“Hello, my name is Pat.”
“Hi Pat. Nice to meet you!”
“Would you like to buy my eBook? It’s only $29 dollars, and I promise it will tell you everything you need to know. Hello…HELLO?!”
(insert obnoxious game show “incorrect answer” sound effect here)
Cold selling, similar to “cold calling”, is when someone tries to sell something to a prospective customer who does not know that person and was not expecting such an interaction. It does not work. You may be able to get a sale here and there, but if you want to create a successful business online, especially one that you can be proud to say you own, you cannot cold sell.
Do you like to get calls from a telemarketer? Do you like to sign up for email newsletters, only to get bombarded with emails that say “buy this” and “buy that”? Do you click links for products in tweets from people you’ve never heard of?
It might sound obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times a day I’m shown some kind of cold offer. In emails, in tweets, on websites – it’s ridiculous. Not only will cold selling leave you wondering why you don’t make any sales, but you’ll lose the respect of people who may have eventually bought something from you, and maybe even help you promote and sell more products.
So the question is, how can we as internet marketers, bloggers and entrepreneurs sell something to people online, without cold selling?
The answer: build a relationship with your traffic.
Build a relationship, and the cold selling immediately vanishes. Become their friend, and they’ll naturally be attracted to what you have to offer. The more you can interact and engage with your traffic, the better chance they’ll stick around and help you out in one way or another, whether its by tweeting your next post, linking to you on their own website, buying something from you, or becoming an affiliate.
Here are 5 easy ways you can interact and engage with your traffic so you can begin to build those important relationships:
1. Don’t Hide
You cannot build a relationship with someone if you’re not there, so why would you try and hide yourself online. As you can probably tell, I’m a big proponent of being totally honest and authentic, telling you exactly who I am and what I’m about. I think that’s partly the reason why this blog has taken off like it has.
Especially online, if you can bring out your personality in your blog posts or articles, and even show a picture here and there of your face, people will be attracted to what you have to say, and eventually what you have to offer. Seriously, what you look like doesn’t matter, so get over the fear, and put your face on your website!
When I think of my favorite websites, like Problogger, Entrepreneurs-Journey and Shoemoney, whenever I read their content, I imagine their faces – Darren, Yaro, and Jeremy, respectively. I don’t think about what they look like or if they’re attractive people, but I take in their content as if they were speaking to me, as I can imagine them doing so.
How many successful blogs do you know that don’t have some kind of face or personality connected to it?
2. Encourage Comments
Another simple way to begin to build a relationship online with someone is to actually get them to contribute something. There’s no easier way than in the comment section of your blog posts! Think about this: if people take the time to actually fill out their name, their website, email, and also a comment, that’s 2 to 4 minutes out of their day given just to you and your post. That’s huge.
Not only will people ask you questions or add to what your blog post was about, but it will encourage others to do the same. Every comment is an engagement that adds to the relationship you have with your traffic.
So, make sure you ask for comments! Encourage them! Talk about a controversial subject that can’t help but be commented about!
Does that make sense? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below 
3. Respond!
Simply put, respond as much as you can. It does take work, and it does take time, but it also works wonders. Responding to people’s comments, emails and inquiries is the next best thing to actually meeting with someone and talking with them in person.
People notice when you take the time to email or respond back, especially if it’s something thoughtful and useful. They’ll remember that, so when you do tweet something, link to somewhere, or even offer a product, they will be more than likely to at least give it a good look. Most importantly, however, you won’t lose their respect, because that relationship has already been established.
4. Hook Up
When I say “hook up”, I mean become friends on social media platforms, like Twitter or Facebook. In this way, you’re in essence really becoming “friends”, not only because Facebook or Twitter tells you so, but like real-life friends, you get to know and understand things about each other that a regular person would not.
In addition, the simple act of accepting a friend request, or following someone on twitter is an engagement that consciously or subconsciously starts a relationship between the two parties.
Make sure to give people a chance to become your friend on social media platforms. Include links in blog posts (just like I did above), or in your sidebar. You are on social media platforms, aren’t you?
