[This is the ninth in a series of posts about entrepreneurship as a way to protect your income in a bad economy.]
In prior posts we’ve talked about ways to build a secondary revenue stream on the Internet. To this point you’ve chosen a healthy market, you’ve selected the products or services you’re going to sell, and you’ve begun to provide your offering through an affiliate or your own Web site or blog. You’re driving traffic through paid advertising or by writing articles with links back to the sales site.
It’s Show Time
Now you’re ready for the most interesting part. This post is about welcoming your shoppers to your online sales environment and studying how they behave.
It’s as if you’ve built a store, you’ve announced the grand opening, and now you’re roaming the floor like a proud proprietor greeting your guests. Except that your guests don’t know you’re there.
Study Your Shoppers in Action
How do your shoppers behave? Where do they stop to look? How long do they look? Which displays do they walk right past? Which items go into their shopping basket?
Because this is the Internet rather than a physical store, you can gather all this information without being creepy.
Google Makes It Easy to Watch Invisibly
If you have your own site or blog, you can see how your visitors behave by signing up for a free service called Google Analytics. It provides statistics on how many people visit your site, which pages they visit, how long they stay, and what ads, inbound links or keyword searches brought them there.
You can also set up Google Analytics to tell you how many people take a specific action on any page of your site, such as opting in to a newsletter subscription by leaving a name and e-mail address. You can track the number of people who visited your sales page and bought something versus those left empty handed.
With Google Analytics you can quickly identify your most successful traffic sources and your most effective Web pages. You can also see exactly where you’re losing your visitors.
Diagnose Problems That Diminish the Shopping Experience You Offer
All this information can point toward problems with your site. Let’s say, for example, that you’re losing half your visitors within 15 seconds of arriving on the first page they see on your site (called a landing page).
Your visitors who left quickly probably expected something other than what they found. Maybe one arrived through a keyword search that wasn’t specific, such as “womens sportswear.”
Maybe she’s a Hollywood costume designer researching the history women’s sportswear. She left when she saw that you’re selling this season’s styles.
Or maybe she was a shoppper who wanted to see tennis skirts. When your landing page showed information about casual wear, she realized she needed to refine her search.
Or maybe she came to your site through a traffic source (say, a Google ad or an article in an eZine) that set some expectation your landing page doesn’t meet.
Maybe your headline didn’t grab her attention. Or maybe she was unimpressed with the appearance of your site.
What to Do When Shoppers Don’t Buy
If your visitor stayed longer than 30 seconds and left without taking any of the actions your site suggests, you might reasonably suspect one or more of these causes:
- your offer is not compelling enough (the visitor doesn’t see enough value for the price you’re asking)
- your sales presentation is not credible enough (not enough testimonials)
- your page is too confusing, too hard to read, or too hard to use.
Put Your Persuasion Process to the Test
You can and should test each element of your site separately to identify such problems. You can do so by using a variety of methods known collectively as split testing. The idea is that you randomly split the traffic going to your site. Some traffic sees one version of your site and the rest sees another.
Split-testing techniques allow you to change various elements in your Web pages – such as headlines, photos, captions, offers, etc., and measure which versions perform best.
Revise, Refine, Then Count Your Money
After you’ve run these tests, you change your Web pages to incorporate the winning elements. Then you watch your conversion rates climb. Your revenue and profit will climb with your conversion rate.
Throughout this series of posts we’ve covered ways that you can supplement your income, or even eventually replace it entirely, through entrepreneurship. This series has focused on direct-marketing methods you can use to sell products that you either create for yourself, that you buy from someone else and resell, or that you sell through someone else for a commission.
Place More Bets
Ken McCarthy, the first and still one of the best teachers of Internet marketing, has said that success in this business is a matter of placing many small bets. With each bet you have little to lose. Some will pay off modestly and others very well. The key is to place a lot of bets.
Someone else has said it’s like drilling for oil. Some of the wells you drill will be dry. Others will generate enough profit to pay your bills. A few big producers can make you wealthy. You won’t know which till you’ve drilled multiple wells.
An Opportunity with Serious Potential
The focus of this series has been on how you can supplement your current income by selling products or services on the Internet. You can of course use well-established direct-marketing techniques to sell products offline as well. In some markets off-line marketing may be a great supplement to Internet marketing or could even be the better way to go.
The beauty of the Internet is that it offers such a fast and inexpensive way to get started. It also provides a way to make money passively, even when you’re asleep, on vacation or working your day job.
If you can find a business model that can deliver more revenue with a smaller initial investment and less work, I’d like to know what it is.
Do you remember the negative media coverage following the dot-com bust of the early 2000s? Did it leave you with the impression that only a few businesses are making serious money selling products on line?
It’s time to reconsider. Tens of thousands of businesses – from one-person companies to multinational corporations — are now generating huge amounts of revenue and profit online.
To be balanced, I should also say that an even larger number are barely scraping by.
This Takes Time, Work, Basic Computer Skills and Knowledge of Good Writing
Setting up a sales capability on the Internet isn’t for everyone. It takes time work and time — especially when you’re getting started.
It also requires enough computer skills to find your way confidently around a keyboard.
If you aren’t comfortable with writing, it’s a flashing yellow light but not a stoplight. You can always hire someone else to do your writing for you. Even so, you’ll have to know enough about good writing to be able to judge the quality of anything you pay someone else to write.
In addition, hiring someone to write for you will add both an element of delay and a relatively high cost to your business model. It will reduce your profit.
Are You Comfortable Engaging in an Impersonal Sales Process?
If selling face to face is your strength and passion, this may not be for you. On the Internet you sell mostly through the written word, and you may never talk personally to most of your customers.
Plenty of sales people won’t have the patience for this or won’t be willing to invest the time it will take them to learn how to do it.
Great Choice for the Right Kind of Sales Person
But for salespeople who have the patience and who are willing to invest the time, you’re holding a trump card that most people who sell on the Internet lack. You know how to sell and are comfortable doing it.
In addition, you may never again have to worry about your current employer being the sole source your income. You’ll reduce the risk of getting stuck working for the wrong company, selling the wrong products, or working with unprofitable markets.
Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric and one of the highest-performing CEOs of all time, offers this strategic gem: “Control your own destiny or someone else will.”
Regardless of what you may think of Jack, those are words to live by.
This series tried to provide you with enough of an overview to help you see if this is something you might like to pursue. It hasn’t provided enough detail to get you through each step of the process.
If you’re interested in learning more, post a comment. I’ll provide links to other resources in future posts.
Stay fresh.
–Scott Silverback