How To Distinguish Your Website From Others That Are Selling Exactly the Same Thing
by Mark Widawer
From "Landing Page Cash Machine"
There are a few different elements to making sure your web site stands out from other sites which are selling the same product as you. The main thing you can do is to take a look at what everybody else does, and do everything differently with respect to the easy way out that they usually take.
What a lot of people will do is put up a sales page that offers all of these different kinds of things, all at one time, and not really hone in on who their customer is.
That's what the problem was with the red shoe survey that I did for Affiliate Summit. The random phrase that I picked for the survey was "red shoes," and I searched for that. Then I looked at all the Google AdWords ads that came up on the first page, and the websites that people were taken to when they clicked.
What I found was really a tragedy. Of the ten websites that I clicked on and visited, there was only one that took me to a page that specifically had red shoes. Several of them took me to their home pages, where I had to search all over again for red shoes.
The easy way out is, "Well, if somebody's going to come and search for red shoes and land on my website, I'll just take them to my home page and let them search for red shoes all over again."
Well, there are lots of people that are going to be selling the exact same shoe that Zappos.com is selling. The difference is going to be how easy they make the customer experience in buying that particular product.
Now other elements of that are wrapped up in the question of whether you are truly demonstrating the value of the product that you are offering. What that really points to is: can you write some good copy to explain the value of your product and the benefits of your product? And if you can, then that copy should include a few key points.
First, you must be able to do a value build. Somebody has a product for sale, everybody sells the same thing, and it's always $50. And if you go from one website to another and another and it's always $50, well, what makes you buy it one place versus another?
One is perhaps a value build to explain that this particular $50 product is frequently more somewhere else, or frequently does not have the following things included in the box, or whatever it is.
Also, adding bonuses is a big help. If you can incentivize your customers to buy it by adding bonuses, then you'll certainly get more people to buy.
The other thing that you might want to add is urgency and scarcity. Now if everybody has the same thing, it is a little bit difficult to create urgency and scarcity, but urgency and scarcity are two very good motivators. (If you haven't heard of Robert Cialdini, he has a book called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, and you can get that at Amazon.com. )
Urgency and scarcity are two of the things that he's studied that cause people to buy. If you can introduce urgency and scarcity into your offer, then you will get more sales than if you don't introduce scarcity.
Mostly if you look at your own habits, when you have a limited amount of time to get something or to do something, then you're more inclined to make a decision in a hurry, and to make a decision right now, than you would be if there was no urgency and no scarcity associated with that.
So, just to review those answers, having your copy speak directly to the person who you are expecting to be on your page, adding bonuses when you can, building value, and also adding urgency and scarcity will help you to effectively distinguish your website from others that are selling exactly the same thing.
This article is by Mark Widawer. Mr. Widawer is the author of the widly acclaimed "Landing Page Cash Machine", which really shares some insight on not only converting visitors into buyers, but on what makes an Internet Marketing business work.
