Up Selling Your Products And Services For More Cash!
Many Internet businesses have sometimes overlooked the obvious profit strategies within their business. I know I have and only the other day was I reminded by Brendan Nichols to include up sells on my website before a customer finalises their order. If you want to increase your profits without having to look for new customers add this one strategy correctly and I can guarantee you that you will have more money in your bank at the end of the month.
I Don’t Know What Up Selling Is..
To define what up selling is, lets have a look at the definition from Wikipedia:
Up-selling usually involves marketing more profitable services or products, but up-selling can also be simply exposing the customer to other options he or she may not have considered previously. Up-selling can imply selling something additional, or selling something that is more profitable or otherwise preferable for the seller instead of the original sale.
In the context of an Internet business we can apply up selling on your website just before a customer finalises an order or at any thank you page. It is quite simple to do and sometimes very easy to overlook and it provides the opportunity to increase your profits with minimal or almost no effort.
How To Use An Upsell In Your Business?
Let’s start with an example to understand where up selling can fit into your Internet business. I am sure you have heard of McDonalds? Next time you buy a burger from them pay attention to how the 15 year old asks you for an up sell. Here is what happens. You order a Big Mac, French Fries and a drink, and it gets processed, then the cashier asks you, “Would you like to upgrade your drink and French Fries to a large for an extra fifty cents?”. You don’t hesitate and answer yes, since it’s only an extra fifty cents and you get more of what you wanted. Bargain isn’t it? Well, McDonalds already had the sale and by adding one little thing into their marketing they immediately increase their profits. This is up selling at McDonalds.
How can we apply up selling to your Internet business and increase your profits? Try it on your order pages or thank you pages. For example, “Buy this product, and get one year free technical support. Check this box to get lifetime support for an additional $29.95.” This allows you the opportunity to make almost an extra $30 from each sale. It is very easy to add to your processes and can make a huge difference on your profits. It is even easier once it is automated which is made possible from an Internet business.
Another way to increase your profits with up selling is to include sales sheets with the packaging of your physical products. Include an offer for free bonuses, which will drive traffic back to your website to take up the offer. Once they are on your website you can offer them one-time offers or repeat the up sell process again on other items. See how easy it is to include this simple strategy?
It’s Easy Cash, Why Don’t More Internet Businesses Use It?
The reason is that most business owners are either not aware of this strategy or have put it off and chased after other opportunities to look for new customers. If you have a database of customers who are not currently purchasing from you at least once a year, then you have an excellent opportunity to up sell your products and services. Take action and don’t let procrastination overtake you. This one strategy can can be your most profitable marketing tool for your business.
On the flip side if you already have implemented this into your Internet business, I commend you! If you want to read other strategies available check out my series on Spreading The Word: Turbocharge Your Traffic.
Tyrone Shum
Up Selling For Profit
Moving Your Business Online
Most owners who start selling online usually have an existing bricks and mortar business. The reasons why a business owner may go online could be to expand their customer base, increase sales revenue, or just to have an online presence and I am sure there are many other reasons as well. I am starting to see a stronger trend from brick and mortar businesses to move online and use online e-commerce systems to run their business instead. Also, for new business owners coming online for the first time I see them starting a blog as a low cost and easy to set up alternative. Let’s have a look at some of the statistics. According to the 2008 Australian Commonwealth Bank Investment Trends Business Owners Survey, they found 42% of business owners had a website, but only 18% of them allowed consumers to buy online. I was quite interested to read this because it shows there are still more opportunities for business owners to capture their share of the online market.
Why Do Business Online?
There are many benefits in doing business online and I have outlined five most compelling reasons:
- Make money 24 hours, 7 days a week. Imagine waking up and turning on your computer to see that you have made hundreds of sales overnight! In today’s time poor consumer market, we see people shopping online at any time of the day, so having a 24 hour, 7 day a week shop can capture sales you didn’t even know about.
- It is easy for consumers to shop online and no more waiting in lines. One of the secrets to shopping online is no more waiting in lines to get what you want. Make it easier for consumers to buy from you and they won’t even need to leave their home.
- Reduces your overheads. The cost of running an Internet business is quite minimal and once your systems are in place your customers become your most profitable asset. With no customer service staff and no overtime to pay, your Internet business can be very lucrative. I am an example of this, as my dragonboat business is an automated system with only one staff to run it.
- Allows you to focus on a niche market. Some of the most successful small businesses carve out a niche market where they don’t have to compete on price alone. This allows them to expand their customer base globally and dominate their niche market.
