Words Make a Difference
Posted On: 2010-11-11
Ok so it's only Wednesday afternoon and Thursday's column isn't due till tomorrow so why am I writing it now? Well I've had my head buried in online shops and the website of a rather shifty company that took the text off one of our client's websites and used it as their own and now I just want to do something easy.
When Steve and I became involved in online marketing of adult products we were right there at the end of that period when all you had to do was throw up a few images plus a banner or two and you were almost guaranteed to make plenty of sales.
It was a good time ... making money was easy ... but it didn't last and everyone involved should have known that it wouldn't last because selling a product is never that easy. Selling a product takes time and effort ... it means that you have to engage with the person you want to sell to ... and it means that you have to understand what you need to do to make a sale.
These days those good times are just a memory and now we're into the hard slog where, if you don't understand what it takes to sell a product, you're not going to survive. And that makes life rather difficult for many people who come into adult marketing because they come believing that they're going to make loads of money even though they have no marketing skills at all.
Some people seem to have some sort of native understanding of marketing ... maybe it's in their genes ... but wherever it might be they have it and they get up to speed with what they need to do to make a sale quite quickly. Others of course ... those who don't understand marketing techniques don't get up to speed quickly. For them it's a struggle and they make an effort to learn the skills they need or they crash and burn.
If you're one of those who needs to learn the skills because you don't intuitively understand marketing techniques columns like this one is where you'll learn all you need to know and today and over the next couple of columns I hope to teach you something about words ... not just any words ... but the words that will help you make a sale.
Let's start with a little background as it applies to adult marketing. Basically we show our potential buyers hardcore images to get them warmed up and interested in buying what we're selling but images will only go so far in getting a potential buyer to reach for his credit card and make that purchase that will put money in our bank account.
You also need words ... even though you may not think that anyone hitting a site loaded with hardcore images is going to be interested in words you will still need words. And the reason you need words is because they take up the engagement process where the images leave off.
So what words do you use and where do you use them? Well you don't use words that talk a lot about you and you don't use words that talk a lot about your product. Does that sound a little odd? Well perhaps it does but the fact is that you don't want to talk a lot about your product because you simply won't engage the people hitting your site if you do.
The words you need to use are words that will focus on the person who is visiting your site. It's a known rule in marketing that if you want to make sales in any vertical then you need to focus not on the product and certainly not on the business that is producing the product but on the person who may choose to buy the product.
You talk about what the product you're selling will do for the person who might buy it. You don't talk about all the features of the product ... you talk about all the benefits the person visiting your site will enjoy if he buys the product that you are selling.
It's a pretty easy concept but one that few wannabe marketers seem to be able to grasp so let me make it even easier to understand. You don't say that the paysite you're promoting has a bazillion images and more hardcore videos than every other site on the planet put together. You talk about the fun ... the pleasure ... the enjoyment ... the beat-off time ... the person who is visiting your site can have if only he heads over to your sponsor and signs up
And that's where I'll leave you for Thursday. I'll be back with some more about words on Monday.