MARKET ME 24/7- FOR SALE BY ENTREPRENEUR

I've called today's post SELLING TIME because no money is made as a reward for our entrepreneurial efforts until a customer BUYS. Whether you've just joined MARKET ME, or you have been following along for awhile, you have made a decision about selling products or services. Or maybe you are still trying to decide.

Let's first take a look at what is available for you to sell products you manufacture or distribute as your new business. This first shopping cart tool offered by Google will allow you to showcase your items on your webpages, then link into their shopping cart program. This will record the sale of your products made, via your webpages and process the payments for you. It can be found from your Google business pages if you have a Blogger account. You can also access Google Mail, Google Adwords, Google Docs and other Google tools from this page.

When you click on the link for the shopping cart, it gives you the option of doing "a test" -- this "test" link takes you to the form page, where you can see what personal information is needed to open this shopping cart and the conditions required for it's use. The cart will process credit cards for which you must enter your bank information. Always check out the sites that ask for such information, and only work with proven, trusted sites before you get involved with ANYBODY...be it a shopping cart or a payment processing system.

PayPal is a typical and trusted internet option for processing payments as well. You can check out their website and the conditions of processing payments through them by going to http://paypal.com I would personally prefer to do all my payment processing through PayPal, but that choice could, in some cases, restrict the opportunity for a sale.

If you do not manufacture and distribute your own products, you can sell the products of other manufacturers that have products relating to your business. Boogie Bikes offers products on their webpages they do not carry in inventory at their store in ANYTOWN. These are bicycle products offered only online, through BB's Amazon Store. Here's a little Amazon Boot Shop listing I popped into today's post in about 3 minutes...you can do the same by setting up a free Amazon account and building an A Store for your webpages.

If you love shopping, you might find an A Store is a great match for you. Take the time to check out doing business with Amazon. Their store builder is becoming easier to use all the time, and even an inexperienced starter can figure it out in short shrift. Read contract terms and conditions carefully. Also be aware, not all free website formats may allow Amazon site content...so do your research. Until tomorrow, Happy Halloween and Cheers!

Now, it's an easy matter to place a few items on a page and provide a description to encourage the prospective customer to purchase, right? Don't believe it! The competition for buyers is fierce on the internet, as it is everywhere else. This is why your business and your website must be top-notch...so you stand heads above the competition.

Your service business is no different than a product retail business. A haircut can be a product, just as a hair brush is a product. If you haven't taken the time to break it down, list the services your business offers. Name and define each one in a way that these services can be seen as stand-alone products. If service is your bread-and-butter, this is crucial to defining your business offering to your prospective customers. By treating each service as a distinctive element, marketing your "products" becomes easier for the customer to understand what you are selling, while you will find it easier to explain to the customer what they are buying.

A services-based website will benefit from tackling explanations of offerings by focusing on the solutions the services provide. If yours is an accounting business, a customer purchases your ability to solve their accounting issues. If yours is a decorating service, you solve the customer's problem of knowing what products, colors and styles to buy, to arrive at the customer's "dream room".

When writing copy about your services, give each distinct service its own title and page. Make sure to make the links to these services distinctive and easy-to-see. Put the "OUR SERVICES" link in a prominent place on the upper half of your website, that the customer can immediately see it and access it when landing on the main page of your website.

Don't be afraid to give ballpark estimates of what your services cost. The number one reason people will call into a service business is to inquire about the cost. This is an important part of planning and spending for the customer, who is typically looking at a higher cost when dealing with purchasing services as compared with purchasing products.

So by stating in an event services web page, "Chair delivery and setup for the first 200 guests averages $75", this gives the prospect an element of information for planning her wedding, and likewise bumps over that inquiry call to bring her a step closer to talking about your other event offerings. If that appears to kill a possible phone lead, add after the mention of price, "Your event rates may be lower or higher than the estimate given, dependent upon companion service specials and discounts. Call for more information on how these save money." This is the call to action that is necessary for sales of any type.

Develop your sales script to answer this very specific question about "specials and discounts" when the customer calls or emails. Of necessity, you will need more information. To maintain a good rapport, don't start with asking for their name, address and phone number. This is sure to scare them off, or worse, develop animosity toward you. Stay focused on what they want -- information.

