A lot of people are confused about social media, especially when it pertains to using it for business. I just finished reading Crush It!, by Gary Vaynerchuk and the bottom line is we need to be creating a community around our expertise, content, etc. The monetization will happen as we get advertisers/sponsors, create products, promote affiliate products, etc. He also recommends patience as we build this community.
Trying to making money online by selling information products, memberships or other things can be hugely discouraging at times. We see the ‘gurus’ making millions of dollars, know that billions of dollars are spent online every year and yet it always seems to be out of our grasp. So maybe we give up, or go back to our ‘day jobs’.
Once I joined the Info Marketers Zone by Jeff Smith, it was both exciting and humbling to realize the huge mistakes I’ve been making when it comes to selling products online. I had been taking lots of action with blogging, tweeting, creating content, but not seeing many results.
Some of the most fundamental errors that I have made are:
Not sending enough offers to my email list
If I sold something of mine or an affiliate on occasion I would be really happy not realizing that when we buy, we tend to buy a lot of other products in the same niche. You might buy lots of books, go to lots of seminars, and so on. So I started finding lots of affiliate offers on networks such as paydotcom, clickbank, commision junction, etc. You might not be into affiliate marketing but if you only have a few products you need a way to offer them more – this could be higher ticket items of yours, or affiliate products of others that you recommend.
Not building an email list properly in each niche
Collecting emails is often an afterthought, thrown up on a sidebar of your website. You need to convince people to sign up just like buying, by offering a free product of value to your customer. Create squeeze pages and send traffic to these pages. Get rid of any distracting menus, sidebars, etc. You need to focus the visitor on the action you want them to take.
Not researching keywords and competitors
Many of us have a passion and so we start creating content, writing blogs and articles about our topic. But we need to think about the keywords that will bring us the most profit (that lead to sales) by testing with Google adwords. Then we use these keywords in all of our content. By researching competitors (using spytools like compete.com) we can get lots of great keyword ideas (that bring traffic to them) and since the popular sites in our niche are popular for a reason, we can learn a lot from analyzing their sites.
Not focusing on benefits or the end result
We tend to emphasize the features and not the emotional benefits and desire that a customer has. I still do it unconsciously unless I edit my writing. So go over your website, make sure the call to action is clear, the benefits are clear and that you answer any possible objections your visitor might have.
One thing that was helpful is to go into your various accounts (paypal, affiliate networks, etc) and print off the reports for the month. Even if you only made $1 you should be proud that you made money online! And that this can be repeated and expanded with the right efforts.
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If you’re liking many infopreneurs, you’re probably not consistently following through on marketing your products. I know I wasn’t. You could probably improve your email marketing campaigns, be more consistent with your adwords compaigns, do better competitor research, find and use better converting keywords, write better headlines (that sell your products), or develop a wider variety of formats for your content.
If you’re like I’ve been, you might want to check out Information Marketer’s Zone, to get access to a step by step system of making money online, finding niches that sell, creating your information products and marketing them. The step by step information marketer’s checklist alone is probably worth it.
After going through some of the video content for the past week, I realized the huge number of mistakes and inconsistencies I was making. Here are just a few:
You can only improve if you admit your mistakes. This is much better than blaming the customers for not buying and referring to them as ‘freebie seekers’ to justify the lack of sales! I also came up with lots of new ideas for things to try, but best of all I’ve been developing an end-to-end systematic approach to creating and marketing my products. I’m seeing an improvement in sales already and it’s only been a week!
PS. Jeff is REALLY helpful active on the forums at his site Information Marketer’s Zone. I feel like I have him all to myself!
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