- Streamlines your systems and improves your cashflow. It is very easy to automate your systems with an Internet business as technology is so advanced that it can do virtually anything. It allows you to feed information into your back-end systems and allows you to control where money goes. Additionally cashflow will be improved with faster electronic transactions without having to wait to go to a bank to deposit the money.
Getting Started With Your Online Business
Once you have decided that your business is suitable for capturing online sales, you will want to begin planning how to put it together. There are many parts to an Internet business and more in depth knowledge to acquire, though here is a summary of the components you will need:
The Front End:
Another article I wrote discusses about the front end in more detail showing you how to capture leads: Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 1: Generating Leads. This will help you understand more about the processes involved.
- Setting up a website. This is the easy part, and also the presence of your business online. First step is to register a domain name, chose a hosting company and build your website.
- The shopping cart. Once your website is setup you can either have an integrated shopping cart with your website or add a shopping cart software. Both with do the same job, the difference is to do with how much you can afford to spend on the website. I’ll explain what is included in a good shopping cart:
- Marketing tools and information including cross selling tools
- Order management tools
- Pricing rules allowing you to offer bulk discounts, special time sensitive pricing promotions and so forth
- Stock management tools
The Back End:
- Payment gateway. This is important for you and the consumer to have. It is a secure connection between your website and the bank or merchant provider that will send private transactional details. A consumer will feel safe when they are purchasing from your website and provide security from fraud.
- Merchant provider. This is the financial institution that will validate credit card details and make the payment into your bank account. It can be either your banking institution or an online provider such as Paypal or eWay. Shop around to see what is suitable for your business that will provide you with the best package possible.
- Accounting system. More and more e-commerce systems have an accounting package module built in and also give you the option to export data into a well-known accounting system such as Quickbooks or MYOB. No matter what accounting software you use, make sure you have this in place as it will save you time and money over the long term.
There are more components that can be added to both the front and back end of an Internet business. I have provided a basic skeleton to get started for any business owner wishing to set up their business online. If you want to find out more about how to create a successful and profitable back end system to add onto these basic components, be sure to read:
Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 2: Profiting From The Back-End
Tyrone Shum
Helping Business Owners Move Online
Why Your Internet Business Needs An Email List?
Over the Easter Long Weekend I spent time with family and had a very relaxing time pursuing my hobby. I also was in the mood to write, so I added another 12 email newsletters for the Dragonboat email list which has about 400 subscribers. I have set them to be sent out monthly using an automatic followup service, and each newsletter will provide my subscribers valuable information about Dragonboating techniques, nutrition, fitness and upcoming Dragonboat events happening across the world. So why have I told you this and what is so important about having an email list?
The Importance Of Having An Email List?
This list that I have built and maintained for over three years generates over $100,000 in revenue alone and I simply write one email a month to provide valuable information to my subscribers. Furthermore, this list is not huge compared to other lists I have built in the past where I have had thousands of subscribers. This least has about 400 subscribers and if you do the calculations, each subscriber spends on average around $250. I don’t tell you this to brag about my email list, but it should tell you how important it is to have and maintain an email list.
Many business seminars I have attended talks about the importance of having a list and how each person or client on your list is where money can be made. A coach and mentor I have learned business strategies from is Brendan Nichols, also known as “Australia’s laziest entrepreneur”. Brendan is an Australian entrepreneur and business coach who was trained by Robert Kiyosaki from Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I personally know Brendan and he is definitely the real deal who practises what he preaches. I highly admire Brendan for what he teaches turning difficult business principles into simple action steps for anyone to apply. This where I learned how to build a profitable email list.
Brendan taught me how to maximise profits from each client and to create a client priority list from my email subscribers.
“The principle of maximisation is to increase the amount of purchases from clients you already have.”
If you want to learn how to build a list please read Generating Leads where I show you some methods on how to capture leads onto an email database. Also a great case study to read is at Yaro Starak’s blog: Building An Email List
How Will A Targeted Email List Make A Difference To Your Internet Business?
Before you can maximise profits from each client your email list needs to have targeted customers or have customers who want your product or service. There is no point in having thousands of subscribers on a database who are not interested in what you have to offer, it is a of waste resources. Therefore your goal right from the beginning when asking people to subscribe to your list is to offer them something they want. In my case, people subscribe to my database to receive information about dragonboating and they receive a free eBook about dragonboat paddling techniques and equipment when they join my email list. Obviously not everyone will subscribe to this list unless they are involved in the sport or are looking to purchase dragonboat equipment.
