Selling our sponsors to surfers is the key to succeeding in this business. As in all industries that involve sales, the good salesmen, the ones who master the medium, are the ones who make the money while the rest of us don't.
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"We can step outside the box and try to make our passive medium much more active. The possibilities are only limited by our imagination." |
A lot of salesmen excel at face-to-face selling. These guys possess the ability to talk a person into purchasing whatever they might have to offer. A good salesman manages to up-sell the client to the next level without the client even realising it.
Their method of selling could even be described as active. They are there in front of the client and can control the event with their body language, tone of voice, choice of words and any number of other subtle things that only work in face-to-face situations.
By comparison, selling sponsors on free sites could almost be described as passive. Webmasters display banners and use hot text to try and attract the surfer, but that is about as far as it goes.
Because of the medium in which we sell, we lose that direct contact with the client. We can't look him in the eye and judge his mood and use our sales pitch accordingly. Instead, the best we can do is put a site up and hope it scratches the surfer where it itches.
Well I suppose that is one way of looking at it, but I am beginning to wonder if that's an easy way out - Not accepting responsibility for the lack of sales that our sites generate. We can always say that we tried our best even though selling through the web is just too hard sometimes.
On the other hand we can experiment with different sales techniques. We can step outside the box and try to make our passive medium much more active. The possibilities are only limited by our imagination.
Sure, we can't see the surfer, we don't know what he looks like and we can't judge his mood. All we have to work with is traffic statistics and surfers that visit our sites when we are asleep. All that shouldn't stop us, good salesmen talk to their clients and so should we - even when we are asleep!
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Now let me make one thing clear, I'm not talking about those horrible online audio ads. You've probably come across them yourself and if you haven't then you should consider yourself lucky. Babes with incredibly sexy - and totally false - sounding voices telling me that I should come over to XYZ Cum Drenched, Big Boobed Bang Wangers and satisfy their craving for stud cock does absolutely nothing for me except reduce me to laughter.
What I am suggesting is that you talk to the surfer through the text on your site. Your free sites, AVS sites and TGP galleries can have some text on it, most surfers can and do read text if it is interesting and not long winded.
Just a moment ago, I suggested that you talk to the surfer but in actual fact, you shouldn't 'say' a word at all. Good marketing in this industry often revolves around building an illusion in the surfer's mind.
Basically, it should be the model appearing in the actual content that should do the talking instead of you, the webmaster. How? You have to become the guy or girl that is in the actual pictures and create an illusion that will make your surfer want to click on your sponsor. This goes way beyond simply saying:
"Click here to see how much more cum I can take on my face before my eyelids are glued shut forever."
Talking to the surfer in hopes to create the right illusion starts on the warning page and, like any good novel, builds up to a climax on the last gallery page. The only thing you have to remember is that you are not writing an actual novel so you should keep the text short and to the point.
With a little practice you can even build your sponsor links into what you are saying to the surfer.
Earlier, I mentioned that good face-to-face salesmen were those who could up-sell the client without the client even realising what was happening.
The good salesman in our industry is the one who can build the illusion that would allow the client to ride the wave all the way through the sign-up page and into the sponsor's member area.