The Authentic Eccentric

Yesterday, Chari posted a question about marketing and promoting your product once you’re ready to begin selling. Hopefully a number of you have started down that path already, so here is my down and dirty advice for making the cash register ring.

1. Make sure your site is set up to sell your product or service. This may involve buying your own domain name, setting up a shopping cart, opening a merchant’s account and select a reliable webhosting service.

2. Ideally, you researched an extensive list of keywords to determine whether or not you had a profitable niche; in the event that you didn’t and now need keywords, WordTracker can help you develop one. You can also use Google’s Keyword Tool to help you discover additional matches.

3. Maximize your free traffic by including tell-a-friend tools and RSS feeds. Strongly consider publishing an online newsletter or blog to introduce more consumers to your product. Be consistent - studies have shown that most purchases are made after the consumer has seen your ad or had contact with your company seven times - if you don’t put a net in to “catch” your visitors and create an ongoing communication/marketing system, your sales will suffer.

4. The most efficient sales systems create pools of prospects who are interested in a topic, subject or theme. In Chari’s example above, her prospects might be gardeners, interior designers, florists and nature enthusiasts. To reach these people, Chari could:

• Advertise on sites that serve content to those targeted prospects;
• Provide or create a giveaway that prospects would find desirable and offer it free in exchange for their contact information;
• Create a website with content that serves those targeted prospects; and
• Form affiliate partnerships with websites that already have lists of targeted prospects.

All of the above methods of promotion work to varying degrees and will help her find her ideal prospect. Most successful marketers will tell you that the money is in your list, so building your own is your most effective over time. If you don’t have the patience to build your own, consider partnering with a website in your niche and offering referral commissions.

5. Begin a paid traffic campaign using Google and Yahoo. Remember that list of keywords I mentioned in step 2 above? You will use those to create target profiles for the search engines to show ads for your product or service. The search engine will show your ad and charge your account each time someone clicks on the ad. Once you are paying for traffic, the need for an efficient sales system becomes obvious - it gets expensive to purchase visitors. For this reason, I highly recommend a good read through of the Ad Words system, setting reasonable initial per click charges and implementing their conversion tracking to ensure you are getting what you are paying for. It’s easier than it sounds, really - you can also hire Google to create a campaign for you, but it will cost you significantly more than doing it yourself.

That, readers, is the nuts and bolts of creating a sales system for your product or service. If you have questions, leave a comment and I’ll get back with you! Tomorrow I’ll be posting some specific Google Ad Word examples to show you how one or two words can double or triple your response rate.