See what one reader posted on the SiteSell forum about the book's content. I couldn't have said it any better myself…

Hi Ken,

I started reading MYCPS 2 days ago and today is the second time.

IMHO if you disregard Sitesell brand, with a minor improvement, you can change the title into “Principles of Web Marketing.”

Why the title? Here is my observation.

First,

Quote:
Building a business is all about building relationship
and …PREselling is the online version of relationship-building
and …PREselling warms up and builds trust and respect

… trust and respect build loyalty. Finally, loyalty builds retention.

The concept of preselling to build visitors, and later customers, loyalty is fundamental for both offline and online business. For online business we learn the importance of retention from how high is our Conversion Rate and the cost of acquiring new customers.

Like the butcher and the hairdresser –which are offline examples– we learn that in offline world we'll do business with someone we know personally. We like to do business with persons who knows our needs and wants and offer products or services even before we ask them.

The personal relationship with customers in the above examples once owned by small businesses now practiced by big corporations. To serve every customer personally a company such Amazon invested in very expensive and sophisticated Customer Relationship Management Softwares.

My point here, if big corporations enter personal relationship game then small businesses have to serve their customers better.

Second,

How can we serve our customers better?

With Content – Traffic – Presell – Monetize concept small business can defend the personal relationship advantage. Despite using high-end CRM softwares, as customers we don't communicate with a real person we know. Whereas small/home business owner communicates personally with customers and their customers know his/her voice and personality.

So with every improvement of personalization technology and much smaller target market/community small business still can win the value war against bigger corporation. Online we can achieve this by providing high-value-added content/information in the form of words. It's about what we offer or the main benefits.

Besides content/words, there are two additional differentiation we can apply to leverage small business position.

One is context or look and feel in your terminology. In consumer goods industry our site look and feel is like the packaging of the product –the content or words to be exact. It's about the way we offer
our target market. Our personalities and how we see our target market will color our contexts.

The other one is infrastructure or technology, facility and personnel as the enabler of words and look and feel creation. SBI with its features belongs to this differentiation category. And last but not least, we, as the subject of all creations, play in the center stage.

So… Have I given a complete body of knowledge to serve our customers better?

Nope. There are at least two additional ideas: marketing strategy and branding.

Marketing strategy is about how to win customers' mind share. In MYCPS you taught segmentation and targeting at chapter 2.2. If many SBIers complain about low income site I suggest them to read and reread this chapter.

Segmentation and targeting are about developing market map and selecting which area to serve. We have to use our scarce resources wisely.

Once we decide the area to serve we can find and develop our positioning statement. Depending on our situation we can write our own USP or VPP. Chapter 3 covered how to leverage our USP or VPP with related domain name.

Now, Let's talk about branding. Your sub title How To Build Your Brand of One… remind us not to trap into commoditization. In a commodity market where supply and demand command price, we are the price taker. By branding we can command price since our brands free us up from supply and demand curve, we are the price maker.

To summarize my review, I'd like to see a triangle of brand – positioning – differentiation. Brand is a value we promise to deliver to our target market. Positioning is a strategy to direct your customers credibly. And differentiation is a tactic to integrate content, context, and infrastructure in the form of our offers to customers. All is almost well covered in MYCPS.

Let's analyze Sitesell.com to get some evidences whether you preach what you teach. Sitesell brand promise is to add value by providing products and services to make sites can sell. Your positioning statement: Ecommerce for the rest of us –simple and effective ecommerce for everyone. Your differentiations: high value affordable contents with unique, easy to understand presentation, and supported by the high-powered SBI as your main infrastructure.

Again, although MYCPS seems like about writing content that presell, IMHO with some polishing you can change your book title into Principle of Web Marketing. Don't get me wrong, I don't say Principle of Web Selling.

That's an incredible endorsement for Ken's “Make Your Content Pre-Sell”, and like I said before, I couldn't have explained it any better myself.

Pick up your copy of “Make Your Content Pre-Sell” today!