You’re probably in business to make as many sales as practical and build a better life for yourself and loved ones. In order to make those sales you need to reach as many targeted prospects as possible with your message. Yet, your message must get through to your prospects one… at …. a ….. time. It’s individuals that read your message, think about it, and react to it. They react to your message once they connect with you and feel an appropriate emotion based upon the content of your messages. So the real key to your on-line success is connecting with your prospects one-at-a-time or one-to-one.
How do you connect with your prospects one at a time? I do it by envisioning individual audience members sitting across from me as I write. I write as if I am talking to them and I often see specific faces. I see specific faces because as I surf the internet I actually study the faces posted on the various websites. I AM actually talking to individuals as I write. That feeling is conveyed in my ezine articles, emails, and web copy. People “feel” this when reading my writing and so they respond to my message to them.
Realizing the importance of knowing who you deal with is the reason I post my photo on my website. I want my visitors to get to “know” and connect with me. Maybe you should consider doing the same if you don’t already.
Realizing the importance of knowing who you deal with is part of the reason I frequent discussion forums. You get a feel for what a person is really like after reading a few of their posts. They also get a feel for who you are over time.
Another tool I’ve found helpful in connecting with people is listening to the audio clips available on many websites. By hearing the actual voices of your audience members, this helps them to “become” real people instead of just names on a list. It’s also fun discovering what individuals sound like. Since we are from many different countries and regions within different countries, people rarely sound like what I imagined. That’s beside the point, but hearing the voice helps me to know the other person. Talking to people on the telephone, naturally, has the same effect.
Through connecting with people one-on-one we build trust and respect. You don’t think of your contacts as just potential buyers. You begin to see them as individual sitting in from of their computer screens reading and responding to something you wrote. You eventually feel the two way flow of communications and that lets you know that your audience IS being reached.
Examples of the two-way communication flow is when your ezine readers email you after reading one of your insightful articles, or someone emails you with a personal thank you after you responded to their question on a discussion board. In the sales arena, it’s when a potential customer emails you with a question about a product you recommended and then orders after getting your very frank response. It’s when someone working on an ebook or piece of software emails you asking you to review it before it’s released because they value your opinion.
If you look at your own buying behavior you’ll realize that you buy from people that you connect with. You feel good when you buy a generic product (that you could have purchased from hundreds of different individuals) from someone you have gotten to know. Others make their buying decisions the same way!
Make it one of your goals beginning today to cultivate those one-on-one relationships. To beginners, it will seem like you might spend a LOT of time just to reach a FEW individuals when you really want to reach as many people as possible. There is a natural tendency not to want to slow down and deal with individuals. It’s critical to your business and personal success that you realize it’s individuals that make business decisions. Individuals sitting at their keyboards, or reading something you’ve written (which they printed out to read during a spare moment), should be the focus of your efforts. Master this skill and you’ll be totally amazed at the effectiveness of all your business efforts. You’ll begin to see the essentialness of connecting one-to-one.
Willie Crawford has been teaching Internet marketing for
over 9 years. Take advantage of his uncanny insights and
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