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Strategies To Sell More Online
Free Traffic From The Search Engines This is the most effective sales strategy I use in my business but it requires more effort over a long period of time to build free traffic from the search engines. The search engines want to be our partners and drive traffic to our pages, but only if we have compelling content to offer. You won't attract a lot of traffic to pages designed to advertise and sell products directly from the search engines. The secret to getting traffic from the search engines is to develop lots of great pages and the more specific the better. People search for information to fill desires so capitalize on that concept and build specific pages with information that's in-demand and link to your products. A good website doesn't have one front door everyone enters. It's easier to attract visitors through several highly targeted content rich pages. The idea is to identify and satisfy the reason they found you in the first place, earn their trust before trying to sell anything. "Give first - then ask"Associate And Affiliate Programs The best way to advertise your product or service is free. You do it by recruiting other people using their own resources to market your products. Nothing else compares with the raw power of the associate or affiliate program. In addition, Affiliate Programs are the least costly way to acquire new customers in the shortest period of time. Affiliate Programs work because you only pay for results. You get free access to other people's time, efforts and advertising. It's more profitable because your commissions are paid out of your profits. If nothing is sold you have no commissions to pay. Using Affiliate Programs is often referred to as "Performance Based Marketing." You pay ONLY for sales, not impressions or click-troughs, Zero out of pocket expense! It just does not get any better. The only downside of running an associate program is that you need to invest in software to automate tracking of sales and commissions. Visit the following website to learn more about how you can set up and manage your own affiliate program. You will sell more of your products and services with this approach than with any other. Don't forget, your affiliates are often your ideal customers.Affiliate Program Management Software
http://www.smithfam.com/url/assoctrac.html
Should you want to concentrate on selling products through Affiliate Programs check out the following ebook. It is great resource for affiliate program managers.Winning the Affiliate Game by Declan Dunn
http://www.smithfam.com/url/winning.html
If you can't afford the software to manage your affiliate program at first, consider using Clickbank as a third party provider. They will collect and disperse your commissions for you and, it's only $50.00 to set up a merchant account with them. I use their services to collect funds from credit cards and checks, and for the affiliate program for my ebook packages, it's worked out fine.
http://www.smithfam.com/signup.htmlYour Personal Recommendation If you have earned respect in any specific subject, whatever you recommend will naturally carry weight corresponding to the respect earned. Many people abuse the power of a personal recommendation. The less often you give one, the more weight it will carry. When I find a great product or service, I often take the time to say thanks. I later discovered people actually follow up and check out testimonials before buying a product or service. In fact, giving and getting testimonials is in itself an excellent linking strategy. It not only helps establish credibility for others and for their products; it helps establish your own.Newsletter Ads Ads in newsletters and ezines are great ways to attract customers. The key is to target your ad and ezine combination as precisely as possible. You want your offer to go to qualified people already shopping for your product, people who can afford to buy it. Nobody wins when your ezine ad doesn't sell. The number of subscribers and the targeted sales expectation determines ad rates. Advertisers must keep costs low enough that ads are profitable. Publishers must also keep rates high enough to make advertising worth the time and effort required to run advertising. Newsletter and ezine ads are most cost effective for products with good profit margins. For example, if you bought a $50 ad that went to 5000 subscribers and your profit was $1 for each sale you would need 50 total sales, or 10 sales per thousand to break even. On the other hand, if your product had a profit of $10 you would only need 5 sales to break even. It's a whole lot easier to make five sales than 50 sales. When you list a URL in a newsletter ad, put a question mark followed by a code right after your URL. This is an easy way for you to check your results to determine if your ad was profitable. Here is an example.
