This is the final article in the Secrets of Creating and Growing an Online Business series. There is now a week’s worth of material dedicated to demystifying what’s involved and what the secrets are to success, all free for you to read and act on.

Yesterday I laid down the ground work of putting together a successful selling website by explaining the shift in your mindset that needs to occur when writing any marketing copy. I will now build on this by providing five specific ways that you can increase the sales that your online business receives through a more effective e-commerce website.

1) Show off Your Testimonials

You have a product with satisfied users so show this fact off! People naturally want assurance that what you’re selling actually delivers the expected results and they will only believe a sales pitch so far. Prominently listing testimonials provides the 3rd party opinions of satisfied users to your potential customer directly on your site. It helps if the testimonials provide specific benefits that your customers received and problems that you solved, rather than a generic “This is an excellent product!”.

If you don’t have testimonials handy then start collecting them. Whenever you receive a positive bit of feedback ask if you may publish it in your marketing material. You can also simply request testimonials from customers that have let you know are highly satisfied.

2) Provide a Money Back Guaranatee

It takes a leap of faith the first time, but if you have an excellent product then it’s difficult to go wrong with this technique. Money back guarantees are everywhere because they are highly effective at transfering the risk of the transaction from the customer to you. It allows the sale to be completed and the customer to use the product even if there are still lingering doubts about this being the correct solution. If your product delivers on its promises you can rest assured that virtually all your customers will keep it, and that the new sales gained will far outweigh having to give the occasional refund.

Be sure to make your guarantee highly visible, particularly in areas on your site where the customer is deciding to buy or not to buy. You will completely defeat the purpose of this selling tool if you choose to hide it as fine print at the bottom - the unsatisfied customers will still find it and take you up on it, but you won’t be receiving any new sales from your generous invisible policy.

3) Setup Referal Programs

Rewarding people for bringing in customers and setting up formal programs for reselling a product could gain you a whole new sales force. There are a number of ways to do this such as providing incentives to existing customers to refer new business, setting up formal reseller programs, or having an affiliates referal system such as Amazon’s. Incentives are usually monetary but sometimes it is much more appropriate to provide extra service or simply some formal recognition (like a special ranking within your product’s community forums). Money is not the sole motivator!

There’s no doubt that you should leverage the power of referals, but the trick is choosing the system that fits well with what you are selling. You don’t want to implement a system that makes your customers feel as if you are bribing them, and you don’t want your product sold through questionable channels. Give it some thought and perhaps experiment with a couple systems. It may even make sense to have separate programs for referals from customers and for people who wish to be resellers of your product.

4) Addons, Tie-ins, Recommendations, Upselling, etc

You’ve sold the customer on your product and they are ready to pay for it. At this point you have a tremendous untapped opportunity to increase the size of your sale and the satisfaction of your customer by a number of techniques for offering additional or better products. If a customer is about to purchase some coffee maybe they would like a new french press to make it in, or try a delicious new flavor for half price as a check-out special? Does the customer know that you offer installation of the new fridge? Or how about a special 15% off on the deluxe model?

Two well-known online companies that aggressively utilize these concepts are Amazon and GoDaddy. Play around on their sites and pay attention to how many times you have the option of increasing the size of your purchase.

5) Start an Opt-in Newsletter

Newsletters are a great way to reach those customers who wish to keep your product in their mind and learn when you have something new. Thanks to e-mail the costs of sending one out are now minimal, but you do wish to make sure that you use a reputable newsletter mailing service and that you employ a double opt-in subscription service (people have to sign-up for the newsletter and then confirm through a link in a confirmation e-mail). You don’t want to turn a fantastic opportunity into a horror story of being accused of spamming.

People need a reason to sign-up for your newsletter. Special subscriber-only discounts and early-bird offers are one way of doing this. You can also include valuable industry information in each newsletter, along with information about your latest product or deal. When choosing the content of your newsletter, ask yourself if you are providing genuine value to the receiver or if you are just trying to make a quick buck. The latter will usually fail and you’ll lose the respect of subscribers.

