How To Build A List of Customers You Can Market To Over And Over Again: The Benefits of A Membership Program

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 gift with purchase offer incentivizes them to purchase from you.

For another example, if you sell a weight loss course online, you could have a free or paid upsell Facebook group page where they can more easily reach you, interact with others, ask questions pertaining to their own weight loss journey, etc.. This has two main benefits: 1) It can increase the chance that they’ll see future messages / marketing from you (like via Facebook) and 2) It can be a super easy upsell that you can add without any extra real work on your part to initially make it! For instance, you can sell access and include the ability to ask you any question and get a response from an expert, which in the eyes of a lot of prospects can be a huge value. However, to you, it might be something super easy that you might do anyway (answering your customers) but now you can get paid for it!

So consider creating a membership program, where your customers become part of a community, and receive special benefits, (for example, free shipping, early access to sales, special deals, free gifts with purchase). This allows you to start to build a list of leads and customers to market to and also encourages customers to continue to purchase from you.

For other strategies on how to build a customer database and other great marketing tips, check out this book here 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!

How Outsourcing An Offer That You Sell Can Make More Money For Your Business

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 (or that you can modify) to sell to your own clients. This can be a great way of making extra money at huge margins.

For instance, there’s often places online like Fiverr.com, Craigslist.com, Freelancer.com, etc., that have tons of workers for almost anything you can think of. In some cases, you can find workers who can make nice looking videos for $25 to $50 (less in some cases) and you could turn around and sell that service for hundreds to even thousands of dollars.

We’ve done that with a variety of services ranging from social media management to video creation, and it’s easy money without any work or extra hassles on our part. And it’s a win-win, because our prospects really wanted those offers and would’ve likely bought something similar at some point, so why not have them buy from us?

Adding a couple of these services of your own can be super easy, add almost no work to your plate, but make you a fortune almost completely hands free!

So be on the lookout for other services or offers that you can sell that you’re able to outsource to others for pennies on the dollar. This can add some easy money to your sales funnels without adding extra work for you to do.

For more great marketing and sales tips to increase your business, check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How Going For The "Big Fish" Deals Can Increase Your Business

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, super easy, and very profitable for them, you’d be surprised how many are willing to do deals with you.

One way of doing the second suggestion here is by offering to white label your product or service. This is where you allow someone to sell your offer as their own while you do all the work to fulfill it. This can be a win-win for both, as they can get a good cut of the sale for doing virtually nothing except making easy sales for you, while you fulfill the sales, do the support, and make lots of extra sales without having to spend money on advertising or do any marketing yourself. A single big fish deal like this can make an entire business.

One thing that still amazes us to this day is that it’s often just as hard to make a huge sale or business deal as it is to make a tiny sale or business deal, yet the vast majority of people tend to focus on the little fish because they don’t think they’re able to land a bigger deal! This can be applied to almost any aspect of business – whether it be finding big players to partner with, selling high end products / services, or even just being an affiliate for more expensive products! Quite often times it’s just as hard to sell a $5,000 product as it is to sell a $50 product, as long as you’re targeting the right kind of prospects. One just results in you making a lot more.

Try going for the big fish now and then, whether by going after more elite prospects, at higher prices with better offers, or by seeking out big partnerships to do white label deals, where they sell your offers for you for a cut.

For more great marketing and sales tips to increase your business, check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How to Increase Your Conversions With This Simple Trick

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.

So, consider adjusting your price points to end in 7, .97, 5, or .95 to make your prices seem cheaper and see how it helps increase conversions.

Looking for more tips and tricks to help increase your conversations? This tool shows you easy strategies to grow your conversation rate and help boost your business: BizFire's Free Funnel Maker & Analyzer.

Why You Need Content For Your Site And Social Media?

There is no doubt about the fact that unique and attractive content is an essential part of your website and social media profiles. Excellent content, along with a well-thought out social media marketing strategy, will help your website stand out in the crowd and attract more users to your brand.

Initially, it may seem a straightforward and smooth process to write content for your website as you have to add a few pages and blog posts to your website. In actuality, the writing process is time-consuming and even exhausting to some people. Your content must be adequately planned and written for your site and social media page. You need to content to draw the right viewers in.

The quality of content primarily determines the success of a website. Other factors like design, theme, multimedia, and any others that influence the website play a secondary role. The content on your site should be done with aftermarket research and follow a reliable keyword research plan.

Content Is Used In All Things

It should go without saying that content is the most critical part of the web because it is used everywhere and for everything. Compelling content is important to increase ranking and traffic of your site. Some of the advantages of different types of content are:

• Good content increases click-throughs
• Unique and engaging web content increases the ranking of the site and improves conversions
• Attractive content like stylish images with authentic written information is necessary for good social media marketing
• Content of blog posts that is captivating maintains readers interest.
• Verified and accurate content establishes trust and bonds with customers, brands, and other companies.

Content Builds Trust

Content is one of the many ways to exhibit your business’ integrity and credibility. As a result, the audience will begin to trust your products or services, and sales will increase. By producing great content thhat reassures the customers that you're the real deal, you can set your brand apart and attract more consumers.
Building trust through good content is an excellent content marketing strategy which can be implemented in the following ways:

• Ask a renowned person related to your industry to write for your website.
• Try to get a guest post on a respected newspaper, magazine, or blog.
• Ask customers to give feedback on your website and social media accounts.
• Hire an influencer to promote your product with your content. Nowadays, many social media influencers, especially on Instagram, are doing this kind of promotional activities.

Content Creates Loyal Customers

Regular updates are necessary on your website, so providing free information to the audience of your website and social media accounts builds loyalty among the customers. If you provide valued content to your audience, they will be happy with your brand as their time spent in your business will not be wasted. As a result, whenever you publish content, your followers will keep checking in with your site and social media.

