thedigitalistic

Selling digital products like e-books or videos (or even services) can be great, as they often carry much higher margins than physical products. However, people often place a much higher value on physical products that they can touch and hold. This doesn’t mean that you have to offer all your products as physical ones - far from it! Instead, you should consider offering a simple physical product like a branded coffee mug, hat, t-shirt, or some other product that makes sense with your offer, as a bonus for those who take action fast. This does two things. First, it makes people take action faster because they know there’s probably a limited quantity of the physical product (vs. a digital one that they realistically know you can have as many as you want). And second, they place a high value on physical products that they can touch. In fact, as crazy as it sounds, you can increase conversions on a $2,000 web service simply by offering a branded coffee mug ...

Want a way to make sales without paying for any ads and with zero risk of losing money in doing so? The obvious answer is a big YES, but very few business owners take advantage of running their own affiliate programs, which can do exactly that! Affiliate programs are where you offer others a cut of any sale that they send your way. When this is done online, there’s traditionally special “affiliate links” that they get from you. When they send people through those links that later buy from your site, they’d get credited for and paid a percentage of the sale. You can do a similar concept offline just by letting others refer your prospects directly (and manually crediting them), or even by handing out special “unique” coupon codes to others to hand out to their prospects so you know where they came from. This could be a special coupon that you hand out, with a code or ID on it, so you know where it came from. Regardless, in either case you only pay them after a sale is made, wh...

It takes a while to understand that social media sites are developed for more than just entertainment and de-escalation of boredom. You can make money through social media without selling anything. These platforms are, believe it or not, perfectly designed to be used as money-making machines. It may take you a little time and a lot of effort to get recognized by other social media users. You'll need to build an image and audience on social media. You'll need to build an audience and engage in an effective social media content strategy. Over time, as your audience grows and you accumulate more and followers a number of new income opportunities may open up to you, and you'll never have to create a store or start your own business if you don't want to. Once you have a substantial audience, here are some ways you can make money with your popular social media account: 1: Brand Promotion: Some of the most effective marketing is done through ads and promotions online, ...

Looking for a way to capitalize on the value each customer is worth to you? An easy way to do this is by offering different upsells. Upselling is offering a complimentary or upgraded version of a product/service that a customer is currently purchasing. One of the most well known upsells can be heard when you head into your local fast food joint: “Would you like fries with that?” Even not so great upsells can add a quick 33% or more to your revenue stream.  Some really good upsells or funnels can even double your initial sales or more! An upsell is a great way to increase the total value of a sale. For example, if you run a dance school, and each class is $15, you could provide a number of upsells. You could offer 3 different upsells, of varying amounts: Upsell 1 - 4 week course for $50 Upsell 2 - Gold Membership where for $120 a month you can attend as many classes as you like. Upsell 3 - Pro dance package for $200 a month, which allows you to attend unlimite...

In the past few years, social signals have become an essential part of a business' website ranking. These trends have only increased as the use of social media has become highly popular around the world. A well-executed social media marketing strategy can greatly boost your business. Social media is essential for businesses to keep in direct contact with their customers, especially their most loyal ones. Through social media, existing, as well as potential customers for your brand, will have direct access to information about all of the critical updates and additions to your business. For a strong internet presence, you need to make sure that your business's social media accounts are updated frequently and consistently. Engaging and consistent social media content will establish steady interaction with customers and visitors to the page. If you have a business and you are not using social media websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to promote and market your bus...

Selling digital products like e-books or videos (or even services) can be great, as they often carry much higher margins than physical products. However, people often place a much higher value on physical products that they can touch and hold. This doesn’t mean that you have to offer all your products as physical ones - far from it! Instead, you should consider offering a simple physical product like a branded coffee mug, hat, t-shirt, or some other product that makes sense with your offer, as a bonus for those who take action fast. This does two things. First, it makes people take action faster because they know there’s probably a limited quantity of the physical product (vs. a digital one that they realistically know you can have as many as you want). And second, they place a high value on physical products that they can touch. In fact, as crazy as it sounds, you can increase conversions on a $2,000 web service simply by offering a branded coffee mug ...

