How Giving Away Something of Value Can Help You Monetize Your Back End

Everybody loves a freebie! What do you currently sell, that is of value, that you could offer for free? And how can you monetize the back end of that? This works especially well if you can offer something that other businesses would normally charge for.

For example, if you have a corporate cleaning business, you could offer your first clean free, and follow up with your customer to see if they were happy with your service and would like you to continue. This is a great way to get new clients to try your service, as you’re taking all the risk out of it for them and, if you do a great job, chances are they’ll want to keep you on. The principle of reciprocity comes into play here too - you’ve given something of value to them and chances are they’ll feel the urge to do the same back.

A twist on this model is our “free plus shipping & handling” funnels, where we offer something for free on the front-end as long as the customer covers a small s&h fee (usually under $5). As long as they think the value is $20+, they’ll consider this a steal and be inclined to jump on it, even if they normally wouldn’t buy it right then and there. However, a necessity with this model is to make sure that you have a great set of upsells and a good backend to really monetize it. We typically have a continuity offer (like a membership or something along those lines), a low to medium priced offer, and ideally a high-end offer in the upsell path. The real money is made in the upsell path, as it’s hard to make a lot off a free plus s&h offer. As an added bonus with this model, you also get a lot of quality buyer leads (worth far more than non-buyer leads), without often having to pay a lot in advertising costs to acquire them. This allows you to market more offers to them in the future and make even more money off these buyer leads.

Think about something you can give away, that has value, and then look at how you can monetize the back end. Whether it is a sample of your service or a physical product, this works especially well if it something that other people usually charge for.

For more insights on how to create a sales funnel that maximizes your profit potential, check out this tool here: BizFire's Free Funnel Maker & Analyzer

How to Get Leads To Promote Your Product Or Service

What is Lead Generation?

Over the years, the techniques and strategies of the marketing of business have evolved a lot. Lead generation has become an essential phenomenon in marketing. It is the process of attracting potential customers to your products and services via social media platforms, email updates, and strong word-of-mouth. A lead is considered to be a qualified and hot lead when the consumer is not only attracted to your business but also has a need for your products or services.

What is the Importance of Lead Generation?

Initially, lead generation is vital in gathering information about the behavior of your potential customers. After compilation and detailed analysis of the collected data, you can devise effective strategies to market your business for the targeted customer base.

It is crucial to attracting a large number of people to your websites, so the products and the services offered by your company are promoted among a vast amount of people.

Lead generation is a time-consuming process that needs skills and research. However, it has become an essential part of today’s competitive business marketing. Different types of businesses can adopt different strategies for lead generation; however, some of the most common and effective strategies are as follows:

1. Determine Your Target Audience

The most important step of lead generation is to identify your target audience. It is challenging to promote your products efficiently if you are not sure of your own potential buyers. Therefore, it is important to research your audience and have an unambiguous idea of your customer base.

Information about the targeted audience commonly includes their age group to determine the tone of the ads, their residential areas, or living standards to set the budget and pricing of the products and the general lifestyle of your audience.

2. Create an effective promotion plan for your business

The promotional plan of your business should be exceptional to stand out from your competition and attract people towards your products and services. Such promotional and marketing techniques include blogs for your business along with vlogs, social media presence, and pay per click (PPC) advertising. Such modern techniques will help you in generating hot leads for the promotion of your business.

3. Use an Email Newsletter to Build Relationships

Once you have come into contact with the possible buyers, you should try to cultivate a healthy relationship with them. It can be achieved in a number of ways, for example, sending updates via social media, or using email newsletters. As a result, a stable communication channel is established with the customers, and they will be familiar with any new launches in your business.

4. Social Media

Social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram are playing a huge role in the success of small businesses. It is an instant method of generating leads and successful promotion of your products and services. The business owners must keep in mind that just creating a social media page is not enough. They have to be regular in updating it as well.

Any major announcement related to your business should be promoted on social media accounts. Interaction with the users is very important, which can be done via holding live sessions, replying to any queries as soon as possible, and posting regular updates. Engagement is necessary for lead generation, so make sure that your social media pages are reaching a considerable number of people.

5. Webinars and Giveaways

Webinars and live sessions have become very popular as they provide quick and easy engagement with the customers. The users also prefer to get their queries answered quickly, so they are more likely to join online live sessions of your business and get any necessary updates about the products and services offered by your company.

Moreover, giveaways on social media pages and websites is also a massive attraction of people towards your business as giveaway posts are shared in considerable numbers in a short amount of time. Social media influencers are often hired by the customers to share the pages and posts about giveaways, which attracts many leads to your business.

