How to Sell Without Being a Salesperson

byKyle

2.4M followers

2 years ago

Today I want to discuss selling online, in particular how to sell without having to be a bold salesperson. One of the first concerns that I see with newcomers to the affiliate marketing and Internet business world, is that they are worried about their sales skills and feel that they are incapable of selling anything to anyone.

The reality is, we all have the ideal built in sales mechanism and that is called trustworthiness and being genuine. This may be easy to accomplish with a friend, or a close family member, because you have established both of these naturally over time. But what I want to help you with today is to understand the concept of taking someone that you have never met within the online world (ie, a click) and achieving both of these important elements.

The last thing you wanna do is try to sell to someone where you haven't first established these lines of trust and likability.

The process that I'm going to be discussing today, is a simple, 3-step process to becoming a brilliant salesperson without ever having to sell. Sounds a little confusing at first, but I am hopefully going to offer you a lot of clarity on this topic.

Step 1: Be Human.

When you were creating content on your website, it is quite easy to overlook the fact that we are going to be directly communicating to a real person on the other end of every single visit. The first goal with your website is to really humanize the interaction between you and the visitor. There are three very effective ways in which you can do this, and they are all not overly complicated and they are things that you would actually do with the off-line world.

• Tell a story. This is not always possible, but often times you will be able to tell a story that helps you "relate" to your visitor. This will create an environment that they are comfortable with right away, knowing that "you are just like them".
  
• Speak in a conversational tone. Don't write your content in a way that feels like a college english essay. People won't read it, and they certainly won't trust the content at the same level that they would if you are speaking to them. If you write your content in first person and speak in 'directional" language towards your audience, this will humanize your content and establish a much higher level of visitor confidence.
  
• Be authentic. Don't try to "fake" things, tell people what you know, why you want to help them, and why you even care. It will be obvious if your intent is to solely try to sell people something and if you are not authentically there to inform, help and connnect with people it will show.

If you can be authentic, communicate in a way that you would with your family, and tell stories where appropriate, you are going to truly humanize your content.

It is very easy to get wrapped up into the idea of writing for search engines like Google, because that is one of the key and core focuses as marketers. At the end of the day though, you need to write for people that will be reading your content and you need to create engaging content that really creates and binds that human element between yourself and someone you have never met.

You only have so long to accomplish this. You don't have YEARS like you do with your friends and family members. You have seconds, and if you are lucky, a few minutes.

That leads me to another critical component to accomplishing this is actually "serving" your audience, which is actually the second step to selling within the online world.

Step 2: Help people.

Let's look at the last thing that you purchased were involved someone so called "selling" to you. What did it take for that person to sway you into making a purchase? Did they force you to pull your credit card out of your pocket? Did they trick you into buying something? Perhaps, but most likely not.

The most likely reason that you made a particular purchase, is because you felt helped. If I am going into a store to purchase a TV and I don't really know a lot about televisions and the latest and greatest ones, I rely solely on my instinct of whether the person helping me knows what the heck they're talking about. If they are genuine in their approach to truly wanting to help me understand what the best television is for me, my trust goes through the roof.

If they tell me a story about their TV they have at home, or one of their customers that absolutely loves their TV because of XYZ, these stories help humanize the entire process.

If I feel helped, guess what happens. I start to trust them. If I trust them, then I am going to heed their advice to choose one TV over another.

The exact same thing happens within the online world, someone visits your site looking for information on something or perhaps they're looking for a thorough review on a product or service. If they feel helped, they will trust your personal recommendations for them at a much higher rate. Even if they cost money.

This is an idea that we constantly reinforced within the education here at Welthy Affiliate and all discussions pertaining to building a successful brand and business. Help people. Make it a focus. The selling part will become easy, as you won't have to sell (which I am getting to).

Step 3: The Seamless Pitch.

OK so you've humanized your content, in effort to establish a genuine relationship with your audience. Check.

And within your content, you have put forth your best effort to selflessly help your audience based on exactly what they are looking for. This could be a solution to a problem, this could be a thorough review, this could be a how to walk through, or this could just be a certain level of motivational support. Whatever the case, you have tackled the second step appropriately and you have helped people. Check.

The last step, is not to sell it is rather to make appropriate, relevant product or service recommendations based on something that will also help those people out.

Then simply offer them a link to the product that will benefit them.

Let's say for example you are helping people solve their "facial acne" problem, within an article. You explain your experiences with acne over the years, and truly connect with people on a personal level.

Then you spend some time helping people understand exactly why they have acne, the causes, free and easy to implement solutions to their problems and make a suggestion to speed up the process through a product or service, then they are going to heed your advice and suggestion at a much higher rate.

If you took a "salesy" approach and built a sales page promoting an acne product without the human elements and without bridging that trust through offering authentic help, you will convert at a much lower rate...if at all.

So...

Be human. Help people. Recommend stuff that further helps them. That is the process of selling without selling.

Are you following this 3-step process with your content? If not, what aspects could you improve upon? Would love to hear your feedback on this topic, leave it in the comments below.