Back...

I had actually forgotten about this blog - not actually that surprising when I think about how many different sites I have...

Business isn't exactly booming, but it is getting better all the time. I've been busy updating the blogs on most of the other sites that I run to eliminate some of the headaches of blog spammers. As fas as I'm concerned, they should string up whoever wrote the software that allows these jerks to attempt to post to blogs without ever going through the main page of a site. In some cases of particularly persistent spammers, I've had to block them from accessing the site completely, which is a bit of a pain, but it is amusing to see the same IP addresses showing up in the error logs for the sites in question.

Productive Days

After all this time, I finally decided recently to get back to work in the web design arena, starting with a major overhaul of my business site at TechCrafters Design. About the same time, one of my customers from my part-time job mentioned that he was looking for some help with his website, so I took a look at what he had online at that point. Yep, he needed some help. That was on Friday before last. I spent some time over the weekend doing a mock-up of how I thought a site redesign should look and sent a link to Steve, my potential customer, to see what he thought. The rest, as they say, is history. We're finishing up the final touches today and the site should be live tomorrow. Gotta love having local customers!

Your Product is....You!

And if you're trying to get someone to buy something from you or convince them to do something, you need to understand this. You could have the greatest product in the world, but if you're coming across as a lifeless automaton, you will find very few buyers - unless your clientele is other lifeless automatons. If I'm approached by ten different people who all have the same product that I want, I'm going to buy that product from the person who seems to be the most like me - it's just human nature. We are most comfortable dealing with those who are most like us, or, specifically, who are the most like us as we would like to be.

That's a bit of a subtle difference, so let me talk about that a bit more. I may be way off-course here, but I think all of us want to improve our lives on a more or less continual basis, so we are attracted to those who are a bit better at things than we are. If I'm looking to improve my tennis game, I'm not going to look for a tennis partner who plays worse than I do (assuming such a person exists!), I'm going to find someone a bit better at tennis so my game will have to improve. But that potential partner has to be someone who's still at my general ability level, not way high above me. The gap between my current ability level and that of my partner has to be a believable gap - I have to be able to see that I can improve to his level relatively easily.

So, when we translate that idea into our marketing approach, we need to be aware of where our prospects' current level sits and talk with them accordingly. Most of us can easily visualize improving something by a reasonable amount over a period of time, but will have a much harder time with an enormous change in a short period of time. If the belief gap for your prospect is too high, skepicism creeps in and you've lost the sale.