by Jess Mickelson

Why do people love to surf the web? To start with, there are as many reasons as there are sites to visit - but most of all you can look and find things you want. That seems like reason enough to me.

The trouble with this situation is that we've learned to interrupt their searching with an array of fairly powerful attention grabbers and an equally broad array of tools to combat them. There are pop-up windows and pop stoppers. There are e-mail spammers and junk e-mail filters. Images dance across the screen with the goal to stand out more than anything else on the page.

The creators of these distractions seem to believe that if they can capture even one customer, then it justifies the negative impact of interrupting thousands and millions of people with their unsolicited products and opinions. Maybe you've noticed.

I want to call it a problem, but it's more like an epidemic. The root of it is failure to communicate, it may be easier to understand this concept in its physical form - If I am rude to you, then you are likely to be rude in return. If I interrupt your web surfing experience will my message still be well received?

Your goal should be to get their complete attention without rudely interrupting them. The best way to do that is to get out your tackle box and find the right lures to attract them to your site. Once they are there, hold out the benefits of your products and services and help them to show their interest by clicking for further helpful information. Once they are clicking you have gained their permission to help them and their full attention.

Here's a little used concept: When they click for more information -consider using an in-between page that gets their attention and gets them happier about continuing on (you've hopefully given them some pertinent and interesting information that got their full attention and prepared them for the next step). Their FOCUS is the main goal. Never underestimate the power of the path.

If you earn the permission of your kind web-surfers then you can build customer loyalty and serve them at a much higher level. Take the high road of ethically providing the best service and instead of hitting them with pop-ups try using more in-between pages that feel like a natural transition to better results.

That way your customers will spend more time thinking about how much they love you instead of how much they hate those annoying pop-ups.

This article was written by Jess Mickelson - Author of "The River of Superior Results" Call him at Supergraphics USA 1-800 353-3646 to get a FREE copy of his new book.