thedigitalistic

Everybody loves a freebie! What do you currently sell, that is of value, that you could offer for free? And how can you monetize the back end of that? This works especially well if you can offer something that other businesses would normally charge for. For example, if you have a corporate cleaning business, you could offer your first clean free, and follow up with your customer to see if they were happy with your service and would like you to continue. This is a great way to get new clients to try your service, as you’re taking all the risk out of it for them and, if you do a great job, chances are they’ll want to keep you on. The principle of reciprocity comes into play here too - you’ve given something of value to them and chances are they’ll feel the urge to do the same back. A twist on this model is our “free plus shipping & handling” funnels, where we offer something for free on the front-end as long as the customer covers a small s&h fee (usually un...

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...

One of the best things you can do to get people to take action, especially online, is to offer a free plus shipping & handling offer. These offers have an obvious HUGE value because nothing beats free, and by having them pay a small S&H fee, they still see the value in the free product, despite how often times your products’ costs might be completely covered in this S&H fee. For instance, if you go to a site like Aliexpress.com, which specializes in drop-shipping products of all sorts, you can find lots of jewelry, pet toys, gadgets, etc. for under $2 that already include free shipping. Some of these have perceived values of easily $10 to $30 or more. That means that your customers get an awesome deal by thinking they got the bargain of a lifetime, while you also get a steal of a deal by getting a new customer at better than no cost to you (if the product and shipping costs $2, for instance, you’re up $3 in profit just by charging a $5 S&H fee). ...

How can you encourage customers to make their second, third, and fourth purchase with you? How can you entice them to keep coming back and buying from you, changing them from a once off customer to a regular? Future-use coupons are one great strategy to employ to incentivize customers to make that next buy. So how do future-use coupons work? When customers make a purchase, you give them a coupon for a dollar value or percentage off their next purchase. This is called a “future-use” coupon. It encourages your customers to come back and purchase from you again, and keeps you in their mind. You can even make receiving the coupon dependent on spending a certain amount, to encourage customers to spend more per sale. For example, if you have tennis shop, you could have an offer where if they spend over $100 today they get $25 off their next purchase of $100 or more. Not only does this give an incentive for your customers to spend $100 now, it also gets you an additiona...

There’s many strategies to increase conversions, but have you tried this one? Try ending your prices with a 7, .95, 5 or .95. Instead of charging $10, for instance, consider charging $9.97. Even though it’s only a few cents less, people seem to think that it sounds cheaper. Even on high priced items the same tricks can work. For instance, you’ve probably never seen a car advertised for $30,000. Instead, you’ll see it advertised for something like $29,995. Amazingly enough, on that last example, some people will walk away thinking that the car is $29,000 in their head (even though they’re smart enough to know that it’s obviously $30,000). In the past many marketers have used 9 or .99 to end the numbers in, but it seems that there’s been a growing trend lately that 7, .97, 5, or .95 seem to stand out even more and appear even less expensive. Crazy stuff, but it can definitely work. And it’s doubtful that you’ll miss those few cents after increasing your conversions....

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 ...

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...

Offering a guarantee is a great way to make it easier for customers to buy. It takes the risk out of the purchase for them, as it gives them an out if they don’t like the product. Psychologically, it also gives them confidence in your product - as why would you be offering a guarantee if you weren’t confident in your product? Now, to be clear, make sure you do offer a great product before you whack an awesome guarantee on it! For example, if you have a mattress company, you could offer a guarantee and word it like this: “Try our mattresses risk free for 30 days - In the unlikely event that you’re not 100% satisfied with your mattress we will give you 100% of your money back.” A guarantee like this takes the risk out of buying for your customers and gives them confidence in your product. Most people won’t take advantage of the guarantee and the amount of returns you’ll have versus the increase in sales will be well worth it. And having said that, it’s often best to...

Too often business owners try to fight over the scraps. They try to make deals or land sales with anyone and everyone that they can find, regardless of if those deals are barely worth any money to them. It’s amazing what can happen when you try to go for the bigger clients or choose bigger businesses to partner with. Just a single deal can often make for a very good month (or even year!). There’s two main ways of doing this. First, you can target more high-end prospects with higher end offerings. By raising your prices and offering more “done for you” services and products, you can try to target the elite buyers instead of focusing on being the low-priced leader barely scraping by. The second way is to try to focus on big “competitors,” or on other business owners who are far bigger than you in a similar market, but not necessarily competing, and then trying to strike a deal with them to sell or promote your offers (for a big cut). If you make this hands-free, sup...

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...

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...

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...

To take advantage of this marketing strategy, look at how you can bundle your service or products together to create a package deal. This can be a great way to move more products and services and add value to your customers. Customers feel they are getting a great deal, as they are paying less than if they bought each item separately, and you get the benefit of a higher dollar sale per transaction. Bundling can also help you move slow-moving products and give you an upsell to offer to customers that may have been looking at purchasing an individual item. For example, if you own a travel agency, offer a package deal where accommodation, flights, several meals and an attraction are all included. For another example, if you own a beauty salon, offer a pampering package, where a hair styling, manicure and massage are offered together. While a customer may have been considering purchasing one or two of these items, if you offer a great deal, they might be persuaded to purchase th...

One of the most important things to understand is that leads are far more than just random people who might be interested in your business. A lead is someone who needs what your business has to offer. The only thing you should have to do is capture their attention and easily be able to convince them that your products and services supply that need. The generation of high quality leads is the most important part of business-to-business(B2B) marketing. Solid leads ensure steady growth and income. Some of the most important straategies you can consider are: Creating and Publishing High-Quality Content Regular All the techniques and strategies to promote your business and generate more leads boil down to the one thing that is most important in any online presence, the content. It's true to say that content is the king in any regard. You must make sure that the material published on your webpage is high-quality, reliable, and engaging to your users. High-quality content...

1: What is Schema? Schema is best described as a type of language and coding system. It helps organize the data and shows more relevant results in search engines for the end user. This system began in 2011 and has widely been supported and used by several search engines like Yandex, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google as an attempt to bring more pin-pointed results to their users. Schema is often referred to as a markup system that is used to optimized websites. Essentially, it paves the way for search engines to interpret information and show the most relevant results. Now, if you think that Schema doesn't apply perfectly to your website, you couldn't be more wrong. Schema can offer a variety of features that you perfectly image and optimize to your advantage. The most surprising thing about schema is that it collects and displays every meager detail about the data you have questions about. For example, if you search for a specific hotel in your area on the Google sea...

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...