Tag Archives: Sales

Passive Income: Your Silent Sales Army in Action

I like to think of my information products as being my silent sales army. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, these digital soldiers are looking out for me by getting out in front of my prospects and clients to let them know exactly which info products I have available. You can have the same kind of business if you set it up this way for passive income.

Teaching online courses is a joy for me, and at this point I have over a dozen of them. This means that I am able to teach my courses live the first time so that I may interact with my students in real time. As a former classroom teacher this aspect of my business is one that I do not wish to abandon. But I can have the best of both worlds as an online entrepreneur. For once I have taught the course live it immediately goes into what I refer to as “home study”. Then the real magic begins.

The course in home study immediately becomes an information product that will sell over and over without my being there in person or virtually. Because I use SEO (search engine optimization) throughout my site I am able to benefit from the organic traffic Google and the other search engines will send me. I am known online as the “Marketing Madwoman”, so I begin to market my info products before they are even completed. And I have many affiliates who continue to let their prospects and clients know about my products. Over time this all builds up to quite a nice business model and an excellent income stream. And my silent sales army is always working in the background to make everything fall into place.

Now I do have many other products that do not contain a live element at all. I created them to stand on their own as information products consisting of written content, audio recordings, and videos that teach and explain the topic completely. These info products can be created very quickly, and as you gain experience you will find that you can put together a new high quality product in just a few days. Your silent sales army will help you to make sure the right people see what you have to offer and the sales will begin rolling in right away.

This business is anything but a “get rich quick” scheme. Instead, it takes time, effort, and hard work to learn what you need to know and to put all of the pieces in place. But once you do, you are unlimited as to what is possible in your business. My Really Simple Info Products training course teaches you everything you need in a step by step manner so that you will not leave out any of the pieces. Begin by creating simple information products on topics you are familiar with, and then expand to more sophisticated products and courses. Over time you will build your own silent sales army and enjoy massive passive income for years to come.

I’m Connie Ragen Green and I’ve been an online entrepreneur since 2006. If you are ready to get started on your journey to multiple streams of online income, visit my site at Online Entrepreneur Blueprint and download your complimentary training to get started today.

Email Marketing to Increase Your Sales and Conversions

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Benefits of Email Marketing

There are so many reasons to focus on email marketing for your business, whether it’s a brick and mortar business or a digital one. Let’s discuss some of these reasons so that you can make the most informed choice.

It used to be that only huge corporations were able to take advantage of email marketing as a targeted and very affordable form of digital advertising. Now this strategy is available to everyone, from Fortune 100 companies to solopreneurs. With the click of a mouse you are able to get your name, brand, and offerings in front of your prospects and clients.

It takes much less time to connect with others via email. Marketing in this way is a shortcut that just makes sense. Using a template for your copy and graphics makes it possible to accomplish in hours what previously took days or weeks. Also, email marketing is all done in real time, so there will never be lag time when it comes to time sensitive offers, sales, and other happenings within your business or industry.

You most likely love personalized messages as much as I do, and marketing in this way makes that a simple task. Using the mail merge features of your autoresponder service allows you to include special information within your email messages, such as birthday, login information, and purchase history. This is an amazing feature!

You can also segment your database to send them more targeted email marketing campaigns over time. These will convert well and increase your sales because they are so specific. The idea here is to provide them with the most relevant message they are likely to respond to at that point in time. And because these messages are short and to the point, you can communicate with prospects and clients more frequently without additional costs.

When I use email marketing with a new niche, part of it includes testing new marketing strategies to see what people are responding to. Because there is no printing or postage costs involved this part of my business is much faster and easier to implement on a regular basis.

And forwarding an email that has an enticing or a useful offer or information is only going to take a few seconds. A lot of people will do it if you remind them to share with others who might be interested and benefit from the information. This means that your marketing efforts will not only have a wider reach but people will also begin to act as your brand ambassadors by sharing your information.

Email marketing can also be done at a low overhead cost. You don’t need to have a lot of employees, marketing analysts or even designers, and many online entrepreneurs do this with only the help of one or two virtual assistants. There are services such as Aweber which will provide you with professionally designed templates that can be changed to suit your needs. An effective marketing campaign will only need a good email marketing platform or service. You can become a skilled marketer who knows how to put the right offers and graphics in front of their community. The return on your investment from email marketing cannot be surpassed.

