I’ve talked to clients a lot in the past about one key question:

What have you done TODAY to make a sale?

I’m going to take it a step further today and ask another simple question:

What have you done TODAY to find a new client?

Some might ask at this point, “Isn’t making a sale and finding a new client the same thing?”

In the past, my answer was yeah, sure. However, as I’ve thought about it more, I realize that I can make one sale today but then never, ever see that customer again. On the other hand, if my goal is to find CLIENTS, I’m really not only looking for a “sale”, but I’m also looking for a long-term business relationship that I can develop, leading to sale after sale after sale to the same client.

I was reading an article today titled “5 Smart Ways to Find Clients“. They mentioned that finding clients is something almost every small business owner struggles with from time to time. There are quite a few ways to do it, but finding new clients really boils down to putting yourself where your clients are, being approachable, and fulfilling a need or solving a problem. It doesn’t have to be much more complicated than that.

Who’s Your Ideal “Golden” Client?

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…)

For Christmas this year I got my first MacBook Pro. I’ve been really excited about all the functionality and ease of use. As they say, “Once you go Mac, you’ll never go back!” So it is with me.

However, lately I’ve been getting this pop-up and it reminds me of Windows:

So, why is Apple trying to subtly force me to install Safari? I read an article about Firefox being really ticked off about this.

What Apple is doing now with their Apple Software Update on Windows is wrong. It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that’s bad — not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web. What they did yesterday was to use their updater for iTunes to also install their Safari Web browser –what follows is some background and analysis. – John Lilly

What’s the status? Is Safari really that good? Is is better than Firefox?

What’s worse than this initial pop-up is the 2nd one I got:

Persistence can pay off I guess.  But is Apple really that desperate to get Safari on everyone’s computers? I’ll bet many people have uploaded Safari without even knowing what they did. Interesting strategy Apple – please don’t fall in to the Microsoft or Windows campaign…

I know, corny title but it’s true – if you are wondering about the effectiveness of a particular strategy, test, test, test. One of my mentors who sells memory foam mattress products is infamous for this – he’s always testing, trying, evaluating, and then re-testing to see what gets the best response over time.

Over the past few years I’ve worked with hundreds of clients in a variety of industries. Surprisingly, all of them want to see results and make sales I’ve learned through my own testing that there are certain things that work consistently; other things may work great for my industry or what I’m doing, but they may not get the same response for a client doing a teleseminar on getting free advertising on the radio or whatever other ideas you might have.

I recently found a cool post while twittering. It is titled “Do Buttons Get Clicked More Than Text Links? A Case Study” by Justin Premick. It talks all about testing in regards to an email campaign. Justin and his partner Marc wanted to determine

…how to increase clickthroughs on the emails we send to our blog subscribers.

One of the ideas that came up was to replace the text links that we had been using to drive people to the blog with a “button.”

Previous testing on the website had shown that in many cases, buttons make better calls to action than text links do. We thought the same might hold true for email. (italics and bold added for emphasis)

So, Marc created a button-shaped image with the words “Read More” stamped on it:

We then created A/B split tests for our Blog Broadcasts, inserted this image into one version as the call to action (to read the full post on our blog) and continued to use text links in the other version as we had before.

The emails were otherwise identical – we kept subject lines, sending dates/times and templates the same for each version.

They had a question, they thought about things they’d done in the past that had worked, and they began the test.

I like that they pointed out the A/B testing: this is one of the only ways to really tell for sure which of two ideas is going to work best. Otherwise too many factors may contribute to the outcome. Like they said, besides the text link and button, “the emails were otherwise identical”.

They go on to talk about initial results:

As we expected, the button grabbed readers – attention and incentived them to click through, much better than the text link did…At this point, about 2 weeks into our test, it was tempting to say, “The button clearly draws more attention and clicks than text links. Let’s just start using buttons and move on to another test.”

Did they stop there? Nope!

We ultimately ran the button-versus-text split test about 40 times, over the course of several months.

For a while, the button continued to beat the text links – but we noticed that it wasn’t doing so by as large a margin as it first had.

While over our first five tests, the button beat the text by over 33%, after 20 tests it was only winning by an average of 17.29%, and the text version was beginning to hold its own in the win column.