5. Mini-Transactions
Lastly, a great way to set yourself up for a possible consumer transaction is to have your traffic go through some kind of mini-transaction. To me, examples of mini-transactions are the following:
- Entering a name and email into an opt-in form for a newsletter
- Entering a name and email into an opt-in form for a free gift
- Answering a poll question or survey
- Performing some kind of action in order to qualify for a prize or reward in a contest
These are just a few examples, but they all go through the same process:
Thought -> Action -> Receive
These mini-transactions train the mind, so that when an offer for a paid product does come around, the thought process is one that the customer has been through before and are comfortable with. Thought -> Action -> Receive
How About You?
Based on your experience, which of these 5 strategies is the most powerful to you?
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{ 44 comments (Click Here to Leave a Comment Below) }
What about if the cold call went like this…
“Hello, my name is Pat.”
“Hi Pat.”
“I know we haven’t spoke before and you probably hate getting calls like this… but I wonder if I could just share with you for 30 seconds why i’m calling, is that ok?”
“Yeah sure, I have 30 seconds”
“Cool. As I said my name is Pat, I work with people that are frustrated with their 9-5 job and they’re looking to build streams of passive income… I don’t suppose that resonates with you does it.? Obviously loads of people are happy working hard for other people’s benefit”
“Well Pat… actually… know you mention it, I would like to learn more about making money outside of my 9-5 job. I have ideas and plans but they never seem to work”
“Tell me more….”
Hopefully you can see where this is going. The point I am trying to make is that there are ways of ‘no pressure calling’ that build relationships and can lead to some very big sales if there is a ‘fit’.
Hope that’s food for thought.
Hi Chris,
That’s obviously a lot better, and just the fact that you take the time to introduce yourself (or myself
) will help a lot. However, it’s much more difficult to build a relationship on the phone with someone who just called you out of the blue.
Because it’s a phone call, people feel pressure to answer right away, which could be a good thing or a bad thing, but more often than not will chase people away.
Excellent comment Chris, thank you for that.
Dan,
Thanks for an interesting post. My thoughts, and a contribution, below:
#1: Don’t Hide
I appreciate that your blog isn’t just about generating passive income… it’s a privilege to receive updates on the baby shower, and so on. (Very excited for you – parenthood is the greatest gift in the world. One day, you, too, can receive ugly neckties for Father’s Day… and love it!)
#2: Encourage comments.
I love that your custom blog template emphasized comments so well. Very nice. How could one NOT comment, when it’s made so easy and obvious? There’s a sub-conscious reward that one feels when contributing to a site on which comments are noticed and appreciated.
#3, #4 Respond / Hook Up:
I was glad to receive your response Tweet yesterday. Nice chatting with you, dude.
Looking forward to adding value to your TweetStream.
#5: Mini-transactions:
As is becoming standard on most blogs, you have the retweet button at the end. Which is the easiest transaction of all to enter into. But it’s a way of bookmarking the conversation, and saying: “This was important and valuable to me”.
One point you didn’t mention explicitly is Eben Pagan’s concept of “Moving the Free Line”. Essentially, mapping out the entire path from where your visitor/prospect is, to where they are trying to get (your end product being the thing that can get them to that final point successfully).
You then map out several milestones between points A and B…
and you give away information/products that will advance the visitor through those milestones.
For free.
Each time they reach a new milestone, their trust increases.
To the point where they feel like YOU are getting the short end of the stick.
(Eben Pagan calls this “The Justice Mechanism”)
Moving the free line – by giving away real value early on in the relationship, allows you to later sell something of value to a trusted audience.
A fantastic example of this is Ed Dale’s Thirty Day Challenge.
What’s your take on “Moving the Free Line”?
Have a great day!
Bolaji O.
Escape the Rat Race. And Find your Best Life.
Thanks Bolaji for your thoughtful comment, and actually responding to each of the 5 strategies I outlined.
I couldn’t agree with you more about all of your points. To further your 5th point, making things as easy as possible is definitely the way to go. If you can make things like retweeting, commenting and even contacting you easier, you’ll have a better chance of building more and stronger relationships with people online.
