want others to experience. And to me, there’s nothing better using a blog to share your experience. With my experience in many diverse fields, I know I’ll end up talking about tons of different things on this blog.

So you have to decide what’s your ultimate goal? And how you are going to achieve it?

2. How are you going to create a connection? – Websites do not exists in solitude. In fact nothing exists in solitude. So when you are going to make a website, you have to find a way to create a connection with people who are going to visit your website.

There’s no other way. You cannot avoid this. No matter who you are. No matter what business you are in. No matter what your race is or where you live.

Your website cannot live without visitors and there has to be a way to connect with them.

2 Easiest way to connect with them are

1. Blog Like this one.
2. Newsletter
3. Forum (I am adding this one but it takes lots of efforts to maintain a forum).

You also have to understand about the media (Audio and Video). Because they ultimately create a connection. You have to check whether you can use it or not.

3. Potential to monetize or not – Third thing I think about potential to monetize a website. It’s very simple, If you are already making an effort to build and maintain a website, then why not monetize it?

There are many ways to monetize. The easiest to implement are :-

1. Sell advertisement space.
2. You can create a list and sell advertisement.
3. Create a product/s and sell it.
4. Promote affiliate products.
5. Sell your services.

Now this is how I start even before I order a website design to be done. I worry about my prospects. I prepare about how I am going to connect. I prepare about how to market. I prepare about how to sell.

Like I said, any one can put a website online. These days even toddlers and their pets have one. But all of this underestimates the real though that goes behind putting a website together.

It’s not that complicated. In fact it’s easiest the moment you decide “What’s my Ultimate goal with this website?”.

This is first of my 3 part formula “Decide. Commit. Succeed”. The moment you decide and decide to commit, things changes. Everything will work in your favor depending on your will. And Succeeding is just next step.

Notice, there’s no where I talked about SEO (search engine optimization) or any other new internet technologies. Because we don’t have to worry about them.

First build a website in mind, then on paper and only then come online.

Best Regards,

Varun Pratap
Desire. Commit. Succeed.

It made me think about quite a few moments of my life and made me realize very simple things.

We, as a human have deep rooted desire to be appreciated. And we know instinctively when someone really appreciates it or whenever someone does it because their sales manual says so.

Appreciation.

If you remember one of my old post about “Just a Thank You”. How the day-to-day boring and monotone situation changed immediately just because my “Thank You” was really heart felt.

I also remember the name of one of the Fast food chain attendant who just gave me paper napkins and said a few things which connected with me.

I also remember when I once helped a friend and he was really grateful. How his simple thanks stood out and I understood it.

And then there was situation where one of my friends jaw dropped when she saw me after a few months. I had lost over 45 pounds and gotten stronger. I still remember her comments.

Appreciation.

It’s  just a simple term, but we don’t get it enough. And we don’t give others enough.

Life is so darn simple. Look around you and appreciate the things in your life. Just like how a 2 letter words “thank you” can be so powerful, I realize how this simple concept of appreciate can brighten your day, change your outlook and create your character.

Remember, the more you give, the more you get.

What do you appreciate about yourself today?

Varun Pratap

Decide. Commit. Succeed.

1. Close your Email Client – First thing you should do is Close your email client. I have noticed this trend in offices, employees (and their bosses) have their email client open 24/7.

Call me rude, but in the office you get paid for doing the work, not check your emails.

I know many people might get angry and protest saying that “our clients are open so that we can get business related emails”.

And my counter argument against it is very simple. Every time You get email, you get distracted from whatever you are doing. Whenever you’ll get distracted, it’ll take you at least few minutes to be able to concentrate on your work. By then, you’ll receive another email and again the process goes on and on and on.

Why I am telling you this? Because I’ve seen one of my friend in the office. His email clients goes off “Ding” every 5 minutes and I checked few of his so called “Office” emails and they are nothing but useless stuff (I am not calling it junk just for the respect of my buddy).

So, now you know, you are wasting tons of time with these distractions. You can close off the client and then get more productive.

2. Improving efficiency by creating better workload – Another big issue people do is they do not organize their work load for the day. If you organize what you are going to do for the day the moment you sit on your desk, you’ll save lots of time, improve efficiency and work better.

