Most small-business marketers assume that prospects will understand why they should buy the product just because they’ve been told about it. Therefore, business owners only communicate the features of their products to prospective customers and neglect to mention the benefits.

What Are Features?

Take a look at the list of features below related to our products.

• Only 2 inches wide
• Only 4 inches high
• Locking Actuator
• Completely Stealth
• Maintenance free
• Batteries included

Each is a feature — a factual statement about the product or service being promoted. But features aren’t what entice customers to buy. That’s where benefits come in. A benefit answers the question “What’s in it for me; how does this solve my problem?” meaning the feature provides the customer with something of value to them. This is where most businesses go wrong:

• The benefit of only 2 inches wide is that the stun gun is easy to hold.
• The benefit of only 4 inches high is the stun gun is easily concealable.
• The benefit of the locking actuator is the pepper spray has a safety switch.
• The benefit of completely stealth is no one will know the software is installed.
• The benefit of maintenance free is customer will not have to fix anything.
• The benefit of batteries included is the product is ready to use out of the box.

While these may seem like true benefits, they’re really just elaborations on the features. So what is truly a benefit?

The best way to understand the true benefit of your product, or to answer the “What’s in it for me; how does this solve my problem?” question, is to focus instead on the real reasons the customer thinks the features are important. A customer’s perception of each feature’s real reasons is what attracts him or her to a particular product. When someone chooses a stun gun that’s only 2 inches wide, the assumption is that the benefit is it’s easy to hold, but the actual real reasons are that it’s easier to grab in an emergency situation, making it quicker to use, making the user feel more confident in her ability to get it out of her purse and defend herself quickly — she feels safer. Those real reasons are the true benefits.

When you try to sell the features of your products, you’re making the customer do all the work to figure out why they want the feature. It’s in your best interest to draw the connection for them. But to do that, you have to know the real reasons yourself. Let’s take another look at that features list to see the possible real reasons the customers likes the features:

Only 4 inches high: If I’m going to carry a stun gun in my hand, I don’t want everyone to see it.  I don’t want people to think I’m paranoid and afraid. Or, the bad guy won’t know I have it in my hand because it so small and I’ll be able to shock him before he even knows I’m carrying the stun gun.  I won’t have to worry about him taking it away from me and using it on me because he doesn’t see it!

Locking Actuator: I don’t want this going off in my purse or when I’m showing it to friends.  I’m afraid I might spray myself.  I don’t want to look stupid.

Completely Stealth: I can see exactly what my child is looking at on the computer, but I feel a little guilty spying on him so I want to make sure he will never know I installed the software.  I don’t want him to think I don’t trust him.

Maintenance free: I suck at fixing things.  I want something that won’t break. I don’t want to feel dumb!

Batteries included: After I buy the product, I won’t have to worry about scrounging around the house looking for batteries or getting in the car and driving to Wal-Mart to buy some.

Even if you are using features and benefits in your sales copy and web pages, if you look again, you’ll probably see that your benefits are really just more features.

So now that you understand the difference between features and benefits, how do you apply this to your own business so you can start marketing your benefits? I have 3 suggestions below.

1. Know your customer. To know your customer, you must gather as much information as you can about your customer. Try to gather demographic data (age, sex, household income, family size, marital status, media preferences and so on) and psychographic data (attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, opinions, lifestyles and so on).

If you are selling from a store or at a flea market and can talk to your customer face to face, you can start asking certain questions to begin developing a profile of your customers.  Just starting having conversations with your customers.

If you are selling online, the easiest way to get an accurate profile of your customers is to do a survey.  You can offer a free gift for their participation.  The easiest to use is www.surveymonkey.com.  Of course, this assumes you have a list of customers.

If you are just getting started, you will have to make some assumptions about who your customer is.  Try to define that customer as precisely as you can.  Even name him or her.  They when you write emails or sales copy for your website or ads, you write just to that person.

As your business grows, you will get a better feel for who your customer is and the problems they are trying to solve with your products.