I am familiar with Eban and a lot of what he does, however I haven’t really taken the time to really examine his strategies. I’ll definitely take a look at your blog post, but using the 30 day challenge as an example, I think I know what you mean already.
Thanks again!
Hi Pat,
I loathe cold calling so much that i ‘dugg’ this post for you. Very good post about how important it is to build relationships before even thinking about cold calling prospects. I really believe cold calling is an old concept myself with low ROI compared to dealing with warm prospects.
I think even word of mouth works and canvassing for prospects works so much better and more effective. Concepts i’ve been looking at closer these days is attraction marketing where you warm up a prospect building somewhat of a relationship and have them come to you. Usually much better on the conversion rates.
Dwight Anthony
Financially Elite Blog
Haha, thanks for the Digg, Dwight!
And you’re absolutely right, and make a great point. A lot of times, when you build these kinds of relationships, people will end up coming to you instead for advice or whatever kind of information or service you may have to offer. Then, your conversion rates shoot through the roof, and you didn’t even have to work as hard to find the “lead”.
Cheers bud!
I again I must say how much I enjoy reading your blog.
One thing I struggle with is coming up with the free give away. I’d like to share things with my visitors beyond my blog which I post to ~once a week. I’d like a way that helps me to stay connected with them. But first I am not sure what to give away and second once I have their email – what do I share?
Hi Jocelyn,
Your web site design is gorgeous.
May I suggest a weekly “Effective Web Sites” review, maybe as part of your blog? You may do this already. But you could simply show them web sites that work.
Or better yet, because people respond better to pain avoidance, you can show them “Ineffective Web Sites – Web Sites Gone Bad”. And share a few tips each time on what mistakes this web site made, that they should avoid.
If you made these video reviews, using Camtasia (or a similar tool) to do the screen capture of the web sites being reviewed, that would be very engaging. Videos rank on search engines a lot faster than text – so you’d grow your audience.
If you did this weekly for 3 months, you’d have 12 entries. Which you could combine into an eBook, and give away in exchange for an email address.
You could further make this engaging by encouraging user comments, and offering a free web site review each week, to a random commenter.
Just a random idea. Hope it helps jump-start your creative process.
Enjoy!
Thank you so much for taking the time to read my comment and take a look at your site. I like your idea of highlighting ineffective websites … but I wonder if that would cause bad vibes. Maybe it is better to stick w/praises for those that do it right.
Hi Jocelyn,
Thanks for your comment. I think what Bolaji said in your first comment response was excellent, and should definitely be something you should consider. I was actually thinking of doing something similar, but from an internet marketing standpoint for blog designs. Don’t let that stop you from doing this though, please.
The “free gift”, or sometimes we like to call it, the “lead magnet”, is always a difficult one. It should be something that people can consume on your own website, because you don’t want to pull people away from the internet and your site, which is where you want people to stay. An eBook, for example, can be read offline, which isn’t a good idea because you want people to stay on your site if possible. Again, Bolaji’s idea is excellent because you can keep people on your site watching your tutorials and such.
As far as what to offer after collecting emails, think about what kinds of content you’d like to see if you were someone new to starting a presence online. Where to start, fears that people may have and how to over come them, really cool tips and tricks. You can even reuse some of your older blog posts and reformat them into an email that addresses a single person.
Hope that helps too!
Your eBook How-to Guide was an ingenious idea, Pat….not only does it keep people on your site, but it’s probably one of the most useful things I’ve used online…….While pursuing my own eBook, I’ve kept my browser window open, to that eBook Guide, for days on end….I would just minimize the screen went I went to bed, and open it back up when I woke up at 04:00….lol (my fiance said I worked too much on the eBook, so our compromise was for me to wake up earlier and work on it from 0400-0800…..long before she even wakes up…lol)….
ah….I love relationships…lol
Howie, you’re a rockstar man! I love how you use military time, my mom does that too because she’s a security guard. I’m really glad you find those posts useful. I’ll be packaging them into a free product soon with some videos, so I’m sorry I didn’t get those to you earlier for additional help as you were going through your project, It seems like you’re doing well though! Thanks again for your support!
