How to Inform Them Into Buying – After Free Traffic

I think it’s time that I wrote a few more traffic tips about what happens After you get the traffic, as well as how your site should be set up Before you get the traffic.

The first thing I want to discuss is the positive side to having your blog function as a free trial of your products and services. This isn’t quite the same as the idea behind Chris Anderson’s book, Freemium, which discusses how the best price is often free, as your actual products and services aren’t free.

It’s more that the content in your blog is a mini-version of what a person would get as a customer, offering them information on two levels – tips related to a need they have, and what it would be like to be a customer or client of yours.

It works for the same reason any other free trial works.

But this is even better, because some of them aren’t going to realize it’s a free trial offer. They’ll get the information, use the free version, get just a few results, then be told that to get even better results, they want the premium version.

Let me tell you a story of just one of the many times it worked on me. And you can tell me whether you think it’s happened to you before.
I was watching PBS the other day, and I saw a special by Wayne Dyer. Now, I’m a huge Wayne Dyer fan, but it could have been Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra or anyone else in that field.

It was a two, maybe three hour special called The Power of Intention. I’d emptied my wallet for Katrina just the day before, and the rest of the personal cash-on-hand allowance I give myself out of business proceeds was dedicated to a birthday present, so I really didn’t have any cash laying around to get the Big Enchilada special they were advertising.

After watching the entire show, I realized that I needed to get more information about either Wayne Dyer or the Power of Intention. I collect his books and speeches, and I didn’t have that one. I Googled it, ended up at his site, and bought it.

You know why?

Because he’s an expert who gave me a free trial.

And because he’s an expert in my mind, he’s not a merchant to me. I
am a fan of his work. Now, if you’re ten steps ahead of me, which I bet you are – you’re probably thinking, “I don’t know if I can get people to be my fans. My industry is kind of dry.”

I have a solution to that.

Get out a piece of pen and a paper.

Now write in capital letters, 25 times, the following phrase: “My company is not some pansy generic. It is a brand name.”

I’m serious.

I’m really serious.

Do it.

Because I’ll tell you what. If I told you from a technical standpoint what I do for most of my clients all day, you’d fall asleep with your
eyes open.

But when I make the basics easy to understand and call them “Free Traffic Tips”, it’s sexy and I enjoy a kind of weird minor niche Celebrity Expert Status.

It doesn’t matter if you sell rice cakes, tires, electronics, real estate,
web hosting, cell phones…

Either you can leverage the concept of brand loyalty to your advantage, and you can find out where the existing fan base is for your area and lead them to you, or you can go broke. Yes, those are our choices, eventually.

For small business, all branding has to be about is finding what the pain of your market is, and melding your company identity with the alleviation of that pain.

There’s no industry too boring to leverage brand loyalty, trust me.

Michelin did it with tires. Coke and Pepsi did it with soda – chances are 80% that you actually care what kind of colored carbonated sugar water you drink. Don’t be ashamed to be a fan- just think really hard before you decide that you can’t have fans of your own.

For goodness sakes, Progressive did it with car insurance! I ask you- what is less cool than car insurance?

People who had bad driving records in their teens and 20s who were now responsible adults wanted car insurance that was affordable, and quick to sign up for.

Progressive is the hip, net-savvy driver’s car insurance because they came to the Net early and different. They added other features that simplify car insurance issues, like cars that come on the scene of an accident and cut you a check, right then and there.

There’s something that your competitors don’t offer, that they never even thought of, that you can use to distinguish yourself from them. Give a free taste of that to your blog visitors and through your other content, and they’ll be that much easier to convert.

Next time – the connection between Twitter and your company’s bottom line.