Impulse shopping in the checkout lane may be what drives grocery store profits, but chances are it doesn't do a thing for your business. Your customers are far more likely to need up to nine contacts from you before they trust you enough to buy from you.

Nine!

That's up sharply from when I entered the marketing field lo those many years ago, and you should expect that number to continue rising over your career too. The good news is that there are some very simple steps you can take to eliminate some of those contacts, or at least shorten the time span from initial contact to first sale.

The first step is to acknowledge that we've created our own monster in our efforts to build our businesses. On average, were bombarded by more than 3,000 sales and marketing messages everyday. That's 3,000 times a day someone waves something in our face, or shouts something in our ear in an effort to get us to buy this, do that, and spend the rest now.

Next, think about how you react to this daily assault. As consumers (for ourselves or our company), weve all gotten very good at tuning ads out online. It's a basic survival tactic.

Like warriors on a dawn patrol in enemy territory, we'll jump from a site two seconds after we land there if we catch a glimpse of an annoying animated gif whosits or doodad in the corner of the page. We use weapons like search engines, popup blockers, personal portal homepages and newsreaders to filter out all but the information we want to see right now.

But we do more than try to avoid them. We sneer at blinking yellow security alerts that offer to eliminate adware deposited on our computer when someone clicks on something like a blinking yellow security alert message. We roll our eyes at Hollywood style hype. And our response to claims of new and improved anything is a yawned, yeah, right.

Weve become jaded, cynical, distrustful, and focused on nothing but fending off all distractions between us and the information were online to retrieve. Is it any wonder we arrive at the end of our day exhausted, with cramped hands, hunched shoulders and clenched jaws?

Now switch hats quickly and look at this from your perspective as a business promoting yourself online. Any way you can help a battle weary consumer get more value out of your website and emails will help you earn their business, right?

Obviously, giving them a clearly marked path from landing point to information source wrapped in an appealing design is something you must do. But that alone may not be enough to win their dollars. You still have to win their attention and their respect before theyll set foot on that path.

Fortunately there is a very simple, affordable way you can do it. With no shouting.

Todays streaming video tools allow you to easily provide visitors with a brief personal message that does more than command instant attention. A simple greeting that you create and manage yourself opens the door to a genuine conversation. All the technical barriers of the web fall away in the face of it and your visitor learns what he needs to know about you in seconds.

How? Your expressions, your gestures, your smile, and your tone of voice, hold more power to attract attention, convey a deeper meaning to your message and convince people of your sincerity than anything else you can do. Scientists have proven that up to 93% of what we learn and remember from a conversation comes from these unspoken, and unwritten clues.

Your human visitors absorb and process all that complicated information a matter of seconds in an attempt to answer one question. Theyre looking for the consistency between your words and your non verbal message that will tell them whether or not they can trust you and believe what you say has value to them.

That makes you the very best tool you have to increase your credibility. If youre feeling too shy to step in front of the camera consider this. As a consumer, you wouldnt dream of turning off your spam filters and popup blockers, or opening every attachment that came your way.

As a businessman using the Internet to generate leads or sales for your company, can you really afford to leave your big gun at home?

Copyright 2005 Liz Micik