This is a great, easy-to-follow explanation of what most of us in blogging for awhile consider common sense but so often gets forgotten by the new folks.
It’s not about tricks, SEO or otherwise. It’s not about numbers. It’s about the RIGHT numbers, and to get those, you have to put in the time, make the relationships, and offer value.
It’s simple, but not easy. And I think that’s why there’s so much resistance to it. Just like losing weight — not one of us who have a few pounds to lose (ahem, or more) needs one single piece of advice or information more. We already know what to do. The reason it’s such a “thing” is because we’re unwilling to do the hard work required.
Same with blogging. There is no magic button. You’re going to have to get out there — put YOURSELF out there — and do it genuinely and authentically.
Well said Sheryl, it’s just basic relationship marketing 101 – no fancy tricks or workarounds needed, and yes – I’m sure we all know what to do, it’s just actually putting in the hard work to do it that will make the difference. Thanks again!
Pat – I have not done it yet, but am planning to start showing more of my face as you mention in point #1. When I first started out, I had concerns over privacy and did not want to show my name or face. As I learn more and see sites like you mentioned (as well as yours!), I am slowly changing my mind.
Hi John, I think it will be a great thing, and you’ll notice that once you put yourself out there, there was really nothing to be concerned about. Can’t wait!
Pat,
This is a great article…and a great site by the way. I am definitely re-tweeting this!
Thanks Michael, I appreciate it!
Hey Pat, good post, and I think it can be (poorly) synthetized in one phrase: “permission marketing”.
As for the point 4 “Hook up” I’d say that’s the key. Once you have got their permission, they recognize value on your offer (a product, a service or just content) so there’s no harm if you follow them as long as you don’t become buggy/spammy. So, being friends on facebook, twitter, myspace, flickr, etc it’s just a way of taking your offer (being a product, service, content, etc) where your audience/followers are! It’s not wise to think they will always come to your walled garden (your website), therefore don’t deprive them from the value you’re offering by not having a well planned presence on social media.
Really good tips!
I think you sum it up perfectly, Roberto. Thanks so much for explaining this a little bit further for us
Another thing to go with roberto’s permission is possibly to ask for testimonials. these are people from the past, you’ve built relationships with and now their authentic testimonials can help in turn create and build new ones.
Testimonials are a great way to get someone who you’ve connected with to give you something back. Great point Craig, thanks!
Currently comments are the biggest success coming from my blog thus far. I take the time to respond to all comments left on my blog and I think my readers really appreciate that.
I like the concept of mini transactions. Sort of a Cold Calling technique i.e. Get the prospect to start saying yes to the easy questions so when you ask them for the sale they automatically say yes.
Nice! I just checked out your blog, and you do indeed have a lot of great comments from your readers. By the way, how is that eHow widget working out for you. Is there any way to know how many clicks you get to your articles from it? That would be nice..hehe.
That is a very good question with regards to the eHow widget. MyBlogLog would show how many clicks it produced, but that’s the only tool I can think of at the moment.
I got the idea to use eHow from your Annual Revenue report-and I already made a whopping $1.09.
WooHoo!
….Make that 10 Retweets, Pat…
I think simply recognizing and responding is incredibly powerful, however, there is only so much one person can do…..when your Blog starts attracting the numbers that very well established bloggers, like ShoeMoney receive, then I’ll completely understand if you can’t respond to every single comment, Pat…..it does give you an online persona/brand that is trusting and genuine…..come to think of it, I don’t really even retweet posts or share them on Facebook very often, but I do for you…..
Pat, i’m quite new to your site, but not new to marketing. I have to say that i’m really impressed with the effort you put into commenting on people’s comments. It proves you are a man worth listening to.
Thanks Chris, I appreciate that. I’m relatively new to internet marketing (but been going hardcore with it the last year), and that’s a really nice compliment to hear from someone who has been in the industry for a while. Thank you
Most often, conversion is a process, not an event. If we build up a rapport with site visitirs – delivering consistent, valuable content they are more likely to make investments of $ in addition to time.