When they ask about the chairs, ask "how many chairs were you thinking of?" Then you can ask, "is that the number of guests you've invited?" Explain to her the need to add 10% more chairs for unforseen guests. "When are you planning to have the wedding? Where?" Using this tactic, you'll get much more information and develop her trust in your expertise. Sell the need for an appointment, only after you have established a friendly relationship where you have adequate information to present her with the full scope of how you can help her with her event. Tell the prospect your name to ask them for theirs.

Don't forget to include a call to action with every service you offer. It is said a customer typically needs 10 closes to buy. At bare minimum, your web content should include 10 places where the customer is asked to do something that leads to the sale.

1. Ask them for their email address in a coupon offering of a free service with the purchase of another service

2. Ask them to fill out a planning form (landscaping ideas, remodeling ideas, wedding ideas, etc.)

3. Ask them to subscribe to your blog RSS feed (make sure you install it first!)

4. Ask them to enter a drawing for a special mention of their story, project or event on your website

5. Ask them to submit ideas for a contest related to your offering (ie, "My Perfect Honeymoon Contest" on your wedding-planning site)

6. Ask them to sign up for your weekly newsletter with special offers and tips related to your expertise (this'll keep your business fresh in their mind as they plan)

7. Ask them to contact you for an appointment

8. Ask them to email you for an appointment

9. Tell them to call you with questions about your services

10.Invite them to RSVP to a presentation or event you are sponsoring in your local area that explains your business

As a service, don't overlook the exposure you can obtain through FaceBook. The new setup allows you to construct pages for events and special announcements. FaceBook also offers commercial listing pages, that can obtained at a price, as well as area-specific target ads to entice FaceBook members to visit your FB commercial pages, your offerings and your website.

Be creative about creating a buzz around your services. Meet customer expectations and give them some chocolate on their pillow. Services stand out when they GIVE services above and beyond expectations. Let customers know your service is a cut above the rest and USE PAST REFERENCES, with their permission, of course.

With that, we'll call it a day. See you tomorrow with more on selling product and service offerings on MARKET ME 24/7. Cheers!

I know this isn't a term you often see in conjunction with building a website. "Landscaping" a website is the careful arrangement of the unseen elements of your webpage setup and flow. It is a means of directing the eyes of your prospect in a pre-determined path around the pages of your website. It is the path you have laid to an adventure of discovery. It is a garden of delights you have carved with beautifully back-dropped niches. It is a feast for the eyes and a delight to the senses...

Well, that's what it should be, anyway...

If you've been working on your website, pop it up and look at it, as if you were a prospect that had never seen your site before. Clear out your perfectionistic tendencies and your critical eye, and look at your webpages with a fresh perspective. Become your own tester and critique your website. What is the first thing you see when your page comes up? Your page title? Your offerings? Your tagline? What catches your eye next? Is it a logo? An ad? A word? A drawing? A picture of you?

Repeat this process with other people that you can trust for their frank opinions. (Someone that simply says "Looks nice to me", is of no help in this assessment) Once you have tested and established what elements of your webpage are most readily noticed, you will also have an idea of what elements are not getting enough attention.

If your product listings for example, were noticed the least, it will be a challenge to get prospective customers to browse through your product listings. Obviously, these links were hard to see during your testing. You need to set the links to your product listings in a "place on the path" the prospect takes in looking around the page.You want them to see it as soon as they enter the page, as well as being able to see where else they can go on your pages. You need to set up a signpost with arrows to take you different places on your site, like a signpost to different attractions at an amusement park.

The sidebar of your website is this signpost. It is in a prominent place at the top of your webpage and hopefully has a different-colored background that accents the main webpage color. This color difference attracts the eye to the sidebar, and you can change this color by going to Advanced Settings in the webpage theme setup tool on Blogger.

When you are setting up your sidebar, the font of your letters in the sidebar should be clean, crisp and easy to read, with high color contrast between the background and the letters. No yellow on blue, or orange on green, please. Artistic expression in this important place is simply too hard on the eyes. Keep it Simple, remember?