Don’t Forget to Test

The above are methods that countless successful online sellers use. Simply shop around on the net for a bit and you will find multiple examples of each point. However not every technique will provide the same results for everyone. Be sure to always have a way of testing your new additions to make sure that they are providing the results you desire.

If you require any assistance in implementing these features or if you would like to have a brand new website that makes use of these principles let me know. I am an experienced website developer who can help you achieve your online goals. I offer reasonable rates and will provide a small discount for reaching me through my blog.

Final Words for Successfully Starting an Online Business

Thanks for tuning into this series. In seven days we have covered a lot of ground and I had a lot of fun sharing this information with you. Although seven days of writing long posts is a lot, it barely scratches the surface of what is out there to learn. If you aren’t currently running an online business and would like to do so, don’t put it off irrationally. Start it up, put everything you’ve learned to use, make some mistakes, and learn a whole lot more. Most importantly put your whole heart into it.

Be sure to check out the rest of the articles in Secrets of Creating and Growing an Online Business and keep reading this blog for new information all the time!

This article is part of the Secrets of Creating and Growing an Online Business series. All week you will find articles that demystify what’s involved and what the secrets are to success.

Yesterday I wrote about the importance of testing and optimization in getting the real revenue that your online business is capable of achieving. In the next two days I’m going to let the cat out of the bag by providing theory and guidance for intelligently putting together a highly effective e-commerce site for your product or service. The tips in this article can be applied to any site where you ultimately want the user to perform an action, such as purchasing a product, signing-up for a service, or even taking advantage of a free offer.

Today we are going to look at completely shifting the mindset that you use in putting together your sales site. If you’ve taken some marketing courses then much of this first article is hopefully familiar, as we are simply taking marketing theory and applying it online. Tomorrow we’ll take this foundation and build on it with specific highly effective methods used by successful online companies to attain massive sales and increase customer happiness at the same time.

Establish A Single Desired Visitor Action Resulting From Your Website

Before you can possibly improve the results that your business receives from its website you first need to figure out what it is that you want your site to convince people to do. An effective site usually only has one main purpose, and everything else stems from that one purpose. If your goal is to sell a product then you need to make sure that everything you place on your site ultimately relates back to this single purpose. It’s very easy to add pages that make the site seem more fleshed out and interesting, but in reality have very little to do with your goal and only serve to distract the visitor.

On the surface this advice may seem obvious, but ever since I started explicitly doing this with my website clients I have attained dramatically more focused projects and been able to deliver results that work specifically towards this single goal. This leads to the actual results that the client was hoping to receive from the site rather than just some information floating in cyberspace.

Write Your Content to Promote Your Intended User Action

There is a major difference between an action-benefit-oriented site and an informational site that can be spotted almost instantly. In the latter case you will find a bunch of links to information about the product and the company, including an overview, features, photos/screenshots, purchase, and about. Each page proudly talks about its respective material so that the visitor knows just how great this product is. Intuitively this sounds like a good approach, so what on earth is wrong?

Your potential customers could care less about how great your product is! What they do care about is how this will benefit them. By taking the approach described above you are leaving the work of figuring out the benefits of what you are selling to your visitors. It’s almost like assigning them a research paper!

Your content should constantly reinforce the benefits that customers receive. These should be based around a Unique Selling Proposition, the unique benefit that only your product provides and which differentiates you from your competitors. Once you have your USP and are writing content based on it, you should be providing a next-action that connects the promise of these benefits with the way to obtain them. If you leave closing the sale to a single Order link on your navigation bar then you are literally throwing money away.

Getting the Hang of It

There’s no substitue for practice and it does take some time to learn how to write effective copy in the style above. You ultimately want to place yourself in the customer’s shoes and address the desires and concerns that they may have. You have created a fantastic product that you are proud to be selling, why not do your absolute best to make sure that your visitors know what it can do for them?

