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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A great way to get more sales is to ‘provide teaser content’. This is a snippet of content from your members-only area that is publicly visible. Then when people read that content they hopefully are interested enough to sign up to get the rest of the content.

Here’s an example of using teaser content to encourage sign ups. This can often be done using membership software such as Extreme Member.