WARNING: This is likely to be a very long ongoing post split into multiple parts to that I can solidify my ideas about trust on the internet, business, blog audiences, and selling physical products without physical presence (i.e. over the internet). I know this will be a long post, because since I have begun to write it my mind has be racing all over the place with ideas.
In this new world of near instantaneous communication, easy-to-use website authoring platforms, and inexpensive/cheap web hosting; there are business opportunities that know no bounds. Add in the capability to have inexpensive shipping, fulfillment companies, access to high quality artists, a plethora of web tools, high-speed internet access, and we are looking at a near perfect storm of opportunities. To digress slightly, I believe the near record low inflation rates enjoyed by most of the world for the past 10-20 years is not due to the wizardry of central banks, but rather the enormous ingenuity which has lowered the cost of doing business. For example, rather than hiring a skilled bookeeper for $X,XXX; I can pay $199 for Quickbooks Pro and track everything I need for a handful of hours effort per year.
Despite all of these cost saving advantages, providing value and getting people to pay for that value is still a difficult task. Every transaction that occurs eventually comes down to an issue of trust. Even when I am at the local Office Max, I am trusting them to not say “Thief!” when I walk out with my new Quickbooks Pro software and the alarms beep. Just as they are trusting me not to walk out of their store with additional merchandise. Transactions that occur without a face-to-face immediate social contract require even more trust.
When I ask people to place pre-orders for Tasty Minstrel Games products, they have to trust that I will provide them what they pay for. I am also trusting the purchaser to not make unwarrented attempts at getting refunds/replacements. Unfortunately, a manufacturer that I used put some strain on the needed trust by having a number of manufacturing issues. In addition, I also strained that trust by making the mistake of taking pre-orders too soon. As a result, people were made to wait too long for their pre-orders to be filled. So, from a position of wanting to increase sales and as a result increase profits, I ask myself “How do I rebuild strained trust? How do I expand the number of people who trust me? How do I show people that placing trust in me is the right thing to do?”
Leveraging Trust To Make Sales
As a financial advisor, whenever I make a recommendation I am leveraging years of trust that has been built with a client to make a sale. Sell this bond, buy that mutual fund… They are all sales recommendations. When it comes to this kind of sales, sometimes you NEED years of trust built up before a potential client will even let you see what is in their accounts. Thankfully, when it comes to selling board games, you do not need years of trust built up. Things like Paypal buyer protections make it very easy for a buyer to get their money refunded as a result of non-delivery. This is why I use Paypal, it lowers the mimimum trust required to make a purchase.
In the financial advice arena, you build trust with face-to-face meetings, phone calls, letters, emails, followups, etc. Also, with financial advice HUGE quantities of trust are required. With selling board games, since there is a low required trust threshold you want to build trust with as many people as possible as fast as possible. When I speculated on this months ago, I decided that blogging would be a great medium. I make any particular post once, and it is available to build trust with anybody who is interested. I do not need to find them so much as they are able to find me. A big problem of course being how to make myself and my blog easily findable.
I have done all of the following to various degree of success
- Buying Traffic.
- Giving away Free Board Games as a contest to email subscribers… AKA Bribery.
- Dropping emails to subscribers twice a month with blog topics.
- Leasing the trust of others. I did this with a Board Game Geek contest.
- Buying Banner Ads.
- Smoking Hot Deals on other publishers inventory. Hot Board Game Deal #1. I hope to have coupon codes for email subscribers making some games as much as 80% off for the next deal… AKA Bribe to Subscribe.
- Following up blog posts with blogs announcements on Board Game Geek’s blog forum.
- Automating Twitter postings to go with blog posts.
- Automating Facebook positings to go with blog posts (set this up last night).
- Twitter contests (upcoming)… AKA Bribery for tweets.
Every little drip helps move things toward the end goal of building trust and selling games.
Attracting An Audience Through Bribery
As you can tell from my list above, I am a big fan of good old fashioned tit-for-tat bribery. Most people love to get a good deal, or possibly get free stuff. As a result, they will give you permission to regularly invade their privacy in exchange. This is what happens with my email subscriptions. An important aspect of this relationship is that it is revocable at any time. If I start to annoy a subscriber with emails that they do not want, it is a very simple process to unsubscribe. I have done this a number of time to various internet marketing lists I have subscribed to.
As I started to do more active marketing on the internet, I found some people were pushing tools for affiliate commissions 95% of the time. Not helpful to me at this stage. Most of the tools are utilized for selling other people’s products, whereas I am selling my own. Also, since most of them use AWeber Communications as I do for their email lists, I know I can unsubscribe without getting SPAM mail.
Attracting An Audience Through Unique and Interesting Writing
I will not claim to be the best writer, and I will certainly claim to be a horrible self editor (I do not read through my own posts to the dismay of some). I will however claim I communicate better than most through writing… THANK YOU PHILOSOPHY DEGREE! Would you like fries with that? The biggest attraction to my blog for those who want to read it, is my topic. I talk about anything and everything that I find relevant to the publishing of board games. I have no reservations about sharing my numbers, sharing my theories, sharing my results, and sharing my advice. Since I am actually in the process of publishing games, my experiences have real world bearing on others. I am sure there are others blogging about these topics, but there can only be a handful due to the number of publishers.
Finding a way to have unique and interesting content in this environment will be difficult. There are so many game review blogs, podcasts, and video review sites that I cannot count them all. If I allocated 500 games for distributing to all reviewers, I could probably not cover them all! The point is that this is not a very good place to be if you want to stand out as the unique and interesting content provider. Too much competition there, and the expanding ranks of bloggers are making things more and more difficult.
The Importance Of Email Subscribers
Here is where I praise the importance of having email subscribers. For several months now, I have had approximately 1,800 people subscribed to receive my emails. I send out blog announcments with blog headlines and excerpts twice a month. For the last 6 “blog broadcast” emails I have the following stats:
- Between 38.7%-47.6% of subscribers open the emails.
- Between 9.3-23.5% of subcribers click on links.
- 1,832 links clicked from 10/02/2009 to 01/01/2010
- Over that time period it represents 10.9% of pageviews, and 20.8% of visits
Without getting email addresses of incoming visitors, all of that would be lost. I could probably even move over to a weekly “blog broadcast” email without upsetting too many subscribers and increasing the total number of visits and interaction with my blog.
Conclusion
In today’s environment creating an audience is difficult, because there are so many opportunities to steal time away from people. Give them every opportunity to remember who you are. Offer people something in exchange for subscribing to an email list, and give them an ongoing incentive to continue their subscription.
End Part 1: Have fun!
Related posts:
- Attracting And Developing An Audience — Part 4
- Attracting And Developing An Audience – Part 3
- 7 Tips For Making People Like You, If Only Superficially
- How-to Start Building Money Making Relationships
- Overwhelmed By The Board Game Geek Response
- Capturing Incoming Visitors And Earning Return Visits
- Internalizing The Algorithm
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