|
|
Imitation, The Smartest Form Of Flattery
Unless you are an inventor, most likely you are selling a product or service that is being offered by someone else, somewhere, at some time. The first person to start your type of business would have gone through a lot of trial and error. Thank that person, as now you can not only profit by not repeating the same mistakes, but by learning what they do to get business.
The best way to do this is to practice what any businessperson knows: know your competition. The most beneficial thing you can do is to study what they are doing to attract customers.
Go online, do a search, pull up the web sites of your competition, and start taking notes. Here are some things to look for.
- What do you like about their web site?
- How can they improve upon it?
- Is it user-friendly and easy to understand?
- Is it too wordy or complicated?
- Could someone browsing this web site learn quickly what this business actually does?
- Does their web site move too slowly, due to an over-emphasis on graphics that sacrifices the actual message?
With your notes, you can begin to set up the key points that you feel your target audience needs to know about your product or service, and why it will benefit them to do business with you.
Look at these different web sites and read the headline.
- Does it draw you in?
- Do you care to read more?
- Do you feel intrigued, or more than a little confused?
If you find one you like, there is nothing wrong with re-wording it to fit your business. Remember that we are talking about imitation, not plagiarism.
It has been said that there is nothing new under the sun. While this may be the case, at least give what your company is offering a unique slant, and make an effort to provide it in a more informative and interesting format than what your competition is doing.
====Side Bar====
This "unique slant", often called the "Unique Selling Proposition (USP)", opens the door for effective competition among businesses selling a simular product -- even the same product.
Rosser Reeves was the first to coin the phrase Unique Selling Proposition in his book "Reality of Advertising", published in 1961.
Here's Reeves' 3 part diffintion of USP:
====Side Bar====
Try to look at your competition with fresh eyes. Treat what they have to say as if it is the first time you have seen this information, because that may be the case for your target audience. Make a list of the questions that come to mind, or points that you feel you would want more information on, if you were in the shoes of your audience.
Even what your competition does wrong with the information they do or do not provide can be instructive. It serves to get you to think of all the things that you can do to sell the service better. You are building the structure of your business on what someone else has done before you, but improving the end product by going the extra distance in covering the whole story in a clear manner.
Now that is smart business.
About The Author
David Geer's Success 4U Marketing helps small business owners discover how to market any product or service online ? quickly ... easily ... profitably ... successfully.
http://www.cashflowseller.com/
10 Nifty Ways to Prolong Your Visitors at Your Website
Increasing the length of time a visitor is on your website will dramatically improve your conversion to sales. Use these ten points to check you are prolonging to stay of your visitors.
Website Woes: Top Five Offenders
I see a lot of mistakes, but here are the top five offenders you need to correct to give your site a boost.
Get FASTER Download Times By Making BIGGER Web Pages!
As a webmaster you already know how important it is that your web pages download fast. In a nutshell, if your pages are slow, then you're losing visitors. And if you're losing visitors, you're losing money.
Sales Versus Customer Oriented Websites
Should Generating Revenue From A Website Be The Prime Motivator?
Online Businesses Still Ignoring Dial-up Market
In this article you will find the parallel between two Internet connections that makes serious actions trough financial market, leading this to great profits or huge losses.
Web Usability: The Basics
What is web usability & why is it important?
How to Use Sliced Graphics to Layout Your Web Site
The problem with designing your site as a graphic, is that it would take too long to load. Your visitors would leave your site immediately and move to your competitors web site. How can you resolve this?
Website Advertising: 10 Dynamic Tactics To Super-Charge Your Sales
Here are 10 dynamic website advertising tactics to super-charge your sales, starting now:
Understand Your Color
Any design on a web application involves the effective input of color scheme in order to impress web surfers, instill a certain image or identity associated with the kind of web site it represents, and add impact to the web pages. However, very few possess the talent and skill of developing a harmonious color scheme. There are even very talented Web programmers who can develop just about any kind of application, but, for the life of them could not understand anything about color schemes.
How to Test Your Web Headlines and Web Site Home Page to Sell More Products and Services
A client asked me, at what point do you change your Web site when not making enough sales? My answer? Within a month because as long as your ad copy is weak, those weak sales numbers will continue.
Converting Traffic into Sales
Making a successful online business can be a long and tiresome adventure. For most new online business's this can just lead to failure and a website that just isnt making sales despite a high number of visitors.
How to save money on a website
Know what you want
How to Double Your Online Sales Without Spending Another Dime on Advertising
Learning how to convert visitors to your web site into buyers, is the single most important factor affecting the success of your online business. If you don't have paying customers, your business will fail.
Custom Icons For Your Specific Brand
Developing a software application is not easy at all; apart from the effective creation of the application you'll have to think of other things as well, like: making the software easy to work with, giving it a unique and appealing look, making it better than other software, etc. Apart from the qualities of the application, these little things are the ones that promote your software application among the end users. If the application is easy to use, has a friendly user interface, the look of the program is unique yet not too flashy a lot more people will want to have it and use it. On the other hand, we should be careful about the overall look of the entire application because if it looks too different or it is too striking, many of the new users will be reserved in trying it. The reticence might be coming from the fact that, due to the unconventional look, they will think that it is hard to work with this application. Also, the icons of the application must be eye-catching but not too flashy or different from the usual.
Website Conversion Secrets Revealed
In my last article entitled, Maximizing The True Value Of Your Traffic (found at http://tinyurl.com/2cf84), you discovered the importance of generating positive responses from all your visitors.
Love at First Site: Giving Your Website Visitors the right Impression
Think of the people who visit your site as blind dates. When you open the door, your blind date usually knows whether they are attracted to you within the first minute. How do they know? Easy. By how you look, what you say, and how you treat them. If you open the door wearing the same clothes you wore in 1987, say, "Wow, from my friend's description, I thought you would be a lot better looking," and sneeze in your dates face, not only will you never get a second date, your date will run for his/her life.
Becoming A Website Designer
The ability to create simple, attractive and functional web pages is a highly marketable skill. There is a huge and growing demand for websites and web content, especially for smaller organizations who often can't afford to hire a full-service web design firm.
6 Tips To Improve Your Business Website
There are six important characteristics that can play a major role on the impact your website has on prospects. Outlined below is the importance of each characteristic and tips on how to maximize your potential. It is always important to tailor everything you do to what your customer is expecting, doing so will help keep you one step ahead of the competition.
You Too Can Have an Amazing Website
It is a well-known fact that a successful business depends greatly on how it is marketed. With an ever increasing dependence on the web, the use of a professional website is not only a necessity, but a priority. Although it is a common thought that only large businesses can have top-notch websites, with the tools available today what seemed impractical can now be a reality. Best of all, designing an extraordinary website can be done without hiring expensive web developers to create your site from scratch. Usually the first comment I get from my customers is, "I have the idea, but not the tools." In this article, I will recommend which tools are the most helpful and where to find these tools so that you too can have an amazing website.
Lead Capture Pages Explode Your Direct Sales Business Online!
Are you building a direct sales or mlm business online? Using lead capture pages can significantly improve your recruiting results and save you lots of time and money! I have known a few people who earned 5-figure monthly incomes in their mlm businesses and they used lead capture pages for Internet marketing.