Internet Promotion

Internet Marketing Strategies

Creating a marketing plan is the most important phase in Internet business. Marketing is about communicating your goods' value and ensuring their visibility in the marketplace.

Even with a strong marketing plan, you need one other thing to achieve success: Persistence. Count on seeing your first sales only after 60 to 90 days of persistent marketing. There are no shortcuts and no easy ways through this step. Devote yourself to executing your product marketing plan and you'll succeed. This section focuses entirely on this very aspect of Internet marketing. It lists out some of the most effective and proven techniques for achieving maximum sales with minimum resources.

1.1 The Marketing Budget

There is no precise answer as to what amount should you set aside as your marketing budget. There have been instances where people have succeeded with a shoe string budget, whereas some others have failed even with a budget running into thousands of dollars. Your marketing budget depends on a variety of factors ranging from your product characteristics to your product target audience to your own aspirations and expectations.

If you wish to target your goods to a large audience, obviously you need to spend more. If you are satisfied with targeting your goods to a very focused and specific audience, you may not have to spend much. Your budget would depend on three considerations – your intended target audience, marketing techniques you opt for, and how much can you afford to spend.

Your target audience would depend on the subject of your goods. Given the nature of the topic, you should be able to figure out a target audience. For instance, an eBook on Internet Marketing can have a huge audience as every online business must employ standard internet marketing techniques. Conversely, an eBook on Real Estate Investment would cater only to real estate investors and brokers.

There are numerous marketing techniques for an eBook, most of which are discussed in depth in this section. There are certain basic strategies that have to be exploited for any kind of eBook. Additional tactics would prompt faster results however, these would also increase costs. The key is to figure out a balance of the right tools for your marketing plan without compromising your intended budget.

Thus, the right budget depends on a combination of factors. The beauty of selling eBooks is that you could start with a nominal budget and slowly build up your sales. The important thing is to make the best use of the resources at hand and attain maximum ROI.

1.2 Intelligent ways to Market your goods

1.2.1 Pricing your goods competitively

What's the best price for your goods? The one that makes people buy it without a second thought. Finding that magic number, though, takes some doing.

You do not want to price your goods too high or even too less. You want it to be priced competitively. How do you know that the right price is? You need to do a lot of research and testing. Look for other similar books. If possible, try to figure out how popular these goods are and how much do they sell. These would give you a very good idea of what would be a competitive price to set. You obviously have to also factor in your own costs in creating and distributing the goods. Fortunately, these are generally pretty low.

The second aspect of this process is testing, which is equally important. You need to regularly track your advertising and other marketing strategies, watch responses, and adjust your pricing until people start buying.

It is crucial that your price your goods competitively – not over priced and not even under priced. Some suggest that under pricing the goods may induce more sales. However, this is not true. Potential customers always compare similar books before buying one. If your price to significantly lower than your competitor’s price, customers may perceive your goods to be not as good as your competitor’s, even if this is not the case. There have been instances when publishers have sold more books by actually increasing the price.

One strategy to determine a competitive price is offering your goods to two distinct groups of audiences at different prices. By tracking the audience response, you may be able to close in on the right price. There is more to goods sales than just the number of sales. You are more interested in knowing what pricing offers you a higher profit. For instance, you may sell one version of your product at $25 to a target audience of 1000 people and make 20 sales. Your gross in this case is $500. Now let’s say, you sell another version of the same product at $15 to a target audience of 1000 people and you make a higher number of sales – 30. However, your gross in this case comes to $450. Thus, you make more profit selling your product at a higher price. This equation may change if you price the product at $25 and $40. In this case you may find out that you make more profit selling the product at a lower price of $25.

Some other factors to consider while pricing your goods:

• Is there a strong market for your product?

• Are there lots of competitive products?

• How do the competitors measure up to your product?

• Are you trying to make money with backend products? If this is the case then you could price your goods much lower or in some cases even offer it for free.

• Are you trying to build awareness? Again, in this case you could offer the product at a much lower price. This applies when you have other products to sell and you use your goods as a mechanism to build awareness.

• If you are trying to make money on the front end, then price your goods very competitively. Ask your peers what they would pay for such a book.

• If you offer truly exclusive information, you can charge a premium price.

As a thumb rule, high pricing works when your product is perceived to be of very high quality by your buyers, or if there is high demand for your goods, or if your product explores a niche market with very few competitors. Conversely, low pricing works when the market is highly price sensitive, or the competitor’s product is priced slightly higher.

Thus, the key is testing and experimenting with your prices. You could have surveys and polls on your website and receive inputs from your visitors about the pricing of your goods. You may not be able to figure out the right price at the outset. However, with a little time and perseverance you would be able to price your goods competitively for maximum profit.

