Why is it so hard to make sales?

I don’t know the details of how your business is set up. From my experience here are a few measures you can take to see where you can improve and get you that first sale.

To start with, the perspective you want to adopt is that you are running a business. Regardless of whether your business operates online or offline, the premise is the same. You need enough of the right people to come to your store and buy things.

What should you do?

 

First, look at your traffic.

 

Traffic is the lifeblood of your business and without it you have no business. So, ask the following:

• Do you have enough of it? If you don’t have enough traffic coming to see what you have to offer, you have no business.
• How targeted is your traffic? If not, you won’t make any sales. For example, if you are in the business of selling bicycles and majority of the people coming to your store are interested in cars, you won’t sell much.

Let’s say traffic is not the issue. You are getting all the targeted traffic you need. Then focus on your capture process.

• How are you going about building your customer base?
• Do you have a blog, a podcast, or a channel on YouTube?

As people visit your place of business you need a process in place in which you have some way of remaining in contact with these people. If you let them go, you are losing out on a lot of money.

Therefore, what type of details are you getting? Are you collecting email addresses or phone numbers? I’ll explain why this matters shortly.

The follow-up process

is critical to your success online. When you couple the follow-up process with the buying process, and you will see why you need this nailed down. Here’s what I mean:

97% of the people you connect with initially won’t purchase from you the first time. So, they need to be followed up with.

12 interactions. This can vary from individual to individual, but it can take up to 12 interactions before they purchase something from you.

3 months to build credibility. Over the years, people are more reluctant to purchase things online because of the fear of being scammed. In today’s environment, it now takes closer to 3 months for you to develop the, so-called, know, like, and trust factors. All of which culminate in you making sales.

Do you know your numbers? Opt-in rate Versus click thru rates. The industry average for an opt-in rate for email is 17% and a click thru rate of 10%. This is the number of people who open your emails and click on your offers. If you don’t know these numbers, it is difficult to adjust a losing campaign.

Why would this be of concern?

For example, you have sent out 100 emails, 17 are open, resulting in you having 2 people clicking on your offer. With this type of result you’re not going to be selling much.

So how well are you doing in following up?

What is your process?

This is why email marketing and content creation play a major role in you being able to present offers and make sales.

If using email, as your follow-up process, how often do you connect with your list? Is the message you are sending, relate to your customer list? Does your content serve a purpose?

On the content side, how relevant is the content you are creating?

Do you publish on a consistent schedule or when you get around to it? Remember, publishing content is a traffic source. View it as an attempt of staying relevant and offering value in your prospect’s eyes. If you’re wondering, this is part of a follow-up process.

Lastly, sales.

 Sales

is a continuation of the follow-up process. The only difference between this and the follow-up process is you are asking for CTA. If this doesn’t result in a conversion, you put them back into the follow-up pipeline.

Hopefully you find some value here but understand there is more to affiliate marketing than posting links. Without a method of following up and continuing to present offers you will have dismal.