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Casual Articles - Your 5-Step Internet Sales Cycle
To clarify and best describe the 3 kinds of marketing, it is necessary to lay out how customers are found, and why they respond to various approaches.There are three markets:1) "I've decided to buy something, and I'm actively looking."2) "I've been thinking of buying something but have been putting it off."3) "I didn't realize your product/service could do that for me - affordably."Scenario #1 is usually for commodities - products and services with known cost and benefit. These are price-sensitive sales, and how to add value is thoroughly documented elsewhere. This market is ready, willing and able. The vast majority of b
3. Follow Up
Marketing studies have always shown that your prospects need to be expo
Promoting offline is a method that many overlook or completely forget about when it comes to advertising their online business. For many people, reading an advertisement in the newspaper, magazine, on a billboard or even in the mail is still a more trusted and safer way to respond to an advert. So this article is going to cover a few of the many ways that you can promote your online business using offline tactics. Some are free, some may require a little money and some thought and cunning.So, lets get into it. Newspaper advertising is still a very beneficial way to go about advertising, and can be extremely profitable. Just about every household these days subscribe to their local and even national newspap
When I meet people and they say they're going to start an "Internet business", I get worried. It's as if that's all they need to know -- not what they're selling or who their customers are. (I mean, when faxes first came out, did you hear people saying they were just starting a "fax business"? Not really.)
The Internet is just one type of media that can sell for your business, and it follows a sales cycle like any other. It's not magic ... it's a process.
But once you WORK that process, it CAN work like magic!
So let's look at the five basic parts of the Internet sales cycle:
1. Collect Leads
Who are you looking for? Your answer should match your ideal client or customer. (Please don't say that's "everybody"!) Do you market to women? Men? What ages? What professions? Certain areas of the country or world? What publications do they read? What interests do they have?
The answers to these questions will help you determine where and how you can find these folks. There are tons of ways to get leads online: search engines, pay-per-click ads, banner ads, articles, blogs, directories, and other types of advertising and promotions.
2. Get Them in Your Funnel
Once you've found who you're looking for, you need to get them in your "sales funnel". On the Internet, that means get them on your list. The best way to make this easy is to offer a free ezine or e-course.
On your website, getting visitors on your list should be your #1 objective! Why? Up to 99% of your first-time visitors will not buy from you or even contact you. They'll take a quick look and then click away, and you've lost them forever. These people are already valuable prospects -- they took the time to find your site and are interested in the subject matter or products you deal with. Does your home page or landing page give the visitor a bazillion choices? If so, ditch the clutter and give them a compelling invitation to sign up for your ezine or e-course.
3. Follow Up
Marketing studies have always shown that your prospects need to be expos
Small business owners mistakenly believe that the size of their business negates the need for strategic planning but the opposite is actually true. Its inherent size is actually what makes strategic planning more important because it can be means for a small business to gradually evolve into a huge and thriving multinational corporation.What Small Business Owners Need to Know about Strategic Planning Planning is one of the five important functions of management, but it’s arguably the most important of all because it’s the first function that any manager or business owners should focus on. Planning sets the goals, mission-vision, and direction for the company. Without it, the other functions may be imp
The Internet is just one type of media that can sell for your business, and it follows a sales cycle like any other. It's not magic ... it's a process.
But once you WORK that process, it CAN work like magic!
So let's look at the five basic parts of the Internet sales cycle:
1. Collect Leads
Who are you looking for? Your answer should match your ideal client or customer. (Please don't say that's "everybody"!) Do you market to women? Men? What ages? What professions? Certain areas of the country or world? What publications do they read? What interests do they have?
The answers to these questions will help you determine where and how you can find these folks. There are tons of ways to get leads online: search engines, pay-per-click ads, banner ads, articles, blogs, directories, and other types of advertising and promotions.
2. Get Them in Your Funnel
Once you've found who you're looking for, you need to get them in your "sales funnel". On the Internet, that means get them on your list. The best way to make this easy is to offer a free ezine or e-course.
On your website, getting visitors on your list should be your #1 objective! Why? Up to 99% of your first-time visitors will not buy from you or even contact you. They'll take a quick look and then click away, and you've lost them forever. These people are already valuable prospects -- they took the time to find your site and are interested in the subject matter or products you deal with. Does your home page or landing page give the visitor a bazillion choices? If so, ditch the clutter and give them a compelling invitation to sign up for your ezine or e-course.