6. Use Lead Magnets

As the name suggests, a lead magnet is a way of attracting leads to your products and convincing them to utilize them. At a small price, the customer should be provided a considerable output, especially at the start of the business, to make sure it is able to survive in the economic conditions.

An enticing offer makes the users sign-up on your website or register for regular updates. Many businesses poll their audience to get an idea of the demand of your customers.

7. Consider some Online Tools

If you are interested in the lead generation for the promotion of your products and services, you should really look into Domain Lead Pro.

How Adding Physical Products As A Bonus, Especially For Your Digital Offers or Services, Can Increase Conversions

Selling digital products like e-books or videos (or even services) can be great, as they often carry much higher margins than physical products. However, people often place a much higher value on physical products that they can touch and hold.

This doesn’t mean that you have to offer all your products as physical ones - far from it! Instead, you should consider offering a simple physical product like a branded coffee mug, hat, t-shirt, or some other product that makes sense with your offer, as a bonus for those who take action fast.

This does two things. First, it makes people take action faster because they know there’s probably a limited quantity of the physical product (vs. a digital one that they realistically know you can have as many as you want). And second, they place a high value on physical products that they can touch.

In fact, as crazy as it sounds, you can increase conversions on a $2,000 web service simply by offering a branded coffee mug or t-shirt as a bonus. Likewise, you can even increase conversions MUCH more on lower priced offerings where you give something away that they perceive to be worth as much or more than what they’re buying. For example, you could sell a newsletter for $19/month and give a free t-shirt away with any new subscriber, and that could in some cases more than double your conversions because they think the value of the shirt is worth more than the $19 they paid (and they’ll often stay for a much longer time, making you a lot more money). We actually included a physical product once as a bonus to a membership offering, which had a perceived value to be more than the first month’s price, and it actually increased our conversions many, many times over to an almost unbelievable amount.

Another example would be if you sold a phone case for $29 and included a free charging cable with that. Since many of those sell for $29 or so themselves, the perceived value of the offer is huge, even though it might only add a dollar or two to your costs (and still give you huge margins).

You can do the same idea for services that you offer. For instance, you could offer a free cell phone clip-on lens with any purchase of a custom web video (justifying it in a way where they could shoot professional looking videos themselves from their phone).

For an offline physical product or service example, you could offer a free towel and sweatband just for trying out a one month gym membership as a trial.

You’d be shocked at how your conversions can jump even for higher priced offerings, and probably more shocked at how much they can help your lower priced offerings.

It’s funny how even a $10 physical freebie can boost sales for a $1,000 product. Likewise, it’s truly amazing to see conversions skyrocket on a lower priced recurring offer by offering something of value that’s perceived to be more than the initial payment (doesn’t mean it has to cost you more, just that the perceived value if they bought it elsewhere would be more).

This marketing trick right here has been responsible for some of our biggest money makers out there, as well as for others that we know. One might say that you could potentially build an entire business off of this tip right here.

So consider adding physical products as bonuses to your offers, as they can tremendously increase conversions for both low and high-priced products and services.

For other great marketing ideas to help you increase your conversions and grow your business, check out his book: 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How Taking Action Can Get You Leads

Instead of waiting for leads to come to you, go to them! Many people just build an opt-in page or a squeeze page and wait for leads to sign-up or reach out to them - so instead of waiting for people to find your store and buy from you - actively go out and find prospects.

Look for questions that are being asked, which are relevant to what your business provides, on forums, Q&A sites (like Yahoo Answers or Quora) and social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Now take a couple of minutes to answer those questions, making sure you provide value first and foremost. This will help you gain extra exposure for your business, help build you up as an authority in your niche, start to build trust between you and possible customers and potentially land you some sales.

For example, if you have an SEO service, look for questions on the best ways to optimize websites. Then you could leave an answer such as, “Here are 3 tips I find work well…(insert your tips here). If you’re after more information, I help people with their SEO, through information and doing it all for them, and here’s a link to an article I wrote listing 17 tested ways to improve your search engine optimization.” You’ve already given great information and value in your answer, making people more likely to click through to your site.

Another example would be if you were a chiropractor, you can find people complaining about back pain and offer a couple tips that you think might help them, followed by an offer to stop by your clinic for a free initial adjustment or consultation.

Or if you were in the weight loss niche, you could find people asking questions on the best ways to lose weight, give them a few tips, and then link to a longer video or blog post of yours mentioning even more tips perhaps with an offer to sign-up for a free newsletter, which can be used to try to drive them into your main offer.