2. Change your point-of-view. Whenever you write from your own point of view, you naturally fill in the blanks with assumptions. No matter the type of business you’re in, you think it’s great because you fully understand what you’re offering. But a prospect knows little or nothing about your products. They can’t make the same connections about it that you can.

Your demographic and psychographic information will allow you to discover what patterns exist among your customers. Using that information, you must learn to put yourself in their shoes as the buyer. Approach your own product as if you’d never seen it (which won’t be too hard for some of my distributors because they haven’t since we drop ship for them). Then ask yourself, and anyone else who will help you, “What are the real reasons these features will benefit me?” and “Why would I want to consider buying or switching?

3. Think in terms of real reasons. There’s nothing wrong with the term “benefits,” but if you refocus the problem to think in terms of “real reasons,” the situation becomes clearer. Your dilemma isn’t features vs. benefits, but rather features vs. real reasons. Start with your current features, and then take each one into the real reasons phase. Try out what you get on friends or family to see which ones spark their interest.

When you use this “real reasons” approach to discovering your business’ benefits, you can be sure the marketing messages you use to reach your prospects will be right on target. And that’s the surest way to get business!

The world is a looking glass and it gives back to you a reflection of your attitude. So the bottom line is if you want a friend, you must first be a friend; if you want people to be happy about your successes, you must also be happy for the success of others. When speaking of other people, speak only in terms of their successes or positive traits. Don’t gossip or waste time reinforcing negative information — free yourself from petty thinking. If you know someone who failed in some way but is clearly trying to make a comeback, support them by ignoring their past and emphasize their present good!

One of the most upsetting traits I notice in many people is their disdain and bitterness if someone they know achieves something or acquires material possessions that they themselves have not achieved or acquired. Many of these people try to find ways to put that person down, to belittle them or find fault. It’s as if they believe that the world is limited and so if this other person profits, then there are no benefits left for them.

Many people spend their energies on bickering, jealousy, and petty criticism. I cannot emphasize enough how the power of your thinking is an instrument for success or failure. You are now the sum total of your past thoughts. The thoughts you have from this day forward will determine your future and the amount of happiness and prosperity you experience. I want to impress on you that if you truly desire to have prosperity in your life, you must start to be happy for others’ successes. Life is like a boom-a-rang — what you toss out into the world comes back into your own life. You’ve heard the phrase “what goes around comes around?” When you have thoughts of jealously and revenge you are actually attracting that energy to yourself. In reality, the world is an un-limiting place where you can create whatever it is you truly want.

Free yourself from criticism of yourself and others. Be different from those who are prone to finding fault with everything, unless you want to remain with them. Dare to act and think in a new manner. Deliberately employ prosperous thinking as your ally for success, therefore freeing yourself from limitations, lack and failure. The famous philosopher James Allen said: “Through his thoughts, man holds the key to every situation and contains within himself that transforming and regenerative agency by which he may make himself what he wills.”

Lee Milteer is an internationally known Performance & Productivity Coach, TV Personality, and Speaker who has counseled and trained over a million people throughout her career. Lee is the founder of the Millionaire Smarts® Coaching Program, www.milteer.com/MillionaireSmarts and is also a best-selling author of educational resources like Success is An Inside Job, www.milteer.com/books and Overcoming Unproductive Behaviors, www.milteer.com/packages. Find out more and sign up for no-cost success resources at www.milteer.com.

Since we aren’t given information about listening to our intuition in our school systems, I wanted to share with you some of the practical information I have gathered throughout my career about getting in touch with your inner wisdom—your true source of strength and infallible guidance. The follow is a small excerpt from my latest program, Intuition: The New Common Sense. You can find out more by clicking here. Intuition sounds almost mystical, but it’s actually just the mind’s ability to match patterns. You “get a feeling” about a new situation because it is subconsciously similar to an experience you have had before. That is how intuition tells us that an attractive business offer has hidden dangers or an associate doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

