Its Not About You, Its About YOU!

For some reason when businesses get online they suddenly forget all the rules of business and marketting which have served them well over the years in conventional marketplaces. This is because the internet is different and advanced and scary and so they get a programmer to sell their stuff for them.

Forgive me for making this point but outside of the internet how many marketting departments have a retinue of techie geeks?

I meen sure, they may have the odd technophile and more than their share of geeks because geeks get everywhere, they're a bit like sand when you've been cruising on a beach - but a developer?

Least of all a lowly web developer who, and let's be honest about this, can be found on the software developer food chain somewhere around about the font designers and proof readers and the MD's cleaning ladies sister who translates the technical manual from Chinese to English.

And here's the thing, web sites aren't any different to a high street shop. They need all the same promotion and presentation to be sucessful.

So whatever you do, don't let a programmer design your web site! Get a designer to do it. I'm the first to admit that my web site designs are hit and miss, because i'm a programmer. This is why when I make a commercial web site I work alongside a designer (also an account manager who handles the products and promotional stuff but that's another issue).

Use all the rules of marketing on your web site too, tools such as AIDA and purple cows and USP's and so on. Don't let somebody who talks in the language of SQL dictate your online marketing strategy. We can talk more about marketting stuff another time as it's a big subject, for now, I want to instill the most important rule of ecommerce into you.

This is the Most Important Rule of eCommerce that YOU MUST KNOW

Allow me, for 1 paragraph, to break this golden rule and you might already guess what i'm building up too:

This is my personal blog and so I tend to waffle on about me, this is because i'm a narcassist with a strong tendancy toward Histrionic Personality Disorder, I love talking about me because i'm shallow and only interested in myself.

Now compare the above to this;

Here you will be able to find out about all the things pertinent to my life and share in our common interests. You can find out all about me in an entertaining way as i'll share with you the tales of my battle with self centred obsession and how I get things totally wrong.

The two paragraphs portray all the same basic information and could both easily be used to describe every single personal blog on the internet.

Now if you had to read 1 of these two blogs and to decide which which one based only on that paragraph which one would you most likely read? Chance would usually favour the first one you came across, but I suspect the second would be more appealing. Do you want to know why?

Because I talked about you, not me.

So my big tip of the insert-time-interval-between-my-blog-posts-here is: Make sure that the words: "I"; "we"; "us"; and "our" NEVER appear on your web sites landing pages, because frankly, nobody gives a bloody damn about you.

You don't meen anything to your customers, especially on first contact. They couldn't care if you go under tomorrow and end up begging on the street. You can talk about yourself all day long and they just wont give a damn.

So talk about them, talk about what you can do for them, talk about how you can help them and how their lives will be just that little bit better for having done business with you.

Your two new favourite words are: "You"; and "Your".

Recent Articles

Ask Becky a Question