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Digital Presence & Marketing Strategy

How to Triple Your Online Sales Overnight

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”.

  1. Have an affiliate program built for your eCommerce store or find one.
  2. When a sale is made and a new client is added to your database, email them right away to thank them for their business.
  3. In that same email, or in follow up emails, ask them questions and build the business relationship:
    1. How did they find your website?
    2. Do they have any recommendations or suggestions for your website?
    3. What did they like about the product(s) or service?
    4. What can you add to the site that would make it even better for the end user?
    5. What other products would they like to see in the future?
    6. Would they buy from your website again in the future? Why or why not?
    7. If they could refer the product(s) to their friends and family for a commission, would they?
    8. Do they know what affiliate marketing is?
  4. 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)
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. Encourage them to think about their email list, their friends on Facebook, and offline connections too.
  9. 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…)

8 replies on “How to Triple Your Online Sales Overnight”

Excellent post there Nate! I completely agree with having an affiliate system in place. It’s been my experience that achieving any kind of sustainable sales growth it’s always about the type of system you have in place. The affiliate system I have on my site automates most of the steps you’ve outlined above and makes my business life online much easier.

My suggestions to double or QUADRUPLE your online sale can be boiled down to FOUR major areas:

1) create a solid product/service that is in demand that will solve specific problems/challenges among the people in your target market

2) create your sales funnel – how to deliver the product/service

3) put a system in place to automate the sales funnel as much as possible thus creating more time for you to develop relationships with those in your market.

4) incentivize your target market, sales team, affiliates, etc.. to purchase/sell more of your products.

Thanks for the feedback Trent!

I agree with your suggestions too: I think many times people think past #1, they don’t really understand #2, #3 can just sound really hard to do, especially for a newbie to the world of online marketing, and #4 is the overall goal for which this post was created 🙂

Thanks again for the great comment!

Good idea, Nate.

Three comments:

1) When you start an affiliate program, don’t expect those sales to increase by themselves. Active affiliate program management (which entails affiliate recruitment, education of recruited affiliates, motivation of stagnant ones, etc) is a must.

2) Make affiliates aware of the fact that they must disclose their relationships with you (cf: Federal Trade Commission Endorsement Rules)

3) Food for thought: most e-commerce platform providers do not use their own platform-embedded affiliate systems, but go with established affiliate networks.

Great suggestions Geno! Do you have more information on #2, like an article my readers can look over to see the new rules and regulations?

What “established affiliate networks” do you recommend that won’t break the bank for a start-up eCommerce business owner?

Thanks for the comment!

Nate,

1) Yes, I’ve blogged extensively about the FTC’s new Endorsement Guidelines ever since they were announced. All 12 articles of mine on this topic may be found at http://amnavigator.com/blog/tag/ftc-disclosure-rules/

2) For e-commerce start-ups, I’d recommend ShareASale and AvantLink. Google Affiliate Network is another great option, but you want to make sure your affiliate program is a managed (and not an auto-piloted) one. Here’s a comparison you may find of help: http://amnavigator.com/blog/2009/02/20/compare-north-american-affiliate-networks-side-by-side/

Hope this helps.

Your advice is timely and right on the money. You listed all the steps, that if followed are a recipe for success.
Building relationships and trust is the foundation of any successful business, without exception. This applies whether you’re an affiliate or own your own affiliate business

So thanks Nate, for more great nuggets. I always look forward to your posts, as I invariably come away having learned something I can use in my business.

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