Imagine this: You are sharing logical and intellectual reasons why your prospect, client, customer, or patient should invest in your product or service or you are asking for a raise or added benefit from your boss. But deep down, hidden away, you are feeling unsure of yourself. You have fears that your supplier cannot deliver on time or you don’t feel worthy of a large commission, or maybe you dislike your prospect. Maybe you fear your supplier will let you down or your staff cannot handle the extra work. Something inside of you is insecure. Or if it is your boss maybe you feel like they won’t give you what you want. Whether your feelings are positive or negative, they are energy that is being transmitted by you to your prospect or boss. They start to pick up subtle energy patterns or thoughts, intellectually or subliminally, and can feel your doubts. This is an important point you should be very aware of. It’s important to clean up your thoughts, doubts, and negative energy before you make presentations of any kind. Maybe your staff or sales people are having these feelings. If they are, I assure you these negative feelings are affecting your sales, profits, and results.

I would like to add that intuitive individuals are risk-takers, not motivated by a need for security. People who are good with using their intuition are normally confident and independent. If your self-esteem is low, or if you trust others more than you trust yourself, you are programming your intuition to fail you. You must start to trust yourself.

Pay attention to your self-talk because we are self-fulfilling prophecies. If you tell yourself regularly that your problems are too difficult for you or you will never find the answers, then you do not trust yourself, and again, you’re programming your intuition to fail you. Have you ever had a feeling that you should call on a particular client? Then, after you ignored your inner nudging, later found out that, had you just called on that client, you would have made the sale? How many times have you had a feeling that it was going to be a waste of time to call on a certain client, but you made the call anyway and the client was not even in the building? In today’s world you must develop and use these natural abilities–your intuition–to be successful in whatever you do, from your personal life to business.

If I don’t use intuition in my decision-making process I tend to fall short of my goals and not make the best decisions. The bottom line is that adding intuition to your life and listening to your inner wisdom is what adds STRENGTH to your life and decisions. Listening to your intuition will allow you to see opportunities that others cannot. Learning to use your intuition on a practical level will allow you to escape traditional boundaries and focus on expansion and freedom in your life.

Blessings,

Lee Milteer

For more information on how to expand your knowledge and use one of the most important skills in your life, Intuition, I highly recommend Lee’s Course The New Common Sense. It will give you the confidence and awareness to manifest more profitable results in your business and life. This system is a must-have for anyone who wants to move past traditional thinking to reduce stress, be more aware, and create more success and profits. Get it at http://www.milteer.com/node/557

It use to take a site months to get indexed in Google.  Now, by creating content that Google can find, you can get a new site indexed in a few days.  Caffeine will be even faster!  I’m talking hours, minutes or even seconds.

You will be most affected if you are competing for keyword phrases that will be trendy or in the news a lot.  An example of this is Taser.  If you are ranking well (on the first page of Google for a related keyword) and there is breaking news about Taser, you will most likely be bumped down.

For instance, the police subdue a guy high on PCP and he dies, or the police Taser a 10 year old girl at school.  The second this news hits the media, news sites and social media are going to go crazy with fresh content about it. Before Caffeine, Google wouldn’t even know about these news, blogs and social media stories so your page would get a lot of attention until that time. But with Caffeine, Google will know about them almost instantly.

Now, what do you think Google wants to show in those top positions?  Your old, static page or all those news and social media pages?  I’m betting on the latter.

Google Caffeine is a result of Google’s desire to show news and social media pages more frequently whenever possible, because news, blogs and social media pages tend to have the most updated and current content.

So,  to put it simply, from what I understand, Google Caffeine isn’t going to affect the average web site until and unless there is a hot trend in your niche or if your niche is extremely active (a great deal of social media and/or news activity).

The best way to combat this, or take advantage of it, is to keep creating good content, providing good information, build links, etc.  Whenever you hear about breaking news, get on your blog and make a post about it.  Google Caffeine loves blog posts.

There are many ways to generate traffic for your Website. But all forms of traffic can be broken down into two essential categories. There is direct traffic and there is referred traffic. Direct traffic occurs when a user types your URL directly into their address bar, accesses your site from their browser bookmarks, or saves your URL as his or her home page and hits your site each time their browser is opened.

