Where To Place Your Impulse Lines

If you owned a  shop the logical place to place your impulse lines would be on the shelves using hang sell strips like the the one you see in the image on the right. The owner of this particular store is hoping that although the customer is in a soup aisle the calculators will trigger an impulse to buy one. If things work the way they plan it to they will have produced an extra sale.

Personally, I feel the way to properly trigger an impulse sale, other than having sweets, drinks and the like at the checkouts, would be to offer something that is related to the products that the impulse lines are next to. Rather than calculators perhaps they could have displayed ladles, spices or something along those lines.

I remember years ago when I used to work in a supermarket how I used to continually fill the impulse lines which just goes to show how well they were placed. The ones that particularly come to mind was the chocolate topping and ice-cream cones that were placed along the freezer bay.

For those of you who are thinking that you couldn’t possible produce impulse sales on your blog I say you probably already are. I say this in all confidence because I know a lot of you have Adsense ads on your blog and every time someone clicks on an ad you’re virtually making a sale. You can bet your blogging credentials that they didn’t come to your blog for the purpose of clicking on that ad so that click was generated on a sudden impulse to do so.

Placing Amazon ads on your blog can also produce impulse buying. Just last month I sold a Yamaha YST-SW216BL Subwoofer as well as some dual shielded subwoofer cable. I know for a fact that I didn’t promote those products on any of my blogs which means that customer would have added purely on impulse.

The way to increase your impulse sales is to offer your readers products that are related to your blogging niche or to the post you’re writing. If, for example, I was doing a review on that Yamaha subwoofer I would incorporate an image of subwoofer cable that link to the actual product. A person wanting to purchase the subwoofer could be inclined to also purchase the cable.

As to where to place your impulse lines on your blog the obvious answer would be to place them somewhere above the fold as this would give it the most exposure. This could include places like your header, sidebars and within the post itself. Best results would be achieved by promoting products that have some sort of relation to your niche, or in the case of a post you’ve written then it should be related to the post in some way.

The question now is whether or not others in the blogging industry have experience impulse sales on their blogs? If they have then I’m sure we would all love to know what products were targeted and what was done to trigger the customers impulse to buy?

The Importance Of Honest Reviews

Where most people go wrong is the placement of links or banners on their blogs in places such as the sidebars, footer header or within the post itself. They’re hoping that if they supply good content they’ll generate enough traffic and hopefully someone will be interested enough in their ad placements to click on a link. Unfortunately this isn’t exactly what you would call targeted traffic and while some may actually click on a link or banner they rarely result in a sale and unfortunately no sale means no cash in your pocket.

The trick to making a sale is giving your customers what they want. That means while sticking something unrelated at the end of the post may make you feel good, in that you’ve done something to create income, but it’s pretty well useless. You may get lucky if its related in some way to your post but not by much.

What you should be doing is writing a review about a product that you actually use and love elaborating on the positive aspects as well as any negatives you may have come across. Having said that the problem with reviews is that they don’t always work and the reasons for that are;

• A lack of trust: People don’t know who you are and therefore don’t trust you enough to take your word for it. This is the number one reason why new bloggers find it so hard to earn any sort of income when they first start off. Those that give up say that blogging for money isn’t possible while those who persevere and who over time have built a presence slowly start to see that blogging for money can actually be a reality.
• Not Having enough products to sell: So, let’s say you’ve stuck it out and people now trust you enough to take you at your word when recommending a product or service. The problem you now have, unless you have a lot of money behind you, is the inability to physically purchase all the products you wish to review.

The Best Review Is A Customers Review

There’s also the problem that even though you have over time built a presence and a modicum of trust with your readers people will continue to hesitate when it comes to completing a sale because of the perception that your review is skewed in that you have an ulterior motive for writing it. You can’t really blame them either because there are so many reviews out there from people who have never tried the product and have written a whole lot of crap just to make the sale.

This isn’t true of reviews written by actual customers who have nothing at all to gain from writing it. When you think about it, time being what it is, there’s only two reasons why someone will take the time to write a review. They either really love a product or they really hate it. Reading the reviews on any given product gives you a feel for how good that product really is. This is one of the reasons why I purchased WP Zon Builder and wrote the post Why I Love WP Zon Builder.

Yesterday I was looking at my Sexual Aids blog and I noticed that one particular post was getting a lot of attention, as were the links on that post. The problem was it wasn’t generating much in the way of sales and it was after much thought that I come to the conclusion which resulted in this post. Naturally I decided to do something about it which was to point all the links to Amazon rather than to the site I had been using as an affiliate.

Naturally to facilitate this I used WP Zon Builder which made the transition a breeze. As you can see from the post The Ten Most Popular Vibrators, each of the vibrators in question now has a link to Amazon, an image of the product as well as a link to the customer reviews. I’ve also stipulated in the post that people should take the time to read the reviews to see whether or not it’s the one best suited to them. Whether they click on the review or the product link doesn’t matter as either way my affiliate link is embedded into both links.

The question now is am I right in making all the above assumptions? What say you, is there value in what I have portrayed above or do you see fault in it somewhere. Either way I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.