[col size="2"]Sarah
Sarah is the Content Creation Expert at Sark eMedia.
This post is the first in a two part series on making sales from your blog. This article is about the visitor experience and the second post will be about the sales experience and managing customer expectations.
So why don’t visitors buy from your blog?
You’re getting traffic. You’re interacting on other social media platforms, posting regularly to your blog and you are steadily building your email list but you’re not making sales.
Let’s look at the reasons why…
The products you have on offer didn’t seem worth buying
I used to work for Reed. A fabulous company and I loved my time with them. One particular saying used to be attributed to Alec Reed. He said (allegedly) ” People are interested in two things: Making money and saving money. If you want to sell something you have to show the client how they will save money or make money”. And that worked well for us Reedies.
There are of course other reasons that people buy, and they are worth knowing –
- To feel included and impress others (Apple taps into this big time)
- To feel or look better / sexier to attract a mate (no need to explain)
- It’s essential – you’ll die without it (think food, water, shelter etc)
- For enjoyment (think Temple Run, Angry Birds)
Your product or offering has to tap into one of these reasons. If you are providing a staple like food you still have to work for it, but it’s easier (in theory anyway).
Not only does your product have to tap into a desire, it also has satisfy a value or worth aspect. When I sold a blogging editorial calendar someone complained that they could have created the same. And yes they could have, but it would’ve taken them 4 hours to create it. If they billed out at $100 an hour then that blogging editorial calendar has cost them $400.
I should have explained the time vs. money trade better in my product description. I assumed (wrongly) that potential clients could work out the value and the time trade aspect. I was wrong, don’t make the mistake that customers know the obvious information as quite often they don’t – they’ve just had a glass of wine, watched something mind-numbingly boring and are not giving you and your product 100% of their brain capacity.
Your offers should be worth buying and you need to present them in a way that’s easy for your readers to get that information. Otherwise there will be no sale.
The presentation is all wrong
We’re visual creatures. We eat with our eyes, and if the presentation of your product isn’t quite right then you are in trouble. One of the reasons I love Product Creator Pro is because it makes my ebooks look great, very quickly for about $1 an ebook. The presentation of my ebooks using Product Creator Pro is consistent and feels good.
If you’ve followed my posts for a while you’ll know that I am always tweaking and testing things here and for me the site’s presentation is an ongoing thing. A website is never truly finished as you will always be updating and upgrading things as you go along. But that doesn’t mean you have to wait until your site is perfect before selling something – you can sell via email or other platform.
If your presentation is off in some way then people won’t buy. If your graphics don’t look good, if your design says one thing and your words say another then people won’t buy.
There’s a good reason for brand consistency and if you are larger than life yet your site is fragile and delicate then you will cause the disconnect.
You just couldn’t relate to them/their products
I’ve only ever purchased one guru product, no wait… two. I’ve purchased two. Why? Because I can’t relate to them. I work from a home office with a remote team of writers and designers. The products I’ve purchased didn’t seem to factor in that I have an existing business and that I’ve been around for some time.
If I can’t relate to other people’s products, there will be people who can’t relate to mine or yours. Now that’s okay if they are not the ideal customer for our business but if they are? Then that’s a problem.
If you don’t work at having people relate to your products then you won’t sell them, and that means thinking like your customer and not like a marketer all of the time.
Offer saturation
Can you imagine eating a meal in a working abattoir? That’s what offer saturation feels like.
If you’ve ever purchased a product off of the Warrior Forum you’ll know the type of email offer saturation that’s common. Some online marketers bombard you with offers. Every day they send a must have tool, software or WordPress plugin. Every time they send an email they burn their list. It reaches the point where they are caught in a devastating cycle of listbuilding to sell. Instead of sending valuable information and actionable advice they send a sales pitch.
If this is you in your business, stop it right now. I mean it. Stop it and sit back and reflect on things. Visitors do not expect a sales pitch at every opportunity. How would you feel in their place?
Some website visitors cannot tell the difference between a call to action and a sales pitch (we have this over at Birds on the Blog all of the time, where some of the authors are more market focused than others). If this is the case with you then you need to educate your readers as to what a call to action is. And remember, you shouldn’t change for one reader but if many readers are saying the same thing then yes, yes you have a problem.
Think about how a visitor moves through your site – is there a path that they follow and if so how much of that path has offers showing? Does it feel like too many offers? Does it feel like you are overdoing things?