1.2.2 Boosting your product sales

The most crucial aspect of any business is developing strategies to enhance sale of the final product. You may have a great goods but without a comprehensive marketing plan you would end up selling it to your friends and family only. With a little bit of creativeness you can explode the sales of your goods in quick time. Here are sale boosting tips and strategies.

Offer incentives

The first rule of any marketing plan is to offer attractive incentives to induce response from prospective customers. This is an age old strategy which works very well even today. Offer free bonus products to you customers if they sign up immediately – something like “Sign up now and receive free …”.

Offer promotional books for a limited period

A sales strategy that has worked well for many businesses, especially for eBooks is to offer a rebate to customers for a limited time. Note that the stress should be on limited time. You would not want to offer rebates after the offer expires. This certainly increases the number of sales, especially during holiday seasons. Interestingly, in spite of the rebate offer only few customers actually end up sending the eBook back for a rebate, provided the content of the eBook is highly informative and useful.

You should allow customers to send back the goods up to a month after the offer ends. Prolonging the offer may only negate any advantage gained in terms of sales. Besides, you wouldn’t want to wait forever to determine how many books were returned and how successful your strategy was.

Create ways to “earn” your goods for free

This gimmick would work if you have other products or affiliate programs. Instead of buying the goods, you could run a promotional offer that anyone who signs up for your affiliate program and brings in a certain number of affiliates would be given the goods for free. This is a win-win situation for both you and your customer.

Offer a guarantee – increase your credibility

I mentioned earlier that customers weigh in the risks involved with buying a new product. By offering strong guarantees you alleviate this risk to a great extent. Guarantee encourages more people to buy a product without putting in much thought. You would also reduce returns and refunds.

Payment in installments

If your goods are highly priced – anything above $50, you may contemplate introducing installment payments for your customers. For instance, you could offer a three installment plan, each installment to be made every 10 days. This would encourage more people to buy your goods.

Many also suggest that you may offer your goods in parts. However, this tactic may not always work to your advantage. It is often seen that people lose interest in books if they wait to long to complete it. Thus, you may end up selling only two parts of your eBook instead of all three.

Trial Period

You could offer a trial period for your goods. This implies that you can have your customers pay you for the goods a few days after purchasing the product. For instance, you may offer delayed payment periods of either 15 or 30 days. This gimmick would do wonders for your credibility. The downside to this is some people might take advantage of such an offering and return the goods after the trial period. However, you would induce many more sales compared to the number of returns.

Start your own newsletter

Newsletters are a great way to build email lists and target potential customers. They also act as a great advertising medium for your goods. However, you need to develop interesting and unique content regularly in order to distribute newsletters. Newsletters should be distributed once every fortnight or month. The key is to have it published regularly. As long as you offer quality content you would not do any harm to your selling prospects.

Offer upgrades and variations

Many marketers use this strategy successfully. You may offer a basic version of your product at a very reasonable cost. Once you sell your basic version to customers you could offer them with updated versions of the same product that have more detailed information. If your basic version is interesting, customers would definitely not be averse to buying an upgrade.

Have a members section

Customers look for a sense of belonging and association with a company or website. This can be achieved by having a members section on your website. You would have to offer additional products free of cost of your members. These could be anything from sample goods to newsletters to articles. When you think about it, this strategy is similar to offering freebies and incentives – the only difference is that you are offering it to your members. Besides, anyone could become a member for free. All they need to do is sign up for membership.

You could run contests, quizzes, promos, message boards and forums on your members section. This enhances interactivity and in turn sales.

Have a discounted products area

A very unique strategy to increase sales is to have a page on your website that sells only discounted products. These could be eBooks or any other products. The discount page could be updated frequently to include new products and exclude older ones. This tactic is very effectively employed by department stores. If you notice a good department store would always have something or the other on discount. Deals are what people look be it in physical stores or online stores.

Respond quickly to all queries

Ensure that you respond quickly to any queries your customers may have. Timely response instills a feeling of trustworthiness amongst customers and will surely improve your sales. It may be worth it to have good customer representatives in charge of the customer service aspect of your business.

Feedback

One of the most important aspects of analyzing and improving sales for any product is by obtaining feedback from existing customers. You could request your customers to fill up surveys and questionnaires pertaining to the goods they bought from your website. Questions in the survey should be aimed at obtaining useful pointers from customers on how to improve your goods and other services.

Ask your customers what do they think of your goods and what sections have scope for improvement. Feedback from customers is precious and can help you immensely in improving future sales. Besides, you could also be able to attain testimonials from existing customers, with written permission from them.

If you find that your customers are reluctant to fill up surveys and questionnaires, offer incentives such as a free article or newsletter of their choice. Of course what works best are cash incentives or even discount coupons for other products on your website.

Study your potential customers

Analyze what kind of people are buying or interested in your goods. This way you can have a more targeted and focused marketing effort thus maximizing gains from minimum resources.