Content is important for SEO

Google’s algorithms of SEO have evolved a lot in the past few years. They have become more determined in removing any bad quality content from the top SERPs and keeping the best quality content on the top. Search engines, like Google, are continuously updating their algorithms and crawling the web to improve the quality of the search results for the user.

Google rewards fresh and up-to-date content. Hence, it is important to keep uploading new content on your website and updating the existing content as well to maintain a firm grip on the SERPs. Moreover, search engines penalize the pages which are full of keywords and using a single term too many times. It is important to produce SEO-optimized content for better ranking of your website.

Content on Social Media Improves Customer Service

Social media has bridged the gap between businesses and consumers. You can give instant replies to any of queries or feedback of the customers on social media. With time and proper social media marketing strategy, the business social media pages expand their reach and can connect with more potential customers. However, it is only possible if the content on your social media profiles is exceptional and attractive for your targeted audience.

If you are interested in producing great content for your website and social media accounts, it doesn't have to be hard. The process can easily be outsourced and automated. Programs like Robot Author are available to help.

Want to Charge More for Your Services? And Still Have People Lining Up to Buy From You? Here’s How!

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 made in a matter of minutes).  That's a raw cost of $50 to $100 for a $400 to $950 profit. Or, if you were to do the work mostly yourself, you'd be talking about maybe 3 to 5 hours of work, easily putting you in the range of earning $100 to $200+ per hour compared to $10 per hour just selling a $5 article.

So, see what you can add to your offer, or bundle it with, to make it a more premium offer. Or, look at how you can make your offer more “done-for-you.” and price your offer respectively. The kicker is that more people like to buy a premium offer than a basic offer, as it's more appealing and more "done-for-you" than just an item that they'd have to do all the rest of the work on themselves.  And less people offer premium services/offers, so you're competing against less.

This doesn’t just apply to services either, as the same can be done for almost any kind of product out there. For instance, instead of just selling a book on how to lose weight, you could also sell a product or program that gives them daily exercises either through e-mail, a mobile app, software, etc.. So instead of someone just reading how to lose weight, you can make it more easy and “done for you” by literally giving them a way where they simply have to follow the daily tip. Or instead of selling a 50¢ apple at a gas station, one could sell a pre-sliced apple with caramel dipping sauce ready to go for $4+ (even though the raw cost is only a tinge more than the standard apple).

One great example we’ve done is instead of selling a course on how to rank on search engines and get traffic, which would be a challenge to sell even in the $25 to $50 range, we created software that helps do a lot of those tasks for people. And instead of having a challenge of selling a course for $25 to $50, we can charge $997 / year to $2,997 / year much more easily. We’re able to do that because it’s more “done for you” and involves far less time for the end user.

A similar example outside of software was with a real estate investing instructor that we know of who at one point sold several courses on how to invest in real estate. Most of these courses originally were on the lower end of the price point, but she was able to turn those “books” into “webinar trainings” and online courses and charge closer to $997 on up, but she didn’t stop there. She was able to partner with one of us to create software that helped do what she was teaching and sold it for around $4,000 a pop. But she still didn’t stop there. She then took all her teachings and tools and basically made an offer that would be as hands free as possible for the user. That was accomplished by setting up an offer where you’d be able to purchase a $25,000 package where you’d get on a bus with others, tour dozens and dozens of homes in a day that they already did the math on and knew were awesome deals, and then be able to make offers on the spot with bankers, agents, mortgage brokers, etc. all right there with you in one place. Granted, this wasn’t for the average mom and pop investor, but for some big investors, including overseas ones looking to take advantage of the U.S. market at the time, this was an opportunity to jump into it as hands free as possible. And they were willing to pay for it.

An interesting twist on making any offer more premium or done for you is that it doesn’t have to always start with your own product or service! You can find existing service providers or products out there, see how you can make them better / more “done for you,” and then try to either form a partnership with them or just use the outsourced provider to fulfill the work for a service. A few simple tweaks to their package / offer and sales pitch can turn a $5 offer into a $500 or even a $5,000 one without even having the need to make your own offer from scratch!

Now start looking at how you can apply this to your business. How can you make your offer a premium or “done-for-you” offer by adding more things to your service or bundling your products together to give more value? This then allows you to increase your prices substantially, your premium pricing reflecting your premium product.

Now you have ideas for a premium product, need help getting leads to sell this to? For help with how to get leads to promote your product or service to, check out this cool tool: Domain Lead Pro.

How A Themed Promotion Can Boost Your Sales

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 as you give them many reminders along the way.  For instance, if you have an email list and are offering a three day special promotional offer, we recommend mailing once on day 1, twice on day 2, and three times on day 3. Using this method will get you a lot of sales on that last day, especially during the last hours when they know there’s no time left!

One observation that we’ve had over the years, which many business owners seem to ignore or be unaware of, is that even “after the holiday” sales can be huge, especially for big holidays when people are often still at home, bored, and looking to buy or do something. We’ve run several webinars and special deals right after Christmas when most marketers in our niche were afraid to schedule anything then, yet that period of time would often get some of the highest amount of sales and webinar attendance. Don’t assume that everyone is out visiting with friends and family. Some (okay … maybe all???) are looking for a break or just aren’t traveling then, so it can be the perfect time to run a special offer or schedule a special event!

During holidays, different seasons, or any other special time of the year, it’s a good idea to create themed promotions with special offers to not only drive extra sales, but to also stand out from the rest of the competition during high sales periods.

For other marketing tricks to help increase your sales, check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.