Your 5-Step Cycle for Endless Internet Sales! Part 2

I just finished attending the Glazer-Kennedy Information Marketing Summit in beautiful Baltimore, Maryland. This is the second half of a two-part article by Ali Brown on how to boost your sales using a standardized process. Part one covered the first two steps. Part two covers the last three steps.

Your 5-Step Cycle for Endless Internet Sales! Part 2
by Alexandria K. Brown, “The E-zine Queen”

3. Follow Up

Marketing studies have always shown that your prospects need to be exposed to your message at least 9 times before they’ll take action! (Some say it takes even more times on the Internet.)

In traditional sales, real people had to follow up with their prospects via live meetings, phone calls, or postal mailings… over and over and over. What a lot of work! But the Internet makes all this easy, instant, practically free, and … automatic.

This is where your ezine or e-course works like a charm, following up for you automatically. In fact, with many of the programs available today, you can schedule email messages up to two years away! It’s like putting your marketing on auto-pilot, so you can just “set it and forget it”!

4. Close the Sale

The goal of your ezine or e-course should be to drive the reader to buying what you have. Of course you’re also providing useful content and information — that’s why they got on your list, and that’s why they’ll stay on your list. But your underlying objective is to make more sales.

Most people make the mistake of trying to sell from the actual email. That is, drive them straight from the email to taking out their wallet. This is usually not effective for two reasons: 1) you don’t have the room in an email to fully explain what you’re selling and demonstrate its value to the prospect, 2) it can turn people off who aren’t ready to buy yet, and you’ll lose those prospects from your list.

The idea of the email is to get them excited about your offering and to get them to CLICK.

Once they click, they’re taken to a sales page that you set up specifically for that product or service you’re promoting. It’s THERE that the prospect will get the full scoop on how great it is, why they need it, how much it costs, how to order, etc.

5. Upsell, and Upsell Again

Here’s the biggest mistake I made when I started to sell my first information product online (Boost Business With Your Own Ezine): It was the ONLY product I had to offer for 2 whole years! So once anyone bought it, I had nothing else in my funnel to sell them. (Marketers also call this having a “back end” product.) That meant I had to work extra hard at finding new prospects all the time.

Smart salespeople know it’s much easier to sell to people who have already bought from you than to constantly go out and find new prospects.

I finally realized I already had thousands of valuable customers who knew, liked, and trusted me. They’d already purchased a product from me that they were happy with. So I learned more about WHAT ELSE they wanted.

That’s when I began churning out valuable new products and programs that my customers ate up like crazy. And that strategy took me from sales of less than 5,000 dollars a month to these days averaging 50,000 dollars a month!

Now, that didn’t happen overnight! In fact, I recommend starting with ONE product like I did. It makes learning this entire process much easier, and your results will come faster. Once you get the system down, you can start adding more valuable offerings to your prospects and customers.

Learn It, Work It, Live It

Pretty simple, yes? Based on this model, you may see the missing links in your own Internet sales cycle. Have patience, keep learning, fill in these gaps, and you’ll start to see the magic work for you.

© 2005-2006 Alexandria K. Brown

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Online entrepreneur Alexandria K. Brown, “The E-zine Queen,” publishes the award-winning ‘Straight Shooter Marketing’ weekly ezine with 20,000+ subscribers. If you’re ready to jump-start your marketing, make more money, and have more fun in your small business, get your FREE tips now at www.EzineQueen.com