4 Easy Steps to Automate Your Online Sales Process

So you’ve got your blog up and running, you’re starting to gain a following, and you want to capitalize on your growing popularity.  One of the best ways to do that is by creating products around whatever your expertise is.  Your followers obviously like what you have to offer, so whether it’s through e-books, audio programs, webinars, or video workshops, creating products to deliver what they want is a no-brainer.  Once you’ve created products to offer on your site, one of the greatest things about the Internet comes into play: you can automate the entire process.  Sure, you have to do the work upfront to create the products and the process, but once it’s in place, it takes very little attention beyond tracking your progress and making necessary adjustments.  This is a great thing, because it frees you up to create more quality content, and more products.  So, how do you automate your sales process?  Here are four easy steps to make it happen:

1. Get ‘em on the list. The first step to the automated online sales process is to get your site’s visitors on your email list.  Your list will become the biggest asset you have, so this step is critical to your success.  To entice people to sign up for your emails, there are two critical factors you must nail down.  First and foremost, your free content (your blog) must be high quality and compelling.  If you’re not delivering value to your visitors, there’s no way they’ll sign up to hear more of what you have to say via email.  Secondly, you’ll want to offer a valuable incentive for people who sign up for your emails.  Value is the key.  While you’re not going to give away the farm in a single swoop, the offer you create must have real, valuable content, or the subscribers you do get will promptly unsubscribe.  The point is, you shouldn’t be trying to trick anyone into signing up.  They’ll detect it immediately, and no one wins.

2. Send out the emails. The next step in the process is to decide what you’ll send out once a person subscribes to your list.  Obviously you’ll be sending a welcome email with a link to the free product you promised.  But then what?  One of the greatest tools in the email marketing toolbox is the sequential autoresponder.  Whatever email marketing provider you sign up with, they should have the ability to set up sequential autoresponders to each new subscriber.  These autoresponders might even serve as the free product offer the subscriber signed up for.  For example, you might offer a “Free 7 Day E-Course on How to Make Money with Affiliate Links.”  Then, each day for the next seven days, your subscriber will receive an email with another part of the course.  If you follow this path, it’s a good idea to just provide the content without selling anything in these emails.  Even if you’re giving value, that value is diminished when you turn it into a sales pitch.  This brings up another good point: When setting up your sequential autoresponders, make sure you’re not selling in every one.  People get a ton of email, and if they know they’re in for a sales pitch whenever they open one of your emails, they won’t be on your list for long.  You want people to look forward to your communications, and then when you do present an offer, it’s far more likely to be acted upon.

3. Accept online payments. So someone has signed up on your list, they’ve received some great value from your emails, and now they want to buy the video course you just offered.  This is the coolest part of selling on the Internet.  It used to be that you had to be present to sell something to someone.  Now, you can do it in your sleep!  Whether you use a service like PayPal, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, or your own merchant account, it will be easy for you to sell your products on your site.  The nice thing about the ready-made services (PayPal, Google, Amazon, etc.) is that you don’t have to purchase shopping cart software to use them.  You’ll be able to create “buy now” buttons and easily incorporate those into your page.  The down-side is that you pay a little more in fees, and you have less creative and functionality control.  In either case, you’ll have access to comprehensive sales reports, so you can…

4. Track and measure. As your online sales get underway, and for as long as you sell online, you’ll want to know how you’re doing - not just in terms of sales, but with marketing and conversion rates as well.  You want to know how many people are visiting your site, how many of those are signing up for your email list, and how many email subscribers are clicking back through to your site and/or ordering products.  Using your site analytics, coupled with the stats provided by your email marketing company and your e-commerce provider, you’ll have easy access to all this information.  These statistics are very important, because they will paint a picture of how your content and your marketing are working to convert browsers into customers.  Using this information, you’ll be able to make necessary changes to improve your click-through and conversion rates.  Of all the steps, this is probably the least “easy” but it’s really not hard once you get used to looking at the numbers.  Then just make small adjustments and see what changes.  There’s no fool-proof formula that works for everyone, so you get to build your own!

