What the Wright Brothers And Your Spouse Can Teach You About Internet Marketing
My Friend and Mentor Perry Marshall illustrates the importance of converting website traffic to sales by telling the story of when the Wright Brothers invented the Airplane
Samuel Langley was the Wright Brothers most fierce competitor. He was determined to be the first to build a real flying airplane, which he called an “aerodrome”. His philosophy was to strap wings on a big engine — the bigger the better. On December 8, 1903, he launched his second attempt from — believe it or not — the top of a houseboat on the Potomac Rivert. The plane plunged into the frigid water.
By contrast, the Wright Brothers decided first to learn how to build a glider. They built dozens of them, crashed many, and worked hard to understand how they worked, and their aerodynamics. Once they felt they perfected the glider, they equipped it with the smallest engine that could provide the thrust they needed.
On December 17, 1903 the Wright Brothers succeeded.
Your website, and its ability to convert a visitor to a buyer is like the Wright’s glider. It needs to be based on the proper technology to do what it was designed to do, and to do it with as little maintenance, intervention, and energy as possible.
Then and only then do you equip your website with powerful Traffic generation methods to truly watch your sales soar.
So How Do You Build a Website That Glides?
It’s safe to assume that about 99% of all visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy now. Some never will be.
Think for a moment about what that means.
It means that if you are designing your website only for those people who are ready to buy right now, you are wasting 99% of your marketing dollar.
It’s like when single people go out on dates looking for a spouse. Chances are, they don’t say “Hello, my name is Joe. Would you like to get married?”. And if they did, they wouldn’t meet with success very often. Instead, they usually say “Hi, my name is Joe. What’s yours?” Shortly afterwards comes an exchange of phone numbers, a meeting for a cup of coffee, a date, and on and on until the big wedding day, months or years later.
Now, not all sales cycles are so long, but the concept is the same for effective internet marketing.
Set up your website to simply exchange some information for the visitor’s name and email address. Provide your visitors with information over time. Educate them about how to be your consumer. Teach them how to self-qualify themselves. Encourage them to contact you for more information. You can do this simply and cheaply with something called a “Follow-up Autoresponder System”. It’s not as scarey as it sounds. And you can find a fantastic one provided by Aweber. You can also find a great Autoresponder built into a fantastic shopping cart at 1ShoppingCart.
And be ready to handle their order at any time, day or night, once they are ready to buy. (1ShoppingCart can help you with this, too).
You can learn more about how to do this on the pages of TrafficAndConversion.com
–Mark Widawer