There is nothing more frustrating than going to run a Facebook ad and seeing it disapproved or banned completely. Even worse is when Facebook deactivates your ads account as a whole. People experience this with their business and personal accounts all the time. It can be devastating, especially if you can't get back online. Still, if your account has been banned from running ads, it may not be the end of the world. New or Reinstated The First step you will need to take is to figure out what's going on and with which account. If your Facebook business account has been disabled, you may simply be able to create a new one and try to be careful in the future. If your personal Facebook account has been disabled, however, there may be something going that is much more serious. Creating a new personal Facebook account for ads will probably not be possible since Facebook is usually very meticulous about tracing duplicates. First Things First, Visit The Ads Manager Before ...

Contests can be a great way to grab more leads or prospects, get feedback or testimonials from existing customers, encourage participation or attendance on webinars, and more. And, it’s not like you have to give away a car or something crazy expensive. In fact, often times cheaper giveaways will help increase your conversions even more (perhaps because they think they’ll have a better chance of winning?). For instance, you can run an ad where you’re advertising a contest for a free drone that you’re selling. Anyone who enters you know is probably a potential prospect, as they’re interested in the drone that you sell. When you do that, you can immediately advertise a special deal you have on them in case they don’t win (and offer to refund if they do) and want to get it right away. The benefit here is that you can get dirt cheap clicks and leads when advertising this way (on places like Facebook), all while building up a very targeted list (we’ve built up some big mailing lis...

With the passage of time, consumers have become highly conscious of the marketing strategies being used by businesses all over. Most consumers are able to differentiate between an authentic business and one that is exaggerated and hyped through artificial marketing. As a result, people tend to spend their hard-earned earnings on very particular products and brands. In such a highly competitive business environment, businesses face the difficulty of increasing their sales, or even worse, just to maintain a steady sales income. As a result, the capital of such companies starts dwindling within a few years, and it can lead to the catastrophic failure of their business model. If you want to keep your head above those choppy waters, you need to keep in mind the following five marketing tips. These tips should be adopted by all businesses to drastically improve their sales: 1. Identify The Market And The Problems. Not enough can be said of the great importance in choosing a...

Any special promotions can help you drive sales, especially those sitting on the fence as to whether or not to buy from you. However, offering seasonal or holiday themed promotions can help even more, as prospects not only immediately understand that it’s a limited time deal for a good reason, but you’ll also hit them up during a peak buying period. For example, the vast majority of people are probably already buying lots of stuff over Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Black Friday, etc., so you can ride that wave while they already have their credit cards out, while also standing out amongst the crowd of competitors by having something that they perceive as a special deal.   Similar to other promotions, it’s often best to have these be very limited time deals (even if you bring them back multiple times) so prospects don’t have the opportunity to sit on the fence too long. Three or so days is often the perfect amount of time to offer a special promotional deal, as long ...

Most businesses tend to practically ignore their prospects and even their best clients. This is a horrible thing to do, as you’d be leaving a ton of money on the table in doing so. One thing that you can do to help remind your prospects and customers about you is to send either an e-mail or a card with something like a thank you note along with an incentive to take some further action (like a discount or a freebie leading into a sales offer of yours). For instance, if you have leads that haven’t bought from you but who’ve expressed an interest of some kind, you can either automatically (via an autoresponder) or manually follow-up with them by writing an e-mail saying how you haven’t seen them in a while, want to thank them for previously reaching out, and then letting them know about either a freebie you’re currently offering, which can lead into a paid offer, or a discount or other incentive/deal that you currently have. This can help revive old, “dead” leads in...

