Building Trust (Part 1 of 5):
Pre-building trust in your visitors.
October 16, 2006
This is part one of a five part series on building trust in your visitors in order to convert them to customers.
If you're a little overwhelmed by the myriad of business opportunities, products and "secret formulas" being touted online these days, then this five-part series should help you regain your focus on what's really important in any business venture, on- or off-line: building trust in your visitors.
You see, few people will buy anything from someone they don't trust. Those few who will buy from someone they don't particularly trust will be quick to demand refunds or scream "fraud" over the smallest problems.
So how do you build trust in an online environment that lends itself to being so anonymous? The best way is to examine trust from the visitor's perspective.
Trust : A Five-Pointed Star
You need to work at building trust in your visitor along each step of his or her journey toward your product offer. Doing this will maximize the number of people who are willing to buy from you at the end of that journey.
There are five basic steps taken by any visitor along that path. They are:
- They learn about your web site.
- They visit your web site.
- They join your mailing list.
- They receive your product offer.
- They receive follow-ups.
Along each step of that path you need to be building trust with your visitor. Today we're going to examine how to do that in the visitor's first step, and each day that follows we'll look at another step.
Step 1. The visitor learns about your site.
You won't sell a thing if nobody ever visits your site, so it's important that you work to get traffic. But it's also important that the traffic coming to your web site already has a measure of trust in you.
You can pre-build this trust by writing articles and distributing them via free article sites and submissions to online publications.
A quality article demonstrates your expertise in your subject area, and that "best foot forward" builds a measure of trust in whoever is reading the article. Also, if the visitor trusts the site where your article is found, some of that trust is passed on to you, since your article is appearing on a source that the visitor considers trustworthy.
A warning note: don't recommend any products in the articles you distribute, that makes you look like a salesperson instead of an expert. Use your articles to build trust.
Try and get your articles spread out to as wide an audience as possible. Having your articles in as many places as possible gives you the best chance of getting visitors who have already seen your expertise, so when they click the link in the article to visit your site they have a good feeling about what they are going to find there.
I personally submit almost all of my articles to the free article sites after they've been indexed by the search engines. Once an article is indexed, then the search engines know that your site holds the original, and you won't get penalized for duplicate content.
An added benefit of distributing your articles is that it gets you in-bound links so that you can rank better in the search engines for your keywords.
After reading your article, if you’ve built up even a small amount of trust in the reader, it is likely he or she will click the link in your About the Author section and go to your web site. That brings us to the second step on the journey toward a sale.
A note: another way trust is pre-built in visitors is if they read positive comments about you or your site in online forums and bulletin boards. Having top-notch content and good customer service will get people speaking well of you and can generate substantial amounts of quality traffic that already has a measure of trust in you.
Tomorrow's post will examine the second step that leads to converting a visitor into a sale by building trust: your web site.
Why you need to pre-launch your next product.
October 11, 2006
Have you noticed that most of the big product launches lately have first gone through a "pre-launch" phase? Have you ever wondered why?
I decided to give pre-launch a try on my latest product release, Article Builder, to see if a pre-launch really does sell more product. The numbers are in, and let me tell you, the pre-launch made a huge difference in my bottom line.
Pre-Launching Creates Buzz
Pre-launching a product means letting people know about the product 30 to 60 days ahead of the actual date that they can purchase the product. There is nothing new about doing this. Movie studios for years have heavily advertised their films many months before you can go see them. Recording artists often advertise their upcoming albums well before they can be purchased.
Letting people know ahead of time about your product creates buzz. It gets people talking about the product in the forums and to their friends and family. This causes more people to go to your pre-launch site to read about it, and builds anticipation for the actual release date.
Pre-Launching Allows For User Input
In the case of software products, pre-launching gives you a chance to show people how the product works and get feedback on it. For Article Builder, I collected as many opinions and comments as I could on the software during the 30 day pre-launch phase. I applied many of the suggestions prior to launching, so that by the time it actually launched, it was three times as good as what I had first created!
There is no better way to sell a product than to find out exactly what your customer base wants, and then sell it to them! Making the product the absolute best it can be before the actual sales date ensures a much higher conversion rate and a lot more sales.
Pre-Launching Helps You Build A List
If you supply a "subscribe for more information" box on your pre-launch page, then people who want to get more information or be notified when the product actually launches are added to your email list. This is great for keeping them up to date about coming changes and improvements in your product up to launch date.
