7 Tips On How To Sell Without Being Sleazy - Part 1

There’s just no denying the fact that the words ‘salesman’ or ‘sales consultant’ immediately turns off most people. These words conjure up images of slick and sleazy guys such as used car salesmen who resort to flashing insincere smiles and deploying sneaky subterfuges just to close the sale.

The general impression is that sales people will sell their mother just to meet their target and the only thing straight about them is their hair.

The question now is… “Why?”

Why do sales people have such a negative reputation? Why is the sight of an insurance agent or an Amway representative enough to send most people running for the hills?

The answer quite simply boils down to ‘poor sales skills.’ People love to buy. It makes them feel good and they want to do it… BUT they hate being sold to. Herein lies the problem.

The experienced salesperson knows exactly how to approach his potential customer and convince them that their life will be incomplete without the product he is selling. He doesn’t need to hard sell anyone because he’s a master at communication.

The inexperienced salesman, however, is totally focused on making the sale at the expense of everything else. They do not communicate properly because they’re trying to rush the sale. As a result, they exude an air of desperation that is picked up subconsciously by the prospective customer and it repels them.

The inexperienced sales person only appears to be in it for themselves and starts to look sleazy. The sad truth is that the majority of sales people are in this category, when all they need is a little education and EQ on how to approach a potential customer and what to focus on.

In this article, we’ll look at 7 ways for you to sell without appearing sleazy or desperate. While the tips below may seem like common sense, rest assured that when one is faced with the pressure of meeting sales targets or generating a specific income, all common sense goes out the window and emotions take over. In times like these, it’s especially crucial that you adhere to the tips below.

1. Create a Customer Avatar

A customer avatar is a fictional person that represents your ideal customer. You know exactly what their wants and needs are. You know exactly how your product is perfect for them.

All the best sales people have a very good understanding of who their product is perfect for. While many of the prospects you meet may not fit in perfectly with your customer avatar, as long as they display some of the needs and wants that your avatar has, you’ll be able to hone in on these needs and be more convincing in your pitches.

A customer avatar will roughly allow you to anticipate what objections you can expect to hear. This will allow you time to prepare and overcome these objections so that you’re ready when you actually face them.

For example, if you’re selling gym memberships, one common objection that you may receive is that it’s too ‘expensive.’ So what will you do? Will you tell them that they can’t put a price on their health? While that may sound good, it probably won’t work on all people.

If you have a customer avatar of a young man who wants to get a fit body to attract the ladies, you could probably tell him that the gym membership will pay for itself many times over when he looks ripped and turns ladies’ heads wherever he goes.

Of you could tell a lady that with a gym membership, she has access to all the equipment she needs to get in shape so that she’ll look good in anything she wears. She just won’t be able to get that by exercising at home. She probably could… but your goal is to sell her the gym membership and not a fitness DVD.

You can have several different customer avatars for the same product. The avatar is just a tool to help you understand your prospect and be prepared to sell to in a way that resonates with them. You MUST be on the same ‘frequency’ as your prospect.

2. Sell Only What You Believe In

You can’t convince others if you’re not convinced yourself. You absolutely must believe in what you’re selling. Not only will your pitch be more convincing, but you’ll also feel a sense of satisfaction. You’ll be more driven and have more desire to tell the world just how great the product you’re selling is.

If you stepped into a Lamborghini dealership, you can bet that every sales person there will totally love the cars they’re selling. They’ll probably be fanatic about fast cars and know all the specifications and will be able to give you a hundred reasons as to why their car is the best in the world. They’re passionate about their product and the passion rubs off on the prospect.

Avoid promoting or selling something that you don’t believe in just because you want the money. This happens online and offline too. Every day, tons of online marketers mail their list promoting products that they’ve never tried or have no interest in. They just want the commissions.

Over time, they lose credibility and their list of subscribers stop believing them… and once this happens, it’s almost game over. If someone does not believe you, they’ll NOT buy from you.

Believe in your product and your prospect will believe in you and your chances of getting the sale will skyrocket.

3. Listen and Empathize

This is key to succeeding with sales. It’s all about listening to the customer and understanding their needs. In fact, the best sales people don’t even mention their product for the first 15 to 20 minutes. They’re more concerned with what the prospect needs.

By having a listening ear and showing empathy, you’re building a relationship with a customer. If we used the same gym membership example above, you’ll discover the emotional reasons why people are considering joining the gym.

By talking to your prospect, you may notice that maybe they lack confidence because they’re overweight and they hope to shed the pounds. Or maybe they had a life-threatening health issue and now they want to turn their lives around. It could be a mother who wants to be healthy to see her kids grow up.

