Learning Objectives
Level: beginners
Target: anyone with a website who would like to write posts that sells
In this How to Create A Website: Writing Great Posts That Sell tutorial, you will learn how to plan and write posts that can convey visitors into buying customers. After you have created your website, you need to add contents and more contents to your website in order to provide more values to your visitors and promote your affiliate products. And you need to write quality contents.
Guide on How to Motivate Your Readers to Buy
First thing first: Is the product/service superb?
Trust is the most powerful aspect your website should treasure. Don’t sell just for money irrespective of the quality of the product/service you are trying to sell. Don’t use the skills introduced here to trick your visitors. When you are writing an article recommending a product or service to your visitors, bear in mind the following things:
- You are personally recommending the product/service, that means you stand behind it for the quality.
- Will your readers feel grateful to you for your recommendation or will they feel tricked by you? Will they buy another product/service you recommend them?
You should wholeheartedly believe that you are providing great values to your readers by recommending them to purchase a certain product or service, not just to earn you some money. Better still, you should have personally tried the product or service and you are very satisfied with it. Your personal testimonial is the most powerful persuasion.
By: Sarah Reid
How to motivate people to buy your products/services?
Since you need to motivate people to click on affiliate links and make the purchase, you need to view yourself as a great salesman than merely a content producer. You write the article because you want to introduce a product that you know is good for them. And being a salesman, you need to understand the art and science of selling and buying.
The number one rule in selling and buying is to “think like a customer” not “think like a seller”. Put yourself in the customers’ shoes to understand what motivates a person to buy instead of just selling the product to them. There are two drivers for buying – rational and emotional. Some examples of rational and emotional drivers are listed below:
Rational
- Increase profits
- Reduce costs
- Higher Efficiency
- Higher Dependability
- Lower Maintenance Costs
- Utility / Functions
- Security
- Health and Safety
- Future Benefits
- Bargain Price
- Actual Need
- Convenience
Emotional
- Pride
- Fear
- Comfort and Indulgence
- Recommended By a Trusted Friend
- Immediate Pleasure
- Peer Approval or Pressure
- Niche Identity
- Reciprocity or Guilt
- Greed
- Pain
- Feel Good
- Perceived Gain
Decisions are made emotionally and then justified rationally. ~ Len Smith
Normal people will recognize that rational drivers are what lead us to purchase. However, a great salesman would counter that emotional drivers are what ultimately lead us to buy. Why would people line up outside Apple Stores overnight to purchase the latest iPhone? Because they need a phone? (They are holding at least one intelligent phone in their hands in the line.) Because they are dying for a new function? (All the functions are usually available on other phones on the market already.) Or just because it is just cool to have a new iPhone?
How to Make Use of the Emotional Motivators?
In the post How to Create A Website: Writing Posts Visitors Love to Read, it is stated that a good title should include the specific benefits the article would bring to the reader and the contents should fulfill this promise. However, not every benefits are created equal. Benefits are more powerful when they are emotionally motivating as opposed to rationally motivating. Therefore, when creating your article title and content, try
- Finding out the pain and pleasure points of your readers
- Selecting motivators that would drive your readers
- Providing more value that addresses the motivators with a sense of urgency
Below are examples of the emotional motivators and their applications:
- Pride – WP Learner’s “How to Create A Website Guide” help anyone to create their own websites in under an hour so that they can show off their new websites to friends and bosses as creating a website is still seen as rocket science.
- Fear – “WordPress security” continues to remain a very attention getting niche as most of the website owners know little about internet security and they fear their websites may be hacked some day and all their valuable contents deleted. Another way to use fear is to include a limited time offer in your message, people usually fear a loss and will take action more readily.
- Comfort and Indulgence – There are numerous WordPress plugins that offer one-click automation of tedious tasks like generating legal pages or creating special effects.
- Recommended By a Trusted Friend – This is why social sharing is such a heated topic these days. People will trust their friend more than what the advertisements tell them. If you can build a relationship with your website visitors, they will trust your recommendations more.
- Immediate Pleasure – Many products (digital products in particular) nowadays offer you “immediate download” after purchase instead of having you to wait for postage. Our “How to Create A Website Guide” help newbies to create a website immediately and the process can be completed in an hour.
- Peer Approval or Pressure – Many websites would display and even emphases how many “likes”, “followers”,”subscribers” or “sharing” they have as a kind of social proof. The Facebook widget would even tell which of your friends have followed or shared the website.
- Niche Identity –
- Reciprocity or Guilt – This is the “give to get” strategy. You give out free advices, products and resources to help your visitors to a point that they would feel guilty of not making a purchase from you.
- Greed – People want more money, more values, more of everything. If you are in the niche of online earning education, you can simply show how much money you are making to attract them into the purchase of your earning secrets.
- Pain – Pain avoidance is the number 1 issue normal people will go after. A solution to alleviate or even terminate people’s pain will sell a lot. Products including task automation, bug or error elimination, etc. are often the top sellers.
- Feel Good – People will feel good if they know that their purchase would help others no matter if that’s just a tiny fraction of the money they have spent on the purchase.
- Perceived Gain – Put the emphasis on the gain of the readers after the purchase rather than the amount of money input. I have seen some website earning programs that guarantee you to get US$1000 or more in a month though the programs themselves are being sold for tens of thousands of dollars.
By: Polycart
Conclusion: Motivate Your Readers With Emotional Drivers
Next time when you write posts about your affiliate products, do not try to sell. Instead, think like a customers and use the emotional drivers (e.g. comfort, pleasure, pride, reciprocity, etc.) to appeal to the hearts of your visitors instead of their brain. You will be able to see a surge in your conversion rate and your commission.
Edward Chung
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