Surveys and feedback forms facilitate this process. You may request your visitors as well as customers to provide personal information such as age, sex, email address, and interests. Provide a guarantee that such information would be kept confidential and never given out. The survey could be made anonymous so that they know that their personal information would not be used in ways they do not approve of. Moreover collecting email addresses would allow you to send them special offers, sale notifications and promotions in the future.

Testing with Ad Tracking programs

There are two main factors that make an Ad effective – Content of the Ad and the sites where it is advertised. Most experts would agree that constant testing and experimenting is the only way to ensure that you get the right combination. However, the question arises

– How do you test your Ads? An integral part of any advertising campaign is, knowing which ads bring you the most visitors. After all, you may have banner ads, newsgroups ads, ads in newsletters and articles, ads in autoresponders, or a simple classified ad on a website.

Every marketer can only benefit by knowing:

• which of the ads received the best response

• whether free classified sites are worth the effort

• which newsletters are the most profitable

• how a sponsored newsletter ad compares to the standard one

• whether animated banners are better than static ones

• how effective are your email ads

• does the ad at the start of an newsletter or article outperform the one at the end

Ad Tracking programs would answer all of these questions. They can help you analyze the effectiveness of every single ad and hence they should be an integral part of every marketing campaign.

1.2.3 Do not “Sell”; Provide a “Solution”

Advertising plays a vital role in inducing sales for your goods. We discussed earlier that customers look for solutions to their problems in different products. This holds true for eBooks as well. Your website or any other advertising medium that you use should portray a feeling that your product provides a solution. You are not there just to sell your product to customer but to solve their problems.

The most effective advertising pieces don't sell; they fulfill. They don't talk about the company; they talk about the customer. They don't push price; they provide solutions. Here are some guidelines that portray just this.

• Many marketers make the common mistake of describing the benefits of using their company more than talking about how the product would be useful to the customer. We have seen various ads that say that our company is the best; we provide the maximum number of information oriented newsletters; we have been providing e-Zines for many months and have acquired a huge customer database. This is not the right tactic. Your ad should speak directly to the customer about his or her needs rather than talking about your own company and its range of products.

• Always personalize your advertisements. Your ads should talk to a single person and not a whole group of people. Make use of terms such as “you”.

• Use real life examples of how your goods can benefit your customers. Identify with your audience and infuse statements that reach them on a personal level. For instance, instead of saying “This eBook can help build your business” say “With this book you can increase your sales by 200%”.

• List as many benefits as you can. Customers always look for reasons to buy a product – give them plenty.

• Tell your customers what life will be like after your product solves all their problems. By showing them that they will get their desired end result, you make a very persuasive argument for your product.

1.2.4 Viral Marketing Strategies and Techniques

Viral Marketing is one of the most effective forms of Marketing. Viral Marketing is defined as “Any advertising that propagates itself the way viruses do”; E.g. When Hotmail users send e-mails, they “infect” the recipients with the tagline at the bottom of their messages. Viral marketing denotes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence.

eBooks can be used as great viral marketing tools. Here’s how viral marketing with eBooks works.

The eBook familiarizes readers with your brand. In order for the eBook to act as a viral tool and induce sales of your other eBooks it should have a message promoting your website and a link to it. This will bring back the reader to your website and create an opportunity for more business. Thus, eBooks can contain advertisements or links to your website that would persuade the reader to come back to your website. For example, a footer on every alternate page can have some message about your business and a link to your website that would interest the reader and encourage him to visit your website by clicking on that link.

How does Viral Marketing come into the picture here? How do you ensure that eBooks can be given to more and more readers and in turn generate traffic? A very simple way of doing this is to allow other visitors to your website to download your eBook and then allow them to sell the eBook to their customers. In plain words, instead of creating just “paid” eBooks you could also empower your customers with “Resale” rights to your eBook. You may charge a bit extra for resale rights.

You would argue that by doing so you would be reducing your profit by letting your customers also sell your eBook. However, if done correctly this might not be the case. Be sure to include hyperlinks to your web site all over - at least one in every two pages. Also, you can include brief advertisements and all kinds of other eBooks. Have the condition that your customers should contain a link to your website and even an advertisement of your eBooks on every other page if they wish to have resell the eBook to their own customers. This way you can reach a much bigger audience and in turn induce higher sales.

To make the eBook more appealing to your customers you can offer them incentives. For example you can offer your customer a commission every time a person visits your website through your eBook on your customer’s website. Tracking software can be integrated with your website that would give you a detailed analysis of all your visitors and track the website from where they were directed to your website.