A slightly off-white background with dark charcoal lettering is easiest on the eyes. Likewise, a white background with black letters, or the reverse is easiest to see clearly and with little effort.

Should the sidebar be on the left or the right? Different camps give different reasons for choosing a left-or-right sidebar placement. I prefer to leave it a personal choice of esthetics and relationship to flow of the website. If I want my visitors to see an image of my product first, I would place a large image at the top of my web page and place the sidebar to the right. If I wanted to highlight the latest news in my industry, I might put my sidebar left, and run my principle news links down the sidebar, plus highlight my main story at the top of the page in large, bold letters.

This left-biased attitude is based on the habit of English readers to scan from left to right across a page. We automatically presume the "start" of our reading will begin to the left of the page, so the majority of people scan to the left when entering a webpage. If they arrive on the web page and look right, they immediately look to the left straight away. So placement of your most important elements, relative to your offering, do best to the left side of the website.

Action elements, like email signups or RSS feed subsciption buttons, do well on the right side of the web page. Some web designers place a set of such links at the top of the page AND at the bottom, nearer to the footer. Facebook and Twitter share buttons are also a nice touch to add both top and bottom for convenience,

Add more links that lead to product and service pages by mentioning specific products or services in your content. And don't think it overkill to insert a separate link to product and service pages at the bottom of the page, to lead a reader on to more information about your business offerings.

No matter where your prospect goes on your webpages, they should continually be given the option of looking at your offerings. Availing the consumer with information about your offerings is really the focus of the whole website thing, anyway, isn't it?

IMAGES -- The Statues in the Garden

Your website will retain viewers for a longer period of time if you incorporate images into your web pages. We are all still children at heart, so we want to see PICTURES with our stories. The majority of information the human brain processeses in assessing whether a thing is of interest or not, is through what the prospect sees of the thing.

So if service is your business, show images of people enjoying the leisure of their problem, your specialty, solved. If retail is your offering, show the item in use by people and in multi-viewed, critical detail.

The more information a prospect has about your product or service, the longer they will study it and consider it. Then you only need convince them that you are the vendor most likely to give them the greatest value for their investment.

Lead the prospect whereyou want them to go on your pages. Take advantage of the attraction of images to link to lesser interesting, though important, details of your offering. If you are part of an organization, list it on your webpages. A Better Business Bureau membership and other similar affiliations help establish professionalism, trust and a sense of stability. These require an investment, so practice due diligence before taking such steps, particularly when you are first starting your business. These could be helpful additions for your business in the future, so keep such things in mind for when you are financially able to enhance your business image.

I've included video that deals with taking product shots for your web pages. Watch and enjoy and we'll see you tomorrow. Cheers!

I'm zeroing in on service businesses, today. This is not to say a product business needs any less attention, as the tips presented here can likewise work for product businesses, too. It's just that service businesses require a slightly different approach than product businesses, because we are now dealing with serving the customer and their variable needs, one-on-one, when we offer a service.

The gentleman I've highlighted in the following videos does business.as a model home broker. We can consider his business a product business, as he sells homes. But his business is just as much a service offering, because he must walk the customer through PLANNING their home. It is this aspect of planning that sets the service biz apart from the product business.

What must your customer plan for? Your customer needs a plan for a new hairstyle. A customer needs a plan for a wardrobe makeover. A customer needs a plan when remodelling a kitchen or bath, or adding a fireplace. So services and products mesh together under the term of "service", particularly when the service requires the purchase of products, or products require the skills of a serviceman.

In the first video, we come face-to-face with a prospect that wants an appointment to see the product Mike offers. As a new service business, Mike cannot afford to turn any leads away for the sake of his own convenience. Here we butt heads with the idea of set "business hours" for a service offering and how to work with the customer's inquiry and availability to set an appointment.

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Mike apeaks in this sales conference on the importance of doing the necessary work to develop leads to get appointments. The producer he is highlighting here is spending approximately 2 hours every day devoted to generating 20 CONTACTS he can turn into buying customers. With the basic "1 in 10 BUYS" sales ratio going for him, that's a potential of 2 buyers a day. During his 20-day working month, that's a minimum 40 appointments toward making a sale. If every lead were worth a mere $100, that's $4000 worth of sales business, and a gross income of $200 a day. If an employer offered you $200 a day to reach 20 people in a 2-hour work shift, would you take the job?