I am constantly looking at websites of successful online companies and carefully examining what they do. You don’t even need to look online to gain insight into writing effective copy as we are talking about basic marketing principles here! Look at flyers, watch TV advertisements, pay close attention to signage inside of retail stores, and learn to spot which material draws you. I like watching As Seen on TV commercials and reading those extremely long single page websites extolling the virtues of “home business opportunities”. While the quality of these products may sometimes be called into question, the sales pitches behind some of them are amazingly convincing. You don’t have to lay it on as thick as they do in your own product, but pay attention to how they systematically remove your barriers to making the purchase.

You’re skills will improve with time as you get a better feel for technqiue and a better understanding of why your customers buy your product. With this in mind be sure to regularly revise the copy on your website and test the results it delivers!

This article is part of the Secrets of Creating and Growing an Online Business series. All week you will find articles that demystify what’s involved and what the secrets are to success.

I made a number of mistakes with my CustomBar product. One was not getting potential clients involved in the development process early enough, leading to much feature changes and wasted development effort. My next biggest mistake was not performing nearly enough tweaking and testing on my marketing methods and sales process, often selecting theory over measuring real results and leaving it at that. This was a mistake that cost me at least 500% of the revenues that I actually received from it.

How to Avoid Falling in the Same Trap

So you’ve released your product or service and the clients are starting to come, but your results just aren’t what you expected. You’re earning a few dollars a day instead of hundreds even though others in your field have received such incomes. This is where the real work begins! No matter how well you think you’ve thought up your website, your advertising, and the product itself, it is at best a vaguely shaped lump of clay compared to the finely chiseled creation that it could be. You need to begin the optimization process and with a little patience see your results doubling! Little things can make a huge difference!

Let’s say that I come up with two different versions of a web page for a new online product that I’ve just released. How on earth can I objectively say which one I should use? I won’t really know for sure until I try both. If one results in twice the people clicking on Buy Now than the other, then I can double my money just by making the right choice! That’s a pretty good case for putting in the effort to find out which works better. The good news is that this is rather easy to do, and can be applied for anything you change online or offline. The trick is merely to try all your options, and then select the best one!

In the case of a webpage a little bit of code written by you or your web developer can randomly mark each visitor as an A or B (creating an A/B Split Test). A visitors get one version of your web page while B visitors get another. The test is run over a period of time and the results are then measured. Select the version that got you the best results. That’s all! If you don’t have a way to get this coded then you can purchase a 3rd party testing application instead.

The changes in the pages can be small like a headline or a completely different site, but do note that you lose accuracy the larger the change is. A headline on site A may actually be better than one on site B, but the other elements on site B may still cause it to score higher overall. Thus after picking a major change you should then tweak it with smaller changes. Other testing methods are available which allow you to test more than two choices at a time, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt you to pick up a book on statistics to learn more. However the A/B method is certainly enough to get you started on recovering all the money that is currently being lost through suboptimal marketing methods.

I learned my lesson at a pretty big price in lost revenue and have since become a massive fan of metrics. I measure the results of virtually every change I make to this site and I pay very close attention to what brings in the traffic and what ad placements work. This goes for changes not only in layout but in content as well. I am very aware of which of my posts attracted the attention of the audience that visits this blog and which did not.

Things to Test

To get your brain rolling here are just some of the things that you should consider testing in your product or service.

• Effectiveness of your referal program.
• Price of the product.
• Performance of paid advertising in various places.
• Performance of the ads themselves.
• Any written copy.
• Your order process.
• Major headlines, graphics, screenshots etc.
• Free trials and demos resulting in sales.
• Money-back guarantees, sales, coupons for future products, and other “buy it now” incentives.

Resources

Steve Pavlina is a big advocate and success case for optimization. He has written a pretty hefty article on testing specifically for shareware developers. As always his articles are a great read for both their content and the inherent motivational value that they contain.

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got covers far more than just testing, and it’s a terrific way to fill in all the knowledge you need to have intelligent marketing methods to test in the first place. I’m glad I bought it because for less than the price of a couple large pizzas I have gained countless insights into gaining more from what I create (which is the best way to describe the set of topics Jay writes about here). I’m also two large pizzas healthier.