It could be a wife who wants her husband to take notice of her again. It could be anything… but you’ll only find out if you listen and show that you have their best interests at heart. Doing this alone is enough to show that you’re NOT just another sleazy sales person.

Over and above all, be genuine. People can discern if you truly care or if you’re just going through the motions. Like Zig Ziglar said, "You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want."

4. Know What You’re Selling

This is of paramount importance. You must know your product. Selling a car? You need to know the specifications, the price, what are the benefits, the safety features… the everything.

Make it a point to know as much as you possibly can about your product. Anticipate any questions potential prospects might have.

You need to know all the features of your product like the back of your hand and when you’re talking to your prospect, you’ll mention these features but dress them up as benefits and show how these will put an end to your prospect’s problems.

E.g. (Features) The gym has a variety of cardio machines ranging from treadmills to stair climbers to rowing machines. There’s enough machines so that there’s always equipment free for the client to use.

(Benefits) They’ll not need to wait for the machines and this saves them time… and with cardio, they’ll lose weight much more successfully.

Parts 5 to 7 will be arriving on the blog tomorrow.....

How To Consistently Add Hundreds Of Subscribers To Your List Every Week

Any online business will benefit greatly from building an opt-in email list that will read your valuable content, buy your products and services, or buy your affiliate offers.
 
Slow and steady wins the race and just know that it is feasible to add more than one hundred subscribers to your list on a weekly basis. This is without depending on Search Engine Optimization or any secret formula. 

The method also works well when adding numbers in the thousands as well, as you become familiar with it. A major mistake made by internet marketing newbies is their thinking that the number added this week has to exponentially increase the next week. This is a total misconception. 

Use the classic model to start small with your plan development, and rise in slow increments with the numbers. It is best to steady build a list, instead of having overwhelming numbers in the beginning of the process.

Keep in mind that the consistent addition to your list on a weekly basis of more than one hundred subscribers will generate one thousand subscribers in just ten weeks.

These one thousand subscribers have the potential of netting you a thousand dollars or more each month...if you maintain your list in a productive manner. This translates into a twelve thousand dollar income from just this one list of subscribers. 

The essential component is your squeeze page which will convert your website traffic into your subscribers. If you need some ideas for a squeeze page you can Google ‘squeeze page templates’ and get some ideas. 

Modify the wording of the template to match it to your needs, and then upload it to your web hosting. In addition, you will need to incorporate your autoresponder code into the template.

Most marketers tend to use Aweber of Getresponse as their AR choice. Although a relatively new option which is getting great results is ConvertKit. With tests showing a 33% increase of email deliverability over Aweber, it has to be taken seriously. I have been converted! Check out ConvertKit HERE

You can get some traffic generating ideas by finding ezine articles written by other marketers in your chosen niche. The purpose of doing this is to compile a list of marketers from your niche who are email list owners. 

You can do this by visiting forums in your selected niche, or obtaining the ezine articles as an email list subscriber to various other marketer’s lists. Additionally, take a look in Google to see if you can find more ezine articles in your niche. 

Contact individual marketers personally by email, and ask if they would sell you a paid solo ad to their list, and what the cost is to send it out to their subscribers.
This is generally a very economical. If you are thoughtful in your list selection you can get hundreds of new subscribers for less than fifty bucks. It is also advisable to place an ad within their ezine article at the top, instead of at the bottom.

A Google search will result in a large number of ezine articles for you to source. To save time you may want to research the Directory of Ezines. This directory supplies you with the number of subscribers per list, the cost to mail to these lists, and any other pertinent information concerning each list. 

Remember that with a well maintained email list, each subscriber generally equates to at least one dollar per month as income. 

There will be some ezine owners who will not consent to a paid solo ad, but you will have plenty who will since it will be profitable for them. It only takes a few quality list sources for this to produce the needed traffic to your website. This is great technique that will help you build your opt-in email list. 
Remember that with a well maintained email list, each subscriber generally equals at least one dollar per month as income. 

An excellent strategy is to avoid hitting them up first with an expensive offer. As they progress through your opt-in process, make your new list member an offer that gives them so much value, that it would be crazy for them not to take advantage of the offer. And this more subtle method is generally more profitable. They don’t know you at this point, or have a reason to trust you enough to make a large purchase from you. 

It is a great way to offer your potential members or prospects something of greater value to them than what it would normally cost. This will put them in the frame of mind of getting a great deal, which will make them very receptive to your future offers. They will check their email regularly for more of your deals. People want to know what you can do for them or how you can solve their problems. 
This method will condition them to become and continue to be paying customers, instead of just reading you or valuable information without actually purchasing any of your offers. Any customer who makes one purchase has a high probability of making future purchases, especially with offers that cost ten dollars or less. 