Bonus step! This isn’t as much a step as it is a suggestion.  Provide outstanding service at every turn, and whatever products you create from your expertise, always offer a money-back, “risk-free” guarantee.  Few people, if any, will take you up on it, and it just makes people feel better about spending money on your products.  For those who do ask for their money back, don’t hesitate to return it, no-questions-asked.  Then try to get some feedback, but don’t count on it.  Sometimes you just have to move forward and focus on those who love you and your stuff!

The Internet has given us the ability to make money using automated systems, and we’d be crazy not to take full advantage of that.  So follow the steps above and get your cash-flow on autopilot.

How To Live The 4 Hour Work Week

Still Doing It All Yourself When it Comes To Blogging? You Need To Read This – And It’s FREE

I recently stumbled across this great little report called Secrets of Outsourcing Experts Revealed – and I had to let you know about it straight away.
You see, I come across SO MANY bloggers who are going out of their mind trying to do everything themselves – from building their blog to customizing their design. They get home from work at around 7.30pm, eat, touch base with the family – and sit down to work on their Internet marketing . . . sound familiar? I know – I’ve been there – and this little gem is specifically for those of you who do it all themselves – and wish you didn’t.

The Secrets of Outsourcing Experts Revealed is not just another report about outsourcing. It melds together leading experts such as Tim Ferriss, Jeff Mills and John Jonas, all of whom have outsourced their entire businesses and live the lifestyle they desire, working as little as 4 hours a week. The report is packed with insights from these leading Internet marketers – they reveal their screwups, and their successes – and what they’d wished they’d done in the beginning. They also wish they’d had the kind of knowledge about outsourcing delivered in this report – and these guys know what they’re on about. One of the things all of them agree on is they wish they’d outsourced more of their businesses earlier – and that struck a chord with me because, like you, I know what it’s like to be drowning in a ‘to-do’ list for my online business.

The report is by Tyrone Shum, a young entrepreneur who has already cracked the secret of outsourcing successfully and now rakes in a cool 6 figures a year while working only 4 hours a week. He has implemented the strategies covered in his report, and knows exactly what (and what NOT) to do.
This is a perfect example of learning from someone else’s mistakes without making them yourself – the report covers the pitfalls and ripoffs people like John Jonas have already experienced – so you don’t have to. Know exactly where to go and how to begin outsourcing from the start – and I recommend doing it as soon as your business can afford it; according to the report, you can begin hiring staff from as little as US$125 a month part time – and think of the time that will get back for you…

I was literally bowled over by the amount of information and knowledge in this report – the more so cause it’s absolutely free. I personally would be happy to pay for this sort of information, so grab it while you can. All of the information you need on outsourcing are in the report, so take a little time right now to download it. After all, if it’s good enough for John Jonas, Tim Ferriss and Jeff Mills, it’s worth your time to look into.

YOUR DOWNLOAD LINK TO THE REPORT

To download your own copy of Secrets of Outsourcing Experts Revealed
report, please visit the following page:

Free Report Click here

For best results, I recommend you print out the report and find a nice and quiet place to sit down and read it from start to finish without being interrupted. That way, you’ll get to enjoy the interviews and have a much better overview of what it takes to outsource your Internet business. You’ll probably get loads of ideas from these Internet marketing experts and start jotting down ideas right away – I know I did. So far I’ve noted dozens of ideas for my own business.

Not everything in the report will apply to all of you, but there’s a lot of information to work with as you grow your online business. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all about leveraging your time. Think about the parts of your business you don’t really like, or that take you far too long (like technical stuff if you’re a copywriter – or content creation if you’re a techie). Do you spend time writing invoices, when you should be strategizing for growth? This is exactly the sort of thing you can outsource – and you’ll get stacks more ideas about leveraging your time in this value-packed report.

If you’re thinking about outsourcing, I recommend you read this report first – doing it the wrong way can cost you a lot in time, money and lost business revenue. Check out this report – you’ll be glad you did.

Free Report Click Here