Again, one of the hidden problem organizing is “distraction”. If you just club up same kind of work in a huge chunk and finish it, you’ll be far more efficient and you don’t have to re-new your concentration.

So if you are going to call up few people during the day, Find a time slot when you can call all of them and do it in one go. Your concentration will be 100%. You’ll be more focussed on the task at hand (there’s no “Oh Shit I had to call Mr John at 3:00pm”).

Now I suggest try these out for few days and take notice of the changes around you. You’ll notice How efficient you’re after doing this?

First lesson :- Strike and Grab the Opportunity fast whenever it presents

This is the first and most important lesson that you’ll learn while doing Internet Marketing.

It all comes down to speed of implementation. If you are slow, time will move on and chances of your profiting from the opportunity has left you by.

If you compare internet time line to offline line real world time line, then time is moving at least 4 times faster on internet (that’s due to advancement in Internet technologies). The cause and effect can be seen almost immediately of internet technology and time.

People who sit on the side line and wait and check are often late and broke.

That’s why I said speed of implementation is important.

Second Lesson : Ideas are dime a dozen, Action is rarer.

Too many people have way too many ideas… but people who take action are rarer. And thats true in harshest of terms for people on internet. With the access to ever changing technologies, people can exchange ideas in a blink. But People who take action on those ideas are rare and those who do, often succeeds.

Again complimented with first lesson of speed of implementation, this will help you tremendously.

Third lesson : Sell whenever the damn you can

Someone told me, “Every attempt at communication is an attempt of persuasion. Either you are persuading someone or being persuaded by someone”. When I am writing as “Sell whenever the damn you can”, it sounds like a sleazy salesman or slick opportunist.

But that’s not my intent at all.

In internet, the method of communication changes a LOT and if you have a business, you have to learn, adapt and implement different communication methods. If you are selling online you have to utilize every opportunity to communicate efficiently otherwise you’ll not sell at all.

Fourth Lesson : Learn to communicate with written word.

Now as you can guess, learning to write is going to be one of the most important way to communicate online. If you can’t write, you can’t communicate. Oh yes there are videos, audios too but let me say it again, written communication is a HUGE part of Online communities. You just cannot ignore it.

Fifth Lesson : It only takes one silly mistake to get crushed in the time

Doing business ethically is important. With internet and the ease of communication methods, you can be easily crushed. If you are a good businessman, then people won’t be able to slander you even with internet. Why ? because your evangelists(customers) will help you fight against them.

You are nothing but a speck of dirt in the time line and trust me, it’s going to be important to do your business ethically and grow and succeed.

There are many other things I can write here but I think the long laundry list is unnecessary. 5 lessons will suffice for now.

Varun Pratap

Desire. Commit. Succeed.

I have hundreds of books, manuals, binders and printouts on the bookshelf. I felt myself pulling towards this book I read few years ago. It’s called “When you can walk on water, take a boat (Download FREE)” by John Harricharan. The title of the book is not only a beautiful metaphor about life but also something to think about.

When you can walk on water, take a boat.

It’s very much presented in a biographical story where you’ll think about “if it’s true”, “I wonder if all of this happened to John”.

This book will mean different things to different people. It can be true, it can also be a metaphor. When I first read the title of this book, I was like “Whoa, now that’s heavy duty”.

This book is not about religion, or just mindless babble on spirituality. You’ll read a story about how author goes through the process called “LIFE”. In a metaphorical way, he meets god in many shapes and forms (from Krishna to jesus to Buddha).

If spirituality is not your thing, then well and good, I will just like to talk to you about this metaphor about the book title.

Like I talked about how people goes through their life in motions. In the motions of life, even though we might be looking for shortcuts, we are doing it wrong. Life is not a go through process. Instead its a journey. And we are taking every step with out eyes closed and making it harder.

That’s what metaphor is saying “If you can walk on water, don’t waste your energy, take the damn boat”. When I first read the title, it hit me like tons of bricks. I was like “funny, how things can be so simple and we make it so damn complicated”, there’s no need to.

Personally I don’t know what this will mean to you as you are different from me. I do suggest you to take time out and read this book and it’s sequels “Morning has all night coming” and “Journey in the fields of forever”.