More and more often, clients have been asking me, "how do you get it all done, Alicia?"
"I don’t know you how do it, Alicia…with a little one running around and so few hours in the day to actually focus on your work. Somehow you manage to write your weekly ezine, hold a bunch of teleseminars each month, run your 10-week group coaching program, AND be creating and promoting new offers and new products all the time. I’m so impressed and inspired by you, but more than that, I want to know how you do it all!?"
To be honest, sometimes I wonder myself! Something I often say to other, especially new, mothers is, "despite what everyone tells you to do, do whatever works for YOU." In a way, that’s how I started running my business after I had my daughter. I just did whatever worked. I still do.
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Creating a profitable business online is a process, just like creating any other business. Regardless of what it is that you’re offering, your cash flow is based on your sales. Once you know and implement the online business sales cycle (which anyone can follow), you’ll be able to create consistent cash flow for your business, too.
Here are the six basic steps in the online business sales cycle:
Step 1. Choose Your Prospects
"Prospects" is basically business-speak for potential clients and/or customers. So, who is the person who is ideally suited for your product, program or service? Who’s your ideal client or customer? Who makes up your target market? Is it parents, health professionals, copywriters, dancers, artists, entrepreneurs, boat owners?
It’s critical for the success of any business to choose a group of people to work with, even if that group is very broad at first. As you become more and more aware of what kind of client or customer shows up for you, you’ll be able to more narrowly target that portion of the market, which will make your marketing a lot easier and bring you cash flow a lot quicker.
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Whether you’re publishing an ezine, sending an ecourse, posting to a blog, or building an email list of clients and customers in another format, there are a few things you need to know to make sure that you’re complying with the legal aspects of sending email as well as for making your list-building efforts that much more effective.
1. Only Use Permission-Based Email Marketing
Simply put, opt^in email (also called ‘permission-based’) is email sent to people who have given you permission to contact them via email. So if someone hasn’t directly requested information from you, they should not be on your opt^in list.
2. Single or Double Opt^in?
Depending on the email list service you’re using in your business, you may have a choice between single or double opt^in email. With single opt^in, someone gives you their email address once and they are added to your list. With double opt^in (also know as confirmation opt^in), someone gives you their email address, to which they then receive an automated response from your list service asking them to click a specific URL to confirm that they do in fact want to be added to your list. Only once they click that link are they then added to your list.
So, which should you use? It depends, but for your main email list, I want to encourage you to use the double opt^in process. It means that you will lose a certain percentage of those people who signed up for your list because they then don’t confirm their subscription, but it protects you from being labeled as a spammer – something you want to avoid at all costs.
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One recent afternoon as I was driving around running errands, I tuned into a local radio station that was hosting a radio-thon to raise money for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. When the DJ said, "Think about what your healthy child is doing right now, playing, having a snack, whatever… and then think of the kids at St. Jude" – well, I couldn’t pull over fast enough to whip out my wallet and cell phone.
Now, like you, I get a lot of solicitations either in the mail or even via email. Most of those get dumped in the trash or deleted. But what was different about this time? I mean, I literally stopped what I was doing (driving!) to pull over, take out my credit card, call the number, and make my contribution.
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After you’ve worked hard to put your product or program together, and spent the time and effort to write a compelling sales page for it, you don’t want to lose your potential customer or client right at the moment they are sitting there with credit card in hand – at the order link or order form.
Here’s a checklist of 6 ways to make sure that doesn’t happen:
__1. Reaffirm the decision
At the top of your order form, add a box that gives a synopsis of all the benefits your buyer gets for their purchase. List the features, the bonuses, and the guarantee. And tell them again that they’ve made the right decision.
There’s another benefit to adding this ‘here’s what you get in a nutshell’ box at the top of your order form. If your buyer is like me, they may skip through a sales page and go right to the order link to see the price. It’s the price isn’t right there, they will likely click on the order link to be taken to your order form to find out how much your offering is.
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