The art of selling whether on the Internet or offline is as old as man, it is a way of life, and there has always been a way of exchanging goods and services for monetary benefits. Selling on the Internet is an art that should be mastered in order for one to excel in it; a lot of materials, CDs and e-books are on the Internet which teach on how to make sales, what am sharing with you here is a proven method that I use in making sales on the Internet. I can assure you most ‘netpreneurs’ won’t teach this method.
Selling is a stage in marketing in which your goods or services are being offered to customers in exchange for money. It should be a relationship. There are two different ways in which prospective customers can see your product; there is one in which you have to send messages, adverts and even look for your prospects on the net, this is called the out bound marketing. Here, you are trying to let people know what you are offering them and most times they are not really in need of your product. The other method is the inbound marketing where your customers will have to ‘beg’ you with their money to have your product. I know you are thinking, “How can a customer beg for a product?” Yes! It happens when you master the art. Actually, the first time I heard that people could beg you for online products I felt the same way you are feeling now until I learnt how it works. It’s simple, as I have also had the good opportunity of prospects calling me to have my product. Which of the two methods do you prefer? I know you will surely want a situation where people call to have your products and not you looking out for them. This is the big secret; choose a profitable niche and pre-sell your customers!
Majority of people that browse the net are not looking for something to buy. Rather, they are looking for a solution to their problems. They will pay anything to anyone that has the answer to their problem. Hey! Let me quickly show you how best to start.
Start with keyword research.
Whatever type of product or service you want to render online, you need a thorough research about it. Keyword is simply what people search for on the net, the words people type in search engines like Google and Yahoo. These are words that are highly optimised by search engines, and they help you to discover the following:
1. Helps you estimate and drive unlimited traffic to your website
2. Helps you know how many people are doing that kind of business on the net
3. How many sites have been developed on that particular keyword
4. How many people (customers or prospects) are looking for your service/product.
5. How much you can pay to advertise your service to the world using the search engines and a lot more (which you can determine through keyword research) To sum it up, keyword research shows you the Popularity, Price, And Competition (PPC) of any online business.
How to determine PPC
Several tools are available which can be used to determine this, the common ones are seen in Yahoo and Google sites. For the purpose of this write-up, let us use Yahoo: www.searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/
Click on keyword selector tool, type in any word you like e.g. gardening and click ok, you will be amazed at what you find out. What you have on your left is the number of times people searched for that keyword last month, and other words related to your keyword. This shows you the popularity of the keyword, more specialised analysis is required to determine the competition and how profitable that keyword is in the chosen niche, like the R/S ratio of the keyword where R is the result and S is the search, this is vital in knowing and choosing your online business. This information helps you package your product.
Don’t forget the secret is to pre-sell your customers. After you must have chosen a niche and packaged your product, please don’t ask your prospects to buy at this time rather you need to pre-sell your product to them first. Pre-selling involves giving your prospects FREE information about your product; you have to make them understand what they stand to get from using your product i.e. the benefits in your product. This should be clearly written and outlined in an article. Everything about your product should be fully explained, this is aimed at building up the confidence of your prospect, the article or e book should answer the following questions on the customers mind.
A. What do I get for buying this product?
B. What is the price of the product?
C. How fast do I get the benefits you promised?
D. What is the guarantee that I will get those benefits?
If these questions are answered to the prospect’s satisfaction, it is likely that he or she will ask for the product. Then, you will have a situation where they buy your product and not you selling to them because customers like to buy and not been sold to. This is an advertising technique that guarantees you a fortune in online marketing. Master the art, and then the sales will come.