With each new split test, the text asserted itself as the better call to action.

By the time we ended our experiment, text links were consistently outperforming our button, winning nearly two-thirds of the time, by double-digit margins as high as nearly 35%.

What can we learn from this? How does this apply to YOUR website? How do YOU plan to implement this testing case study?

To sum it up best, let’s read on to see what conclusion they came up with:

What works today may not work tomorrow.

Had we stopped our testing after one broadcast, or even one or two weeks, we would have concluded that buttons were better than text links.

It’s important to continually test your email campaigns to make sure that you know what works, rather than assuming you know what works.

Finally, one last point I feel obligated to make:

What works for someone else may not work for you.

The text links won out in our split test, but that doesn’t mean a button can’t be an effective call to action for you.

Again, don’t just take our word for it. Find out for yourself through your own testing.

Running an effective business, both on and offline, takes analysis like this if you plan to see the long term results you want to see. I am currently doing a test right now with a client email campaign and will let you all know the results in the upcoming weeks.

I talked recently about continuing to educate yourself, even after your site starts making sales and things seem to be on the up and up. Education seems to be so essential in whatever field you are in. As some of you know, I love sports. The best athletes seem to be the ones who are “students of the game”. They know what they are going to do in every big situation because they’ve studied it out, watched film and are prepared to succeed. This preparation also has a direct effect on their confidence, which really separates the mediocre from the extremely successful.

One of the things I’ve been studying about a lot lately is online sales conversion. I found a great article that gave a long list of things to do to improve sales online and keep your clients coming back. These are a few of the things I felt were most important:

• Set up an analytics program. I recommend two stat tracking tools – StatCounter.com and Google Analytics. Both are pretty easy to use and free.
• Track visitor trends. Watch where visitors are coming from,what they are doing on your site, what keywords they are searching for to get to your site, and work on improving bounce rate (the visitors who just come to the home page and then leave without doing anything).
• Analyze keywords visitors are using to find your site. Make sure that the products matching the three most popular search terms appear on your home page.
• Resize and compress your images using an image editor. While you can resize an image by simply changing the ‘height’ and ‘width’ attributes in HTML, that doesn’t make the file smaller. So someone may sit for 30 seconds waiting for that postage-sized image to download.
• Always evaluate your home page. Does it have a clear ‘shop now’ call to action, above the fold? If it doesn’t, add one! Some of your visitors don’t even know they can buy from you, direct, online.
• Remove any animation you have on your home page that doesn’t directly sell a product. It’s a distraction. Get rid of it.
• Remember, you’re selling products. Everywhere you show a product, show a price and a ‘buy now’ button, or at least a ‘learn more button’. This is one I need to implement on my clogging shoes website.
• Promote yourself! On your home page, make sure you have a heading that says why you’re great. “We ship overnight” or “All walnuts checked by squirrels” are great, compelling calls to action.
• Ask for the sale! On your home page, show your products! So many online stores fail to do this. Instead, the front page is a testament to their web designers’ talent (or lack of talent). Don’t make that mistake.
• Make products easy to find. If you don’t have a search tool on your site, get one. Google custom search is easy to set up.
• Use your web real estate wisely. Don’t put ‘about us’ in the main navigation. Frankly, no one cares. They want to buy stuff, not hear about you and your three dogs.
• Show multiple ways that visitors can contact you. Put your phone number and other contact information in plain view on each page of your site. It tells people that you’re for real.
• Keep your text simple and easy to read. Use sales copy that scans well. Short, 2-3 sentence paragraphs and bullet points scan more easily than huge paragraphs of text.
• Use a spell checker. Nothing says ‘You will never receive your order’ like a page full of misspellings.
• Get a second opinion. Have someone else proof your writing.
• Get names and emails from visitors. If you don’t make a sale to a new visitor, at least get them to sign up for something. A name and email is almost as good as a sale – it’s future sales if you use the list wisely.
• Paid Search Marketing: If you don’t have a pay-per-click account, start one, at least with Google Adwords. Spend $.10/click or so to start, and see how it helps sales. These should be the first ad dollars you spend online. Nothing else makes sense until you’ve tested the PPC waters.

These are just a few ideas I found that I either implement now or plan to implement in the near future. Let me know how they increase your sales and which ones work best.