Traffic Conversion Secrets Lesson 10 - Involvement Invigorates

People who get involved tend to be more committed to a
particular path than those who are just visiting. This is
true whether you are doing retail sales or online sales.
However, in a face-to-face presentation people are
naturally involved because a social interaction is taking
place and they usually give you their full attention.
Online, people may be surfing the web and be multitasking
on their PCs. You don't know if you have their attention or
not since you're not directly there to give them eye
contact. So, how do you get them involved in your site if
you can't reach out through their terminal and put the
product in their hands?

Well, the solution is a lot easier than you think since
social networking sites are now more predominant. Blogs,
discussion groups, forums, and even surveys and games can
be a way to engage the person to stop a moment and interact
with your site. Once you've engaged their participation,
they will start to identify with your site more. Now, if
you get them to become a regular visitor who comments on
your blog or has tried out some of your products, they
start to feel like this is their home. They start to take
pride in being part of your site and it can give them
feelings like pride of ownership.

The Technique

Direct sales like mail marketing use something called an
involvement device to get people involved over a long
distance. That is something that they can touch and feel
and that asks for some participation on their part. The one
involvement device that comes to mind is some of the
advertisements that ask you to peel a sticker from a
particular part of the advertisement and place it somewhere
else to signal your acceptance of the offer.

It seems very simplistic that having someone place a
sticker or add a business card or drop something into a
slot could ever increase sales, but it does. Once a person
becomes involved in the sales process, they are more apt to
pay attention and buy. Any device that engages the reader
brings them into the buying process and reduces their
resistance to the offer.

You don't just want to use any involvement device, you
typically want to use something that ties into what you are
selling. That's why Facebook applications are so popular
because they are a great involvement devise that typically
tie into the product or company and provide a way for
people to associate their participation with some company
or product. Then, if there is a link available back to the
website, you are already primed to consider this a part of
your virtual heritage.

Another type of involvement device is like the
advertisements that ask you to draw a picture to see if you
qualify for drawing lessons. You find that you get so
involved in getting the picture done right, that you can
hardly wait to mail it off and receive an offer for classes
in the mail. Not only did those advertisers correctly
identify people who might have an interest in buying art
classes, but they also got them so involved they probably
waited by the mailbox to see if they were accepted for this
offer. That's very clever marketing!

The key there is that involvement device used was directly
related to the product or services being sold. You can
still use an involvement device that merely gets a person
to participate, and online that would be like getting a
comment on a blog. A person has taken some action that has
gotten them involved in your community. But, did it make a
sale? Not really, it might later, but not right away. So,
the best involvement devices are those that are tied
directly to the product or service you are trying to market.

The Secret

Have you ever seen a baby find a new toy and become
completely fascinated by it? It captures their attention
and all their old toys get ignored why they explore this
new object. They may put it in their mouths, stare at it
intently, shake it, or even smash it on the floor. They get
highly involved in just touching it and trying to get as
much experience as they can out of it. Well, adults still
have that fascination with new toys. And, that's part of
the psychology of offering them something new that brings
up that childish wonder of exploration. The other thing is
that people love to be challenged and to beat something and
identify themselves as a winner. Some of the puzzles,
games, and involvement devices can include different levels
that differentiate your ability from other people and give
you a sense of pride that you made it to a certain level.
Another way to involve people is to make it fun. Who
doesn't want to include a little entertainment in their
day. In fact, entertainment is one of the most sought after
things in our Western culture. If you happen to provide a
fun involvement device that also happens to lead them to
your product, all the better right? They get to have some
fun and you end up with a sale, so in a sense, it's a
win-win.

Also, people tend to distrust a product that they can't
see, touch, or feel. So in direct retail sales, the
involvement device is typically the ability to try on a
dress before buying, kick the tires of a new car or test
drive it, or even get a free make-over at a make-up
department store booth. They want the experience of
possessing the item before they actually purchase it. These
types of retail actions are simple ways to involve a person
by just allowing them to touch and experience the product
first-hand. This becomes a little harder in the virtual
world of online sales because your product is not there to
have and hold, but you can still produce some very good
involvement devices and even virtual visualize and
experience ads that can lead to bigger sales.

