Читать книгу The Trust Factor - Garrett M.D. Pierson - Страница 3

Do you remember your very first business idea?

I remember mine. It all started at my grandpa’s kitchen table one lazy summer day.

My Uncle Luke and I were young, scrawny 14 year-olds with nothing but free time and big dreams. On that particular day we came up with a brilliant idea for a brand new lawn mowing business called Quick Blades. We thought it was the coolest lawn mowing company name EVER! In fact, it was so good that we couldn't even think of another name.

That magical afternoon, Luke and I spent several hours planning out how we were going to become the richest kids in our schools. We came up with marketing tools that consisted of a really cool logo, some stylish uniform sketches and several hand-drawn fliers. We also created what we thought was a brilliant franchising plan.

You see, because Luke and I lived in different cities, we had to create a system that would work for both of us. So we had the genius idea of recruiting other teenagers as franchisees. In a nutshell, they would do all of their own marketing, mowing, trimming, and collecting, and then they would give us a share of the profits for the rights to our super cool logo, our fliers, uniforms, and a rudimentary, top secret formula that we had devised for determining how much to charge for each lawn they serviced.

Interestingly enough, there was a very important, underlying concept that we understood, even back then.

It was this...

Building strong 'Relationships of Trust' with customers is the key to long-term business success.

You see, even as nerdy 14 year old kids, we realized that if we could get someone to trust us enough to let us mow their lawn just once, and if we did a really good job, then there was a really good chance that they would let us mow their lawn every week from that point on.

This was how Luke and I were going to get rich. By building a group of loyal, lifetime customers, we believed that we could ultimately create long-term, stable recurring revenue. And although Quick Blades didn’t pan out exactly as we had hoped, twenty years later we are successfully executing this important concept in all our various businesses.

It's timeless. It's proven. And it works!

Over the last 14 years of doing business, we have sold millions of dollars of products and services online. During that time, we have discovered that trust is one of the most powerful assets that a website owner can have. In fact, trust is such a crucial, integral part of our business that we literally felt compelled to write this book, which is a compilation of seven of the most effective ways that we've discovered to build trust with visitors and potential prospects and convert them into long-lasting, loyal, repeat customers.

One of the first things you will realize is that this book doesn’t follow a traditional format.

For starters, this book is written by myself (Scott Brandley) and Garrett Pierson. We have both collaborated on each chapter. However, I have written the majority of certain chapters while Garrett has written the majority of others.

Sometimes Garrett or I share a personal story, and at other times we will discuss shared experiences that have taught us important business principles. We've also thrown in some of our favorite quotes and sayings and we've both integrated our various backgrounds and expertise on different subjects.

Ultimately, we feel that the unique set up and writing style of the book make it attractive and entertaining, as we emphasize important ideas and concepts that will help you in your business.

Why you should listen to us:

If you have a website and you sell products or services online, then the information you read in this book will help you take your business to the next level. Garrett and I have nearly 20 years of combined internet experience, which you can instantly and easily leverage.

What kind of experience? Well, for me it all started waaaay back in 1997. (You know, back when Al Gore invented the Internet.) In those days email was all the craze and online shopping was so new that many shopping carts didn’t even have SSL certificates (a commonly-used security mechanism on the internet.) In a short amount of time, my dad and I figured out how to create a web page and post drawings with a handful of printed t-shirt designs on it. Before we knew it, we were in business.

I wish I had taken a picture of that first site. It was painfully ugly. But somehow, after only a few days, we actually got an order! I was so excited that I ran around the house jumping and screaming like I was possessed! It was great. I’ll never forget it.

Over time, the orders increased. We went from getting an order a week, to an order a day, to 3 orders a day, to 10 orders a day and it just kept going up. Before long, we had dominated the search engines. We were even beating out huge brick and mortar stores that had been in the industry for decades! The great thing was that it was just me and my dad in a condo basement. Talk about leveling the playing field!

After a few years, we had grown to the point where we were maxing out our niche online. It was at that point that we decided to sell our online clothing company.

Ultimately, we sold the business because we realized two things:

The first thing we realized was that selling physical products online is hard work. If you sell products online, you can probably relate. Selling products involves inventory, suppliers, sorting, packaging, shipping, out-of-stock items, returns, small profit margins, and a long list of other challenges. Long story short, we decided that we didn’t want to sell products anymore.

Now don’t get me wrong. Millions of people sell products online every day. And although we were very good at it, it just wasn’t for us long-term.

The second thing we realized was that we loved helping other people succeed online. We also discovered that we had a special skill for developing software, so we decided to create valuable, innovative digital solutions and services to help online business owners become more successful.

This was about the time that Garrett and I crossed paths.

Prior to my meeting Garrett, he was in the health care industry. Back In 2004, Garrett was given a very unique opportunity to build a health care company from scratch. With only two people, an office and two laptops, in a few short years they created a multi-million dollar health care company with hundreds of employees, therapists and nurses.