A customer who makes one purchase has a high probability of making future purchases, even at the cost of ten dollars or less. 
These members are much more valuable to your business than the subscribers who never purchase anything. However, don’t devalue those subscribers, as they may refer others who will make that purchase. 

This strategy will also help you to compensate for money spent on promotion or advertising costs. It will also become profitable over time with determination and consistency on your part.
New customers will be more open to your future offers, and will remember you from their previous product purchase, so your follow up email offers have a greater likelihood of producing more sales for you. 

It is imperative that you present them with exceptional value over and above the cost of the product. This will lead to future sales and may lead to their participation in your blog or forum. And they will be more inclined to tell others about your business, and promote your products as an affiliate. 
An illustration of a valuable offer could be where your product that costs almost one hundred dollars has gone for months will little or no sales. Offer this same product to new subscribers for ten dollars. 
In addition to this, tell them that you are practically giving it to them at such an unbelievable bargain, because you want to make them loyal customers.

Remember that during the process of building an email list, it is vitally important to supply quality, informative content to educate the subscriber, in addition to soft selling them on your products that will resolve their problem. This will get them excited about you, your emails, and buying more of your products. 

Be respectful to your list subscribers, and always avoid sending them stuff with a ton of offers with no valuable content. You are there to make their lives better. 
If they feel that you are motivated only by money they will unsubscribe, maybe send your emails to the spam folder, or delete them all together. They have to see that you care about them to become your dedicated, loyal customers now and in the future.

The Fear of Failing

Very wise words indeed. Keep striving every day.

5 Campaign Internet Marketing Tips

Internet marketing is an important tool for any company that wants to be successful and prosperous. More and more websites and companies with websites realize the importance of driving traffic to their website.

Internet marketing helps to drive this traffic. Internet marketing can raise awareness, create brand recognition, and drive traffic to a website. The idea behind Internet marketing is to catch the attention of consumers and possible customers as efficiently as possible. For many, campaign Internet marketing is the only way to do so.

Campaign marketing helps to hit your target audience in multiple ways. Campaign marketing can be an incredible tool for some, but can be an issue and nuisance for others. These five tips will help you to get your Internet marketing campaign off to the right start.

Know your Target
The most important thing for you to be able to do is to completely define and analyze your target market. If you are going to have an Internet marketing campaign you need to make sure that you know exactly who you are trying to talk to. This information will help you to effectively reach your consumers, making your marketing efficient.

Be Clear and Concise
If you want to have a successful Internet marketing campaign you need to be as clear and concise as possible. Clearly state the message that you are trying to get to your target audience. Muddled or confusing messages will render your Internet marketing campaign useless and unsuccessful.

Use Multiple Venues
There are multiple venues and mediums that you can use with Internet marketing, including online advertising, email marketing, and search engine optimization. Your campaign should include multiple venues and mediums, as you need to connect with your audience on as many levels as possible.

Why not check out how to start leveraging social media to build your online business? Enter your details below

Join the newsletter

Subscribe to get our latest content by email.

Success! Now check your email to confirm your subscription.

There was an error submitting your subscription. Please try again.

First Name

Email Address

We use this field to detect spam bots. If you fill this in, you will be marked as a spammer.

I'd like to receive the free email course. Powered by ConvertKit

Work with Professionals
If you are thinking about an Internet marketing campaign you should consider hiring a professional Internet marketing company. Professionals are going to be able to provide you with the level of service that you need to have a clean, polished, and effective Internet marketing endeavor.

Have Patience
Internet marketing is not going to be instant; it is going to need time to be successful. You need to be patient and wait for the results of your marketing to fully understand the success of the campaign. You will then be able to analyze your strategy to find weak points and strong points to work with for your next campaign.

You need to make sure that you do your due diligence when attempting campaign Internet marketing. If you fail to do your research, your campaign will fail to provide benefits to your company. You need to think about your target and think about how you are attempting to reach them. You also need to think about how you are going to go about your Internet marketing tactics. Companies that cover all of these bases before attempting to market over the Internet will see the greatest benefits and the greatest success.

Effective Links Building Strategy

Organic search engine traffic is often considered to be the holy grail of traffic sources. It is free, plentiful (depending on your niche), and Internet users across the globe use search engines. However, as any seasoned website owner can attest, search engines can be as fickle as a teenage girl. 

One day you are Number 1 and the search engines love you. The next day your site has been nonchalantly pushed to page 47. No rhyme or reason or "Dear John" letter. In order to balance out these inevitable downgrades, it is equally important for site owners to master the art of link building. 

