Photo by rogiro

This is the one question friends and family ask us over and over again – and was recently asked by a new reader. Most of our friends and family don’t live in the online world as much as we do and so the concept of people trusting us enough to hand over their hard-earned cash without ever having met us (and often spoken to us) seems completely foreign.

They have a fair point…what would make you hand over money (in some cases $2,000+) to someone you’ve never met?

If you think about it, whether you’re buying something online from someone you’ve never met or something in the real world from someone you have met, there’s a certain number of boxes you need to tick mentally in your head before you hand over any money to anyone. These include:

• Do you want it?
• Can you afford it?
• Do you know the seller?
• Do you trust the seller?

I’m going to skip over the first two points for now – they’re things to consider as part of your marketing plan (right target market, right price) – but the last two points are the things I want to focus on because if you want to sell your services and products to people you’ve never met you have to:

1. Give them a way to get to know you
2. Give them a way to get to trust you

Our strategy had/has three key stages:

1. Pre-departure marketing activities which included face-to-face networking and meetings: we still get numerous referrals and new clients from these efforts.
2. Keeping prospects warm on an ongoing basis: we do this with the blogs primarily and our mailing list.
3. Reaching out to new prospects and clients: again with the blogs but also using a range of social media tools to meet and keep in touch. These include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Ecademy.

In our experience, one of the best methods for giving interested people a way to get to know, like and trust you enough to buy from you without needing to meet you in person is…

…a well-designed, well-written blog.

More so than newsletters and ezines because they’re a non-threatening, pull (rather than push) method of staying in touch with people who want to find out more about you without being sold to.

If you combine a good blog with a series of teleconferences and phone calls/consults then you can quite easily overcome the barrier of converting prospects into clients without ever having to meet them.

====

I realise this is pretty brief, fairly non-specific and non-actionable post. There’s 2 main reasons for that:

1. I am having a pretty full-on time of it lately with my temporary ‘job’ (11pm most nights – a really, really rude awakening from our usual LI life) and am so knackered that I barely have time to sleep yet alone blog sensibly.
2. I think it would be much more sensible to have group chat about this aspect as it’s such a big one and encompasses quite a number of things you need to consider. If anyone’s up for that, leave a comment or send me an email (to projectwoodward @ gmail) and let’s see what we can organise…(it won’t be a sales pitch in any way, shape or form – it’s just a much quicker way at the moment for me to share our experiences & info rather than spending several hours crafting a sensible post that says all I want to say!).

Share This...

Hide Sites