Expert: Peter Gabany - 5/14/2011

Question
QUESTION: Dear Sir,

I hope you are fine.

I want first of all to thank you for your such kind services.

I am preparing to launch an online mall that enable every store in my country to have dedicated page on the website by subscribe in the site services paying 100$/month, and get these advantages:

1) Allocating a special page for the subscriber retailer designed specially for it with private link (OurSite.com/YourBrand), and private background.
2) Enable the subscriber retailer to show unlimited numbers of its goods, and offers, through a gallery system for browsing.
3) Allocating a special page for each product offered by the retailer contains a photo album of the product (including 1-3 photos per one), its features, and price.
4) Enable the subscriber retailer to share its news, social and special activities, and reports with the page viewers by publishing without any limits on the count or space.
5) Inclusion the retailer page with the retailer contact information such as (website, phone and fax numbers, email address, and map).
6) Enable the subscriber retailer to make competitions specified to the retailer page' viewers with prizes apportionment, which enhancing the loyalty of the shoppers to the retailer.
7) Enable the subscriber retailer to design and upload down-loadable 3D magazines of its products and news.
8) Updating the retailer page' content as it want without any limits within 24 hours (maximum).
9) Enable the retailer to send a weekly newsletter email (maximum) to our site shoppers.
10) Work constantly on SEO (search engine optimization) to improve our ranking in search results, since we aim to ensure a link to OurSite.com appears when people search for relevant keywords in Google, MSN, Yahoo and other search engines.
11) Provide the retailer detailed evaluation reports include valuable information about its viewers' age, gender, education level, income, browser type, operating systems, and time spent on OurSite.com.
12) Numerous initiatives are underway to promote OurSite.com on various Social Media platforms. These include OurSite.com offers on Twitter, a blog, a Facebook page, all encouraging users to share these with their personal networks.

My Question is:
HOW CAN I CONVINCE & CONTACT POTENTIAL ADVERTISERS TO SUBSCRIBE?

I have finished designing the website, and a professional media kit.

What do you want to advice me to do?

Best Regards

ANSWER: Is there any way that you can offer the people a free listing? Is there any way that you can send them monthly analytics of their listing and indicate what traffic is coming to their site or as a matter of fact passing them over. Always do this in relation to amount of traffic that you receiving. If you are receiving a million hits and the business is only receiving 10,000 hits it is easy to indicate

Then can you offer a staged upgrade to your offer working up to the $100/month such as adding contact information, catalogue, advertising, link to online store etc. Some people just don't understand the value.

I believe that you laundry list of benefits is a good one, my question is can you turn each of these into a value. People buy values and rarely benefits. For example if the offer for the purhase of a car is that the buyer not only gets brakes, but ABS brakes the motivator to purchase is only marginally different. But if you were to position the car having specialized, ABS brake control for better handling and safety making you and your family safe then you reach what really matters to the individual.

For example - allowing the retailer unlimited catalogue items is a good thing. But to say that the retailer will reach millions of viewers per month, showcasing their unlimited supply of goods for one low, predictable price should help to the retailer make a purchase decisison.

I hope that this helps

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Can you help me to rewrite these benefits to become values​​?!

I would be very grateful if you answered my following questions:

* What is the proper way to address more of 3331 I think they are "potential participants" in the site.
I am thinking to phone them, request their marketing managers e-mails addresses and sent them an email contains all the detailed features of the site, do you think this is will be effective and convincing?

* I am thinking of attracting some stores for free and say to the rest of the stores that I had some subscribers in my site, what do you think?

Answer
Attracting anyone for free is NOT business, it is charity. You might give the stores a free trial to determine if they like it and this is where it is up to you to prove convesion. If they are getting sales as a result of the traffic that you bring them then they would be silly to abandon your business model - especially if you can prove that the result is trending upward.

I just don't know about making 300 phone calls let alone 3,000.

Let me know if this works.

Pete