3. Follow Up
Marketing studies have always shown that your prospects need to be expo
"Who's Suzie?"My wife Katrina had been acting strangely ever since I had returned home from my Native American cultural class, not to mention the weird phone call I received just before I left, full of little pauses instead of our usual fast-paced communication. Now that I was home she had been pretty much ignoring me completely, then comes this strange question. Katrina was calm but I could tell there was something under her skin as she chopped up the vegetables for the night's dinner."I don't know anyone named Suzie." I replied. "Well come to think of it, there's my old friend Peter's wife Suzie."My wife remained calm, " Do you want to tell me anything?" she replied. "There is nothing to t
The answers to these questions will help you determine where and how you can find these folks. There are tons of ways to get leads online: search engines, pay-per-click ads, banner ads, articles, blogs, directories, and other types of advertising and promotions.
2. Get Them in Your Funnel
Once you've found who you're looking for, you need to get them in your "sales funnel". On the Internet, that means get them on your list. The best way to make this easy is to offer a free ezine or e-course.
On your website, getting visitors on your list should be your #1 objective! Why? Up to 99% of your first-time visitors will not buy from you or even contact you. They'll take a quick look and then click away, and you've lost them forever. These people are already valuable prospects -- they took the time to find your site and are interested in the subject matter or products you deal with. Does your home page or landing page give the visitor a bazillion choices? If so, ditch the clutter and give them a compelling invitation to sign up for your ezine or e-course.
3. Follow Up
Marketing studies have always shown that your prospects need to be expo
Do you ever wonder what makes a person listen? What qualities make one’s message heard and understood? Even before the understanding process can begin you have to be heard and we simply don’t hear everything around us. Just like elevator music, we tune out sounds that are without variety, inflection, and interest. To capture someone’s attention you have to put interest into the rhythm of your sound.We communicate everyday, with many people in equally as many ways. Indeed, communication can be overwhelming and tedious. But we all have meaning behind our communications and getting your message across is more the province of the speaker than it is the listener. You have control over how you are perceiv
Once you've found who you're looking for, you need to get them in your "sales funnel". On the Internet, that means get them on your list. The best way to make this easy is to offer a free ezine or e-course.
On your website, getting visitors on your list should be your #1 objective! Why? Up to 99% of your first-time visitors will not buy from you or even contact you. They'll take a quick look and then click away, and you've lost them forever. These people are already valuable prospects -- they took the time to find your site and are interested in the subject matter or products you deal with. Does your home page or landing page give the visitor a bazillion choices? If so, ditch the clutter and give them a compelling invitation to sign up for your ezine or e-course.
3. Follow Up
Marketing studies have always shown that your prospects need to be expo
Blogging gives you a great way to learn some extra cash. You can even turn blogging into a full-time career, or a new business. Getting started as a freelance blogger is simple. All you need to do is create a blog, make a few blog posts (these are your work samples), and then look for blogging gigs.Create a blog If you don't already have a blog, creating a blog is your first step. You can do this very quickly. Creating a new blog at blogger.com (which is owned by Google) only takes a minute or two. This is your "sample" blog. Think of this blog as your blogging portfolio.Your blogging topic can be in any subject area that you choose, but give some thought to your potential clients
3. Follow Up
Marketing studies have always shown that your prospects need to be exposed to your message at least 9 times before they'll take action! (Some say it takes even more times on the Internet.)
In traditional sales, real people had to follow up with their prospects via live meetings, phone calls, or postal mailings... over and over and over. What a lot of work! But the Internet makes all this easy, instant, practically free, and ... automatic.
This is where your ezine or e-course works like a charm, following up for you automatically. In fact, with many of the programs available today, you can schedule email messages up to two years away! It's like putting your marketing on auto-pilot, so you can just "set it and forget it"!
4. Close the Sale
The goal of your ezine or e-course should be to drive the reader to buying what you have. Of course you're also providing useful content and information -- that's why they got on your list, and that's why they'll stay on your list. But your underlying objective is to make more sales.
Most people make the mistake of trying to sell from the actual email. That is, drive them straight from the email to taking out their wallet. This is usually not effective for two reasons: 1) you don't have the room in an email to fully explain what you're selling and demonstrate its value to the prospect, 2) it can turn people off who aren't ready to buy yet, and you'll lose those prospects from your list.
The idea of the email is to get them excited about your offering and to get them to CLICK.
Once they click, they're taken to a sales page that you set up specifically for that product or service you're promoting. It's THERE that the prospect will get the full scoop on how great it is, why they need it, how much it costs, how to order, etc.
5. Upsell, and Upsell Again
Here
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