Maintaining Your Credibility Online - Internet Marketing Australia

As an online business man/woman maintaining your credibility online remains one of the most important aspect of this business. Since your prospective customer must have some level of confidence in you before he/she commits his/her hard earned money.

Just as it is with offline business, you need to make your clients have reasons to trust you, in so doing they can commit their money. But, almost all offline business have physical presence, what do I mean by physical presence? An offline business must have an office address. Most clients visit this address to get the products advertised, in the case of non-delivery of a product; the client can visit the address to inquire why the product he paid for has not been delivered to him. But this is the opposite with online business. Basically, the life wire of an online business is the website, and as such online all websites are ranked the same. This is the beauty of online business, yet the issue of credibility ranks high in every regard. So the question now is, how do we maintain our credibility online as infopreneurs?

Build a Professional Website: for you to create the desired impact online, a professional website is one of the pre-requisites of succeeding online. In building a professional website, the following are to be considered. First of all, your website needs to look very simple, just look at top sites like yahoo.com, Google.com, AltaVista.com etc, there are very simple in look, but thick in content. The graphics of your site should be very communicative, use of colors like pink and yellow should be avoided, or how will your prospect read the content of your site, make presumptions and assumptions, then go ahead to patronize you? So your site should be as simple as eating sliced bread, to enhance easy surfing and in turn rate you high credibility wise.

About Us/About me Page: as an intro to your site, the about us/ about me page should be very professional in out look, to achieve this, you need to sound like a professional and not like a beggar. Start by introducing your self, give a brief detail about your self, your mission statement, terms of service (TOS) and the sole purpose of your site, by so doing; you crave the indulgence of your visitor and he remains on your site, without closing his browsers window, this page should also be very brief and concise, or else you begin to sound boring to your visitor. Overall, a very good intro of your about us/me page gives you a high level of credibility and makes your prospective client stick to your site and thereby patronizing your product or service.

Use Your Photograph: to further enhance your credibility, the use of photographs are very important, though in most cases not all that necessary, most internet gurus don't have their pictures on their sites, however you can distinguish your self and increase the level of trust of your potential client by adding your photograph to your site. Your clients get to see you and how you look physically, you also endear yourself to him.

Offer Money-back-Guarantee: when you make your sales, offer money-back-guarantee, most people after patronizing you might not find your products as suitable to them as expressed in your sales letter, and this makes them want a refund of their monies, however when offering a money-back-guarantee terms and conditions should be applied. But on the contrary, money-back-guarantee makes your client trust you and trust the product/service you are offering to him, this makes you look more like a guru to them, as no good business man would make full refund of money to a client who has paid for a product or service. Invariably, the money-back-guarantee whets the appetite of your prospects and makes them trust you to commit their money to purchase your product.

Testimonials: lastly, when making your offer, include the testimony of previous customers who have purchased your product, when you make sales, always ask your customers to write a short testimony of how your product has helped them in achieving some thing which hitherto has sounded un achievable in the past, this makes your new prospects fall over to buy your product and also keeps your pre-existing customers, as well known generally in business parlance, your best customers are the old ones that have patronized you in the pasts. He advertises your products to other people, he wins their confidence for you, and the end result is increase in sales. This is to role of testimonies in online business. But stop! It would be very grave if I don't mention this very salient point to you, last two weeks to be precise, I was going through one of those motivational magazines I patronize fortnightly, I was perusing through one of the columns, this particular column deals with exposing fraudulent advertisers that feature in the classified ad section of this publication, now the featured article for that week was captioned "see why this info buyer is very, very angry", this column features a client that complains of the hypes associated with most of the products advertised in the ad spaces in the magazine, he complained specifically about a product that gives you accurate FOREX signals to increase your earnings (pips). He went further to state that the so called advertiser did not include real testimonies of real people, rather that the testimonies where bereft of credibility as no form of contact was added to the names of the previous customers who testified to the credibility of the said product. Now a drama ensued between the publisher of the magazine and the advertiser, who complained that he was castigated and maligned by the complaints of the info buyer, who called him and other advertisers' dogs at the market place; this infuriated the advertiser and this made him stand to attest to the credibility of his product. The next edition of the magazine, the advertiser reproduced unedited testimonies of previous customers of his products, their email address, physical contact address and proofs of their success using the said product. So you can see the role of testimonies in increasing the level of credibility of an online business venture.

Now, I would like to encourage you to practice this tips today and witness your business soar to high heavens.