Photo by Paul Worthington
As an online copywriter, I’ve come to realize that the web is a very different place to the offline world.
After multiple failures I kind of caught up with the reasons why. And this realization played a crucial role in the success I’m enjoying now.
So I want to share this with you… and hopefully save you from a couple of potential failures you might have otherwise go through.
The Online and Offline Difference
- When people go online, they don’t normally have purchase intention. They are online to do research - to find more information about something they are currently interested in. This means that your website has to provide some kind of sought after information that educates your readers. But don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you can’t sell them anything…
- Your customers have just about as much publishing power as you do. If they are more than satisfied, word spread fast. On the other hand, if they end up unsatisfied, word spread faster. With online communities, web 2.0 sites and forums, word of mouth is more powerful than ever.
- Keywords are everything online… and I’m not talking about emotional triggers here. I’m talking about what words are people searching for online. Targeting the right keywords can mean a flood of highly targeted traffic, while targeting the wrong keywords can mean your content rotting in unknown corners of the internet.
- People who go online are typically very impatient. They are looking for something and they want it fast… and remember, your competitors are only a click away. And because of that, their attention span are extremely short (About 10 seconds in my own tests). If you can’t hook them by then, they are forever gone.
- Relevancy is everything. If people are looking for gardening equipments and you give them porn… nobody is going to stop to look… well, maybe some will stop but you get what I mean. In the offline world, you target anyone and everyone and hope a good number of them are interested in what you have to offer. In the online world, they are already interested, you just have to give them the content they’re looking for.
Now you tell me what’s 6th difference.
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