One last example, of an awesome way to go to leads instead of waiting for them to come to you, was when I first started out online, I decided to just be an affiliate for some diamond sites (where I’d earn 5% to 15% per sale through my link). I would search the internet for leads of people asking questions on diamonds, trying to see if they found a good deal, etc., and then offer to do a free analysis for them. I would often times end up finding better deals through one of the sites I was an affiliate for (sometimes I’d even have a coupon or discount through the site), pass on my affiliate link to the specific diamond, and make a nice commission when they bought it. All this was done while coming off as being a super nice guy helping them out (even if I mentioned that it was an affiliate link).

Don’t underestimate the power of going to leads instead of waiting for them to come to you! In fact, it’s important to note that this doesn’t just have to be done with consumer leads. You can apply the same methods to finding other businesses to partner with, for instance, and proactively reaching out to them to try to land a deal. Or even proactively going out to leads in the media to see if they’d want to run an article or story on something that you’re an expert in related to your niche. Even taking just an hour or two a week doing this can have huge benefits for your business.

Although you can manually search for leads out on the internet, if you get serious enough about this technique, there are tools out there like WebFire.com that can help you do this and more.

Go looking for leads, instead of waiting for them to come to you. Look on forums, Q&A sites (like Yahoo Answers) and social media (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to find questions being asked that are relevant to your offer. Answer those questions, providing good value, to increase your exposure and potentially make sales.

For help with finding leads after what you offer, you can check out a demo of WebFire's tools here and grab a special deal!  Web Fire

How To Create A Better Funnel For Your Business?

Every entrepreneur is well familiar with the importance of marketing in today’s era of extreme competition. Marketing through various channels has become essential to make sure a business is able to thrive in the market. Without a proper marketing strategy, a company will not be able to gain new customers and expand their reach.

Are you looking for tips and techniques to create better sales funnel for your business? If so, you are in the right place.

What Is A Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a marketing concept that provides a schematic of the process through which a customer goes through while making a purchase. The term ‘funnel’ is used as an analogy because most of the people who know about a business are its potential customers and represent the top, most significant part of the funnel. This might also be described as your “warm market” and may include those who are on the fence about your brand, or barely even giving it a thought. These people are on top. The people who can be described as committed customers are likely much fewer than those who are simply familiar with your brand. They represent the bottom part of the funnel.

The following are the five essential steps in constructing an excellent sales funnel for your business:

1. An Attractive Landing Page

The landing page of your company’s website is the first and best chance of impressing your potential customers. It should reflect the best qualities of your business and convince the customers to utilize your products and services. An excellent landing page is the one that will encourage the readers to sign-up for updates or notifications from your website. In this way, you can establish a regular and continuous interaction with your potential customers, allowing you to work them into different parts your funnel.

2. Give Front-End Offers

An enticing front-end offer should be made clear and visible on the front page of your website. The offers should be adapted to the market’s requirements, consumers mindset, and modern marketing trends. This strategy is often called the "pre-selling" as at this stage of the funnel; you are convincing your potential customers to buy your products or services.

3. Add Back-End Offers (Upselling)

An option of expanding the shopping cart should be provided to the customers at the back end. It means that the customers who have just bought or are about to buy a product or service from your business should be given the option of upgrading their order. For instance, you can create a unique offer that will provide even more benefits to the customers at an affordable cost. The strategy of upselling is often used in the funnels to enhance sales.

4. Downselling

The option of downselling is the opposite of the upselling strategy. The technique is essential in the selling funnel as it facilitates the customers' experience with your business. Many companies make the mistake of thinking downselling to be a failure of the business or as a negative step.

However, it is important to make sure people with strict budget constraints can utilize your services efficiently. The budget of your customers can keep changing due to many reasons, so your business should be considerate towards your customers by providing cheaper and reasonable offers, including the option of downselling.

5. Steady Marketing

The last important strategy of designing an efficient sales funnel is to keep your marketing steady. It is essential to follow up with your latest customers, take feedback from them, and make sure they are happy with your products and services.

To establish a good relationship with your customers, you can offer a rewards program for your customers. Different packages and offers can be introduced under this program which will keep the customers coming to meet a specific threshold of the program and get rewards from your business. Moreover, you will be able to keep the customers informed about new deals of the business and increase sales.

The five steps listed above are some of the many strategies that can be adopted by the firms to develop a better sales funnel. Other than these steps, every business should evaluate the type of their business and the targeted audience to select appropriate strategies to create a funnel for the business.

If you need help in marketing your business and creating a better sales funnel for your business, you can check out the BizFire's Free Funnel Maker & Analyzer program to get help in this whole process. It makes your funnel strategies so much easier.

How To Sell To Other Businesses

Business to marketing seems like a foreign language to many people who are trying it for the first time. The consumer markets seems so much plainer and easier, after all, we're dealing with every day people. With businesses we feel we are dealing with some mysterious entity or some divine VIP, a thing whose persona is foreign to everything we knew in the every day human consciousness.

