Reviews can make the difference to a product’s sales.
A bad review in a newspaper can close a play.
A lot of cinema goers will check a site like Rotten Tomatoes to find out what the critics and the public think of a film before deciding which movie to watch.
Car dealers offer test drives – a short term review copy – to help individuals decide whether to buy a car.
Reviews work. Especially honest ones. And they can be a relatively easy way to make affiliate sales.
We can’t multi-task.
Try to pat your head with one hand and rub your stomach with the other and you’ll quickly find that out.
We might pretend we can multi-task but that’s about it. Various studies have shown that people who concentrate on one thing at a time get much further ahead than those who try to run in every direction at once.
Concentrating on one thing at a time gets much better results.
Deep down, you know that.
But – if you’re like most people I know – you struggle to put the theory into practice.
So how can you concentrate better? Whether that’s with your internet marketing or anything else you want to accomplish more?
We’re all creatures of habit.
You’ve got internet marketing habits – things you do regularly in your business – but are they helping or hindering you?
There’s no quick answer as we’re all different but the first step is to work out what your internet marketing habits are.
Scarcity sells.
We’re hard wired to want scarce stuff, it’s part of our survival instinct.
The trouble is, most things aren’t really scarce.
Especially not downloadable products where, unless the internet stops working totally, they can be available at the click of a mouse.
So how can you ethically use scarcity to increase your sales, whether those sales are for your own product or one that you’re selling as an affiliate?
If you believe some sales letters, you can set your internet marketing on something close to perpetual marketing.
But does that kind of promise really work in practice?
The short answer is “no”.
The longer answer is “sometimes, kind of, but for nothing even close to perpetual really”.
There are lots of reasons for this and I’m going to delve into a few of them here,
Web pages and advertising on the web only work one way: you have to know what you want before you see web pages and adverts for it.
This problem is maybe the biggest elephant in the room with regard to the web.
If you don’t know something exists, you won’t search for it and you won’t see adverts or web pages for it.
It could be the biggest thing since sliced bread but you’re blissfully unaware of it.
There’s no easy answer that I’m aware of but let’s at least examine the problem:
Refunds are a fact of life. They happen in almost every business to a greater or lesser extent, even when no refund option is given.
How you deal with them affects your customer relationship and therefore affects your business.
The first thing to remember is that it’s almost certainly nothing personal.
You can’t please all of the people all of the time.
For instance, my products vary in style but are usually “how to” products or “watch while I do this” products.
Clarity helps: people need to know what to do. Life’s too short to read the instruction manual on everything we encounter – even if you could find where the instruction manual has been hidden because although one’s been created, no-one ever really reads it.
Websites are no exception to this.
If a website is too confusing, you’re more likely to click the “back” button than you are to spend time working out what to do next.
New websites are especially bad at making themselves clear – the team are so engrossed in their concept and think that everyone will “get” what they’re offering just from a few icons and maybe a 30 second video.
I encountered more than one site like that when I was looking for a podcast platform. The sites maybe told me that I could upload an audio (d’oh!) and after that I was expected to sign up. Often without a hint of pricing or the different offerings.
In theory, doing the same thing and expecting different results is silly.
There’s a quote (often wrongly attributed to Benjamin Franklin) that says doing that is the definition of insanity.
But the rate things change on the internet it’s often the case that something you did last week or last year gets totally different results even if you’re doing the same thing as you’ve always done.
For instance, if you’re still using MySpace rather than Facebook your audience will have dropped along with the relative usage of the sites.
And if you’re unfortunate enough to be a website designer then you’ll know that you haven’t changed your code but the browser you’re using has done so and your nicely designed page is now broken. You’ve done the same things you’ve always done but you’ve got different results and maybe even a few sleepless nights whilst you fix stuff that shouldn’t need fixing.
Our minds follow patterns and use short cuts all the time. Otherwise we’d have to re-learn what doors and other things were each time we encountered one. And we’d have to go back to our text books to find out how grammar worked every time we spoke. Which, on second thought, could be useful for some people online but that’s another discussion entirely.
Pattern interrupts help us reboot our mind when we need to.
In much the same way as Windows needs rebooting to clear the junk out of its storage that’s been left lying around by programs like Firefox that habitually leak into its memory as well as other processes that should have ended but are still running. Our minds do the same thing.
Usually “what if” questions for all sorts of possible outcomes that could happen but almost certainly won’t.