A well thought out and developed email marketing platform will provide you with tracking information on the number of people on your list that opened and email and read it, the number of people who clicked the link in an email, the specific link in the email that was clicked, how many people complained the email was spam, if the email was unsubscribed and if your email reached the recipients inbox. These simple metrics can mean everything to your business success over the years.

Finally, using email for your marketing is good for the environment. Cutting down fewer trees is a noble goal and you are making a decision that’s helping the planet while improving your business. It’s a win-win!

I’m Connie Ragen Green, online marketing strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker on the topics of entrepreneurship and inner game mind shifts. Let’s connect to see how I may best serve you in the near future.

Your Sales Offer Funnel – Putting It All Together

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Putting Your Sales Offer Funnel Together

Meeting the Needs of Your Customers

When you put your customers’ needs before everything else, you’ll be able to create a flagship product and all the products or services in between. When you develop an offer funnel, start with the most expensive product or service. You’ll easily see what you should create for your audience that will lead them to the most helpful and expensive product or service.

After all, it’s a lot easier to provide people with something they already want, than to convince them that they need something you already created without studying your audience. A deep offer funnel will make most of this almost seem automatic once it’s set up. Identifying where your audience is in the buying cycle and delivering content, products, and services to them right when they need them will make it seem like child’s play.

Of course, it does take some work to get started.

Putting it All Together

Create your sales offer funnel by knowing your audiences’ needs, motivations, and buying cycle. This will enable you to create your flagship product or service, and then all your other offerings will stem out from there. Based on your products and services you’ll need to create landing pages for each offering, plus an email list for each as well.

Create the flagship product and then a couple midrange products along with freebies or entry-level products each with an email marketing series. Remember, you can reuse and repurpose content for each list as long as it makes sense. So, for example, let’s say you have 10 short mini-courses loosely based on your flagship product of a 52-week course with one-on-one coaching.

Each of these 10 courses offers an entry point into a new list. Each list needs to be separate so that you can ensure the messages make sense but the message is to get the next product down the funnel until they approach your flagship product. Segmentation is important because you don’t want to confuse your audience.

You don’t want to tell people who just signed up for mini-course 1 to sign up for it again, instead, you want to promote mini-course 2 or you might want to promote your webinars that promote your flagship product or service. But, you can re-word the messages to fit with each list accordingly.

If you use your autoresponder software to its full potential you can actually set it up so it automatically moves someone from one list to the next based on whether they answer your calls to action or not. Tip: Good software to consider using is Aweber. These all offer you the ability to segment lists in a way that works for your business and needs.

Once you have created these products that offer new entry points into your sales offer funnel, using your website as the hub for all your products, services, and in-depth information, you can use social media as a way to push it out to others, to build relationships, and get attention. Once it’s set up, it’ll be practically automatic and all you’ll have to do is curate and add new content occasionally based on the season, the trends, and the issues of the day. And, with each new product you create, you make it easier for your audience to find you and learn about your flagship offering as long as you’re staying on brand and on message.

Getting Started

Now it’s your turn. What is your flagship product? Don’t worry if it’s not even created yet. You can create it as you go. Consider that a 52-week course only needs to be created one week at a time. That’s exactly how we created the popular Lights Camera Massive Action 26 week training program. But, you can still make the sales page now, and then use that information as a jumping off point for the rest of your midrange, low price and entry point products and services. As you build it out, you’ll soon realize that your sales offer funnel has and will continue to explode your business in ways that you never thought of before.

Creating Your Sales Offer Funnel

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Why Do You Need A Sales Offer Funnel?

Your job is to create the right information and content to lead your audience from awareness to purchase. A great way to do that is through creating a sales offer funnel. You’ll match each stage of your audience’s buying cycle to the content that helps them become a paying customer or to move through your funnel, buying more expensive products or services.

Planning an Info Product

One of the best ways to get people to sign up for your list and get into your funnel is by creating an information product. The best way to plan any information product is to figure out at least one problem that you can easily solve for your audience. The information product can be a longer report, a short report, a checklist, or something else that is useful for your audience.

