Information as a Sales Tool - Article Marketing

Dreaming of “Overnight Riches”?
There are many more stories of broken Internet business dreams than ones of success. Many people have cleaned out their bank accounts in pursuit of the “overnight riches” that is highly touted on the radio, television and Internet, only to find that the overnight riches belonged to the one pitching the program.

As a result of these types of experiences, the individuals who have decided to change their method of operation are coming to terms with the fact that their dreams can be realized by using methods that work in concert with factual information, products and services that have market appeal and techniques that address the way people make their purchase decisions.

If the challenge of finding customers has you wondering what to do, you have done exactly what thousands of others had done: started to search for information. This brings us to the point of this article: how to use information as a marketing sales tool.

Power of Article Marketing
Article writing for the Internet is experiencing a huge boost of popularity. Why? Because most people use the Internet to find information. Articles have always been written and published, but today many internet marketers are strategically building trust and “readership” through Article Marketing.

No matter what product or service you choose for your marketing or affiliate marketing business, the fact still remains that you must give people information about it so that they can make a purchase decision. No one is going to buy a product without knowing how it works, what it will do for them and how much it costs.

Using graphic images and flashy headlines no longer satisfies the savvy Internet shopper. For those individuals who shop online regularly, they have long since become familiar with cool graphics and luring headlines.

Promoting a product or service by low price alone won’t work either, because the marketplace is global and the competition is such that some merchants will sell an item at an incredibly low price because they know they will sell huge quantities of the goods.

There is no “Magic Formula”
If you are subscribing to every newsletter, ezine and e-book in sight to find the magic formula to gain customers, you might be in for a disappointment. The truth of the matter is that it takes a combination of factors to find, retain and service customers.

Operating a business online has as many advantages and disadvantages, as a brick and mortar business has to face. The challenge is to understand the differences in the dynamics between these two ways of doing business and apply the correct set of principles to make it work.

For example, in the physical world, a customer enters a store that has an item they are interested in buying. There is a salesperson present to answer their questions and demonstrate how the product works. If the person is satisfied, with all that they have heard, seen and experienced to the point where they are ready to purchase the product a sale takes place.

Shopping is a Social Experience!
On the other hand, shopping on the Internet is a completely different experience. And this is the first thing that many internet marketers and affiliate marketers lose sight of. Shopping is a social experience. When a person visits your site, they are greeted by text and images instead of a human being. Even if there is a picture of a person on the site, the visitor has no way of knowing if that is a real person.

This underscores the greatest challenge that everyone who is working online has to face:
how to build trust in the hearts and minds of the people who need our products or services.

Online marketing is a process that normally cannot be accomplished in one fell swoop. It takes time to establish trust when we are face-to-face, why do we think it will be easier to do this when we are on the Internet?

There are many methods you can use to promote your internet marketing or affiliate marketing business, but none of them will work if they are only used one time. The rate of information exchange on the Internet is as fast as lightning. You cannot expect someone to buy your “widget” if your single advertising banner flashed at them once last month.

You can spend hundreds of dollars on banner advertising and still not be any closer to building the interest or the trust necessary to make them click their mouse and visit your website.

Strategically use Information
Obviously, you cannot rely on banner advertising to bring the customers you need, so what CAN you do to get them to your site?
Give them what they want:
Information.
Information that they (your customer) want by researching their interests and problems.
Information on the benefits of your product or service and how it will SOLVE their problems - and - make their lives better.

People are being bombarded by advertising images and messages all the time. On the radio, the television, and the Internet. This is what makes marketing through information more effective. If you construct your article in the same tone as you would talk to a friend who has come to you for advice about a problem they have, you will begin to gain the trust of whoever reads that article.

With the millions of websites and social media sources on the Internet, the possibility a person will see and act on a “banner ad” depends completely on the amount of money in your marketing budget. But if a person needs to know the definition of a word, they are more likely to go back to dictionary.com because they know they will find the information they are looking for there.

Work To Become The Source
The same holds true for your internet marketing or affiliate marketing website. If you focus your attention on defining your niche on the Internet, and then work toward becoming the source of information that is relevant to all of the people in that niche, you are now in the position to become the “dictionary” so to speak.

Writing and publishing articles is one of the best ways to create the reliability and trust you want for your marketing website. Each article you write and publish is like a little “salesman” out working for you.

Newsletters and ezines delivered by email is also a great way for building trust in your products and services. But the challenge is to first get the subscribers or website visitors and then to deliver informative content that is different every time. Once you begin to build a mailing list of subscribers, it is fairly easy to keep them coming back.

Michael Wise
eMarketProfitStrategies.com