When you create a targeted email list, it is becomes an excellent tool for building stronger relationships with your subscribers. I consider a person who opts-in to my email list a high quality prospect who will ultimately purchase a product or use our services in the future. This is why promoting to a targeted email list allows you to focus on narrower topics and reuse content over and over again as each new subscriber moves through your sequence of emails. As a result of this, you have structure and a refined system that requires less work and produces more income.
Maximising Profits From Each Client
Whilst you are building a targeted list of email subscribers you will constantly look at ways to maximise profits from each customer providing them with valuable content and offering your products and services in conjunction. Here are three hot profit maximisation tips to help you increase your income:
- Look for add-ons products or services to upsell or use additional promotions
- Develop an upselling script e.g McDonalds: would you like fries with that or a soft drink?
- Create a special priority client list to offer them special offers and pre-launch events. e.g. If a sale starts on the 1st Decemeber, they can take up that special on the 25th November as a VIP client and get in before the rush.
The key to successfully maximising profit from each client is to ask the question, “what can we do for our clients that they can’t do for themselves?”. Essentially we are creating value and offering them a service to save them time and resources.
The true power of building an Internet business with a targeted email list is to leverage the website as the traffic creator and relationship starter, and then finish the process with email marketing to generate your income.
There’s a lot of subtleties to this system but I guarantee you the results will speak for themselves.
Tyrone Shum
Building Targeted Email Lists
e-Commerce With Integrated Blog (e-Blogging)
Lately I’ve been exploring different e-Commerece web applications and e-Commerce plugins for Wordpress. Since this blog mainly focuses on how to create profit from an Internet business, the first thing is to choose which web application is suitable for your Internet business. There’s not a one size fits all because each Internet business has different needs and requirements. Though, the foundation (system) can be the same across the board, whether you choose to use Wordpress as a customer management system (C.M.S) or an e-Commerce solution such as Magento, OsCommerce or Zencart. All of these systems work very well and they are constantly being updated and developed for users.
I Am Still Not Convinced With Using Wordpress e-Commerce Plugins
I wrote a post comparing Using A Blog Vs. Using A E-commerce Website?, which discusses the differences between a blog and an e-commerce system. Then over the last few weeks I’ve been writing reviews looking at the different e-Commerce plugins available for Wordpress. If you want to see the various reviews, read the articles section under eBlog Reviews. What I am exploring today are the different options available to integrate a blog into an existing e-Commerce system. If you have read all of my reviews about the different e-Commerce plugins for Wordpress, you will see that I am still not completely convinced. Wordpress for blogging is a fantastic system and is more than capable of handling large volumes of data. Though, once you add on an e-Commerce plugin it does not have the same functionality in comparison to an e-Commerce system, which are more robust to handle large consumer transactions. Now, the big challenge is, most e-Commerce systems do not have a blog interface built-in, which raises the question of how to integrate an e-commerce system with a blog?
Why Have An e-Commerce System Integrated With A Wordpress Blog?
Over the years, web users have found blogs to be more compelling to look at than just shopping sites. Most blogs have written reviews and information relating to a product or service, allowing any web user to do their research before making a purchase. Imagine that you were looking to buy the latest iPhone and you wanted to look at some reviews and read other people’s opinions before spending your money. If you typed “iPhone review” in Google, the first site that appears is usually a review site such as Cnet or Smart Company, which all run a blogging application such as Wordpress. These review sites usually only provide a review and opinions, but don’t have a link saying where to buy. This is where having an e-Commerce system integrated with a Wordpress blog can benefit your Internet business. Instead of the customer going to other websites to read reviews and opinions about the product (by that time they may have forgotten your website), you can have your own reviews and comments linked to your products. This encourages the customer to stay on your website and helps them save time looking for other places for reviews and opinions.
Additionally, the benefit of having a Wordpress blog integrated with your e-Commerce system, is that it helps to increase your search engine rankings. With higher search engines rankings, your Internet business will be found much quicker and also help with becoming an authoritative site.
How To Integrate An e-Commerce System With A Wordpress Blog?
Luckily for us, most e-Commerce systems have a special add-on package which has been developed by experienced programmers. At this point, I would recommend you hire a web developer to install or modify an e-Commerce system because it will can save time for you to focus on other important business tasks. Though I will explain to you how it generally works with some systems I have test:
Magento: This is a relatively new e-Commerce system that is taking the e-Commerce Open Source market by storm. It’s very user friendly and is very powerful, just like how Wordpress has been very successful for many Internet businesses. Magento has an add-on extension called Lazzymonks Wordpress Integration 2.61, which allows Wordpress to be integrated with their system. You can easily access Wordpress from Magento’s administration as well and would save you the hassle of logging out of Magento and logging into Wordpress.