http://www.ebook2004.com/special/?sf100 Your browser will ignore the question mark and everything after it but your server logs will list your special URL with its code as if it was a separate URL. Using this method, you can tell which ads and publications yield the best results. You can also ask prospects to reply to your ad with a special Id number, or use a unique email address to track each ad. Setting up a series of follow-up messages is perhaps the best way to not only track leads but a great way to get the sale. Test your ad several times with small changes until you get one that consistently sells before running a big promotion.Opt-In Email You absolutely MUST develop an opt-in email list. If not, you need to start building one today. Start by keeping a list of your customers. The easiest sale you can make is usually to someone you with whom you have already established a trusting relationship. This is especially true online. Build several small-specialized lists and only mail to your own lists. Email them when you have something new or important to share. Don't hard sell to your opt-in lists, or they will unsubscribe. It's also a good idea to send from time to time non-commercial information you are confident they will be interested in. I personally don't use "opt-in" lists for commercial mailings often. Frankly I am concerned about how commercial messages are often regarded. Remember, it's not an opt-in list any more if someone complains. The best form of opt-in mailing list is a regular newsletter or ezine. They work great because:
People's interests change, so always provide an easy way for people to remove their address from your list. I always provide a simple way for people to add or remove their address *AND* (this is important) I print their email address as it appears on my list. I use a great low-cost program that sends personalized opt-in email messages to the lists I maintain.AYMail - For Sending Personalized Email
http://www.aysoft.com/Getting & Giving Links Getting people to link to your website is a great way to draw traffic, but again there is a downside. Usually when people link to your website, there should be some benefit to the party offering the link. People usually offer links to websites that are content rich; ones that are not in direct competition with them. They tend to offer links to your free content, but not usually to any product or service you are selling. Finding websites to link to yours is hard, time-consuming work. If you have a content rich website, it is worth the effort to ASK others to link to you. On the other hand, providing links to other websites or exchanging links may NOT be in your best interests. Whenever you provide a link to others, you are offering your visitors the opportunity to leave your website. You don't want to send your hard earned visitors away if you can help it. Manage your off-website links carefully. Don't waste your traffic linking to websites that are already getting plenty of traffic of their own. For example, don't link to Netscape or Microsoft; they don't need your link and they won't link to you. If you run a website with a graphics theme, you might want to offer a link to companies that offer great graphics resources or to companies that sell products like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. Whenever possible try to earn a commission when you send your visitors away from your website.Banner Ads Banner ads work sometimes, but they work much better for the person or company selling you the banner placement. Considering that most web surfers have learned to ignore banners, their effectiveness has been in doubt for some time now. If you want to use banners as a part of your overall marketing program, try to find someone who will only charge you for the number of hits or banner clicks you get, not for the number of times your banner is displayed. Better yet, find someone who will charge only for the sales you make. Most Affiliate Programs will supply you with banners to put on your website, but almost any other method will yield better results. Animated banners work better than static banners. However animated banners tend to annoy your visitors. Banner co-ops are another way to market with banners. Usually you host a banner for someone else. When you display their banner twice, they display yours on someone else's website once. The co-op sells the second banner display to third party advertiser. Banner co-ops depend on you to help them sell banner displays to their paying customers. But why display 2 banners in return for one? You would think that choosing a banner co-op that offers targeted exchanges would be better, but think again. Let's say you are selling widgets. You display two banners on your website for your competition's widget in exchange for displaying one banner for your widget. Am I missing something? Banners slow downloading time, which can send your visitors elsewhere. Use them sparingly. Try not to display more than one per page and try to keep the loading size under 7k in size (about 4-8 seconds).Unsolicited Email - Spam I mention this method because it appears to be the cheapest way to get your message out. Many people use unsolicited email because, on the surface, it appears to be the cheapest way to reach a lot of people. Nothing could be farther from the truth. If you employ targeted, unsolicited commercial email, you may make a few sales, but in the end you will destroy your businesses reputation. If you are selling someone else's product, you will not only hurt your reputation, but theirs as well. Moreover, you may get sued or lose your Internet service. Sure, you see a ton of Spam emails telling you that bulk email pays. It's true, bulk email pays; but only for those selling lists, or bulk mailing services. Even so called "opt-in" lists do not pay off. People "opt-in" to mail lists to receive specific information, NOT to receive your commercial messages. More importantly, even if they checked yes on a form somewhere indicating they would like to receive information on a specific topic, the recipient may complain at any time. You can lose your Internet service, and your hosting company may dump your files without even giving you the chance to defend your actions. They may have wanted information on business opportunities in January, but in March they may be really fed up all the email they are getting. Personally, I do not reward anyone for sending me commercial email that I did not specifically request - I'll go out of my way to buy from someone else.ROBERT SMITH Since 1996 Robert has helped thousands successfully market their Internet based home business. You'll find tons of free marketing tools & resources on his Internet Marketing web site at: >>http://www.smithfam.com/ Master's WebKit CD
>>http://www.smithfam.com/webkit/You can reach him by phone at: (541) 689-1847 PSTand by email at. <Contact Robert Smith>
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