Last week, I wrote about having a personality for your website or blog. The focus in that post was on doing things with which you are comfortable. It’s difficult to achieve success doing things you don’t enjoy or that make you uncomfortable. With that out of the way, this time around it’s all about personality.

A lot of blogs fail. A lot of eCommerce websites fail. One reason is that frequently people succumb to the idea (which is often bred by the plethora of TV, internet and even spam ads promising us wealth just by having a website) that all they have to do is put up a website and the money will just magically start coming in.

I do web page design and hosting, and I once had a client that had me do a website for them. They had a single page website and did no advertising of any kind for it. I don’t even think they listed the website address on their letterhead or business cards. After three months, they cancelled it because they weren’t getting any business from it! At that time, it’d be at least three months before the search engines even indexed your website.

The other mistake is doing what everyone else is doing. People will create an eCommerce site, sell some products (either stocking them themselves or using drop-ship), and put up an online catalog. And wait for the orders to come pouring in. Now, there are countless other people doing the exact same thing and selling the same or similar products. Now, when given a choice between product a on one website or product a (the exact same product) on another website, which will you choose?

If your answer was “whichever has the cheapest price,” congratulations. You must be a Wal-Mart shopper. Now go to the back of the class.

People tend to think about price first. And, so if they’re running an eCommerce site selling the same thing as a bunch of other sites, their first thought will often be to lower their prices. Then, their competitors respond in turn. Eventually, the prices get so low that profits are hard to come by. If you can tough it out, it might work out well. Once competition is reduced or eliminated, you can raise your prices again.

The old adage is that you can offer the best of two out of three things: price, quality or service. If you offer quality and service, you must have high prices. Quality products and low prices means poor service. Great service and low prices equates to crummy products. You can probably name some examples of companies that provide all three, but those are rarities. For the most part, you’re only going to be seeing two of the three offered.

Now, personality is your secret weapon. It’s your plus-one option. You can two of three aforementioned plus add your own personality.

Personality is what helps you stand out from the crowd. You see, when most people set up their webstores or whatnot, they frequently just copy and paste the manufacturers’ descriptions. Or they’ll write their own, but they will be generic and boring.

Now, when you visit websites, and you see the same product offered at different sites, are you going to go for the lowest price? Maybe. But, what if the price is the same? And, even if it is lower, do you trust the site with the lower price? More than likely, you’re going to go with the site that grabbed your interest, didn’t have an unreasonable price and inspired some amount of trust. If someone knows a product well enough to write their own custom description, doesn’t that convey more trust than a website with a copied and pasted description that’s the same as dozens of other sites?

And, if you have fun on a site (or at a store), aren’t you more likely to return?

So, how exactly do you give your site a personality? Well, that’s up to you! Sure, that sounds like a cop-out, but, really, that’s something you have to determine yourself.

What you don’t want to do is just copy, verbatim, the descriptions offered by the manufacturer. Look at other sites. In just about any niche, if you view a lot of different sites, you’re going to see a lot of the same stuff. You don’t want to repeat what everyone else is doing. You want to make the site your own! You want to stand out from the crowd.

To better illustrate the idea of having a personality, below is a sampling of sites that have unique personalities. They could have just done a generic description and have essentially a “cookie-cutter” website like everyone else, but instead they opted to put their own spin on things. Mind you that a couple of these sites predate the rise of eCommerce, but, before the world wide web, they established unique personalities in their catalogs.

• American Science and Surplus - If I were to win the lottery, this would be one of the first places I’d be going shopping. They could have just done mundane, boring descriptions of their goods, like other surplus stores, but instead they decided to inject a little fun into them.
• Archie McPhee - Fun stuff, and they also have fun with their descriptions. I’m pretty sure this is where I bought my rubber chicken. And the Martian popping thing. I think MrBaconpants and Michelle will like these. And, they’ll no doubt want to try the bacon jelly beans too.
• The J. Peterman Company - It was originally started in 1987, parodied on Seinfeld, and went bankrupt after Seinfeld went off the air. Then, it was purchased by another company, which in turn went bankrupt, after which, John Peterman bought back the rights to his name and restarted the company with a group of investors that included John O’Hurley, who portrayed the fictional Peterman on Seinfeld. (Read the Wikipedia entry for more.) Now that all that’s out of the way, what made J. Peterman so popular in the first place was its use of stories and product illustrations (rather than photos) to present its catalog (and now website) in a unique way.
• StampandInk.com - Okay, this one falls into the “shameless plug” category, since it is my website. I’ve tried to inject some personality into the site, so it’s not just the same as every other site out there. I’ve been more successful on the art stamps than on the ink pads in that regard. But, with a future update pending, I hope to greatly improve on that! Not to mention other things I’m not going to mention.

If you want to increase your chances of success, give your blog or eCommerce site or even your retail store a unique personality!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Success Saturday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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