By Patrick Lysons
[July 26th, 2000]

See Also   Want A Sticky Website That Sells? Forget Content!   Giving Customers What They Want   Rule Busters Lose   Building Your Web Site's Sales   Abandoned Shopping Carts: Enigma or Sloppy E-Commerce?   The Only Visitor That Counts Is A Repeat Visitor   Three Steps to Get More Customers   Your Web Site - Do It Yourself? or Get Serious!   How To Make Them Buy Now   The Future of E-Commerce Stinks!   Beware Overload   Does Your Site Have Stopping Power?   Online Sales Psychology That Works   And the Broadband Played on, and on...   How Your Web Site Can Learn From Newspapers   Promise Not to Tell   Where's Your Community?   Understanding Your Visitors   The Seven Deadly Web Site Sins   The Good, The Bad and the Ugly - Part 2   The Good, The Bad and the Ugly - Part 1

I received an email recently from a fellow who was extremely excited about the hits he was getting at his web site. His claim was that he got over 70,000 hits each month. "That's nearly 1,000,000 hits per year" he proudly said, after being online only three months!

Here's what I thought: "This guy's got to be doing something right".

Wrong!

Sure, he was getting the hits. He had nearly every traffic-producing tool ever imagined. Here was the sites flaw. It didn't motivate. It contained nothing that would ever motivate a person to make a single purchase.

I sent him an email and asked how business was going. His reply was surprisingly candid. "I'm getting lots of traffic, but not making much money!"

The problem was in his approach to marketing. His aim - like that of so many other online entrepreneurs - was to attract clicks, not customers. The problem is that clicks don't make purchases - customers do! How do you attract customers? Here are three indispensable steps that you MUST follow....

A Valuable Product

First you need to represent a product of true worth and value. If you can create you own product, that's best. If that's not a possibility your next best bet is to represent another person high value product!

How do you determine the value of a product? Here is the first and greatest rule of thumb.

Do you use the product? If it is the latest and greatest herbal supplement, do you actually use it? If it is a book, have you read it? If it is a software program, do you use it?

Think about it! How can you really endorse the value of a product if you don't believe in it enough to own it and endorse it?

Targeted Traffic

The next step is to think in terms of quality not volume. Pay close attention! The number of hits on your web site does not matter. What matters is the quality of those hits! You need to attract people who are interested in what you are selling. That's the central difference between a click and a customer. We are care givers to both a dog and a cat. I love the dog. My wife loves the cat. Now if I have the best tasting new doggie bone ever developed, I wouldn't market it to cat lovers. I need to attract dog lovers. If you were selling a dog bone, wouldn't it be better to have 5000 dog lovers visit your site than 50,000 cat lovers?

There are dozens of techniques available for targeting traffic, especially via search engines and directories. Learning how to properly craft your title page and meta tags will certainly help. It will also be beneficial to purchase targeted traffic through some of the better "pay-per-click" services such as Goto.com.

A Killer Sales Letter

There is one more piece of the puzzle that's missing. The Internet is filled with thousands of sites owned by webmasters who represent great products. Many of these webmasters have learned the fine art of targeting traffic. Nevertheless they are still not making many sales.

The problem is that their site just doesn't sell. As such, it is just wasted cyberspace. To succeed online you must learn how to write "CASH PRODUCING" text! You need to learn the art of writing a killer sales letter, geared toward the customers needs. Without this skill the best you can do is attract clicks. You'll never convert them into customers.

Follow the above steps, and you're already on your way!

Patrick Lysons, author of this article, has discovered two secret and HIDDEN links that will boost your online success dramatically. To find those links for yourself, rush down to his Web site NOW.