Do you make money online?
Why?
Or maybe a better question is, Why not?
Last year alone, Amazon.com made $24.5 BILLION dollars in online sales.
Why didn’t you get a piece of that pie?
I’ve been running online businesses and teaching others how to start an online business for over six years now and have learned one main point that I can’t teach clearly enough…
Online Marketing is about SALES!
If you want to actually make money online, you have to provide a product or service that has enough demand and that you won’t have to compete with the likes of Wal-Mart and Costco to sell.
Online marketing is NOT just about selling products ONLINE!
To me, this is one of the most common misconceptions about an internet business – that most, if not all, of the sales are made online.
First off, yes, your eCommerce website can be the PORTAL to sell your products online. But you’re not necessarily LIMITED to only selling them there.
Some of the biggest sales I’ve made online have been because of connections made OFFLINE that then got the ball rolling to finalize the sales online.
Do you have an affiliate program for your website?
I was talking with a client today about his website that sells cool pencil cases. He’s using a website builder that has a custom affiliate program BUILT IN! I was pretty excited for him when I heard that he’d made about 70 sales within the last week.
I asked him how many of those sales he’d made were now affiliates that were promoting his products to their friends and family in exchange for a little commission on sales they helped create.
He told me 1 person was and they’d helped generate FOUR sales already.
I then did the math. 1 person for 4 sales….?
That means, if he got all 75 people who bought from him already to do a bit of affiliate promoting…. He be “in the money” for (at least) 300 sales!
From 4 sales to 300 sales is actually A LOT MORE than TRIPLING YOUR ONLINE SALES!
Are you seeing where I’m going here…?
How to Build a Successful Affiliate Program for Your Ecommerce Store
As we talked more, ideas started coming about what he could be doing. Here are some I want to collect on “paper”.
- Have an affiliate program built for your eCommerce store or find one.
- When a sale is made and a new client is added to your database, email them right away to thank them for their business.
- In that same email, or in follow up emails, ask them questions and build the business relationship:
- How did they find your website?
- Do they have any recommendations or suggestions for your website?
- What did they like about the product(s) or service?
- What can you add to the site that would make it even better for the end user?
- What other products would they like to see in the future?
- Would they buy from your website again in the future? Why or why not?
- If they could refer the product(s) to their friends and family for a commission, would they?
- Do they know what affiliate marketing is?
- Make some of these questions direct links to a page on your website that explains more about what they can do to make money or help a cause or whatever…(a landing page with an invitation to do something)
- On the landing page, teach them how they can set up their own affiliate program on your site and get PAID as they refer your products to friends and family who then BUY your products.
- Teach them about http://bit.ly – a website address shortening service that basically “hides” all the affiliate tracking information and keeps the website address short and easy to remember.
- If they want to do “Offline Sales”, teach them about how they could collect the money from buyers of your products offline and then go through their own affiliate link to make sure they get credit for the sale.
- Encourage them to think about their email list, their friends on Facebook, and offline connections too.
- Start helping them make a list of people they think would be ideal for the product or service you offer.
These were just a few of the ideas that came to mind as we talked about the success he was having so far with his new online business.
What are other suggestions you have to double, triple, even QUADRUPLE your sales online?
(by the way, the title is an example of a Flashy Headline and nothing else; yes, I do think a process like this has potential to triple sales overnight, but I DON’T believe in “get rich quick” schemes at all…)