Spell checking our comments and posts helps to build up that credibility also!
It never occurred to me to ask people for comments on my blog. I assumed that when they had something to say, they would. But I saw a friend of mine on Facebook asking people to come leave comments on his blog because he really wanted to see people talking to him. And I went right to his blog and commented because I know what it’s like to put yourself out htere and hope someone reading it ares enough to leave a word or two. So I’m trying to ask for comments from my community more for my own blog.
Hey Deborah, asking is definitely the easiest way to go, and like you said, people will be more than happy to leave a comment. That’s the best part of a blog! Good luck!
Pat,
Your blogs are always thought provoking and many time revealing some hidden common sense. Reading this article some doubts occurred in my mid. since I am an internet marketing novice, this is basically a curiosity question.
If I understand you business, your most of the sales come from LEAD exam aspirants. That exam material is your main product. Correct? In this article you are talking about connecting with your traffic. One of your main channels of communication is this blog site and some others blogs. I have never seen you running any campaign to sell your stuff in this site. Unless someone carefully goes through the site , they won’t know that you have a product out there.
On the other hand the crowd that is interested in the book/exam material doesn’t normally hangout here. What I am getting to is that, in the diverse demographic of internet crowd, don’t you have to do a targeted marketing instead of just being the “cool guy” in the internet?
Could you write your thoughts on this?
Hi Bheem,
This website, and my LEED exam website are two totally separate entities.
Yes, the exam material is my main product, and I connect with people who are interested in taking that exam over on my other blog, by doing exactly what I mentioned – responding to comments and emails, and also having them do a “mini-transaction” via a newsletter signup.
There’s no need for me to target LEED exam people here on this blog, because that’s not what this blog is intended to do. It would be silly for me to do that. I currently don’t sell anything here, because I don’t have any products for the type of audience that reads this blog, nor do I plan to ever stop providing free internet marketing tips as I have been.
For my other site, I target market the crap out of it – but that has nothing to do with this site, other than talking about how I market on that site, here. Does that make sense?
Yes, that makes sense. I didn’t know tat there is another place where you do, do heavy target marketing.
So this site is like a philanthropic wing of your business where you educate others with what you do elsewhere in the internet right?
Thanks for the insight.
-Bheem
Yep! You’re exactly right. Take care!
To Chris Green,
While that is much better it is a bit polyanna at least for me and is what is known as ‘interruption marketing’ no matter how nice you are. And chances are unless you targeted me somehow the calls are usually not relevant. And my guard is up and I’m quick to be irritated with cold calling, like someone calls and says ‘Hi how are you?’ which seems nice right?
But for me it’s like, who the hell is this and why is he calling me at supper time?
I get a ton of calls saying ‘thanks so much for your support of our charity/school, etc’ and right away I know that they are going to ask for more money. Or they ask me to do a survey which goes way too long and ends up trying to sell me (near the end you find out what the true product is).
I can also read into your quote – if I was an employee and you say ‘some people love working to make other people rich’, wait, now I’m an idiot? Don’t underestimate the anger that is out there over the years with sales calls and spam!
I couldn’t agree more, “praxis” is by far the best key for worthy communication and conviviality.
Just starting my blog Spineatopia has been a huge learning experience for me. Not that I thought it would be easier to get people to follow what I have to say, but I put a lot of time and work into it and sometimes wonder where everybody is.
I have a opt-in for our newsletter and to become a spineatopian. This is how I’m monitoring the sites status. After I get some more people following I will include surveys and contests for prizes.
If you or anybody have anybody have suggestions for my blog or what I can do better I sure would appreciate the feedback.
Thanks for the tips and I will be using your ideas…
Dr. Jason
Powerful stuff! I just recently finished reading Ewen Chia’s book “How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can To”. He drills you on capturing a visitors email, building trust, and selling to people you have built a relationship with – just as you have pointed out.
This is the very reason why you have a lot of friends Pat.
People will feel your sincerity when you expose yourself and be transparent. We should very well do this since we want to build a network, a community, a family.
Have an awesome day!
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