Living Well On Less
Less Money - Less Stress - More satisfaction
You only need three things to sell online.
WEBSITE - A place for web pages/blogs.
TRAFFIC - people coming to look at what you're offering.
FOLLOW UP - An email auto responder with an ongoing series of messages. This builds trust and sales automatically.
WEBSITE
Don't spend huge amounts of work or money setting up a fancy web site. The days of "put up a good website and they will buy" are long gone.
Trust sells things.
Trust isn't going to happen when someone looks at your website once.
Anything appearing on a website beyond good clean design and ease of use is re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Behind the scenes on your website you'll want a way to track where traffic come and goes. This lets you know which ads are working and how well you're converting traffic into sales or email list sign ups.
You'll also want a way to split test things on the website. Split test means give two equal size groups of people two different versions of the same thing. You track that and see which version worked best.
Tracking and testing are often available in one piece of software or as a service. You don't need these two to get started but it's easier to have them in place from the start.
There is also a free but very labor intensive way to do the tracking by using a ? and some coded numbers/letters at the end of each URL. You use a spreadsheet and your web site statistics to track.
TRAFFIC
Before anything can happen, you need traffic.
Your most important "get traffic" work is figuring out how to use your time and money to get the right people to your website and email list. The "right" people are the ones looking for exactly what you sell.
You want that targeted traffic only.
FOLLOW UP
Why follow up with an email auto responder? Once someone signs on to your email list they get to know you.
They can decide if they trust you...or not.
If they trust you they'll buy, and they'll buy again if you stay in touch and treat them well.
Let's take a quick look at time and money.
TIME
After setting up the website and auto responder in the beginning, your time goes into getting traffic. Traffic from writing articles, reports, white papers, doing videos, audios or any other way you can think of to give out information with your name and a way to find you on it.
You want to create things that educate or solve problems.
The information you create needs to end up on websites, blogs, newsletters, forums, social media, how-to sites, print/broadcast media or anywhere you can.
Sometimes things end up in places that would make you look bad.
That happens. You can't control the distribution. You always retain copyright to your work so you can get your work pulled from anywhere that you don't want it.
You'll also want to take some time to set up your website to index in search engines easily.
You don't need to do much more than that. Many people put a whole lot of time and effort into getting to the top of the search engines.
Search engine rules can and do change often, dropping websites into oblivion.
Spend your time getting traffic from your own sources.
Once the traffic starts coming you'll want to work on the tracking and split testing.
MONEY
Money gets spent on buying advertising from search engines, ezines, blogs, media and otherwise.
You'll do better with a combination of time and money in your advertising.
Advertising by spending the time to create high quality teaching or problem solving material and getting it out there will do you the most good in the long run. The things you create work for you from that day on. That's evergreen.
If someone comes to visit your site via something you put out there, you've already helped or interested them. They're curious about how else you might help. They've warmed up to you a little. They're beginning to trust you. If your email follow up series can take it from there, you're golden. Buying ads is not evergreen, it's a one shot deal. The best way to use it? To to get those visitors on to your email list.
Why?
They know next to nothing about you. There's no trust yet. Your follow up emails build that trust.
There's one more problem with one shot ads. How many people buy something the very first time they see it? Do you? No? I didn't think so. There's an old "rule of thumb" that people look at something seven times before they buy. Another good reason to have that email auto responder.
You say you just can't write? No time? Don't know how to do video or audio? You can always trade money for time and outsource the work.
Check out places like elance.com, guru.com, getafreelancer.com, odesk.com, and fiverr.com where people will do anything you need done. At least at fiverr you only risk five dollars to see what you've got.
I'll go into a lot more detail, along with the best places to find what you'll need in future articles.
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