How To Draw in Visitors and Make Them Like You

July 12, 2007

This is the fourth of a six part series on how to get your small business website off the ground.

At this point, I am going to assume that you have a business website that is online already. I am hoping that you have considered the topics I have talked about in the prior posts of this series in terms of designing your site around a single goal and getting your sales funnel set up. Doing it this way, your site can actually serve a purpose for your business rather than simply being out there as another one of millions of useless business sites.

Now that you have a site online, you want traffic. To do that, you need to promote. It used to be said that if you put it up there, people will come. That is not true. If you simply put the site online and cross your fingers, you’ll die waiting for the traffic to come. It would be like building a road out in the middle of the woods with no entrance or exit. It’s just there. Nobody is going to know it’s there.

The thing to think about here is what is likely going to draw in a prospect? Is a casual web surfer likely going to come to your site just to read about you and see your mug shot? Probably not. They have no REALITY with you and simply don’t care whether you live or die. That sounds brutal, but it’s true. The average web surfer has an incredibly short attention span and is borderline bored. Your job is to provide something on your site that they will care about and then convert them into a person that DOES have some reality with you.

Affinity - Realty - Communication

You will do that by communicating with them at a reality that they will understand. There is a triangle written about by L. Ron Hubbard called the ARC Triangle. I have not found anything else out there that describes what I am trying to convey as well as that. Let’s look at it for a moment. You have a triangle which is made up of affinity (A), reality (R) and communication (C). Each corner of that triangle directly affects the others. If you raise communication and reality, you increase affinity. In other words, if you talk to your web visitor about something they understand (like the need to solve a problem), their affinity for you will go up.

Now, let’s look at the cookie-cutter business site. They talk about products and services. The average web surfer happens upon the site. They have probably never heard of you (no reality). They obviously don’t really care much about you or your business (no affinity). If you, at the same time, don’t really communicate to them (bad ad copy, no personality), you are killing yourself. That visitor will be gone in seconds never to come back again.

On the other hand, you take that same visitor and they come to a site which really communicates to them (not just words, but words that hit home to them), you are very likely to increase your reality with them, and in turn the affinity. They are much more likely to stick around and enter your sales funnel.

So, what is the key to this?

Content

Your site needs content. Not stuff that is all designed to talk about your business. Like I said, they don’t CARE about your business. They care only about themselves and fixing their issue at hand. So, you provide real content that is designed simply to HELP them. If you help your visitors and you provide content that is designed to solve their problem, you will raise your stature to them by many times and help your business.

For most businesses, I usually recommend they start a blog. A blog is a great way to easily provide content to your visitors. And besides the blog simply being easy for the owner, the blog software will also help you in your online promotion activities by pinging the search engines every time you post something new. They also automate the generation of RSS feeds. In other words, a good blog publishing platform allows your site to spread it’s tentacles out there onto the internet rather than your site sitting there as a remote island in a sea of distractions. I highly recommend using Wordpress. There are others, but Wordpress is the most popular and has the largest user community. It is also free. As a business owner, I would highly suggest downloading and installing Wordpress on your own site (or having a pro do it for you) rather than using the Wordpress.com service in which they host for you. You really need the ability to customize the operation and look of your blog so that it blends in with your business site, and you simply don’t have that kind of flexibility when using their hosting.

That said, content is king and always will be. You need to get outside the trap of having the entire site just talk about what you and your business do. Your web visitors don’t care even a little. At least not yet. In order to get them to care, you need to undercut it with some freely available content that is designed to help your prospect. Of course, that content needs to be related to your area of business. If you are in the home building business, for example, you should run a blog on your website which talks about issues that would be of interest to people having a home built or thinking about it. Articles about how to find an honest contractor, understanding the home building process, home design ideas - these types of things are all prime ideas for a business blog for a home contractor. Not only will that content get your name out there as an expert in home building, but it will draw in traffic from people who did not otherwise know you. As a side effect, that content can also provide a more educated client (which are usually less trouble).

Regardless of the business you are in, there is content that can be provided to people interested in that subject. Write it professionally. Use keywords that a person would actually use to search for that information. And post as often as you can (once per day if you can). If you do that, I guarantee you that your blog will serve as the primary traffic magnet for your business website.

With that in the equation, you now have communication in volume (C), written to solve their problem (R), which will provide you plenty of affinity from your audience (A). That’s ARC, and trust me, it will put prospects into your site’s sales funnel. It works in normal life as well.
But What Else?

Sure, there are a lot of other possible ways to get your business site out there. We’ll look at the rest of them tomorrow. So, stay tuned.

Outside Reading

Other Parts of This Series: