According to Andy Jenkins, your prospects are all just ‘lazy skeptics’ who read your sales copy with two thoughts upper-most in mind:

“Why should I bother?”

“This can’t possibly be true.”

In other words, they don’t want to do anything they perceive as hard work - whether it’s taking out their wallet or following your home study course - and they don’t believe what you’re saying anyway.

If true… such beliefs surely lie in the way of converting your prospects into customers. So how do you overcome such barriers and get them to buy from you.

Andy Jenkins recommends harnessing your prospect’s inherent laziness and skepticism to your benefit. To do so, you emphasize how EASY it is to take the desired action… and that what you’re offering DOES sound too good to be true (appealing to their latent skepticism) but really isn’t.

Take a look at Andy’s article for how he recommends you do this, but here are two ways you might appeal to/dismiss prospects’ laziness and skepticism respectively:

1. Laziness

Use words such as ‘easy’, ’simple’, ’step by step’, ‘in just 3 steps’, and so on. For example, which of the following appeals to you?

“A weight loss guide”

“An easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide to losing weight”

2. Skepticism

Agree with the prospect (never DISagree with them!) that what you’re offering sounds too good to be true and provide a LOGICAL reason why your solution is an exception to the rule. For example, if you build up the value of a software program to such an extent that it could reasonably be worth hundreds of dollars, but then offer it for just a fraction of the price, a skeptical prospect may wonder if the product really is as good as you say it is. To combat that response, you might use a logical argument that, for example, you wish to ‘beta test’ the product among a select group of people before you formally launch it, or that you are offering the software as-is with no helpdesk support, etc.

Source: Andy Jenkins, “Use Emotion AND Logic to sell MORE”, StomperBlog, October 1, 2008

Here are three (3) super quick - and super powerful - tips for designing a website that sells. I pinched them from Eben Pagan, who emphasized these particular ideas during his Altitude program trainings.

Above all:

1. As soon as they land on your website, your visitor should know instantly that they’re in the right place.
2. Excite your visitor and suspend their disbelief. (We’ll talk about how to deal with ‘lazy skeptics’ i.e. most of your prospects in a later Kikabink Lab article).
3. Your visitor should leave your site better off than when they arrived.