How to Make it Work

Since we are basically concerned with turning traffic from
your website into customers, we want to really understand
how to create an involvement device online. It's really not
that hard, once you understand the concept. What you want
to do is put yourself in the customer's shoes and see how
you can get them engaged in at least visualizing themselves
using your product or service. In the first strategy, you
can simply provide a novel and fun gimmick to your site to
get them involved. If you are a dating site, for instance,
you might want to add a personality test to your website.
Once they complete that, you can sell the service by
saying, Find compatible people who match your personality
on our site! It not only gets them involved right away,
but it appeals to ego identity, a large reason people join
community sites. Social networking is great for forming
groups of people who can interact with each other. In a
sense, the people on your site become the involvement
device that attracts more people. If you are trying to sell
memberships, you want to highlight who is already on your
site and why it is worth it for you to join so you can
network with them too. 

If you really think about it, your entire website can be an
involvement device. It has buttons people can push,
drop-down menus they can fiddle with, and maybe videos they
can watch. So, you can do the same thing when you are
selling a particular product. Just be careful that you
don't get too fancy. Some people try to involve their
visitors by adding incredible technologies that look great
on newer PCs, but can't be opened on older models! You
don't want to lose a customer because the involvement
device is too complicated or it crashes their system! You
want something simple and you want it to appeal to the
psychology more than the technology.

When you are marketing people offline, you can also provide
involvement devices that lead back to your products online.
There are now business cards that are mini CD-ROMs that can
be loaded into a computer and lead people straight to your
website. Just the fascination of seeing something so small,
so cute, and so novel, will get people to put it in their
machine to see what it does. Once they are on your site,
you can involve them further with other involvement devices.

But, what if you're selling engagement rings online? How
could you possibly create an involvement device for that?
Won't someone want to try the ring on first before buying?
Here is where you see the magic of the Internet really
shine. You can hire a programmer to build a database of
your inventory and an applet that allows them to build a
ring online in the virtual world. Thus, they not only get
the fun of creating something online, but they get to try
out the ring too, in their imagination. It's the closest
thing to actually being in a retail store where they can
hold the ring in their hands. It may take a bit more
programming and sophistication, but if your market demands
a virtual try-out there are ways to do this, as many online
diamond marketers have proven. Your call to action can also
include an involvement device or a fun game by allowing
them some discount for performing a specific function on
your site and thus getting access to a coupon code. Once
they have that coupon code, wouldn't they want to use it to
get the discount? So, you lead the potential buyer from
their fun game straight back to your product or service.

Finally, even emails or sales copy can get the reader
involved, if you happen to use the person's name in them
and help them to imagine what it's like to experience your
product. If you have a product that you can personalize,
that also will give a person a feeling of pride of
ownership before they've gotten the product in their hands.
As can be seen, there are a great many ways to use this
strategy online to help promote participation and
involvement with your website and products.

This strategy works best at the very beginning of your
sales funnel, or even before. You should have at least a
few involvement devices on your website to help you create
membership, if you are a social networking site. Otherwise,
people lose interest in just writing posts and move on. If
you have a fun game, or add a video from YouTube, when they
first land on your page your website appears more
interactive and alive.

Have you ever seen the sign on the side of the road as your
waiting in a traffic jam that says: You could live here.?
That is a simple device that helps you imagine how much
time you could save living there, how much nicer your life
would be, and how you could own a condo there if you just
took the initiative to walk in the door. That's a very
powerful involvement device and it wasn't even in a sales
brochure. You might not have even been thinking of buying a
condo up until then. So, that explains that the timing on
this strategy is sometimes even before the person has
realized that your company even exists or what your
products are. 

You can wait for them to somehow stumble upon your site,
but why not go out to places where people in your target
demographic are and just put a link to your fun,
experiential, involvement device there. You don't have to
sell the product, you don't have to tell them at the end,
they'll be solicited to buy a product. Once they choose to
try this out, they will be hooked and you will have created
a sales opportunity where none existed. 

Once you have the person involved in the product, you can
continue to keep them involved by upgrading the experience.
This will create a habit, reducing their resistance to
future purchases too. So, if you are using a game, make
sure you have various levels. Keep the strategy going
continuously and vary it every now and then to keep people
involved and buying. 


To Your Success,
YOUR NAME

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