Often, direct traffic is the result of print, billboard, radio, and even television advertising. Many large companies claim direct traffic is the best kind to get because it represents visitors who are extremely targeted and probably ready to buy when they arrive. However, there is generally either a substantial advertising cost or a long process of branding involved with the generation of large quantities of direct traffic.

Referred traffic occurs when a visitor comes to your site from another Web page by clicking on a link, finds you in the search results, clicks the link in an email, or is redirected to you by some form of paid advertisement. So referred traffic is all about people following links, in one form or another, to get to your Website.

There are two reasons I believe referred traffic generation is the best investment of time and energy:

1. It’s very cost-effective. You can create a wide array of referral traffic sources inexpensively and even for free.
2. Referral traffic sources often last forever. In many cases the links you build back to your Web pages will remain in place for the lifetime of the site being linked from; this of course means long-term passive traffic and search engine optimization benefits without continued spending.

SEO includes generating a large number of quality back links to your website and individual pages.   Remember, the best way to become an authority to Google and win the ranking battle with competitors is to have the most relevant content and links to your website.

2. Separate multiple topics on one page into individual pages that focus on single topics. Keep the number of keywords for each page as small as possible.

3. Format your title with the most important keywords first, with secondary keywords following. Never more than 10-12 words (or 60 characters) – less if you can. A popular form is to use your main keyword phrase, a vertical bar or “pipe” character, and then your secondary keywords. i.e. -

Self Defense Products | Stun Guns and Pepper Sprays

Try to make it very readable – as this is what searchers will see as your site title in the search engines

4. Craft a good description of your site for the <description> meta tag, using your keywords, but don’t obsess on it. Include a <keywords> meta tag if you feel like it.  However, the keyword meta tag is not important any longer.

5. Use your keyword early and late. Recent statistical data shows that content at the beginning and end of a page has greater influence.  Make sure to start out with them, and end with them.

6. Provide as much good, useful content in your subject area as is feasible with your site concept; using keywords as often as make sense; using all of the various style tags at some point on the page with your keywords, like bold, underline, and italic. It’s also helpful to have your keywords be the first words in the first paragraph on the page.

7. Use anchor text in links within your site that contain the keywords of the page you are linking to.

8. Last – and probably the most important and time consuming: Engage in an ongoing linking campaign. Get as many quality sites as you can to link to you. Do everything you can to get them to link to you with your keywords as the anchor text of the link itself.

Patrick: I started Stunster.com in September 2007.

Kim: Why did you get started with Safety Technology business?

Patrick: It really all started out of curiosity.  I had just started building websites as a hobby, then one day someone told me about a free open source ecommerce software platform called osCommerce.  I downloaded and installed it and started playing with it.  Then I decided I needed to sell something.  I had no idea what to sell, but one day I was in the bookstore thumbing through some magazines and saw Mike’s (Safety Technology) ad.  I immediately thought to myself, “security products are great items to sell.”  That’s how it all started.

Kim: What were some of the obstacles you had to face and how did you overcome those obstacles?

Patrick: Traffic, Traffic, Traffic!  It’s all about getting traffic.  Of course, free traffic is the best.  But if you pay for traffic, how do you make it pay for itself?  I’ve played with various ways of generating traffic and that’s always an obstacle.

Kim: How has this business changed your life?

Patrick: The income from Stunster.com is a very nice supplement to my salary.  I enjoy running the business and plan to keep growing it.

Kim: What advice would you give to someone else starting a business?

Patrick: Continuously educate yourself and never give up.  I strongly believe that the harder you work, the luckier you become.

Kim: What is the main thing you are doing to drive traffic to your site?

Patrick: I do both SEO (Search-Engine-Optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click).

Kim: What’s your favorite product?

Patrick: I’d say the Taser products, particularly the X26c and M26c.

Kim: What is the craziest story that a customer has told you?

Patrick: I had a gentleman who used a stolen credit card to order items from me.  When I contacted him, he was upset that I contacted the police.  He stated I should have called him first.  I said, “Ok, we can settle it now by you paying.”  I never heard from him again and he would never answer my phone calls.  All of our communication was by email.  The police did end up searching his home but they didn’t find the stolen items. His ex-wife told the police he had just moved to another state.

