Remember the old sales quote? “You have exactly 1 minute to make an impression.”
Think it applies to Internet Marketing?
You’d be sadly mistaken if you didn’t answer Yes.
In the sales world the “impression” determines if they are going to buy from you or not.
In Internet Marketing, it determines… guess what? If they are going to buy from you or not 
And, if you aren’t directly selling something, it determines how much (or little) of a value they associate with you.
The higher the value, the more trust they have put into you.
How do you get people to give you a higher perceived value and more trust?
Your humanity and the quality of your knowledge, amongst some more complicated stuff that we’ll get into later.
If you are giving someone a load of you know what and they realize they are telling them a load of you know what…..then….. you know what? Their first impression was pretty bad and they probably aren’t going to follow you or buy anything from you.
Now you might be wondering what happens when you make a bad impression. Can you redeem yourself? Yes and no. Think of it like a video game of real life. If you start out with a -5 , you need to work that much harder to build up someones trust and impression of you again.
How does this all apply to Internet Marketing? If you have any type of presence online, you have some type of value associated with you by each and every person that knows about you. Obviously, people don’t sit around writing down numbers of how they value someone, but in the back of their mind they have some sort of subconscious value of you or your product/website.
Another good example is with Email Marketing, List Building and Newsletters (all the same thing.) When you have an email list, you are starting off because someone had a good (or bad) impression of you which triggered them to join your email list. Over the course of 1, 2, 3, 4 (and more) emails they will associate a value to how good or bad you are. Each email will make you look better or worse. The impression of you that they got last week might be different this week because of something you said (or didn’t say.) FYI, if you want to learn more about email marketing and how it be can used in any business, I strongly recommend that you check out my coaching program at ListPlaybook.com.
Impressions are made even on landing pages. However, on landing page, they are made VERY last. A minute at the MOST, usually a matter of seconds is all you have. You need to capture their attention and give the highest value you can to what you are trying to do. When someone goes to your landing page they immediately get an impression. They associate a value to what they are looking at. This time its both numeric and textual. When someone goes to your landing page they associate a small phrase to it. Sometimes this is conscious, sometimes its sub-conscious. That phrase could be as simple as “garbage eBook” because of the poor job you did in trying to sell something with a big sloppy buy button right in the middle of the page that looks like some lame Clickbank product.
The point of all of this is so that you realize that you need to be dealing in quality and it needs to be transparent the second a visitor gets to your website, reads your email or sees whatever it is that you are showing them.
Surveys are a great way to determine what people are seeing. Do some random surveys with friends, pay strangers to do a survey and find other creative ways to get people to give you their honest opinion. Then, go back and increase the quality of what you’re working on so that the next person gets a better impression from your content!
Great post Brian. One thing that makes me not trust a person is when you sign up to their email list the first correspondence you get from them is an email pushing some affiliate product. I normally unsubscribe when they do that. It’s actually astounds me how many internet marketers do it.
Heh I used to work with a small web development company in my town called FigureSeven. When I asked why they named the company that it was because when people ask how long it takes someone to decide to close a web page when they are viewing it they reply to them ‘we figure seven seconds’. I always thought that was a catch name/reasoning.
Yes. There are certainly cases where you have a matter of seconds to make an impression. Especially if you are taking someone out of their comfortable zone and trying to get them to do something that they may not have been thinking about doing in the first place. In these kinds of cases that first split second impression is absolutely crucial. If it’s a bad first impression those are the people that show up in your Google Analytics account as being on the site for 3 seconds
Then, I believe the longer they stay on the site the better BUT there are varying levels of impressions they get. They get an impression when they LOOK at the page.. then again when they READ the page and as they read and click around that impression grows… Ultimately a minute at maximum in most cases. And, if you lose them at any one stage in their impression building process then they usually click close.
Landing and sales pages have been the toughest thing for me to learn upon entering the internet business world. Unfortunately, I get some things and others fly over my head. I think I am sticking with preformatted landing and sales pages from now on.
David Damron