So how can you charge more for your services? How can you increase your price tag and still have customers lining up to buy from you? One easy way is to change your offer from a simple product/service to a done-for-you offer. What does this mean? Check out this example below. Say, instead of charging $5 to write an article, you instead charge $497 to $997+ to write five articles, create a blog, post the articles up, optimize it for their keywords, and have a custom graphic or two. If you were to outsource a $5 article for $3, the first example only gives you a $2 profit, or if you were to write it yourself, you'd be trading $5 for 30 minutes, at best, of your time ($10 an hour on the higher end if you’re super fast).  However, if you were to offer the second, more premium example, you could outsource the articles for $15, allocate $10 for some custom graphics on Fiverr.com, and put in $25 to $50 to outsource the custom blog with SEO (blogger.com blogs, for instance, can be m...

One way to show value and highlight the great price you’re offering your customers is to point out when you are giving a discount or savings, as this lets customers know you’re giving them a great deal and lots of value. A discount also has a psychological effect - we feel we are getting a better deal and are more likely to buy. Seeing that an item is discounted not only is an incentive to buy it now, it can also encourage new users to buy that might otherwise have not considered it. For example, when listing your price, you might write: "$97 --- 50% Off Today!" This makes people feel they are getting a great deal, helps them justify the purchase to themselves and is more likely to push them over the line. If you have several similar offers that are slightly better or more/less expensive than the other, instead of just listing off the benefits of each one next to their price, you can also not only list off the savings, but say “Good Deal,” “Better Deal,”...

In terms of cost-efficiency, the most crucial method for attracting traffic to your website is through organic searches. They allow you to reach people who don't even know about your site initially but are searching for a specific product or service related to your website. The primary factor of the success in organic searches boils down to the ranking of your website on search engine results pages (SERPs). There are a ton of factors that may contribute to your website may not be ranking well on search engines. Some of these reasons are: A Slow Website Millions of search results are available to the user as soon as they enter a keyword into a search engine like Google. With such a massive amount of data available on the Web, it's become challenging to hold users' attention for extended periods of time. Pages that load faster not only provide excellent user experiences but also play a huge role in SEO ranking. Site speed is an official search ranking algorithm in...

There’s only so much time in the day, and although it can be a great idea to add extra services that you sell and fulfill yourself, it’s not always practical. This is why it can be a great idea to look for other services or offers that you can sell yourself but easily outsource to others to do with little to no work on your part. For instance, you might be a web designer that often gets requests to create and add videos to your clients’ sites, but it might either be very time consuming or nearly impossible for you to create nice looking videos to sell as a service even if you could get hundreds to thousands of dollars per sale for them. Instead of just passing on that easy money, why not look for others online who already offer those services, reach out to them, markup their prices (or make them more “done for you” to increase the value and prices you can charge) and get permission to use their testimonials, social proof, examples, sales pages, etc. as your own (o...

In many cases it can be a wise idea to offer multiple similar packages when selling something. However, instead of offering drastically different offerings, which might make your prospects hesitate more due to not being sure which option to get, you can offer similar options where the “value buy” seems like an amazing deal. For example, let’s say that you’re selling an SEO service to help websites rank better. If your main offer is a done for you package for $997 where you fix up their site and offer some basic consultations for them too, that can normally seem like a lot of money to some people and can make them hesitate more on if they should buy or not. However, you could offer three options where the “basic” package is for $897 and only includes a report where you identify the issues but don’t fix it for them, the “most popular” package is for $997 and includes identifying and fixing all the issues on top of three free consultation calls, and the “elite” package is for $...

So how can focusing on the benefits of your offer increase your sales? It’s a marketing technique that encourages customers to focus on the end result that your product will give them, which is a powerful motivator to encourage customers to buy. Your offer will have features (specifications) and benefits (the end result). In your marketing focus on the benefits of your service/product, instead of the features. It’s the benefits that sell your product, not the features. For example, does a person buying an anti-aging cream want to know that it contains the ingredient Q10 or that it visibly reduces wrinkles and makes them look younger? Think about how you can use the benefits your product provides in your marketing - you can still list the features, but link them to the benefit that the feature will give your customer. For example, if you have a business selling a course teaching guitar lessons, you might have three main features that you could translate into benefi...