Everything starts with knowing who your audience is, where they hang out, what they do, and what they want or need. You could start with a small item as a freebie opt-in, building up to the most expensive products and services. However, there is an even better way to create your entire offer funnel fast.

Once you have done the research about your audience, you know who they are, what their pain points are, and how you can solve their problems then you can actually build your offer funnel backward. Instead of starting with the smallest thing first, start with the biggest most outrageous expensive product or service that you can offer then tiered down to the least expensive item or freebie after the fact.

Identify Your Most Expensive Product First

Depending on your niche, start by writing down what your most expensive product or service will be. It will help to write it all down as if you’re going to create a sales page. Choose what the price point will be for this most expensive product or service and all the benefits of it to your audience.

If you already have a super expensive product or service such as a long-term, one-on-one coaching package, start with that. Because everything you do is designed to get more of your audience into your one-on-one flagship product or service. When you start from there you can easily create the less expensive products and opt-ins that will most fit with this audience.

Identify Lower Priced Products that Work with Your Most Expensive Product

Now look at any lower priced products that you have that fit in with your flagship product or service. If you don’t have any, you’ll need to create them as they fit in with the buying cycle of your audience. For example, your flagship product is a $10,000 dollar a year group coaching with one-on-one coaching options mastermind. What can you find or create that will appeal to and help your coaching clients? Items like checklists, Facebook Groups, webinars, courses, training, information products and more can all fit into your sales offer funnel as long as they make the audience curious about the flagship product.

Identify Free Content/Gifts That Leads to Increasingly Higher Priced Items

Finally, you can fit in freebies that attract people to your flagship product or your lower-priced products too. These might be free webinars, blog posts, infographics, eBooks, small reports, case studies, interviews, and more. As long as it’s of interest to those who would want your main product you can use it. For example, keep in mind you want people to join your flagship coaching program mentioned above, you might offer content that explains why coaching can work using case studies to prove your point.

Forms & Formats of Products & Services

Let’s look at some potential formats of different levels of products and or services to help get your creative juices flowing. Your most expensive product has a format, as do your other offerings. Some products include a combination of formats. This is just a potential example for you to use as a guide.

Most Expensive (Flagship) Product

Offer: Group coaching, with one-on-one coaching possibilities, as well as a membership website that offers a lot of materials and lessons. Your price is $10,000 a year and includes all the bells and whistles. Your exclusive clients get access to all your checklists, mind maps, infographics, lessons, courses, information products, group chat, group discussion board, weekly webinars, weekly Q & A, a one hour one-on-one call each week and daily email access and discounts on live events and other products that might be of interest to the audience.

My Flagship product is my Internet Marketing Six Pack training course, even though I also offer a Mastermind group through the Online Marketing Incubator program.

Mid-Range Product

Now that you have your product, you can easily identify mid-range products that will solve a problem or two for your audience, while also make them want more. A great mid-range item is an information product that solves one of your audience’s problems. For example, if you’re a business coach, you might offer a course on branding, content planning, or social media marketing. Essentially, you can take one small part of your cornerstone product and make it one of the mid-range products you offer. Say that one of the things you help your clients do is choose a business name. You might offer a short course on naming your business.

Intro Product

When you figure which items you’ll offer in the midrange area, then you can identify the intro products to offer your audience as a part of your sales offer funnel. Intro products can be low priced or free products. Anything that requires an email address to opt-in will work great here. Webinars, teleseminars, podcasts, social media posts, Facebook live, YouTube videos, free eBooks or reports, checklists, and so forth all make great intro level products and services as long as they offer a taste of what’s in the flagship or mid-range product or service offerings. Let’s say you have a mid-range product that is a six-week course on branding. You can offer a free branding checklist to collect email addresses and market that mid-range product and the flagship product to the people who signed up.

Free Products

While some of your intro products may be free, there are things that you may not consider free products. Blog posts, social media posts, guest posts, images, and other things can be also being thought of as products. But, if you have a good grasp of what you can do and what is possible, it’s going to be a lot easier to figure out what you need to offer your audience in terms of tools and free information. For example, I offer many Special Reports at no cost whatsoever and these serve me well in my business.

