Do You Make These Mistakes When Selling Products Online?

This guest post was written by Mohsin. Mohsin is a blogger who writes tips, tricks, and articles on creating successful blogs over at Blogging Bits. He has also been a webmaster for three years and earns part-time income online. Check him out at Blogging Bits.

We can always learn good lessons from others’ bad practices. Especially, when it comes to internet marketing and selling products online, it’s essential to learn from the success and failures of others.

If you have researched about affiliate marketing, get rich quick schemes, or selling any kind of information product, chances are that you have come across those loud and annoying sites that try their mightiest to sell their marketing product to you (usually an ebook, a disc, or some kind of software).

After looking at many of such pages, I have made a list of tactics such tricksters employ that you should avoid when selling products online.

How Not To Sell Your Product

No jokes, this is exactly how I react when I bump into one of those pages.

DON’T SHOUT AT ME!

The first thing I notice upon entering such pages is that they have put up a huge ALL CAPS headline at the top of the page that is supposed to get my attention and convert me into a customer right away. No, thank you. I think you should learn some basic manners of greeting a guest before thinking of turning me into a customer.

Don’t Be Overzealous

Go easy on the bold, italics, underline, and font size tags. It’s all right, you got my attention, I am all ears, but please don’t tick me off by your enthusiasm about something that you have created. It’s not like you have uncovered a secret that no one on the planet earth has ever known. Please be polite.

Argh! My Eyes!

What’s with the bright yellow, green, and red colors all over the page? It’s like entering a house and being greeted by someone who is wearing fluorescent bulbs as clothes. Just so you know, jazzy colors don’t amuse me, they put me off.

Don’t Shove Everything In My Face

It’s understandable that you have gathered a lot of information and you are eager to impart it to me, but how about you give it to me one bit at a time instead of cramming everything into one long page?

I don’t know why they have abandoned the rule that information on the web is best served in little chunks, and a proper navigation structure in place to browse around different sections of related information makes that task easier, but they seem to believe that a potential buyer will leave without buying if they don’t pounce upon him right away.

This is a mistaken notion. If I have come to your page to buy something, I am committed enough to take the time to browse around and explore your product. But, If I am overwhelmed and confused by the sheer amount of information that is presented to me all at once, I’ll likely go shop elsewhere.

But That’s A Bad Thing To Do, Isn’t It?

What gets me most is that some of them proudly promote bad practices and pride themselves on being lazy achievers. The majority of us aren’t criminal-minded and the majority of us also want to do something we can be proud of (laziness is certainly not one of those things). So, stop promoting bad practices and tell me how to do it without killing my conscientiousness.

You Are Supposed To Be A Millionaire, Right?

How many millionaires have we all seen promoting their get-rich-quick ebooks on cheap looking web pages? They call themselves millionaire and can’t hire a web designer or a web usability expert to help them design a decent looking web page. How ironic!

How Big Is Your Book? What? 27 Pages?

It’s funny that some of the product pages are lengthier than the ebook they are supposed to promote. Looks like their authors spend more time on writing the ad copy than on writing the ebook itself.

To cap it all, such web pages are almost identical in their design, their style, and their lousy selling tactics, and they show the incompetence of their creators.

How To Sell Your Product

Here are some products that I want to buy because of the way they are presented to me.

SEO Book By Aaron Wall

Aaron has built a community around his product, he has got a blog that he updates regularly, he doesn’t shove everything in my face, he proves his competence and his knowledge of SEO, and slowly converts me into a buyer.

Seth Godin’s Blog And His Books

Seth Godin also promotes his books through his blog. He gives away free ideas, and even free ebooks. When you go to Seth’s blog, you aren’t greeted with big claims, photoshopped product boxes, and annoying marketing speak. He comes across as a normal guy who is also a marketing guru. You can also find links to his books placed very unobtrusively in the sidebar.

Dr. Wayne Dyer’s Self-Help Products

Self-help guru Wayne Dyer has a very minimalistic products page where you get to see all his product titles that lead to individual product pages. Moreover, with the help of the navigation bar, you can know more about Wayne Dyer, his activities, and everything else he has to offer.

Lessons To Learn

If you want to sell an information product or any other product online, and want to be successful with it, be normal. Interact with your potential buyers, create a community to build trust for yourself, give away free information, and present your product with grace when the time comes.

Have you ever sold anything online? What was your experience with it?

Stay tuned for even more Back To The Basics posts!

Please subscribe, or else I will cry. Do you really want to make a programmer cry?