Some leading sales professionals say that it often takes seven or more sales messages before prospective customers buy anything. They also confirm that it’s generally simpler to sell to a referral, because word of mouth is perhaps the single most powerful weapon in the sales industry, especially when positive testimonials about your products and services are given.  Converting prospects into buyers can be challenging so here are 3 way to help you improve sales conversion:

1. The use of an autoresponder is a major online marketing tool. It could mean the difference between long-term success and one-hit wonder. Collecting leads with your autoresponder should be the lifeline to your business. Definitely request names and email addresses, and based on what products and services you are providing, mailing addresses and telephone numbers could be incredibly ideal for additional ways to follow up with each person.

2. Once you start growing your list providing valuable content to your subscribers should be the primary key before considering monetizing. Bombarding your subscribers with sales offers and pitches will ensure the loss of subscribers. You have to nurture your list of customers and prospects like you would a newborn baby by giving them information that is a benefit to them. It would mean much more to your business if you provide free qualitative content that will eventually convert your subscribers into loyal and long-term customers. You can then begin to provide a price list of all the products and services that you offer using the following as some examples:

• An insert
• Direct marketing package
• PDF to be made available via autoresponder
• Order forms
• Product Descriptions
• and other sales material

Using the contact information your subscribers have provided allows you to follow up in multiple ways. You can mail postcards or sales letters, make phone calls, and other promotional options.

Remember to send announcements of new sales and products/services, monthly updates, and a request for referrals. You could probably survive on referral requests alone if you have a great product or a service that is in great need and not enough available to go around, so keep that in mind.

3. Another great approach to your future earnings is by creating other products and services.  You can easily do this by re-purposing your current content and growing that into various income streams but with the primary goal of helping your customers first.  Create quality products and it is inevitable you will grow your income.  Find out what your customers and subscribers need and want and give it to them!

Based on what the leading sales professionals have confirmed regarding the amount of times it takes on the average for prospects to make a purchase, would it make sense to provide them with information that will be worth their while to make certain they continue returning instead of bashing them with sales offers? Absolutely! Converting prospects into buyers can be challenging but if you nurture them correctly you will improve sales conversion – guaranteed.

Hello again and welcome to Part 4 of the current series “A Killer Plan For Internet Income” and if you missed any of the entries before this one there is a link leading to the previous post at the end of each entry.  In the last post I covered Phase 1 which would be best described as the foundation of the plan, so Phase 2 will cover building on that foundation to ensure you make some money.

Here is a Killer Plan For Internet Income – Part 4:

For this phase of the plan it is important you fully understand what an autoresponder is, so I want to get that out of the way now.

What Is An Autoresponder?

The simple way to explain an autoresponder is to think of it as a program that automatically responds to email sent to it.

Autoresponders not only automatically answers emails sent but it remembers who sent the email and follows up with them whenever you tell it to… automatically.

Effective sales people know that the fortune is in the follow-up. This is why good sales people spend so much time following up on past clients, making repeat sales calls, sending postcard reminders, sending out brochures to the same people, going through their list of contacts to see who they haven’t talked to in a while.

Autoresponders takes care of following up with your online prospects automatically.

Phase 2

1. I’m going to assume you went with Trafficwave because you receive a 30 day Free Trial with no payment required to join and the point of this plan is to start making money without spending any of your own, so please go to your back office and on the left hand side of the page you will see an area called Quick Links and click on Training Articles.  Then choose the category Autoresponder. Then choose from the  list of Articles – How To Create An Autoresponder.

It’s very simple and the training material at TW is easy to understand but again if you need help, please contact me at ask@jimmyadames.com (SPAMMERS will burn in hell) and I will do my best to help you.

2. Once you have created an autoresponder you must add a series of messages to begin building a relationship with your subscribers.  For an example, sign up to one of my lists by visiting the following squeeze page and enter your name, email address and click submit and you will get a Free Report titled (click on the title) Discover How Autoresponders Can Make You More Money and pay close attention to the whole process from beginning to end.  You will receive a series of emails throughout the next few days.

