Close your eyes and imagine in your mind’s eye you are walking down the street. On a brick wall you see the picture of the exact pair of shoes you have been searching for! What luck. Next to the picture is a little slot that reads “Insert $50 here, the shoes will arrive at your home in 7-10 business days.” As farfetched as that sounds, it is precisely what online shoppers face every single day. They cannot see you, so they need something else to have enough in the people that want them to hand over their credit card number.

A simple way to build trust and reduce the friction a shopper encounters on the road to make a purchase is to use icons with trusted brands. Here are three every sales page should have:

1) Payment Security
This can be in the form of a “PayPal Verified” icon, an SSL certificate, hacker safe certificate, etc. Let the visitor know how their payment will be handled and use trusted icons to build confidence in the process.

2) Business Credibility
Common icons here include the BBB seal or honest-e online seals that simply say, “we are not shady, in fact, we can prove it because if you click on this seal a third party will verify that we act honestly with our customers.”

3) Delivery Reliability
If you are shipping a physical product to your customers, what better way to borrow some brand equity than to display the UPS, USPS, DHL, or Fedex logo on your website (with permission of course). These companies all have rules about logo use, but are all eager to let your website help them brand their company…while lending you some needed trust for your visitors as well.

I met a recent high school grad over the weekend named Ali. Lest you think of Ali like many other young adults in her shoes, let me explain what sets her apart.

While her cohorts are looking to coast through college on mom and Dad’s dime as they carefully balance school work with partying and “extra-cirricular activities”, Ali wants to race the Iditarod. You heard right. She wants to become a sled dog racer and she wasn’t afraid to say it. In fact, I had only known Ali for a few minutes when she told me this. I’ll be honest, I was taken aback. At 5′6″ ish, very slender, and in a dress (she had just come from church) to say she didn’t quite fit the typical ‘musher’ stereotype would be a gross understatement.

Yet here she was, fearless in her determination to pursue a childhood dream of racing sled dogs and not backing down an inch from that goal. I feel like all of my posts recently have had a similar theme…lifestyle, goals, desires…and this one is no different. How impressive is that to have a dream since childhood that seems so farfetched and impossible to most, yet one that you are ready to go after no matter what. Awesome and impressive, that’s what I say.

So I spent the afternoon reviewing my own goals and personal direction to see if I had any personal Iditarod’s that I was afraid to go after for fear that others might have a good chuckle at my expense. And sure enough…there were. In fact, I spent two hours today planning how I might reach one in particular and identifying obstacles that might stand in my way. Now the only question is…do you have any such goals? And what are we going to do about them?