Do you have the ability to know who your buyers are, just by looking at them? Have you ever avoided talking to an individual because they didn't appear to be the type of person that would want, or could afford, your offering? In sales, we call this pre-judging the lead. Mike refers to it as "curb qualifying". I've heard sales managers also refer it to "cherry picking" your leads...only going after the brightest, prettiest and most obviously ripe.

Be aware that some of the wealthiest people do not go out in public wrapped in mink and chauffered in a Rolls Royce. Many monied individuals are simplistic and unassuming, often frugal and able to recognize good values. This is perhaps WHY they have what they do. If a prospect asks about your product, don't just give them passing answers to blow them off if they have holes in their sneakers, or maybe their hair needs a washing. I've known unkempt little old ladies living in ramshackle homes with adequate cash to send a football team through college, Do yourself a favor,,,don't assume anything. Give every prospect your best shot. You never know who else might be listening.

Make Sure to Follow Up

Mike's 4th video reminds us of the necessity of following up with the leads we get that have been or could become appointments. Here, he explains what NOT to do, which is to back off the follow-ups and lose sales to another salesperson. Don't let your leads grow cold. Keep 'em warm with follow-ups. Interesting insight...

Tomorrow we touch on the elements of making contact with prospects through the use of email. Until then, study, learn and apply what you know. Cheers!

Today's post will be short because of internet connection issues.

Using email to bring your prospects back to your site for specials, new products and discount offers is fast becoming one of the easiest ways to get purchasing traffic to your website. While previous posts have touched on the importance of offering your viewers the option to contact you via email or to subscribe to your blog posts through an email account, reaching back to the potential customer with information about your product and service offerings is what email marketing is all about.

Email marketing relies on the emails of viewers who have come to your website and signed up for additional information about your offerings. You'll use these email addresses to send timely reminders back to them of specials and items of interest. If you are using the GoogleDocs template to gather email information from your website viewers, these addresses will be captured in a spreadsheet for you to use. Simply copy the email addresses into your Gmail account, if this is your primary business email account. Then you can send out your newsletter in a mass mailing with some timely and unique information that has to do with your offerings and provide a link back to your website.

There are a variety of email marketing services available on the web that can be found by simply Google-ing "free email marketing". Constant Contact offers a top-notch service and while your mailing list is small, can provide this service for free. Most email marketing services offer page Templates you can use, that do not require HTML coding knowledge. Many of these sites also give you the option of using a form that looks very much like your website, to maintain recognition and continuity.

Images that capture your company offering and written content that gets the buying juices flowing are key ingredients to a great email message. Most of all, the Subject line of the email should be warm, friendly and inviting. Make your Subject line a negative, using things such as "5 Things You Shouldn't Be Saving Your Money For" if yours is an accounting business, or "10 Ways To Ruin Your Hair" if yours is a salon business. Why negatives? Because they tend to garner the most curiosity, besides being catchy to the eye. Above all, you want your prospect to open the email. This is the only way they will receive your message.

Often email will be delivered to the recipients' Spam box when doing mass mailings if the recipient hasn't added your email address to their inbox listings. Email marketing companies can get your mail delivered into the prospects' primary Inbox by their extensive knowledge of what causes a email message to be kicked into the Spam box. This alone makes their services worth the small investment. Since email marketing can involve costs, particularly when you rely on the service to provide addresses or schedule a campaign through their service, email marketing gives website entreprenuers the most bang for their buck. Many services are very reasonable and inexpensive, with some starting as low as $10 a month.

So if you want to reach more people with your offers and products, email marketing is the way to go. Look for additional services through any email marketing company you are interested in that will likewise expose your company on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. These are wonderful tools to gain more leads for more sales.

There will be no post tomorrow, so come back here Monday for the link to the new installment of MARKET ME 24/7. Have a great weekend, and to all my followers, THANKS! and a hearty Cheers!