This will allow not only your direct customers but also customers of other people selling your eBook on their websites to come back to the source of the eBook, which is your website. This will benefit not only you but also your customers in two ways. First of all he/she can sell your book at his/her own price. The second benefit is that every time your customer brings in traffic to your website through your eBook, he/she would get a commission. Your customers can again employ the same strategy and allow their own customers to market the eBook, thus, making the eBook viral.

To further benefit from eBooks, allow your customers to copy, change, and co-brand the eBook, which would contain a few ads and links about their own sites in addition to your own links. This will also help your customers to generate traffic for their websites. This is a proven strategy and should be employed.

eBooks can themselves act as one of the best marketing tools online. With its vast variety of uses, just one quality eBook development and distribution can produce an on going viral marketing tool that will work 24 hours a day, seven days a week and multiply itself by leaps and bounds.

1.2.5 Using Autoresponders to sell your goods

The auto-responder is a program that automatically sends a message or a reply with a pre- designed response to any email address. It is also often called infobot, autobot, auto- mailer, or responder. Auto-responders are great for introduction or confirmation messages, much like your answering machine on the telephone. .

The auto-responder allows you to capture the email addresses of your visitors; so you can build your own opt-in targeted mailing list. The auto-responder will automatically extract the prospects name and use this information in your follow-up messages. With this marketing tool you can send personalized follow-up messages. If you personalize an email message, your prospect is twice as likely to buy from you.

You can sell your goods 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with the help of an auto- responder. You can send your sales letter as a part of any automated response to anyone, anywhere in a matter of seconds with no work on your part.

Following up with your prospects could mean a 50% increase in your sales. Your potential customers may simply forget about your initial message or they simply may have a bad day; for that reason, it is important to follow up with your prospects at preset time intervals after sending your initial message. This is achieved with auto-responders and reminders.

A reminder informs your customers about new goods or leads them to new content that the customer might be interested in. You can configure your auto responders with business rules to select from incoming mails or your address book, choose appropriate messages based on specific conditions or filters, and also set the time interval when such reminders have to be sent.

Auto-responders should be personalized and designed in such a way that they include the following information:

• They introduce your business to the prospective customer

• List out special offers

• List out benefits of buying your goods

• List of information on how each product can help a prospective customer

• Compare your goods with your competitors

• Give testimonials of existing customers

• Welcome letters for new members

• Thank you messages for new orders

• Order confirmation

• Acknowledgement of a query or a receipt of payment from your customer

1.2.6 Harnessing the power of Back-end Selling and Cross-Selling

Most marketers are successful because they apply back-end selling into their marketing efforts. Back-end selling is when you sell other goods to your existing customers after they have purchased at least one piece of your goods.

It is always easier to sell products to your existing customers because you have developed a relationship with them when you sold your first product to them. You will find it less expensive to sell to old customers as compared to selling to new customers.

Your conversion ratio will be dramatically higher with existing customers. Every time you continue selling back-end products to existing customers, you will be building a life- long relationship. You should continually bring out new back-end goods to sell to existing customers. These could be goods that compliment other merchandise already sold or could be updated versions of the same goods.

Many businesses sell their front-end products (initial products) at almost zero profit in order to generate back-end profits. These businesses do not care even if they lose money on the front-end products or services; they want the back-end profits.

How do you make backend sales? There are several ways. When you order a product from a mail-order company, they'll send you a catalog along with your order, or put you on a mailing list and send you new catalogs from time to time. They might also send you a sales letter for another product. This may be related to the first product in some way. Many companies implement such a strategy.

To implement this technique, you can put the sales pitch for your backend item in the email to the customer to confirm their order. If you have an online catalog of goods, you could include a link to it, or even include a coupon or special offer "for all valued customers".

For a faster response, you should put the backend offer on the "Thank You" page that is generated by a credit-card sale. The customer just bought something from you and has a credit card in his or her hot little hand! Why not ask for another purchase while they are in the mood to buy. In case you do not sell more than one product, affiliate programs might come in handy. This way you can back sell products promoted by your affiliate programs as well.

Back-end selling can also be integrated with “Up-Selling” wherein you introduce more expensive goods to your existing customers in similar ways as those mentioned above. This will almost instantly raise your sales and profits.

Cross Selling

Another successful strategy similar to the ones discussed above is Cross Selling. One of the best examples of cross selling via the web is on Amazon.com. If you search for a book on the Amazon site, a message will appear on the same page, saying 'Customers who bought this book also bought…' and will list half a dozen other books for your consideration. This is an excellent way to cross sell additional goods to your customers.

You can also direct visitors to other parts of the site, to consider goods or other products you offer that they hadn't previously considered. Successful cross selling is the result of recognizing a customer need and meeting that need with a useful product. Customers benefit from needs-based cross selling efforts because they receive the services they need and want.

Cross selling can help your business realize its objectives: providing useful products in the form of goods, retaining customers, attracting new customers, and staying competitive with other websites.