The reality that most people miss, and it's a well-kept secret, businesses are people. They are decision makers, executives, highly paid company officers, and even midgrade managers. At the end of the day though, they are people, selling to other businesses is no different than selling to people, except that you have to consider the kind of person you're selling to. Much of this involves trying to get into a person's head. What does a business owner or manager need and/or want? What things will improve their lives, and more importantly, the operations of their business? Answering these questions is the first key to selling to other businesses.

1: Identify Your VIP

The first step in creating a strong pitch for your product and service is considering your VIP, there may be more than one to consider depending on how the decisions are made. You have to know who you're selling to and then consider how your business can benefit them personally. As we discussed, you're dealing with real people, and they taking their own needs and desires into consideration as well as their roles in serving the greater needs of the company. Is your contact a buyer, a manger, or a business owner?

Depending on who you're speaking to, you'll want to come with ideas and features about what you have to offer and how it makes their lives easy as well benefiting their employer.

2: Don't Just Sell, Give Them Something They Can Use

Whoever your VIP may be, you can expect that someone has found them too, and they probably get multiple pitches a day for what you have to offer. A simple letter with a sales pitch is no longer enough to draw people in anymore. Because of this, you want to attach your sales pitch to something they can use. Many companies do this by offering white papers. White papers may be written as guides on important industry topics and trends, and may even highlight problems the industry is facing. This can be accompanied by a pitch explaining how you offer a solution. Either way the white papers are free and useful, so there's no harm in reading.

Writing effective white papers isn't easy, but it can be done.

3: Start With Value Over Price

When you're making a pitch to any business, you may find yourselves in the middle of a bidding war. Too many entrepreneurs focus in only on their prices as a way to put their best foot forward. While pricing certainly is important, it's far more vital to highlight the value your product has to offer. What can your product do that others can't. Can it save the company time or money even while requiring an investment? Can it make life easier for managers or help improve employee morale and productivity?

When you're making your bid don't advertise that you are cheap. If anything this will raise red flags if it's all you have to offer.

4: Highlight The Business Benefits

Whether it's in consumer to consumer or business to business marketing, even professionals have made this terrible mistake in copy-writing. Never just tell someone about the features of what you have to offer. Features are boring and no one wants to hear you list them all day long. They want to know how what you have to offer is going to solve a common problem. Just don't tell them “My computers have a lot of RAM” but instead consider, “Are you tired of losing valuable company time and money waiting for your computers to load? With our CPUs high RAM capability your upload, download, and processing speeds will be through the roof. You'll save time, money, and your business will be moving at lightning speed when processing your data!”

Benefits are everything. Nobody wants to know what you can do, everyone wants to know what you can do “For me”

5: Make it Easy To Act

Your call to action (CTA) is the grand finale of any pitch you write. It needs be dazzling and out of the park, but more importantly, it needs to be easy to act upon. Links in emails should be large, thought not obnoxious, and easy to see and click on, and MUST NOT BE BROKEN OR INACCURATE. Contact info should be prominent, accurate, and very visible. Like it or not, nobody likes a hassle. If your final pitch is hard to act on, even a little, or your lead finds it hard to get in touch you may lose your sale to someone else out of sheer convenience.


6: Gather Leads
This probably should have been the first step, but you need to gather solid prospective leads to sell to. It means nothing if you have the greatest product in the world and killer sales pitch to back it up, and no relevant people to sell it to. Gathering leads can be tricky, but made much easier by programs like Macroleads that help you organize, streamline, and even somewhat automate the process.

How to Increase Your Conversions With This Simple Trick

There’s many strategies to increase conversions, but have you tried this one? Try ending your prices with a 7, .95, 5 or .95. Instead of charging $10, for instance, consider charging $9.97. Even though it’s only a few cents less, people seem to think that it sounds cheaper. Even on high priced items the same tricks can work. For instance, you’ve probably never seen a car advertised for $30,000. Instead, you’ll see it advertised for something like $29,995.

Amazingly enough, on that last example, some people will walk away thinking that the car is $29,000 in their head (even though they’re smart enough to know that it’s obviously $30,000).

In the past many marketers have used 9 or .99 to end the numbers in, but it seems that there’s been a growing trend lately that 7, .97, 5, or .95 seem to stand out even more and appear even less expensive. Crazy stuff, but it can definitely work. And it’s doubtful that you’ll miss those few cents after increasing your conversions.

So, consider adjusting your price points to end in 7, .97, 5, or .95 to make your prices seem cheaper and see how it helps increase conversions.

Looking for more tips and tricks to help increase your conversations? This tool shows you easy strategies to grow your conversation rate and help boost your business: BizFire's Free Funnel Maker & Analyzer.