Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Making Sure Your Business Connects With Customers
You've heard a lot of excited talk about how easy it is to make money online. The call of independence and self-fulfillment that owning your own business can provide is powerful and exciting.

Unfortunately, many people jump in with no clear idea of what to expect. I firmly believe that the Internet offers a great opportunity to build a business of your own. But, in order to succeed, you need to proceed with a little reality.

There's nothing magical about the Internet that causes money to fall into your lap. A business is a business whether it's online or off. Yet many business starters hang onto unrealistic expectations that make it likely that they'll never reach their goal.

To get a more realistic picture of how internet business works, let's look at it in a slightly different way. Let's take it offline for a moment.

Imagine a bunch of business owners standing on one side of an auditorium with a customer standing on the other. A lot of the business owners just stand there, waiting for the customer to choose them out of the crowd.

Others start waving, jumping up and down, maybe even yelling in the hope of attracting the customer's attention.

A third group of business owners—just a handful—who have deeply researched the customer walk across the auditorium and start talking about the very concerns that are on the customer's mind. They impress the customer with their grasp of how prepared they are to deal with the customer's needs.

Meanwhile, all the business owners on the other side of the auditorium continue to wait and jump and yell. And their resentment grows against those who had the nerve to go across the room and monopolize the customer's attention.

The first two groups complain that the third group must have some kind of unfair advantage over them. And they wait. And they wait. And they wait for the customer to wander over to them.

Which business owners do you think will come out of that auditorium with a sale?

Your online business can act like any of those three groups of business owners. It can sit there quietly, like the first group, offering bare details about your product in the hope that merely going through the motions of putting up a website is all you need to make money online.

Or your online business can act like the jumping and yelling group. When "build it and they will come" doesn't work, you can throw in lots of hype and flashy colors and meaningless bells and whistles in the hope that it will be a "magic wand" that will awe your visitors into buying.

Or your online business can act like the group that walked across the auditorium and talked about the specific concerns that the customer had. It can take the details about your product and frame those details to show the ways that they address the customer's most pressing needs.

Online business is not rocket science. In many ways it truly is simple. But there is no way to get around it. You cannot succeed online by waiting for your customers to come to you.

You have to learn their needs perhaps even better than they understand those needs themselves.

I've gone through this process lately with a client, talking with him about his favorite stories about the ways buyers have reacted, the pride he's taken at the special projects he's done for them, and the joy that those projects have brought them. It's been a real emotional high going through all these stories and learning the underlying emotional needs that his products have filled.

And it should lead to some much more effective website content that "walks across the room" to engage new customers with exactly what's on their minds.

But what if you're just starting and don't have years worth of past accomplishments to draw from?

Then look back in your own life at times when you purchased products similar to what you sell. Find the times when you came across something similar that you just had to have. Hold those objects in your hands if you need to. Dig back to those emotions you felt when you bought them.

Effective copywriting is not about following dry rules so that trick people into buying something they don't really want. It's about uncovering emotions and putting them into your writing so your customers can experience the same ones as they fulfill their needs.

There's no way around it. Doing business online is all about connecting with your customers. Now, what do you need to do so you can walk across that auditorium and connect with them?
Jeff