Your product generally will be a combination of all of these types of content and services. One way to figure out what you can offer in every step of your sales offer funnel is to conduct a content audit. When you find out what you have, and what you need, you can fill in the gaps.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, an Online Marketing Strategist, bestselling author of more than a dozen books, international speaker, and Mentor. I would love to connect with you to see how we might work together in the future.

Planning Your Sales Offer Funnel

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Planning Your Offer Funnel

If you want to be successful in your business and marketing, it’s important to learn about offer funnels so that you can automate the process by which you create awareness, gather leads, and follow up with prospects so that you can seamlessly increase sales. The offer funnel is what you pull people through as they go through the buying cycle.

It works like this: You give away a lot of content given away freely such as blog posts, social media updates and so forth, which will lead people to sign up for a free or low-cost product which requires the customer to opt-in providing their email address.

Once the potential customer signs up, then your email messages will lead them through the funnel until they get to your highest cost products and programs such as continuity programs and high-level one-on-one services.

Parts of the Offer Funnel

Let’s take a closer look at the offer funnel. But first, you need to understand your audience’s buying-cycle, which your offer funnel should closely match. The general buying cycle goes right along with the offer funnel. The customer first needs to realize they have a problem, start searching for information about the problem, and then they’ll identify some solutions and then choose between them.

Awareness

At the top of the offer funnel is awareness. Your leads will come in via the free content you put out online. You’ll work on branding efforts through blogging, social media, advertisements, organic search, and SEO to attract potential leads to your website. These things will bring your audience to you. All you have to do is describe their problems, educate them about them, and yourself, and the solutions you can provide to them while maintaining a consistent brand using different types of content.

Leads

At some point during the awareness phase of buying your audience will potentially take some of your offers that will get them on your list. These people are considered leads. At this point, you can offer checklists, eBooks, short reports, and helpful solutions that solve one problem for the audience member. This may occur with opt-in offers and sales pages. You will start sending information to your leads to get them to become prospects. The types of content you might use to get people on your list are webinars, checklists, and anything that your audience will use and trade their email address for.

Prospects

A prospect is someone who has already proven to want what you have to offer because they signed up for your opt-in above. Now, depending on what opt-in they signed up for because you may have many entry points, you’ll send them email follow-ups and higher tier offerings including upsells, down sells, and cross-sells. You’ll send content to them that nurtures the prospect so that they become a paying customer. Content that can nurture prospects and encourage sales includes small reports, case studies, how-to articles, videos, and webinars. This is where segmentation comes in. You’ll need to send the right content to them at the right time.

Sales

Eventually, a percentage of your prospects will move all the way through your offer funnel buying your continuity plan, higher priced products and services and more. The content you provide to your audience needs to be designed to encourage them to buy more of what you offer due to the solutions you provide. This content will make your customers feel loyal, part of the group, and special.

As you can see, an offer funnel is a very powerful way to weed out unqualified leads, get the attention of your ideal audience, and gently encourage your prospects to become customers. It doesn’t need to be pushy, or even sales like. You can simply use content, and solutions, to help your audience achieve their goals.

The Art of Writing Persuasive Sales Copy

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Are You Writing Persuasive Sales Copy?

Writing persuasive sales copy can change the way your online business is perceived, as well as increase your bottom line. Learning how to write in this way is a skill that can be learned and I will share some tips on that here with you.

Storytelling – We all grew up listening to and learning from stories, so it just makes sense that storytelling would be the magic ingredient in writing persuasive sales copy. Your stories enable you to take complex or abstract ideas and present them in a simple and easy to understand format.
Write Like You Speak – Writing your sales copy in a conversational tone is key. Instead of writing to impress your reader, simple write the way you would naturally speak to them. Writing persuasive sales copy is about communicating one to one through your words.
Features and Benefits – No one really cares about the features of what you are selling; it’s the benefits those features will bring to your prospect that will make them more likely to buy. I have found that by presenting the benefits first, and then relating them to the features, your reader will understand exactly what’s in it for him if he takes the action you are suggesting.
Sub-Headings, Bulleted Lists, and Short Paragraphs – Most of us are “scanners” when it comes to reading through large chunks of writing. If you take the time to break it up into sections and divide the text into short paragraphs, your reader will be able to work their way through your sales copy more easily. They will also be far more likely to purchase. I also recommend sub-headings for each section and bulleted lists that explain exactly what you are offering and what will be included.

