Rogers Online Business Management for the Agriculture Community

Archive for the ‘Research Tools’ Category

The practice of one-page-long sales letters is being used widely today by businesses of various sizes to sell and push their products and/or services into the Internet marketplace.

Long sales letters are really just one long page with focus on selling the product to one prospect. It's like an electronic salesperson on your behalf, and it certainly beats having you to prospect and sell to someone else face-to-face or gamble on sending out hard copy mail (that can span 5-20 pages long when printed) and face the chance of not covering your investment in printing.

Believe it or not, online sales letters consist of mainly the use of words, some images, and now videos. And words are indeed powerful tools; you should consider them as a double-edged sword.

If used correctly, words can sell literally anything. If used improperly, not only would your sales letter suffer in conversion rate, it might just deliver the wrong message and the worse case scenario can be that of offending your prospects (besides not closing the sale).

If your sales letters are currently not producing the kind of conversion rates you want, or this is your first try at wrting a sales letter, perhaps you may want to contact me at information@easmyworkload.com to help you design a sales letter that will produce a decent conversion rate of 2 to 4 percent.

Online forums and discussion groups are an excellent way to build visibility on the Internet and drive traffic back to your website. There are forums and discussion groups of every description. Regardless of your area of interest there is most likely a group or groups you can join.

To find forum groups do a simple Google search using the following key words: online forums + “your topic”.

Be sure to participate in the dialogue of the forum once you have been reading posts for a few days. Pay close attention to the topics being discussed. If the topic is something you have a lot of knowledge in, offer helpful suggestions and show your expertise.

Make sure you pay close attention to the rules of the forum as well. Some have no problems with blatant self promotional marketing, while others absolutely forbid it.

I have been receiving a lot of questions about how can you research a subject for your Ebook before you spend a bunch of time writing something that no one may be interested in.

The fact is that you want to tap into people’s greatest desires. People like to make money, save time and are passionate. Your goal with your Ebook is to help people pursue their goals.

One of the easiest ways to do your research is with your own readers. If you are already doing business online and have a website and a mailing list, you have your very own research center. Get to know your readers and what they want…and then sell it to them. Ask them questions and really get to know them and how they respond to different mailings and bits of information you give them.

It is so much easier selling to someone who is already a customer then to go out and look for other customers. That is why I limit my products to my main market. I already have a decent list of customers, why would I go create an information product on something completely different when it would be just that much harder to sell to them?

But if you don’t have a list or a website with much traffic, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start creating information products. We all had to start somewhere so if you’re just getting started there are plenty of research tools available.

Tools:

Google Suggest: http://labs.google.com/suggestfaq.html
 - As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you’re typing and offers suggestions in real time. Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers. Just write down the suggestions that come up and then later enter them into a spreadsheet to keep track of them.

Google Zeitgeist: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist/index.html
 - Several tools that give insight into global, regional, past and present search trends. These tools are available for you to play with,  explore, and learn from. Use them for everything from business research to trivia answers.

After you’ve done some keyword research, you should:

1. Look for other products on the same topic. If there is no other information product or book on the same topic, don’t get discouraged. Usually this would mean that the idea may not be profitable but in our case the agriculture industry has been untouched by this new way of marketing. Think of how you can blow your competition right out of the water by creating information products in this way.
2. Promote similar products as an affiliate. Sign up for the affiliate programs for these type of products and sell them on your website, blog, or through a Google Adwords campaign.

I really want to encourage you not to be afraid of this new way of marketing. The agriculture industry needs to look for ways to make things better than what has been out there. You need to make yourself stand apart from the rest of the crowd…differentiate yourself from the competition and outsell them!!!