Jun 22 2008
Comparing 1st impressions On and Offline
First impressions are always the most important whether your talking face to face or a customer navigates to your home page. Just yesterday I was buying a few groceries. When I had all my items ready to go I headed to the nearest cashier with the fewest customers in line. Aisle one looked to me to be my best bet. A man had just finished giving the cashier the money for his purchase. I proceed to throw my stuff on the treadmill table ,I guess you would call it, and started noticing this guy before me trying to recruit the cashier into his Multi-Level Marketing business. Dressed like a mechanic with faded blue pants and shirt and a red trucker hat this guy looked like he just fell out of bed. I listened to him go on to say, “Yea so if you sign up three people, you can make back what you pay to get in!”.
She replied, “uh sounds ok”. How she said it, it sounded like she meant to say, “uh sounds good for you. As I paid for my stuff and left, moments later he followed my path without the sale. So will you buy from a salesman with a weak pitch, unprofessional appearance and a business that sounds kind of shady? Of course not! This goes for internet users also. Nobody is going to take a website seriously if the format is jacked with a single page showing a heading which says, “MAKE A MILLION IN A MONTH!”. For one, honesty is the best policy. Be real with your visitors. Most people are not dumb so don’t treat them as if they are. If you have a great company, you will not need a cheesy pitch to earn the interest of others. Introduce you website to the public how you would like to see it as a visitor. You can start with a small, and to the point, introduction and your purpose. Have a “history page” or an “about us” page. Even though it’s a good idea to have Company name, full address and phone numbers on the index page, it’s still a good idea to add a “Contact Us” page where the visitor can easily fill in a small form containing a subject, message and email field. Some people are too lazy to login to their email, copy paste your address into the to: field and send you a message. The convenience of having a form where visitors can easily contact you will lead to more sales. To get ideas of how to format your site take a look at some websites belonging to the leaders in your industry. Shoot to make yours better. The possibility of beating out the leaders all depends on your motivation.