Once the company was up and running smoothly, Garrett was asked to go in and turn around a large assisted living community that had been neglected and abused by several years of bad management. This new assignment took him away from his family and left him with many nights with nothing to do. It was during these nights that Garrett started learning all he could about Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Social Media. It didn’t take long before he had become a online marketing expert, attracting the attention of several prominent marketers like Alex Mandossian, Russell Brunson, and Joel Comm, just to name a few. Since then, Garrett has been invited to speak at several different events throughout the country teaching many of the strategies that will be taught in this book.

With his new found passion to help teach website owners about SEO and social media marketing, it wasn’t long before Garrett left the health care industry and moved back home to Utah. We became acquainted shortly after that and ever since then Garrett and I have worked together, creating and developing innovative online services to help website owners become more successful.

One way we achieve this is through our ‘Outstanding Ventures’ email list – a special email newsletter that goes out to tens of thousands of like-minded website owners throughout the world; discussing the latest marketing techniques and trust-building strategies.

Do you have ‘The Trust Factor’?

Ultimately, running a successful online business boils down to three main things:

•having a valuable product or service

•generating traffic (prospects), and

•consistently building long-lasting relationships with your customers.

If you get these three things right, everything else will naturally fall into place and you will have a very good chance of being successful online.

It all comes back to what I inherently knew when I was a kid with the Quick Blades lawn mowing idea. That formula for success that I knew back then is the exact same formula that our company is using to make millions online, and it will be the exact same formula that we use 5, 10, even 20 years from now.

To help you get off to a running start, Garrett and I have put together the 7 core trust strategies that will help you convert your online visitors into lifetime customers. These 7 strategies cover everything from how your customers perceive your website design, to how they contact you, to how safe they feel buying from you, to the social proof you integrate into your website.

Each of these 7 strategies build on each other throughout the book, creating a powerful synergistic effect that help entice and motivate your customers to buy from you and to keep coming back.

Who needs this book? You do, if you are:

•A website owner who sells (or plans to sell) a product or service online

•An entrepreneur that is wanting to start a business in today’s market

•A brick and mortar store that wants to take their business online

•An affiliate marketer that promotes others products or services

•A webmaster or designer that services clients

•A business coach or teacher that helps companies grow

No matter where you currently happen to be, you will have the opportunity to take what we teach and apply it to your business instantly. In fact, nothing that we are going to teach you is revolutionary (as much as we would like it to be). Successful online companies are already using many of these strategies. This book compiles them in a strategic manner that will help you implement them quickly and effectively.

The purpose of this book is to arm you with tools that will help you become the “go to” company or service in your market. By following our advice, you will outperform your competition in every trust aspect of your business. Think of this book as the ammunition you need to survive in this jungle we call the internet. It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out or have been running a business for 40 years. These strategies will protect and serve you well in all cases.

The Game has changed!

It’s pretty obvious that doing business has changed dramatically over the last five, even ten years. This change is not a bad thing, in fact it’s a great opportunity for all of us to put on our thinking caps and reinvent how business is done. Online consumers are more educated and demanding than ever. It is time to give them exactly what they want and desire. What is that precisely, you might be asking? Well, that is what you will learn in the pages that follow.

Here are some suggestions we have while reading this book:

1.Don’t skip any chapters - even if you think you are already applying a certain strategy. Make sure you read the entire chapter to ensure that you haven’t missed something important.

2.Keep in mind that not everything will apply to you. You may find something that we are teaching may not fit your niche or business. This is totally fine. Try and see the big picture. For example, you might think, “I can’t use this idea, but how many of my customers, employees, or vendors could use it?” Keeping this frame of mind will improve relationships with those involved in making you successful.

3.Share this book with others. If you have business partners, give them the opportunity to read this book so that you can all be on the same page when making changes to your business. In addition, make sure you share what you learn with friends and colleagues that have a business as well.

4.Apply what you learn. The only way that you will truly succeed in anything is if you consistently apply these principles. We are going to be sharing with you some important strategies that can literally change your life and the direction of your business - but only if you apply them. We suggest that you read a chapter, apply what you have learned, then go to the next chapter. This will help you be more productive and efficient.

Very few people actually understand the complexities of running a business with this relatively new medium called the Internet. However, by the time you finish this book, you will truly grasp the importance of TRUST and you’ll know more than 99% of today’s online business owners.

Our entire goal of this book is to help and teach you. If for whatever reason you are not quite understanding or following our points and examples, feel free to contact us anytime. You can reach us by email at questions@trustfactorbook.com. And to be super transparent, here is our phone number: 801-334-7078. Just ask for Scott or Garrett!

So without further delay, let’s jump right into Trust Factor #1.