Establish Credibility

When someone visits a sales page, they may not have any idea who you are or why they should buy from you. In order to make a case that you are indeed trustworthy, you have to either list your credentials or get other people to vouch for you. There are a number of different ways you can convince the average visitor that you are a genuine businessperson and not just some Internet scam artist. Here are a few good ways to reduce the resistance to buy from you, simply because they don't quite know who you are or whether your business is legitimate.

Flaunt Your Credentials

If you have degrees, teach seminars, written a book, or done anything that can establish a personal connection and authority on the subject you are selling, be sure to flaunt it. Nothing sells better than a person who is keenly involved in the field that they promote.

Provide Testimonials

You can write up testimonials that others provide to you. Preferably, they should include real results, not just gushing admiration. In order to give them authenticity, ask permission from the person who offers the testimonial to reprint their quote with their full name. Adding a city and state also gives it more credibility.

Point To Favorable Reviews

Did someone else give your products, service, or business a review? If it was favorable, post a link to it on your sales page so that they can see that you really are who you say you are and can provide what you say you do. If you don't want to post a link, quote the article and list the reference that gave you the review.

Give Out Contact Information

This seems very simple, but many IM people bypass it for fear of being “too available.” You don't have to give out a physical address, but having a phone number or email address where people can reach you to ask pre-sales questions is good. It shows that you are an actual live person who is doing business online and not just some scam website.

Shoot Out Those Benefits!

When someone asks you why they should buy your product or service, it's a good thing to have tons of benefits ready to list. Benefits sell products, as any good marketer knows. You can't have too many benefits, so don't be afraid of listing too many. How you list those benefits is just as important as what you list.

Bulleted Lists

If you go through a number of Internet marketing sales pages, you'll find they almost all have one thing in common: a bulleted list of benefits. This is the best way to list your benefits because of the way people scan a sales page before deciding what to read. The bulleted list makes it easy to scan the major benefits and then read any details if the main benefit is appealing.

Order Is Important

The order of the bulleted items is important too. You want to list the biggest benefits first and work your way down. Again, this is because people tend to start to read and then lose interest the more they read. So, to keep them reading, put the juicier benefits at the top and work your way to the weakest benefits at the bottom of the list.

Why More Is Better

You might think that listing two whole pages of benefits is a bad idea. Actually, there is no way to list too many benefits. The reason for that is that you don't know why someone has landed on your sales page or what trigger will make someone push the “Buy” button. Since you aren't a virtual sales agent, your copy has to do the job of overcoming all objections for you. You aren't there to hear the objections running through the visitor’s head. Only he/she knows what those objections are, and so the copy has to address each and every objection someone might have by listing all of the benefits the product can create in a person's life.

Eventually, as the visitor reads the list, he/she will come upon the benefit that may be the biggest trigger for him/her, but it may be placed further down the list. There's no way to know what exactly triggers that particular individual, but when he/she gets to that benefit, that may be enough to sell him/her on your product. So, be sure to list as many benefits as you can think of, even if the list runs several pages. If the visitor doesn't want to read them, he’ll/she'll simply scroll onto the next subheading.