One common and popular phrase that has stood the test of time is "content is king" why? Because it has remained true despite hundreds of other factors like SEO practices, social media, and many other modern trends influencing online businesses and marketing. SEO experts have begun to adopt the philosophy that content is the most crucial factor of the ranking of any website. Despite the fact that the importance of content is emphasized in many high places, too many aspiring online entrepreneurs have not fully understood and embraced this idea. Many will miss out on the benefits that great and original content can bring to a page. There are many to consider. First of all, though, it is essential to be familiar with what content actually is. There is no short answer to this question. Content is everywhere and it's used in everything. In blogs, posts and articles you can find it along with web content like an “about us” page or a page describing products and service...

Business owners often do more talking than listening. When it comes to making sales, often it’s best to do more listening than talking. Instead of overthinking and brainstorming what your prospects might want, why not just ask them? You’d probably be surprised at how easy it can be to sell them what they’re already telling you they most want/need. For example, if you’re selling a variety of online marketing or web services, instead of trying to force them to buy a particular SEO package to help rank their site, why not ask them what they think their biggest issues are right now with their business? You might find that they really don’t care much about their ranking but might instead be focused on their social media, e-mail list management, or some other service that you could easily do for them. Once someone tells you what their issues are, ask them what they think that would do for their business if those issues were solved, and then ask them how much more they t...

Sometimes it’s hard to see the benefit of something we haven’t seen in action or tried first. Offering a free trial period, or a demonstration of your product, can be a great way to alleviate a potential customer’s fears and make them confident the product will work for them. Also, once someone has tried something free they often feel obliged to reciprocate by purchasing from you - it’s the principle of reciprocity in action. For example, if you have a software product, offer a free 30 day trial, so customers can see how it works, use it and see the results they get from it. You’ll get customers who may have sat on the fence or not purchased previously all of a sudden be ready to buy because they can get a chance to experience how great the product can actually be for them. There’s one tip we’ve learned over the years that can greatly increase your retention rate here (or essentially how many stay on past the trial period), and that’s to offer a free trial, but re...

Did you know that some big influencers out there online can literally drive millions of dollars in sales, with a single post on social media, or mention on a big blog? In fact, there’s even billion-dollar businesses that have gotten their start from single big influencers mentioning their products. And, surprisingly enough, it’s easier to do than you might think. Sure, it might be far harder to do a multi-million dollar launch overnight from a big star mentioning you just to be nice, but there’s plenty of well-known influencers that can still drive a ton of sales your way (and you never know when you might get lucky by landing a bigger one). To increase your chances of this, you should take the time to reach out to these big influencers, blogs, news sites, etc., and offer them your products for free in the hopes that they’d be willing to review them. Sometimes you can even pay these influencers to mention your products. And although some of the biggest ...

So you’re looking to build a list? This strategy is a great way to build a list of people that are interested in your niche. First, find relevant Facebook groups in your niche, join them, and take the time to see what people are complaining about. What are the common complaints that keep coming up again and again? What product or service could you come up with to provide a solution to these complaints? Once you’ve come up with a solution, sell it or give it away for free to build a list or following. For example, if you run a wedding planning business, join Facebook groups in that niche and see what the common complaints among brides-to-be are. Perhaps they find that it’s very overwhelming, trying to remember everything to organize and knowing when to do what. You could create a timeline checklist, of what to organize when in the countdown to the big day, and offer it free to build a list of potential clients. So join Facebook groups within your niche and see what the most common...

