General


The decision to buy something, or conversely not to buy something, is not one that is ruled by logical thought processes. Rather it is one ruled by a range of different outside influences and emotional impulses that we really have very little control over.

This is something that savvy website owners and shopkeepers know well and use to their advantage. Here we will look at some of the psychological phenomena at play which cause us to decide to buy something or not, and how they can be taken advantage of in the sales process.

Time Pressure

As a race humans like to mull things over. We don’t like making snap decisions. If you show someone something they might want, they are likely to decide to ‘sleep on it’ and see if they want it in the morning. The problem is though, that people often don’t want something in the morning because they’re already thinking about something else. If you are trying to sell something from your site then, you want people to buy now, now, now, to remove the opportunity for them to change their mind. Adding a time pressure such as a limited-time-only deal is a great way to get people to act right away.
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“Chat, flirt, socialize and have fun” is the tagline for the popular social dating site, Badoo. Founder of the site, Andrey Andreev, started Badoo in 2006 when it served only as a photo sharing site. Andrey was living in Spain at the time, and mainly because Spanish girls couldn’t be dated until the male had met her family, he thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to launch the site with a “meet new people” concept.

One year later in 2007 Andrey made an about turn on his initial judgment. He decided to test his views on Spanish women, and repositioned the Badoo as a place to meet new people, rather than just a photo sharing site. This decision came after Andrey observed that even though his site was not earning him revenue, the number of users had grown tremendously within the first year of its launch. The 2007 Google Zeitgeist recorded Badoo as one of the fastest growing search terms, second only to iPhone.
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If you run a website or otherwise operate online, then keeping a watchful eye on Google is highly advisable. After all, Google is the most popular search engine of all with a massive global market share of around 80%. For that reason alone it has the ability to ensure that your website is either a big success, or conversely that it is not seen by anyone.

If Google makes a change to its algorithms or policies and you should happen to miss that this happened, then you might find your site suddenly penalized and your traffic halved or worse.

And Google does make changes to the way it operates – a lot actually. Furthermore, this is truer now than it has ever been before and of those changes made recently there are several that have already had a big impact on the rankings of sites. Here we will look at just some of the many big changes that have happened in the last year or so.
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When you’re running a small business, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of the daily tasks. Many of these don’t require your physical attention, but they need to be done just the same. If you’re running a small one or two man operation, there aren’t a lot of options for delegating these tasks to someone else. That’s where the services of a virtual assistant can really come in handy.

Virtual assistants are online professionals who act in the same way as a secretary might, although they can do a wide variety of duties that might transcend normal clerical work. Of course, if you are going to entrust a portion of your business to a complete stranger, it’s important to find a virtual assistant that you will be able to trust. It’s easy to hire virtual assistants, but you have to know where to look if you want to find quality. Here are some of the best places to begin your search for a high quality virtual assistant.
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