I hope this post has been helpful and that you have more clarity when it comes to writing persuasive sales copy.

How to Write Effective Web Sales Copy

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Writing Web Sales Copy That Sells

I believe that learning to write effective web sales copy (copywriting on the Internet to sell products, services, courses, and more) was the best investment of time and money I could ever have done for my business during my first year online. Now that I have more than fifty different products for sale on the Internet, my web sales copy is like a sales team always at the ready to assist me in making sales 24/7/365. And the interesting part of this is that it didn’t have to take me a full year to learn how to do it. Now you can get started in as little as ten days.

I was given a review copy of a new training on copywriting by Dennis Becker, and I’d like to share my thoughts on this with you within this post. I also decided to do some additional research before publishing it here.

I was reading a post by Derek Gehl over at the Entrepreneur site called Make Your Sales Copy Sell: 7 Tricks to Writing Copy that Brings in Business where he says that:

Writing good sales copy doesn’t have to be hard–you just use a formula. Plug in all the elements, and you’ll create a whole that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.”

I agree, up to a point. When you are new to copywriting it’s easy to get confused by the glib comments of more experienced copywriters and marketers. Writing effective web sales copy takes practice, and that is exactly what you get from a new training just released by Dennis Becker. It’s called CopyBox and is a ten day copywriting challenge and short course on how to get started with copywriting to sell your products and services online. And it’s quite inexpensive as well. Dennis says:

Learning how to write good sales copy is one of the most valuable and profitable skills you can pick up in your business career. Because once you know how to craft irresistible, sizzling sales letters, then you’ll have the power to sell anything to anyone!

That’s why I’ve put together this 50+ page hands-on course, where you’ll get a step-by-step guide for crafting high-response sales letters. This includes:

*Ten daily modules where you learn exactly how to write sizzling copy!
*Ten daily assignments to go with each module. If you follow along, you only need to invest a few minutes a day to write a new piece of your copy – and in just 10 days you’ll be ready to roll with a high-response sales letter!

I love this type of “short course” where you can go through the materials quickly and easily over a ten day period. And I promise that if you do that you will most likely look forward to writing copy instead of dreading it like I once did. And Dennis provides dozens of examples and tips throughout this entire course to make it easier than ever for you to create your own sales letter.

One other part of Derek’s post that you will find helpful is this one on the topic of features and benefits:

Talk about benefits, not just features.
Your potential customers want to know how your product or service will make their lives easier, so focus on benefits, not features. Here’s an example:

Feature: The Grade A Gardening Shovel is ergonomically designed to remove weeds more efficiently than traditional shovels.

Benefit: Get your weeding done in half the time and reduce wrist soreness!

A benefit answers the question “What’s in it for me?” and gets visitors to imagine using your product to take care of the problem they’re trying to solve.”

So if you are ready to jump in to the world of copywriting for the Internet, grab Dennis Becker’s Copy Box and start your ten day challenge and course of study. You’ll be glad you did, as this is a necessary part of online marketing that you can’t afford to be without. And you might even decide you like it enough to write web sales copy for others. Yes, that’s something that is in high demand among those of us working exclusively online, and learning how to do this part of the business effectively could be your next career.

Marketing Tips

Connie Ragen Green Shares Internet Marketing Updates

Tag Archives: Sales

Passive Income: Your Silent Sales Army in Action

Email Marketing to Increase Your Sales and Conversions

Benefits of Email Marketing

Your Sales Offer Funnel – Putting It All Together

Creating Your Sales Offer Funnel

Planning Your Sales Offer Funnel

Planning Your Offer Funnel

The Art of Writing Persuasive Sales Copy

Are You Writing Persuasive Sales Copy?

How to Write Effective Web Sales Copy

Writing Web Sales Copy That Sells