Small Business Marketing Strategies

Why You are a Salesperson Whether You Think So or Not

By Christian

Everyone is a salesperson. Just like everyone is an actor. This is a responsibility that most of us do not want to undertake, because it means extra work. It means paying attention to every detail. But even though it’s extra work, it’s worth it. The fact is, we cannot decide how things are; we can only decide whether or not we are going to be effective and successful, given the circumstances.

Running a blog is hard work, and if you’re reading this you are someone who wants to learn to do it effectively. This is a theme that comes up many times in my writing, and I think it’s important to cover it regularly, because there is SO much information steering us down the wrong path…a path that will waste our time. This is information that caters to the little voice inside all of us that is always seeking a shortcut. We need to destroy that voice and get to work!

Why to be a Salesperson

Being an effective salesperson means that you will be effective in getting the results you want out of your readers. It means you will present yourself deliberately and professionally. It doesn’t mean your blog needs to be prim and proper…it means you need to present yourself in a manner consistent with getting the results you want and need to run your business effectively.

Being an effective salesperson means you will not be afraid to ask for the order. Maybe this means you will ask people to comment your posts, maybe it means you will ask them to buy your product or services…but it means you WILL ask for what you want. This is something most bloggers fail to do.

Not only will you ask for the order, but you will study and perfect the craft of asking for the order daily…constantly seeking better and more effective ways to improve what you do. Maybe you need to phrase your requests differently. Maybe you need to use a pop up window. Maybe you need to frame your request in red and put it in the upper right hand corner of the page (the statistically most effective placement for an opt-in box). Details matter. As an effective salesperson, you will care about these details, and you will attend to them daily.

What Happens When You’re NOT a Salesperson

If you’re NOT a salesperson, you will have a much easier time of it. You will simply write what you want, post when you feel like it, and you will expect your readers to do what you want them to do. Some of them will, but most will not. Success will remain a nebulous and mystical phenomenon to you, because you’ll see a lot of other websites and blogs that seem to you to be very similar to what you’re doing. Yet some of them will have vastly more traffic and make a lot more money than you, and you will always wonder why. After all, you will think to yourself, you’re blogging. You’re working every day, so why aren’t you getting the results?

At some point you will decide that it just isn’t for you, and you will quit…not ever having realized that you were a salesperson. You thought you were a blogger. You thought wrong.

Success is in the Details

You are a salesperson, whether you think you are or not. That is the business we’re all in. If we do this for money, then we need to get results…it’s just how it is. A lot of what I write about will be conceptual stuff like this, but it all leads into a detailed analysis of the mundane details. Details which will make many of your eyes glaze over. If you’re one of the ones who glazes over, it will be because you will not want to do the work I’m describing. That is the moat which separates the successful and unsuccessful…in blogging, internet marketing or any business endeavor. Big success is made up of millions of tiny, seemingly insignificant successes. Success is in the details.

Does it matter whether you use Verdana or Times New Roman on your sales page? Yes, it matters. A true salesperson knows this and is EXCITED to determine which one to use. Why? Because choosing the right mundane details is what will create tiny, incremental improvements. And those tiny improvements, done consistently over time…THAT’S what makes you a huge success. A salesperson knows this.

Those of us who are successful at making money online have embraced this fact. And we’ve embraced the work that comes with it. We do what it takes. Are you a salesperson? You better believe it!

Are You Wasting Time on SEO?

By Christian

Search engine optimization. It’s a huge concern for anyone involved in internet marketing. Perhaps you want to sell products online. Maybe you’re an affiliate marketer. Maybe you run a home based business of some sort. Maybe you’re in real estate. Maybe you’re a lawyer. Any number of businesses are well-served to have a strong online presence. Some of us sell products; some of us sell services, but we all have something in common…we want to show up in the search engines! So how do we do it?

Perhaps it has not escaped your attention that search engine optimization (SEO) is a significant concern for nearly every business these days. And perhaps, if you’ve looked into it at all, you’ve witness that sheer magnitude of information on this topic. Perhaps you’ve become intimidated a bit? How can you possibly become an expert on SEO as well as everything else necessary to be successful and make money online?

Here’s the answer…and it’s an answer you might not like. The answer is, you can’t. You don’t have time to become an SEO expert. Don’t waste your time. Hire an expert. This is a fundamental principle of success in business…

Don’t try and do every single thing yourself!

