It doesn’t take years to build a profitable online business. If you make some good decisions when you launch your business, it will be easier to turn a profit faster.
First, choose a profitable business model. Offer video tutorials or personal coaching; sell digital products in high demand and sell them on Amazon FBA; share your knowledge through blogging; or deploy your digital skills through freelancing.
Next, focus on increasing your volume of sales by fine-tuning your sales process.
Finally, ensure that your marketing strategy engages a niche audience to attract attention and boost response rates.
Assuming you’ve decided on your high-demand online business model, let’s take a closer look at how to improve your sales process and marketing strategy.
Fine-Tune Your Sales Process
When deciding how to fine-tune your sales process, it’s important to identify if your business should focus on direct or indirect sales.
Direct selling works when you only sell selective products or services. Some business models, such as freelancing, selling high-ticket products, or offering consulting services, focus on a small audience. If, for instance, you’re selling medical supplies to health care practitioners, you should leverage the benefits of business automation. When prospecting you can use companies like Emerged to make it easy to generate plenty of leads and nurture relationships until you can arrange an appointment to talk to them directly by telephone or videoconferencing.
Indirect selling works when you sell products in volume. Some business models, such as an e-commerce business or online conferences, focus on a large audience. Since it’s impractical to have one-on-one conversations because you’re dealing with hundreds of people simultaneously, you must rely on explainer videos, online seminars, and copywriting to sell your products or service.
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter how well every element of your online business runs, if you don’t have the sales process down, then you won’t have a profitable business. You’ll either just break even, or worse still have higher overheads than revenues.
Market to a Niche Audience
Marketers have developed many ways of driving traffic to your website, but unless your marketing message is directly tailored to appeal to your online niche audience, you will not make many sales.
Don’t focus on whether you are targeting a large or small group of people, focus on targeting a niche audience. Unless your marketing message applies to the wants, needs, and desires of a niche audience, few people will respond.
An example from sports supplementation will make this marketing concept easy to understand. If you sell a weight-gain supplement using a PPC advertising campaign to attract a general population of people who think they are too skinny, most underweight people will ignore it. But if you were to advertise to a niche audience, such as “hard-gainer” bodybuilders, then you will have a large response rate because one of the main reasons many people take up bodybuilding is because they want to get bigger and stronger. Even bodybuilders who are at the ideal weight for their height want to get bigger.
First Focus on Revenue Generation
Many people fail at launching a profitable online business. In fact, the statistics are alarming–90 percent fail after 120 days. This occurs even if they have chosen a good business model, one that others are making six to seven figures with every year. One common reason is that they are not focusing on revenues first but prioritizing other things. Think of marketing and sales as the engine of a train. Everything else—product value, customer service, competitive pricing, and so on—are more like the passenger and freight cars.
