Getting people to buy

[franklin dematto]

Could anyone share their ideas & experience about the following method:

A site is the home site for a certain service. Instead of focusing on the seller, the site has lots of useful articles about that service in general, with the hope of attracting and impressing prospective customers, who, if and when they decide to buy, naturally go with the site itself.

Also, how should these articles be linked in? In their own section (which may be ackward to work in)? Or referenced somehow from the product description (which is kinda backwords from the method's intended sequence)?

[jackofalltrades]

You could either have an "useful articles / related articles" section, which would link from your homepage. On each page of each service you offer, you can then link back to the related article(s) for this section (and within each article link to the related service).

For example, your homepage links would be, "widgets for sale" and "widget related articles" so you would also link the widget article to your widget sales page.

Or you could have a section for each subject area which would split down into "related articles" and "services offered".

For example, your homepage links would be "blue widgets", "green widgets", etc and within each section you would have, eg, "blue widget articles" and "blue widget sales".

With your articles, you should always try to link them to your sales page. It means that the user isnt forced upon "widget sales" if they dont want to go, but it is the natural progression from the navigation of the articles page for most of your users.

With the sales pages, you should always link back to your articles pages, as it offers a better reference and resource for your users and potential customers.

And there is undoubtedly some sort of benefit in terms of search engines, PR, etc of creating a weave of realted links within your site.

Scott