What is Lead Generation? Over the years, the techniques and strategies of the marketing of business have evolved a lot. Lead generation has become an essential phenomenon in marketing. It is the process of attracting potential customers to your products and services via social media platforms, email updates, and strong word-of-mouth. A lead is considered to be a qualified and hot lead when the consumer is not only attracted to your business but also has a need for your products or services. What is the Importance of Lead Generation? Initially, lead generation is vital in gathering information about the behavior of your potential customers. After compilation and detailed analysis of the collected data, you can devise effective strategies to market your business for the targeted customer base. It is crucial to attracting a large number of people to your websites, so the products and the services offered by your company are promoted among a vast amount of people. Lead ...

Search engines remain one of the most common tools users are utilizing to find things online, Google of course being the most prominent among them. Search engine optimization is therefore key and making your site visible and getting your content on more eyes. You need traffic to build an audience, and an audience to build conversions. That starts with search engine optimization. There are different types of search engine optimization including off-page and on-page, and the rules vary a little by search engine. For the sake of this post we will focus on practical ways you can create your written content in a way that optimizes your on-page content for Google. Choosing Your Keyword The first step in optimizing any content you write is going to be choosing your “keyword” the keyword is the main word in your text, which you want to stick out to search engines. In other words you want to try and think of a keyword that users searching for what your page has to offer, would type i...

People often overlook this very simple, very easy way to increase their business’s profits: increase your prices. Most people tend to undercharge for their services, so try increasing your prices, as a test, and see what happens. Funnily enough, most people perceive something that is higher priced as being of higher quality, which can encourage people to buy your product or service. As you increase your prices, you’re also receiving more per sale, increasing your profit margin. Take this strategy a step further and target higher value clients. For example, if you run a business coaching company, and you currently charge $200 an hour for your time, increase your rates to $1000. With the perceived higher quality and value in your coaching, target businesses that make a lot of money vs. those that are barely getting by. In this example, one client would be worth 5 of your clients in the past. Not only have you raised your hourly rate, but you’ve decreased the amount of work you nee...

Offering a free gift, with a purchase over a certain amount (or just with any particular item), is a great way to encourage people to buy from you, but also to spend more per sale if they have to spend a certain limit. A great way to take this strategy a step further is to make your free gift a sample of other products you want to promote, or a new product you want to encourage your customers to try so as to buy in the future. For example, beauty brands use this strategy regularly, and to great effect, offering a selection of sample size beauty products in a cute looking case, when spending over $50, $70, $100, etc. in one transaction. Not only does the free gift encourage their customers to buy more beauty products in one transaction, it also allows them a chance to introduce their customers to new products or items they may not have bought previously, without the chance to try them first. A twist on this method that we used with great success in building a coup...

A membership program is where your customers sign up, either for free or for a fee, to be part of a community or elite club. As an incentive to sign up they often receive special discounts, invites to product launches, early access and other rewards. The benefit to you is that by offering incentives and rewarding customers’ loyalty, you encourage them to keep coming back to you and buying from your business. You also have the benefit of beginning to build a list of clients that you can regularly market to and offer deals to. For example, if you have an online store and sell health food products, you could create a VIP membership program for customers, where one of the main benefits is free shipping. You could also offer special deals, such as a free gift (perhaps a sample of a new product you want to promote) with each purchase over $30. The free shipping encourages people to join your VIP Membership Program, now allowing you to continue to regularly market to them, and the free...

It’s time to check out the competition!! In school it may have been called cheating, but in the business world it’s just good old-fashioned market research! Find out where your competitors are advertising, spy on their sales funnels, and see how you can replicate any of their good ideas that appear to be working well. There are many online tools to find out what ads and keywords your competitors are using. There’s also a couple of basic ways to see what your competitors are up to - follow them on social media and subscribe to their blogs and newsletters. If they have smaller priced items, you may choose to purchase one of their items to see what their purchase process is like, whether they offer upsells, what those are and what their follow up process is to a sale. See what they are doing really well and look for how you can replicate it or adapt it to your business. For example, if you sign up to a competitor’s newsletter, you can see how they nurture a lead and turn it onto a sa...