Introduction

When most people begin any kind of internet business, they seem to have a lot of expectations. They think the money will come flowing the moment they place their ads, get a webpage, or spend money on advertising and a promotion campaign, etc. If you have an internet business, you pretty much know that that is not necessarily the case.

In this article, I am going to focus on the online success of an internet business. because you are online reading this article right now, you may want to learn a little bit more information regarding how to sell your products or services online.

By the way, do not think because you are a production worker for example, that the internet could not be of use to you. If you get a little creative and you will be surprised by the ideas that can come about, that could help you generate income online. So, let us continue with this article, shall we?

I am not going to dispute the fact that a lot of profit may be generated in a short period of time. This has happened in the past and may keep occurring in the future. There is a saying, “There’s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come!”

In other words, you may have a very lucrative idea, but the market is not yet ready for it, therefore you may end up losing your investment to find out several months later that, the very same idea becomes a huge success for somebody else. Basically, being in the right place at the correct time certainly helps. You will always be at the right place and the right time if you listen to the guiding Spirit within. In time you may gain intuition around your business (gut feeling).

There is the flip side of this coin of course. Having a great idea and being at the right place at the right time, but not being able to take advantage of it. This is what this article is hopefully going to address.

We are going to look at the reasons why people buy! And I am going to dissect each topic briefly so you can have a much more in-depth understanding as to how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together.

Value – Benefit

Firstly, I am going to address the understanding and importance of the word VALUE. When you have a product or service to offer where there is an existing market and demand for it, your efforts revolve around advertising.

If the product or service you are advertising is being offered by other businesses, then you have what is known as competition. That being said, you have to be able to create an urgency trigger for people to buy from you, otherwise, you could lose your potential customers to your competition, not because theirs are necessarily better. But because not everyone buys on the first visit. Sometimes customers need a little bit of time before they decide. So, if you have already exposed them to what you have to offer and later, they see the same product on another site, they may be ready at that moment to purchase. They may end up buying from someone else the product or service that you took the time to educate them in the first place. In other words, you do all the work and someone else gets the benefit.

As internet surfers are what is known as impulse buyers, you must be prepared so that when a potential customer visits your site, he or she is ready to make the decision at that moment!

If you are advertising a product or service that teaches people how to market products online, you need to figure out ways to increase the “VALUE” of what you have to offer. You need to answer questions such as.

• Why is your product or service significantly better than the others on the market?
• What is in your product or service that you feel would make someone say, “I want this!”?
• What are the benefits they will gain from ordering the product or service you are offering?

Marketing has always been all about identifying ways to sell people on the idea that if they acquire whatever is your product or service on offer, they will “gain” something from it.

If you have subscribed to various newsletters and have read some marketing articles, they would have summarized what I have just said in one term. THE BENEFITS. If you can highlight what it is that your potential customers will receive as a benefit from your product or services from the beginning, you will dramatically increase the value of your product.

There are many ways that you can add value to your product or service. This is the best way to establish a rapport and generate interest from your potential customers. So, you must always firstly let them know how your product or service is going to benefit them by how it makes them feel, or improve their life, or help them succeed, etc.

Build trust and integrity

Once you have been able to add value to your product or service, honesty, integrity, and credibility play an important role. Maybe, at the exact moment of purchase, they may wonder, “how do I know this person knows what he or she is talking about?”

So how do you add integrity? If you are an expert on something, can you tell them about your experience? Do you walk your talk? Does your site reflect what your product or service is about?

For example, do not go telling your site visitors false or misleading information. From a customer’s point of view it means one of two things, you don’t know what you are talking about and therefore you are just regurgitating what others have told you, or there is something you know about the product or service that you are not telling them.

Does that mean that if you do not have established credibility people will not buy from you? Absolutely NOT! Your credibility could be your website. Here is what I mean, if someone visits your site and you don’t have a degree as an engineer but your site is filled with very convincing articles and provides valuable information on your site subject that shows that you know what you are talking about, that is enough to add credibility.

Let’s take it one step further, if you create a very engaging powerful sales letter, you can have your customer so focused in the information that he or she may not even bother to figure who you are, or what you do. However, to pull that off, you must offer a product that has great value or benefit, and where possible, offer a money-back guarantee!

What you need to do is to build a reputation for credibility, honesty and service, and show ways in which your product will benefit your market, you should then be able to sell your products or services online.

Endorsements

So, you have a product or service of value to your customers and you have been able to build credibility. What can you do to build on the value of your product or service?

Let’s say that you are giving a speech and want to quote an article relating to your subject matter which you have a copy of on a piece of paper, if you hold the paper and read the words from the paper, it holds more credibility than if you were just saying the words. Why that is? I do not know. But that is just one of those interesting mysteries we come across occasionally.

So, by having independent people saying positive things about your product or service, it helps to add some credibility which in turn helps to increase the value of what you are offering.

This is often achieved by testimonial videos or text posts from satisfied customers. But make sure that the content is real and credible, or it may harm your reputation.

Conclusion

So, what we have done so far is, we have strategically created leverage. We have given a solid foundation as to why people not only should but must obtain whatever product or service you are offering. Assuming that you are placing all these strategies in the correct order, positive results should be way within your reach.

So, what makes people buy is:

• Value-Benefits (What will the customer gaining from this.)
• Value-Honesty, Integrity (How do I know this is true.)
• Value-Endorsements (What others have to say about you, the product or service or site)

You will see that I included the term “value” together with each example as the “value” is what your potential customers will be focused on before purchasing anything.

Benefits, honesty, and integrity as well as endorsements all have a role to play in adding value to your product.