Hard Sell or Soft Sell?
I’ve heard these terms only a few times during my life offline, but now I’m learning about these concepts more and more as I go deeper into internet marketing.
Soft Selling. I’ve always understood this as unobtrusive selling of a merchandise. examples include small banners or links and the like that people may just see in passing, and may or may not opt to click. This is less obvious, and apparently less irritating to potential customers than…
Hard Selling. Writing about the product, using action words like ‘buy’ or ‘avail’ or ‘click’. This is actually synonymous to pushing the product to potential buyers, and is only considered irritating if the person is not interested, or detests being forced to buy something.
Let me tell you about my experience as a Christmas stall lease owner. I leased a stall for 2 days during Christmas rush time and the space wasn’t cheap. I sold gift items (i.e. pre-packed, available for wrapping) such as small towelettes in 2’s for generic gift giving; bath sponges in various shapes and colors, also pre-packed in 2’s and 3’s; plastic boxes filled with craft items for kids; and chocolate houses. During the first day, I planned on breaking even, and I did so by lunch time. The second part of the day was slow, as siesta time set in. I sat there smiling at customers and entertaining orders as they came. This was soft sell day.
The second day was hard sell day, and I knew it. Because the benchmark for gaining back my investment was met the other day, it’s profit time. It was the day before Christmas and people are rushing to complete their Santa lists. I broke open a chocolate house and invited passers by to taste some. I engaged parents in conversations and pushed the craft items to them, all the while creating my own crafts from one box to demonstrate. I sold a lot more than the first day but noticed that a lot of customers who were really ‘just passing by’ got irritated with my pushing.
Some would say i probably could’ve sold more if I started out hard selling rather than lounging around waiting for customers to inquire. I see the same trends in internet marketing. Will I be content just pouring out the content and attaching affiliate links to posts and sidebars, or should I review the products, push them, market them everywhere, wear them on my signatures and the like? There are certain factors that affect how I may approach an affiliate program:
1. Time
Some affiliate programs terminate accounts after a duration and nothing is sold. Another thing related to this is personal deadlines. Some bloggers or marketers value the time they spend on one project very much and won’t spend a lot of it on products that don’t sell for a certain time frame. What they do is hard sell a product from the onset and all throughout. If they don’t convert during that period, they quit and move on to the next.
2. Resources
Not all affiliate programs are free to join. Some of them require a certain pledge money from associates, or require that you buy their product first before you have the right to earn by re-selling it. Some never want their resources to get tied up for extended periods and want to gain the invested money back ASAP.
3. Trends
If the item you are selling is hot as of the moment, you can sit back and relax, put up a banner and let the sales roll in. However, if a product is an innovation that no one has heard of, or an improvement (or knock off) of a popular thing, you’re in for a challenge.
Selling a product whether insistently or not really depends on how much you loved the product yourself. Sometimes, it’s easier to hardsell a product if you are firmly convinced that people who can relate to you will buy it too.