Kim: Can you give me one of your internet marketing secrets?

Patrick: You must offer “great” customer service, which most people don’t consider marketing.  However, if a customer is happy with your customer service, they may become repeat customers and will recommend your business to friends and family.   If it’s a potential customer contacting you, many times if you respond quickly and even call them on the phone, that person will feel more comfortable buying from you.

I’ve had several potential customers call me on the phone but not leave a message.  I’ll see their caller ID and call them back.  Quite a few times they’ll end up buying from me because I took the time to call them to answer their questions.

One of the things I like about Safety Technology is that you can always quickly get someone on the phone.  Also, if I send an email I usually get a quick response.  I’ve dealt with other companies where you can’t get someone on the phone and if you send an email, they take 24 to 48 hours to respond.  That is poor customer service that will drive potential customers away!

People naturally want things and either move towards the thing they want or move away from something they don’t want, thereby getting what they want.

It helps to understand what motivates you or someone else. It usually doesn’t work to use the stick on a carrot person or offer a carrot to a stick person. It will only cause frustration to everyone.

When you understand this, you don’t have to passively let motivation happen. You can now control what motivates you and the people you sell to.

If you are trying to motivate someone to buy your products, sometimes the carrot is a weak tool, especially if the person doesn’t feel in danger at the moment.

That’s why the stick works best sometimes. The polite thing would be to say, “Wouldn’t it be nice to carry a pepper spray so you would feel more secure when you leave your home.”

But, it would be more effective if you said, “The odds are 1 in 7 that you will be raped someday. Do you want to gamble with those odds or would you prefer to carry a $10 pepper spray?”

Instead of moving them towards the warm and fuzzy feeling of being safe and secure (the carrot), you want to make them aware of the bad that could happen so they will do whatever they can to avoid it (the stick). Your products will help them avoid the bad thing.

To understand better what motivates you and others, you have to understand the three basic desires that motivate people. All three of these have the carrot and stick variation.

One would be power. People want to either gain more power in their life or avoid feeling helpless.

The second would be association. People want to either do those things that will make them liked and admired by others or they want to avoid those things that will make people dislike them.

The third is accomplishment. People want to either succeed at things or avoid failing at things.

Unfortunately, most of the world does not have the ambition or prosperity consciousness to make the carrot effective. Most respond to fear or the stick: fear of being poor, fear of losing their home, fear of not having money for retirement or money for their children’s college, fear of someone taking what’s theirs or fear of someone hurting them.

There is no right or wrong to this, but it’s important that you understand it. It will give you greater insight to what motivates the people you sell to.

For example, when you enter the keyword “stun gun” into Word Tracker’s free keyword tool –http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. You’ll see a list of the top 100 keyword phrases related to stun gun, ranked by the number of searches in the last 365 days.

1. stun gun
2. stun guns
3. make your own stun gun
4. build stun gun
5. homemade stun guns
6. plans to make a stun gun
7. make a stun gun
8. instructions to make a stun gun
9. stun gun schematics
10. how to make a stun gun

You’ll also notice that results 3 – 10 all have to do with making your own stun gun. Does that surprise you?

Knowing that, I think it might be smart to create a report about making your own stun gun. You would create a page or pages on your website based on these keyword phrases; one page for each keyword phrase. On the page would be the report written around the keyword phrases.

Now, I know some of you will have a first response of, “I don’t know anything about making your own stun gun.” But, that’s the attitude of someone who isn’t making much money. If you want to make money you will become a problem solver. You will take the time and search for and find a ton of information on the Internet about making your own stun guns.

You will take that information and rewrite it in your own words or pay someone to rewrite it for you. You will then create pages using this report and the keywords above.

When they come to your page, you will suggest it might be easier to just buy a stun gun, already made and have a link to your stun gun page so they can buy one.

Do this with all your primary keyword phrases and I think you might find some keywords you weren’t expecting. Keywords that your competition are not targeting.