OsCommerce: This system has been around since March 2000, which shows a long history of e-Commerce development for them. OsCommerce also has an add-on which is quite easy to install – the Wordpress Integration. Unfortunately this add-on does require you to log onto Wordpress separately. Once you have installed Wordpress with OsCommerce you will be able to still post your articles as normal and all the posts will be integrated into the OsCommerce theme you choose.
ZenCart: This is the system I have been using for many years for many of my clients and own e-Commerce shops. It is easy to set up the Wordpress On Zencart add-on with a few installation files to upload. Though, I found it wasn’t matching the style of the shopfront at first with this basic add-on. I did hired a programmer to modify some files which generated a good result in the end.
With many Internet businesses seeing the growth of web users searching on blogs and search engines today, it would be unfortunate to see you lose sales because you did not have a blog integrated with your e-Commerce shop. There are great benefits with having both these systems integrated into your Internet business and someday e-Commerce with integrated blogs will be the new community called e-Blogging.
Read how you can promote your eBlog: eBlogging 101: Getting Your Internet Business To Stand Out From The Crowd
Tyrone Shum
Starting the e-Blogging Revolution.
Using A Blog Vs. Using A E-commerce Website?
This is a subject I’ve been exploring over the last week to decide whether or not to use a blog with an add-on shopping cart, or to use an e-commerce system such as Zencart or Oscommerce. I have a few clients who will be using my services to design their e-commerce website and I’m deciding between using a blog with shopping cart add-on functionality or running an e-commerce system with blog integration. It’s been quite interesting reading comments from forums and on other blogs about this topic and here are my thoughts.
My Previous Blog / E-commerce Experience
I’ve been using Wordpress for a couple of years now and have tried integrating it for a ZenCart ecommerce site. It worked okay but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. The issue was that I have to create a WordPress site and an ecommerce site with matching themes, so that the end user would have the experience of a single site. This solution was not ideal because the site administrator would have to login to different backends to update information.
On the other hand, installing Wordpress as the main system and installing an e-commerce add-on sounds like the ideal situation (for now, I’ll call this an eBlog). Everything will be in one system and on one database and no need to log into two different systems as I previously had to. I have tried this method and so far it works okay as well, but there are a few issues such as payment methods, having large product catalogues and limited reporting. The Wordpress plugin can’t handle these things as yet compared to e-commerce systems which have been designed for this.
Advantages Of Using eBlog Vs E-Commerce System
Simplicity and easily customisable
The reason why I am choosing eBlog is it’s simplicity of use. Especially when you are training a client how to use the system for the first time, it is quite self explanatory from just looking in the back end of Wordpress. Additionally the vast amount of themes available make it easy for any developer to customise and install new website faster without consuming too much time on a project.
Search engine friendly
Another advantage is, search engines love blogs and the content that comes from them allows them to be easily ranked in search engines much faster than e-commerce websites. Most e-commerce website only have products listed and require additional programming to be allow them to be search engine friendly. In comparison, Wordpress has additional plug-ins that automatically make any article or product become search engine friendly saving time and money for a client.
Automatic upgrades
Since the release of Wordpress 2.7 every update can be automatically deployed with a click of a button and makes upgrades and changes very easy. Unlike Zencart or Oscommerce, whenever a new upgrade is released it takes me almost a week to upgrade due to the vast amount of customised plug-ins installed and main files that can be overwritten.
Disadvantages Of A Using eBlog Vs E-Commerce System
Payment methods
At the moment, there are limited amount of payments being accepted via the eBlog and a lot of development and programming would be required in eBlogs to accept the vast range of payments other e-commerce systems offer. The most common available is Paypal, but what if I wanted a payment gateway for eWay or other commercial banking gateways? It’s not possible as yet.
Handling 100+ products on a single database
Most e-commerce systems have been build to handle lots of products and be available to display on their website. The architecture for this is not available for eBlogs and limits any Internet business to less than 100 products. It’s possible to have 100+ products on an eBlog but to find them on this system will take forever.
Limited Reporting
It’s important to track what customers are purchasing and knowing what the numbers are in your business. Unfortunately eBlog doesn’t offer accounting and proper reporting.
Overall if you have an Internet business that has a few products to sell, this would be a simple way to get started and have your Internet business up and running quickly. Though for Internet businesses with a range of products and requiring greater functionality, a proper e-commerce system such as Zencart or Oscommerce is still the way to go.
Tyrone Shum
e-Blogger