3. Add an opt-in area on your blog/website by copying over the HTML code provided by Trafficwave or the autoresponder you have decided to go with.  At TW you would go to your back-office (provided you set up an autoresponder), click on Autoresponder at the top then Autoresponder Campaigns, then at Manage A Campaign choose the autoresponder you set up, then click on Capture Pages on the left hand side, then Generate Capture Form Data (HTML), then copy and paste over the code to your Blogger site in the layout section.

This may all sound confusing but once you get the hang of it you will be kicking yourself for not having  autoresponders sooner.  Just like anything else you need to read the training material at whatever autoresponder service you decide to go with.  I went ahead and added an opt-in section to the blog I’ve set up for this plan as your guide: CLICK HERE.  You can place it wherever you see fit, but I wanted to squeeze in both the About Me section (for branding purposes) so I placed the opt-in section above the area where the blog posts (once we start adding articles) will begin.

4. There are 2 other components I need you to add to the HTML code you have copied over – both will have to be URL’s that will lead to a page once someone subscribes to your list and the other other will be to the page after the person confirms their subscription.

You will see these instructions regarding this:

Additional Website Intergration Fields

Landing URLs: To allow a more “seamless” integration with your website, you may insert URL values for these two form fields:

subscrLandingURL – redirects to specified URL after a person subscribes to your campaign.

confirmLandingURL – redirects to this specified URL after a person confirms their subscription.

These form fields must contain a valid URL (e.g. http://www.yourwebiste.com/thankyoupage.html)

You can use the following services for some of those components:

OTO Goldmine – this system offers the subscriber a One Time Offer and you can earn some commission if they decide to purchase the package offered or they can say No Thanks and go to a thank you page you can set up or have the default page kick in.

Instant Bonus Page – this system offers free bonuses to the person once they confirm their subscription you can send them to a download page and have some free bonuses added where you get other opportunities to earn some commissions if they decide to upgrade at any of the free bonuses offered.

They are both FREE to join!

5. Other than an opt-in form at your blog/website you want to have a lead capture or squeeze page.  This is simply a page encouraging you to sign up to their list by offering something of quality in return.  It could be a free e-book, report, software, newsletter membership, free membership to a site, etc.  TW provides you with Lead Capture templates or you can create your own and copy over the HTML code as you would do to add the opt-in form to your blog/website.  If you signed up to the list I mentioned above you saw my squeeze page, here it is again – CLICK HERE.

For this list, I decided not to go with an OTO page so it goes straight to a Thank You page with instructions to whitelist my email address and the subscription confirmation leads to a download page I created myself using My Free Website Builder because I have a place to host the page and quality hosting is NOT free.

Here are 2 other powerful marketing tools that can help you with both squeeze pages and info products to give away to help you build your list:

Instant Squeeze Page Generator – this system will allow you to choose from various squeeze page templates including e-books and reports you can give away to your subscribers if they sign up to your list.  All you have to do is follow the steps and add in the lead capture HTML code from your autoresponder.

Viral E-Book Explosion – this system gives you dozens of e-books to give away and also gives you the opportunity to add your referral links in these e-books to add more income streams.  They also show you a lot of ways to promote these e-books to give you a lot of exposure and subsequently more traffic and of course more subscribers.

and YES, these are FREE to join too!

Part 5 will cover Traffic Generation and getting people to your blog/website and lead/squeeze pages.  It doesn’t matter what you are promoting, how great your site is or how kick-ass the free stuff you are giving away, if no one knows about it then you will be spinning your wheels because there will be no chance in making any money online.  I doubt if I can cover all that in one entry without driving you nuts, so I may increase the plan to a 7 part series but not more than that.

Here is the link to the previous entry:

Internet Marketing Tips – A Killer Plan For Internet Income – Part 3

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification