What’s the difference between a good looking sales person and a good looking website?

Nothing really, because looks count for little when a customers is deciding whether or not they’ll buy from you. Marketing isn’t a beauty contest, it’s a contest to win the hearts and minds of customers.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying a good looking website isn’t important, because it is. After all, good looking people find it easy to get people’s attention and a good looking websites the same; it can buy you a few seconds of interest, but after that if the message on your page doesn’t grab them, if it doesn’t offer something interesting, intelligent or meaningful, people loose interest fast… after all, the promise of finding exactly what they’re looking for somewhere else could be just 1 click away…

So here’s a big mistake I commonly see made.

Businesses getting carried away with flash animations on their website.

For those who don’t know what flash is, it’s a programming language used to make moving picture animations. Some people build their entire website in flash because they think it looks impressive.

This is a big mistake for a number of reasons, one being that search engines relate to websites via text, not images. Flash websites are a liability in search engines

I’d back myself to build an simple 1 page website that would out perform any flash website any day, and by outperform I mean out rank them (in the search engines) and out sell them in a direct mine v’s theirs split test!

Why? Two reasons:

1.    Because when it comes to online sales, substance beats looks every time. Nothing outsells a well crafted sales message.
2.    The money you save on the flash design costs can be spent on traffic generation strategies that get hot prospects in front of your well crafted sales message.

So just what makes a website sell?

Your message! The benefits of what you do and what those benefits mean to people and their life.

Let’s take a simple example, cheap prices and the money you’ll save.

A lot of consumer products are sold online because people are buying “the lowest price.” As consumer products are standardized, people can easily compare apples to apples, same brand, same model, same same, so why pay more? In that case the cheap price is the message, the issue of substance, “the” thing they are looking for, the thing that gets the sale.

But cheap price isn’t always what people buy online.

If you sell any complex product or service, price has far less influence because people are buying the ‘perceived value’ of what you are selling. Sure, price will be a part of that, but not always because it’s low! In lots of cases people pay more because they associate a higher price with a higher value, better quality, greater luxury, better results, etc etc.

Premium brands, luxury motor cars, Apple Macs, 5 star hotels and the like are all testament to this.

So what’s the take away here for you and your business?

If you are a business owner looking at building a website that will help you make sales, beware the trap of stylish looking web designer who will seduce you to build a good looking, expensive flash based website.

Unless the accompanying sales message has been expertly crafted, It won’t sell and it will just cost you a lot of money better spent later on getting traffic to your site.

In general, if you are selling any type of complex product or service, your business is going to sell much more if you can demonstrate and explain to prospects on your website
•    what it is that distinguishes your product/business from the herd,
•    why you are better and why that quality is important to them and their life
•    why they should buying from you instead of your competitors.

Also, don’t forget that in the online world, words are important because search engines relate to web pages through words, not images.

Now you know this you won’t fall into the trap of thinking that a good looking design is what makes a good website, and you can avoid becoming the casualty of some trendy web designer who knows nothing about how to really help your business get sales online.

Till next time
I wish you every success in business
David Mollet

Want to know a fate worse than death…cold calling for a living!

How’s this for a picture of hell. You stuck in a phone room being forced to make unsolicited phone calls to people who don’t care about you or your business – for eternity!

Sounds bad doesn’t it, and yet that is some peoples lives every day.

If you’d prefer to never make a cold call again and still have plenty of business, you should read the rest of this article…

If you ask me, one of the worst things the internet has done is lower call costs so that some dull, last century business executive can afford to herd a bunch of unfortunate people in developing economies into a phone room so he can ‘churn the numbers’.

I don’t know about you, but I hate getting unsolicited phone calls (and door knocks) and I never buy from them.

If your only weapon in business is a telephone and your ability to withstand rejection, you’re part of a dying breed, and as the world moves on you’ll be left further and further behind.

In today’s connected world, sales people are being replaced with websites and media. If you doubt this, imagine that you were a door to door salesman selling books in today’s world. How would you ever compete with Amazon or any other half decent online book store.

Impossible. You’d starve to death. And you couldn’t possibly provide your customers with an equivalent service or selection.

But here’s the TRUTH: If you carve out a niche for yourself and you use automated tools like a website and email auto-responders, you can increase the efficiency of your business and you can compete.

And you won’t antagonize your customers in the process…

So Listen Up: You must build a website that sells for your business and use modern communication tools shrewdly.

Most companies don’t. Most websites aren’t built to sell; they’re just thrown together because people have some vague notion that they need one. And most important of all, most companies wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how to write effective sales copy that gets the phone to ring (and ’s why they think websites aren’t worth spending time and money on).

Here’s The Good News: Their ignorance is your opportunity…

If you build a website that sells, the chances are you’ll own one of a few elite marketing machines in your industry. And even better, because of the way search engines work (i.e. they identify and reward authority sites with more traffic) this machine will allow you to out perform your competitors for years to come.

And by the time they wake up and realise they need to change what they are doing to match you, you’ll be light years ahead and they may
never catch up.

Let ‘em eat your dust. Get a website that sells…

You can download a free report that provides invaluable information about how to build a website that sells, and how to avoid the pitfalls of web design from this website.

I wish you every success in business.

David Mollet

It’s conventional wisdom in today’s highly connected world that your business must have a website to succeed’! But is that really true?

The short answer is ‘only if it helps you get sales’.

I’ve consulted with hundreds of businesses about web design,and in all those consulting meetings I’ve never met a business owner who didn’t want their website to get them sales.

So why then don’t all websites sell? Why do so many of them sit on the internet gathering little more than cyber dust, with hardly anyone ever visiting them, and even less buying from them?

The answer is simple, it’s because most web designers know nothing about marketing and selling, so they have no idea about how to build you a web design that sells!

You can’t be serious, (I heard someone say) how can this be true?

Despite the fact that this sounds absolutely preposterous,the truth is most people in the web design industry are graphic designers. So what is the expertise of a graphic designer? It’s NOT in selling, it’s in making things look nice…

I was recently employed to helped a client who’s story proves this beyond all doubt, because her naive website, built by some fancy design house that knew nothing about how to design a  website that sells, built her a website that nearly cost her the business.

You need to be aware of the classic mistake she made and learn how to avoid making the same mistake, because it could just save your business.

Catherine ran a wedding gift registry and a good business it is too, because so many of her sales come through direct referrals. Her website didn’t really matter much when she started because her prospects were ‘warm’, they had been told by a trusted friend or family member to call, so all she needed to do was turn up and 9 times out of 10 she got the job.

Catherine worked hard, she was super enthusiastic and fantastic with people, I swear if you met her through a referral, it was a ‘no brainer’, she’d win your business.

Anyway, after a few years of hard work, she was ready to expand her business.  So she began spending a significant amount of money on advertising and that’s when things started to come unstuck. I met her just after the slide had started…

She told me she’d just spent 30,000 on advertising, including $10,000 gearing up for a big Trade Show, as well as hiring two new staff members, who were both on full time wages. Her outgoings had ‘gone through the roof’, her savings were rapidly disappearing and something really bad was happening in the business.

NOTHING!

Her new marketing strategies were failing! And she didn’t know why?

Some customer surveys she’d had done by a market research firm suggested that she needed to improve her website, and that’s why she’d called me. It didn’t take me long to isolate her problem.

The big mistake Catherine had made was to underestimate how important her website was inside the context of her more aggressive marketing.

She’d gone from being a trusted referral to a hunter in a competitive market. This is a totally different sales context to dealing with warm prospects from a referral. Warm customers forgave the failings of her website because they already knew she could deliver because a trusted friend had told them she was great.

Cold clients didn’t know that.
They were skeptical!
They doubted her ability!
They needed proof before they were going to be comfortable enough to proceed…
And they didn’t get it from her website!

In fact any red hot leads her advertising was exposed to went to her website and promptly crossed her off their list. You see, her website was so poor it was a negative to a cold client; it actually raised objections in peoples minds…

Big, bad, costly, mistake because…

By the time she got back to them, they’d checked her out online, gone stone cold and in many cases had already signed up with one of her competitors, who had better websites.

Now if she’d  had had a ‘website that sells’, Catherine could easily have gotten a ten to twenty fold return on her $10,000 convention costs alone. I saw the list she had of people she’d met at the convention, there was no shortage of leads, in fact there were so many, she would have been able to set up her sales funnel for the entire year!

And the greatest tragedy of all is that she is really good at what she does, she has a unique story to tell, and could have had a website that literally kicked the butts of her competitors.

So what’s the learning here? Well there are few things:
1.    If your business is at the point where your spending money on advertising you’d better have a website that sells, otherwise you’ll loosing money through missed sales and lost opportunities.
2.    When people hit your site you only have one chance to turn them into a customer before they either buy from you, become a genuine prospect or go somewhere else. It really is that cut throat and that simple.
3.    Websites are only important if they help you make sales and if they’re not making you sales, the chances are they’re losing you sales. Realise that bad websites actually qualify out potential buyers before they call you!

If your reading this article, chances are you have already got my free report “The Shocking Truth: Why Most Websites Fail to Sell and The 10 Critical Must Haves for a Web Design That Sells”.

If you haven’t downloaded or read that report, I encourage you to take the time to get it/read it now. It will dispel a lot of myths about web design and give you vital knowledge you need to be able to tell a website that sells from a website that doesn’t.

In the next few days I’ll post a different story, a happy one about someone who started business with a website that sells, and you’ll see the awesome difference that can make to your business.

Till then I wish you every success in business.

David Mollet