Link building is defined as locating other targeted sites in your niche, and either exchanging links with them, or having them link to you. The latter of the two - one way links - are considered to be the most ideal option amongst link building professionals. 

Obtaining links from other sites basically gives you targeted traffic. And in many cases, links from other sites can last forever. Because of that aspect, it is important to incorporate this tactic into your overall online marketing plan. 

The following are some of the suggestions to construct effective link building strategies.

Put some link bait on the hook. Link bait is marketing lingo for - "create content that will absolutely, positively compel other site owners to link to you." 

It is typically an article or a blog post that has a definite "WOW!" factor. What creates that "WOW!"? You can put together a huge list of helpful resources for people in your niche. Better yet, go beyond the name of the site and the URL and include a comprehensive description. Tell why you like the site, or how it is going to help your site visitors the most. 

Purchase text links. This is probably the most frequently used link building strategy. This is also one of the fastest ways to generate one way links without breaking a sweat. There are many directories that specialize in matching text link buyers and sellers. These directories are good because you were find a number of sites to choose from in almost any category. Plus, you can read reviews from other text link buyers in your niche.

Obtain blog reviews. A simple way to build links to your blog is to get blog reviews. The concept is basic. Someone reviews your blogs content - you get a link.

Blog reviews are great because someone is actually giving specific details about your site, rather than just one line of text (which is what you will get with text links).
If you do a search for "blog reviews" you will find several sites offering the service. Depending on the site, you may or may not have to pay for the review.

As you can see, link building is not hard. It does require time and commitment. But the payoff - increased targeted traffic - makes it well worth the effort.

Camtasia 9 for Beginners

Camtasia Nine Makes Video Creation Dead Simple Whether you want to record a simple video, presentation style with a program like Google Sheets or Powerpoint Or you just want to show your customers and prospects some things you're seeing on your screen... Or maybe, you want to take a talking head video with NO screen sharing...just you and your audience You’re probably wondering, if Camtasia makes any of these easy...or easier to do than what you're doing The answer is yes and no. YES, Camtasia has lots of features inside of the program that make it dead simple to do supercool things to make you look like a pro. But all of these cool things are buried inside of the menus and the toolbars, without a prior knowledge of what to look for you could easily go out and buy lots of other video tools...when all along you had it with your copy of Camtasia. What if someone were to take you inside of Camtasia...Really deep inside to show you exactly how to start using it to do the Stuff that guru level video creators do. And what if you could pick and choose what you wanted to learn and when you wanted to learn it. And you could do it whenever you wanted.…

Camtasia Nine Still Has All of the Old Powerful Features It Always Had Camtasia Nine may look familiar to veterans of using the program, but can take much of what you use to do to make it ten times easier. Think of what it would be like to have a working knowledge of the insides and controls of this powerful program.... Why not take a look at this really useful training video > HERE

How to Grow Your Instagram Following

How to Build More Followers on Instagram

Having a big Instagram following can be very lucrative for marketing and driving free traffic to your site.  But there’s more to it than a simple numbers game.  Simply having a lot of followers doesn’t necessarily mean anything.  The key is having active followers – people who not only follow you but actively like and comment on your posts.  These are the people that you want to target when growing your audience. 

We’ve all heard of people buying Instagram followers, and while they have impressive numbers in the tens and hundreds of thousands, those followers don’t mean anything.  They are purely aesthetic in nature.  That’s not what we’re trying to do.  We want interaction with our audience.

Be Consistent

There are some simple things we can implement to help organically grow our following.  The first is to post consistently.  This means you want to post once a day (or every other day, or twice a day, find what fits your needs best!) and try to keep it around the same time daily.  But that’s not all, it also means that you should stick to a particular theme.  Sure, you can absolutely post a beautiful landscape photo one day, and a picture of a gaming computer the next, but it is most beneficial to stick to one theme for all of your posts.

Interact With Your Followers 

Click the image to grab our Free Instagram Guide

You’ve got the consistency down, and that’s great, but it doesn’t end there.  You should also be interacting with the Instagram community.  When someone comments on your post, take the time to acknowledge that comment – like it, and reply to them.  You will notice increased interaction over time if you take the initiative of talking to your followers.

Your interaction doesn’t stop at your posts.  You should also spend time every day scrolling through hashtags that are relevant to the information you share on Instagram.  While you scroll through it’s important that you keep liking and commenting on posts.  What’s the best way to draw people to your page?  Show genuine appreciation for their page! 

