It would be great if all you had to do was open a shop, website or business and new customers would just walk in the door (or website). But alas it doesn’t work like that!
Oh how we wish it would!
Ok, so there are a few times when you just put up a website and someone just happens to see it and buy something from it. But how many times have a I have that happen? None. You might have.
This is one of the biggest challenges any small business owner faces. How to get people in the shop to buy.
If you have opened an actual retail store then this can be an expensive way to go. If you have built a website then at least that is pretty much your only expense. Just having a web business gives you the opportunity to try things out and not spend all your money. That said when I was selling software some of the companies I sold to would spend £Millions getting their websites right.
As a small business owner it is easy to spend £10,000 before you even know where it has gone! The truth is you don’t have to if you know what you are doing.
So let’s just look at the online area of this.
Let’s say you have a website, you have paid a development company and designer to create something fantastic. All your friends and family say it looks nice and you are pretty pleased with yourself.
Now what? Well now you have to start getting people to look at it. There are a number of ways you can do this: -
- Paid advertising
- Article marketing
- SEO
- Video marketing
- Social network advertising
There are more but these are the bigger known ways.
Adwords – Why not give that a go? Oh hold on a minute I have now got people going to my website but they are not buying. So I am spending all this money and not getting any sales!
This is a very common problem. This article is not about Adwords, there are far better people to teach you about that but it shows the main problem when running a website.
FINDING PEOPLE WHO WANT TO PURCHASE!
It is easy getting people to your website if you have some money. Getting them to buy is more of a challenge.
That is why you should GIVE SOMETHING THEY WANT FOR FREE?
What really? Give your visitors something for free? Yes, in exchange for either their email address or trust.
You have probably seen this yourself. If you go onto many sites they say “Get this for free by entering your email”. Are they just trying to get your email address for email marketing? Yes and no. We can all get email addresses, what they are doing is trying to build a relationship with you.
And that is exactly what you should do. Especially for small business owners.
The internet marketing world has known this for a long time and if you speak to any of the well respected people in that industry they will have say “Get an email list”. But I can gurantee they won’t say you should buy email lists. They will tell you to give away something on your site for free.
Please think about that. These people make their money online…so they should know what advice to give.
I do have an email subscribe button on my site. I also giveaway a FREE 20 page Steps to Success Guide. You don’t need to subscribe to get it. http://www.lifeturnaroundnow.com/books/.
Why do I do this? Well I genuinely want people to benefit from it without giving anything for it. If they like what I have written then they will come back to my blog and subscribe.
That is my choice. What I tell my consulting customers is that they should ask for the email. It is so easy to do this.
Let’s say you are a Garden Design business. Why not create a small report on how to save money when designing a garden? Write it and save it to PDF. Then if someone enters their email send them a reply with the attachment!
If you want to be a little more sophisticed you can have a service like Aweber do that for you. Just create an account and then it will send the email to the person when they email automatically. It does a lot more but does costs money. Check it out here www.aweber.com.
Do you see how this works?
Once they realise you are just trying to help then that is when they will come back to you.
Whatever you do I know that you will be able to find something that will help people. This simple step could make you a lot of money.
Give it a go.
To your business success
Matt
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