So many of us are still wrapped up in the the idea that the internet should be free and easy. Truth be told, there is a LOT of free content. Take this site for example. I post all these articles for free, just like bloggers do. And I will eventually charge money for the information products I’m developing, and I do charge for consultation. But 99% of this site is free. That’s the way the internet works, but it has taken me years of reading, trial and error, many many late nights and working through a lot of frustration to learn what I’ve learned.

Do you have a business you want to promote online? Do you want to set up a social networking strategy? Do you want to set up a blog? Do you want to get rockin results from your internet marketing? No doubt you’ve said yes to at least one of these things…or else why are you reading this blog? 🙂

If you have years to learn the ropes, then get started and do it that way. It is the most comprehensive and economical way to solve your internet marketing problems. But if you have a business to run, and you want to concentrate on selling stuff and living your life, don’t try to become an SEO expert on top of everything else. Just don’t go there. You honestly have better things to do with your time!

A Fundamental Business Principle

Should you hire an SEO expert for an hour to solve a problem? The hour will probably cost you $100-200, which is a good amount of money. The question should not be answered by deciding whether or not you think $200 is a “good deal” or not. Look at your options.

Solve the problem by paying a professional ($200).
Solve the problem yourself (investment of your time…how much time?).
Don’t solve the problem.

First, of all let’s look at the last one. Don’t skip over it. Maybe your problem just isn’t important and you can do without addressing it. Trying to handle every single little thing that comes across your desk is business suicide. You have to pick and choose. But if your internet marketing solution is something you’ve decided really needs to be addressed, you have to solve the problem.

Second, consider what solving the problem yourself entails. Do you have the time? How much is your time worth? How much time do you think it will take for you to solve this problem yourself? If you estimate you can do as good a job in an acceptable time frame, then you should solve the problem yourself. If not, you should hire someone to handle it for you.

If you want to run your business like a real business, the last thing you want to do is to try and do every single thing yourself.

Is Your Niche a Good Niche or a Bad Niche?

By Christian

I’d like to take just a minute to dispel, as well as I can, the myth of there being such a thing as a “good niche” or a “bad niche”. Do you think there is such a thing as a “good niche” or a “bad niche”? I’m going to argue that there is not. You’ve either done adequate research or not. That’s all there is.

No Such Thing as a “Bad Niche”

There is no such thing as a bad niche! You can make money on nearly anything. The point of this post is to hopefully get you to look past the niche and to look at what really matters. What you sell doesn’t matter nearly as much as how you sell it. Look at all the millions of dollars being made around the world by selling substandard, crappy products. I’m not advocating low quality of course, but I’m saying that your business plan matters much more than what you’re selling.

Thinking about whether your niche is good or not puts the focus on the wrong place. The focus needs to be on research and planning.

Is there strong demand for what you’re selling?
How have you verified this?
What are you offering to fill this demand?
How much is your target market willing to pay for this?
How do you know?
How do you plan to reach your target audience?
What sites do your target buyers visit most regularly?
Do your visitors prefer text or video content? How do you plan to engage them?
Are your buyers more inclined to respond to a free ebook as a premium, or are they more responsive to a physical product, or perhaps a service of some sort?
Again…how do you know?

These are questions you should be able to answer. You don’t need a “good niche”. You need a good business plan!

No Such Thing as a “Good Niche”

Just as there is no such thing as a bad niche, there is also no such thing as a good one. There is no magical niche that will make you successful. If you’ve done your research and found that you have an actual, valuable solution to a real demand that exists, and you have a solid plan on how you’re actually ready, willing and able to supply that solution, you will be successful, period.

Likewise, if you have an awesome product that people really would like, but you fail to connect to the right people, or if you fail to market the product properly in any number of ways, you will fail, period. So it’s entirely possible to have a “good niche” and still fail. Your niche doesn’t matter. Your plan matters. Research matters. Do the work up front. It’s worth it!

Why Making Money Online with Advertising is not My Focus

By Christian

So many people have questions about how to monetize their website! I talk with a lot of business owners, real estate professionals and others who really want to ramp up their social networking and blogging efforts and really start to get results. This is very smart, and I applaud your interest in this hugely powerful technology. Internet marketing is the place to be if you run a small business, because it allows you to be very targeted, to connect with your buyers in a very personal way, and it’s more cost effective than any other form of marketing out there! That said, most people seem to have a very limited view of how to make money using these tools.