Gaining Followers Quickly By Following and Unfollowing 

If you are looking to quickly amass a large following there is a fairly simple and straightforward strategy you can follow that has proven itself time and time again.  This requires that you find pages with large followings that are similar in content to yours.  Then, in addition to following the basic rules of consistently posting within your theme, and maintaining constant interaction with your followers and the community at large, you will go to the page of your choosing and follow their followers.  Typically, you want to follow between 25 and 35 in a single session.  Then you should allow them some time to follow you back.  If you want to increase your chances of getting a follow in return, you can like and comment on a few of their posts when you follow them.  After you have allowed some time for them to follow you, you will unfollow everyone from that page that you followed before.  Then simply rinse and repeat, and you will find your follower count quickly increasing with real, quality followers. 

Growing your Instagram following can be very important for business purposes.  If you follow the basic rules, post high-quality content, and are willing to put in the time and work, you can easily see a bump in followers almost immediately.

CLICK HERE to download our awesome NEW Instagram Monetization Checklist

Why viral marketing is so important!

Leverage On Other People’s List

Internet marketing gurus always talk about building your mailing list. Mailing lists are important because it is true that the money is always in the list. Most of the time, some Internet marketers will beg other marketers (especially those with a bigger list size) to promote their products, do an ad swap or help them to build their own lists in general. But what if, instead of relying on YOUR OWN LIST, you can LEVERAGE on other people’s list? You see, in Internet marketing, there is always someone who has a bigger list size than you. These people will always want to sell products. If you can create products (such as master resell rights or no restriction private label rights products) and give them the rights to sell YOUR products with YOUR ads in it, you will be getting constant advertising for FREE and people are doing it WILLINGLY for you! After all, when you promote a product to your list, it is still limited in the sense that you can only mail your list once or twice, but having your products being promoted all over the Internet, will take the burden off the lists and give you additional streams of income. The Power Of Exponential Growth Many people neglect the power of viral marketing because they have this misconception that it yields very little at the start. They feel that they would rather promote their products by themselves rather than share the product with other resellers. The same applies with blog posts. Let’s do a little math. Would you rather make $100,000 a month or build a campaign that doubles in revenue starting at $0.01 a day for every next day? 1 à2 à4 à8 à16 à64 à128 à256 à……… MILLIONS! The power of exponential growth tells us that you will become a millionaire after almost 30 days! (2 to the power of 30!!!) Do you see the power of viral marketing? Whether you are getting one new subscriber a day or one sale a day, you will be able to generate lots of traffic just by viral marketing alone! Now to be realistic, even with the UNLIMITED growth potential on the Internet, there will come a time where there is a saturation point. But it still doesn’t dispute the fact that there are millions of customers (and many resellers) that will market for you and expand your efforts FOR YOU! It is always a good idea to build several viral marketing channels. That way, even when your viral campaign starts to slow down (due to saturation), you will still be able to leverage on many

The Importance Of A Call-To-Action

The Importance Of A Call-To-Action

To get this topic clear will help help you understand what a call-to-action is and why it's important to use. An element that entices viewers or readers to take an action is often called a call-to-action. You can as well relate this action to websites and the internet. On this note, a site call-to-action can be expressed such as ''Buy Now,'' Add to Shopping Cart,” or “Subscribe to Newsletter.” The basic objective of a call-to-action is to persuade the viewers to click or act immediately. It can as well help viewers to interact farther with a given website. This will hopefully end in the viewer purchasing a given service, product, or brand. In a nutshell, the call-to-action from any website can be basically called conversion goals. From research and feasibility study, the blue underlined text in a website has been used for several years to denote a call-to-action. It is also associated to trust and calming features to help your prospective target audience act positively. Is your quest on the importance of a call-to-action? Reading through the enumerated points below will help greatly on the importance of a call-to-action.

With the simple explanation above, it is imperative that every good business web page should have at least one call-to-action on each single spot within the site. Depending on the nature of web pages, it is important to offer several call-to-action options to prospective viewers or visitors. This will help visitors to follow a given website to obey the stipulated conversion goals thereof. On this note, one of the basic reasons of a call-to-action is to obey your conversion goal.

You may ask, what is the importance of a call-to-action? It is clear that if a prospective visitor did not find any factual information within three seconds, they will exit your website. This will reduce your conversion rate drastically and thereby experience decrease in ROI. With a well thought out call-to-action, there is every possibility for your sales to skyrocket over night. Are you looking to increase your online business sales quickly and effectively? A good call-to-action is the solution you need, time and again. Another importance of a well thought out call-to-action is lead generation. If you are looking to increase organic traffic flow, then a call-to-action is required. To gain frequent predictable results for your online business website, product, brand or service, a well though out call-to-action is the solution. You can give it a try today. You will be astonished at the result.