1. Use Social Media to Make New Contacts

When you add Social Media to your arsenal, you have just as much reach as the big players. In fact, Social Media is allowing the little guy to shine as it’s all about the personal touch.

Using video not only drives laser targeted traffic to your business – it enables your customer to view you, your products or services and creates a bond of trust. Most sales offline are based on trust and recommendation, so video is an excellent tool to use as creating that trust without meeting in person is harder to do.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter allow you to directly connect with your niche, but the real power lies within the ability for your audience to share your information around. If you haven’t yet created a Twitter account or set up a Fan Page on Facebook – then I would highly recommend you do so.

Make sure that you post things of use and never blatant sales pitches as this really doesn’t work. Make sure that your profile links on social sites like these point to your blog rather than your money site.

2. Get Yourself a Blog in Addition to Your Money Site

A blog is a really, really good idea because when done correctly, you are giving out great info and creating a customer bond without even trying to sell anything.

Blogs are great tools for delivering info, adding special offers, creating an email list and filtering prospective customers through to your main money site. They are also excellent because you can update them regularly and use keyword rich post titles so that your customers can find you easily online.

I’d highly recommend WordPress.org as the blogging platform of choice as it is so versatile. It can be added to your existing website under a sub-domain of yoursite.com/blog, the flexibility of it will allow you to seamlessly blend it into your main site and the features and benefits of all the plugins you can use to enhance your blog are way too long to list.

Check out my post on content ideas for your blog if you need inspiration.

3. Re-Sell To Your Customers

Oh, I know it sounds simple but you would be surprised at just how many business owners who don’t do this. The simple point is; You are selling an excellent product or service, you have very satisfied customers who are obviously interested in whatever you are selling – so why not sell them something else?

You must have your favourite retailers? The ones that you always end up going back to because they sell what you want and are reliable – you know the kind I mean.

How often does an email from one of these retailers pop into your inbox with some special offer? You may not have intended to purchase that day, but when the 2 for 1 offer lands, you can’t resist clicking through….. and spending money! It doesn’t have to be retail, you can apply this to any business model.

You can do this in a number of ways, all of which I advise you do;

• Set up a newsletter for past and prospective clients.
• Send a follow up after sales message – include a special offer
• Cross sell on your site. If they are buying one product, offer a discounted second product or show a list of related items
• Make sure you keep your email newsletter regular so that your customer is comfortable with receiving them and opening them up
• Use your Social Media sites to stay in touch with customers, so that they can always hear about your latest offerings and spread the word
• Say thank you and treat your customers to exceptional customer service. If you do this, they will come back to you without much nudging! They are your biggest asset – so look after them.

4. Use Customer Testimonials and Reviews

As I mentioned before, selling is all about trust, so what better way to let your new customers know that you can be trusted, than letting them see some comments from previous customers.

Depending on what you are selling, you can use user reviews, which are incredibly powerful. Amazon turned the world of online selling with this exact method. It builds customer trust and loyalty.

Testimonials for a service you have provided also go a long way to building a great relationship with future clients. Don’t be afraid to ask for testimonials for the great service you provide. Most folks will be more than happy to send a few words. If you can get them to add a pic and a link to their business, then it really does solidify the deal!

And if they are kind enough to agree to a video testimonial – then all the better. Imagine you have a gardening business that you are promoting online, once you have completed your job – you can take a little Flip Camera (I use one of these) with you to the customer and ask if they’d mind giving you a little video testimonial. If they’re not camera shy and they are delighted with the work you have done, then they’ll happily agree. If not, you can still take some footage of the work you have completed and add a written testimonial from them. There are numerous business models that this works incredibly well for.

5. Drive More Traffic

It goes without saying that the more targeted customers you get to your site, the more sales you will ultimately enjoy. Using the ways we have discussed above, especially Social Media, will certainly afford you plenty more traffic. But don’t forget about the search engines. If someone searches for something you sell on Google – you want to be appearing at the top of that search, or at the very least within the top five sites.

The easiest way to get more traffic is to do some keyword research, find out the terms people are using to find your site or sites like it and make sure you optimise your site correctly.

You can read more about how to do this on previous posts I have written;

Ranking in Google

Do You Really Want to Rank for That?

Constructing Great Keyword Rich Titles

There’s plenty more in the archives, so have a dig about! If you found this post helpful – perhaps you could give it a tweet or hit the ‘like’ button below and share it on Facebook.

And of course, if you have any comments or thoughts or your own tips you’d like to share, then please do leave them below,

Nikki

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Setting Up a Shop

Setting Up a Shop the right way will determine your long term success. If you already have an eCommerce store and are wondering why you have few customers, low conversion or little traffic then perhaps it’s time to consider some aspects of running an online store that often don’t occur to a new estore owner.

How to Get Customers

Often overlooked, but kinda essential, customers that buy stuff are crucial to a stores survival – without them your store is a failure!

I don’t even want to mention how many stores I see come and go within the Mumpreneur niche and it’s normally because of a lack of understanding of how to get an ongoing stream of traffic.

You do need to know about keywords and SEO – tedious and boring but actually essential. If you don’t know what people are searching for then you can’t optimize your store to meet their needs. It’s no skin off their nose as they’ll just buy from your competitor.

When I say keywords (and feel the draft from you yawning), I mean that you need to be finding out what people are typing into that little search box over on Google – we’ll call this a key-phrase, you then need to check and see who else has optimized for that key-phrase as you want a high search volume (from the customer) vs a low competition. Once you start optimising your own store for the actual keyphrases people are searching on, you’ll soon start to rise up the ranks in the search results pages! You want to be on page one of Google – don’t settle for anything less!

Now obviously there is a lot more to it than that, so if you think you can handle learning about keywords then pop your name and email in the boxes below and I will send you my ‘Mastering Keyword Research’ report, which goes into all of this a bit deeper. This does mean that you’ll be on my newsletter list, but you can unsubscribe if you feel that you’re not getting any value! (pffft…as if)!

How to Get Customers to Buy Something

So now that you are the keyword queen and have established how to get tons of targeted traffic to your store, it’s only a matter of time before you retire to your counting house and wallow in a stash of cash – right?

Hmmm – well back up missus – not so fast! These folks are not buying anything, so now what? There are numerous reasons as to why your customers are not converting as well as you think they should but one of the main ones is TRUST. If you don’t come across as the respectable establishment that you are, then I’m afraid that no-one is going to be parting with their credit card details today thank you!

Some of the main things that you can do to show your integrity as a merchant is to have a ‘trust’ sign, something like McAfee security badge which shows that they have verified you and test your site regularly. This isn’t any ol’ badge, if the customer clicks it, they will be taken to McAfee and shown your details are on their records – sweet!

Make sure that you have a business telephone number

Pref a 0800 or similar as your customer wants to know that they can contact you. For the shy ones who hate to talk, consider having a ‘live chat’ service. If you can be available as a live person for customer service in your busy periods, you’d be amazed at how many more sales you can convert.

And if you have all this covered but you still don’t seem to be converting then you need to start testing your landing page. It could be anything from bad product images to the wrong kind of ‘Add to Cart’ sign. Simple tweaks can yield great results.

But start with the keywords, download that free report cos it will help you understand what’s involved far better than a short blog post. And make sure that you have Analytics installed because you can’t test what you can’t measure!

Read the report and then come back and let me know if it helped you!

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