To make sure you get the most number of subscribers, be sure and give them a reward for giving out their email address. With Article Builder I sent people the URL to a video where they could watch the software in action, if they were willing to get on the pre-launch list.
The benefits of having the person on that list doesn't stop after the product launches, however. Even if the person chose not to buy, you can still send other offers their way that they may take you up on. It’s a great way to continue to earn from people who may have not even purchased your pre-launch product!
For Article Builder I was able to get over 2,000 people on the email list! You can imagine how that has helped me in selling additional back-end products. So you certainly will want to offer an opt-in box on the pre-launch page.
Summing It All Up
These are great reasons to pre-launch your next product: it creates buzz, it allows you to get feedback and improve the product, and it builds an email list of people interested in the subject area. All three are key points that boost your bottom line.
For me personally, I will not be launching any new products without a pre-launch first!
Article Submission for Search Engine Rankings
October 3, 2006
It's not big news that submitting articles to free article sites is one of the best ways to get free one-way links into your sites. However, it's important that you think about your linking strategy when submitting articles, otherwise all of your efforts will be lost. Here's why.
Vary Your Anchor Text
The primary reason you want to submit articles is to get links back to your site, but how are you formatting that link in the resource box? You want to have the anchor text of the links to be the keywords you're wanting to rank for, yes, but it's important that you don't have the same anchor text in every link.
Why? Because if the search engines see that every link to your site contains the exact same anchor text, it's a red-flag that your links were not acquired naturally. People don't always behave the same, and search engines know that it's statistically impossible that every single person who links to your site will use the same link text.
So be sure to vary your link text. I like to reinforce my main keywords while also optimizing for related keywords. For instance, if your site's primary keywords are "kitchen remodeling", you could use a variation like "kitchen remodeling tips" or "kitchen remodeling advice" or "how to remodel your kitchen".
Those anchor texts still help reinforce your ranking for your primary keywords since they contain your primary keywords (or variations), but they also help you rank for lesser terms–and it's the lesser terms that are the easiest to rank for.
So when submitting to article sites, be sure and vary your anchor text, using your primary keywords about 70% of the time. This is simple enough to accomplish: just change your resource box for each site that you submit to.
Submit Slowly to Avoid the Sandbox
There is one school of thought that Google and Yahoo both penalize links that appear too fast. They basically wait for months before actually applying the value of those links to your ranking. This is referred to in the search engine optimization world as "sandboxing".
As of right now, MSN (under it's new name, Live) does not sandbox links. So if you're looking to rank and get some traffic going quickly, getting a lot of links fast will pay off with MSN. You'll just have to wait a while before seeing much results in Google and Yahoo.
If you're trying to rank in Google or Yahoo as quickly as possible, and if you're a believer in the sandbox theory, then you're best bet is to submit to the article sites a little more slowly. Maybe only submit to a few a week. This will cause your links to build more "naturally" from the search engines point of view.
If You're Not a Sandbox Believer…
There are other schools of SEO thought that claim sandboxing doesn't exist at all. Their theory is that it just takes a long time for the algorithm updates to hit Google and Yahoo so that your links are counted. If they are correct, then it's still best to get as many links as possible as quickly as possible, and then just wait for them to be applied.
What I Believe
I tend to lean away from the Sandbox theory myself, but not because I have a lot of emperical evidence that it doesn't exist. It just seems illogical to me for search engines to sandbox links just because they appear quickly.
For example, let's say there's some big news event that happens regarding some web site, and suddenly thousands of links appear from every news site covering that sector. Would it make sense for the search engines to ignore all of those links just because they appeared quickly? It was natural that they appear quickly, since the event was unexpected.
So I tend to believe that it just takes a while to update the rankings for billions of web pages, and therefore the links don't kick in immediately.
Summing it All Up
Whatever your Sandbox beliefs are, you can see that your linking strategy needs to be analyzed before you start submitting to article sites. Take a few minutes to come up with the list of keywords you want to rank for. Try to get at least five or six sets of keywords into your article resource boxes. Don't put all of your keywords into one basket, so to speak.
Taking a little time to plan out your submission strategy could save you from wasting all of that time only to find that the search engines have ignored your links because they think they're "not natural".
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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