How Much Does Advertising Pay?

This is the main reason I want to focus on selling things as opposed to advertising…advertising just doesn’t pay very well! So many people want to make money online with advertising, and the thing I think these people don’t understand is that the average ad will pay out something in the neighborhood of $3 cpm. That’s $3 per thousand visitors. So to put that in a real world example, if you have a pretty successful site that’s getting 30k visitors a month, you will get $300 from an ad. It’s very possible to make a lot less than this, but it’s not very likely you’ll make much more.

$300 is nothing to scoff at. If you run 10 ads on your site, you’re looking at something like $3k a month.

This is why I’m not against advertising, it’s just the reason I don’t focus on it. If you have a site that is getting tens of thousands of visitors a month or more, and you want to get some ads up and running, use these:

Google Adsense
Text Link Ads
Kontera

With these three well-known and proven solutions, you’ll be able to get ad revenue coming in from your site. Google Adsense can be put up anytime, but the other two will require that you have adequate traffic to your site before you can get approved to use their ad network.

If you want to make money online with ads, I recommend visiting John Chow and downloading his ebook. It’s free, and it has some good tutorials on how to set these things up in detail.

Again, setting up ads is fairly simple. It’s a no-brainer. If you have some good traffic, you can put up some ads and get a few thousand a month. Not bad. And since I get questions about it often enough, I wanted to have this post up to direct you to the right resources.

Why I Focus on Other Ways to Make Money Online

I honestly think there are way better ways to make money online than with advertising. Like I said, I’m not against it, and I’m not saying I’ll never put ads up on Next Level Blogger, but if I do they will be minimal and non-intrusive. It’s not the point, and it’s not the focus of Next Level Blogger.

You can sell a product or a service and do so much better. It takes more work, but it’s a vastly better return on your time, and it has the added benefit of creating a better, more targeted experience for your readers.

To use a very basic example, let’s say you put out an ebook in your area of expertise. Let’s say it’s a 100 pages long, and you decide to sell it for $47. You can put up a landing page and sell the ebook through that page. I’ve written before about how some of my sites get far above average conversion rates, but even if you get an average 2% coversion, that means you’ll sell 20 out of a 1000 visitors. Are you following me? That’s $940 of revenue, vesus $3 that you would have made with Adsense. See why I focus on selling as opposed to advertising? The difference is massive. Yes, it takes more work. Yes, you need to take extra measures to make sure you’re traffic is targeted. Yes, you’ll need to set up a way to take orders and process credit card payments. Yes, you’ll have to field questions and the occasional person demanding a return, etc. Money ain’t free! But I’ll take $940 over $3 any day. How about you?

The CASE Method of Success

By Christian

Terry Watson is a sales trainer I’ve learned a lot from, and I credit him with teaching me the CASE method of success. Copy And Steal Everything. Couldn’t be simpler, and I love it when things are simple! It’s one of the great myths of all time that if you want to be great, you need to be 100% original and do everything on your own. People take on too many things if you ask me. Success requires a lot of work; why make it harder than it needs to be?

I’m NOT saying to not be true to yourself, and I’m surely not advocating plagiarism. What I’m saying is that the model for success is likely already laid out for you. Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to!

Who’s already out there doing what you want to do? Go out and model your efforts after them. Before I started selling things online and doing internet marketing, I learned how to sell face-to-face. I started in direct sales. I learned right away that if I wanted to make any money, I needed to sell, and if I wanted to learn to sell, all I needed to do was watch what successful salespeople were doing. I basically became a stalker! I followed them everywhere. I literally sat in on their sales presentations and watched their every move. I took notes. I copied their techniques. I learned to say the same things and act the same way in front of a prospect. I modeled my behavior to match theirs in every way I could think of, and when I did this a funny thing happened. I started to make money. I started to make sales. And that’s how it started.

I found that I could simply choose what level of success I wanted and then achieve it by simply modeling others who had already done it. I started off copying the top people in my office, and within months, I had learned their techniques and was the top salesman in my office. Then I branched out and started talking with the top performers in OTHER offices around the country. This increased my performance to where I was the #1 salesman out of 1500 in my division.

This is what the CASE method will do for you when you apply it yourself to YOUR business. I guarantee it. Success is free for the taking. All you have to do is go steal it 🙂