Last night at dinner, I was telling my wife about one of my mentoring students, “Tom”, who  received an angry email from a prospect he had contacted.  Apparently, the prospect was offended because Tom asked if he would be interested in a new web design for his local business.  He had designed the site himself, and took offense to the idea that it could possibly be improved.

Tom responded with a polite email, apologized for causing offense, and mentioned a few things that he thought could be improved, and explaining that those were the basis for his contacting the business owner.  Soon after, the business owner called him on the phone, wanting to know more about Tom’s ideas for his site.  After a 30-minute conversation, the business owner had requested some renovation work to be done on his site, and a possible contract for a new design for his wife’s business.

When my wife heard this story, she said “Hasn’t that happened to you before too”, and she’s absolutely right.  I’ve turned angry customers into buyers on several occasions, and all it took was a polite and genuine response to an angry email.

When people are being sold to, especially online, they put up a lot of barriers.  I know I’m a nice guy who would always work as hard as I can to please my clients, but potential prospects have no way of knowing that at first.  Simply showing a genuine interest in them and their business is enough to break down much of the skepticism they have towards me and my business.

I was talking to one of my students from my offline mentoring program today, and he was expressing frustration that he had been in touch with several prospective clients who were on the verge of committing to buy from him, and yet he couldn’t seem to nail down the final sale.  He’s shown them everything he could do for them, given them pricing and a timeline, and they are ready to commit – only they haven’t yet.

Understandably, he doesn’t want to bother them by contacting them repeatedly, but he doesn’t want to lose out on what seems like a sure sale because they’ve forgotten about him for whatever reason.

As someone who sells websites and web services for a living, as well as a full-time small business owner, I can see this from both sides.  Business owners have a million things on their plate at once, and there are always fires to put out.  Though we all know that changing a business’ website can have fantastic effects to their bottom line, it’s not exactly an “emergency” to the business owner, so they allow everything else to take precedence over it – and it’s hard to blame them.

What we can do on our end is follow up consistently, politely, and not so frequently that we start to annoy our prospect.  Calling someone once per day (until we are able to get in touch with them) if they have already made it clear that they are interested in working with us isn’t too much, in my opinion.

As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m not a good salesman, and I’m actually terrible at following up.  If I couldn’t get in touch with someone for a few days, I’m the type that would stop calling, and then forget about the prospect altogether.  Of course, this is a terrible way to make sales, but I’m working on getting better.

My initial sales strategy needs more follow-up too.  I contacted prospects via email, and if they didn’t get back to me, that was the end.  Following up with a simple reminder a week later can convert dozens of additional clients, yet I just didn’t make the effort.

Once I changed my strategy, and followed up with clients, in a non-aggressive way, it really made a huge difference to my bottom line.

By the way, if you’re interested in building a local business of your own, with very little risk, check out my mentoring program.  I’ll come to your city, build your website, and find you clients, until you turn a profit!  Guaranteed!

Happy New Year!

One of my new year’s resolutions this year was to finally make this blog something that people are interested in reading.  I’ve had this site for about seven years, and it’s been in it’s current form for about two years and I’ve done almost nothing with it.  2011 is the year when that changes, along with many other things.

For the past several years, I’ve had a tradition on New Year’s Eve.  After everyone goes to bed, I sit down with a pen and a legal pad, and I brain dump onto the paper.  I think about the past year, and my goals for the coming year, and I get it all out.

Then, I make a list of what I want to accomplish in the next 90-120 days.  It would make sense to set goals for the year, but I think those are too easy to break.  Any goal that I don’t want to start working on immediately isn’t something I even want to bother writing down.  I’ll keep it tucked away until I am ready to work on it.

Anyway, at the end, I’m left with a list of 10+ things I want to accomplish on in the coming months.  These aren’t goals like “make $15,000 a month by March”, but rather goals like “Sell the viral script I’ve been working on” or “Create and sell a line of WordPress themes”.  Sort of like goal/projects.

This master list (which ended up with 13 items – my lucky number) now sits on my desk, and every morning when I plan out my day, I look at the list, and for each item, I ask myself “What can I do today to get myself closer to reaching that goal?”.  It’s a surprisingly effective strategy.  I’ve already made huge progress towards two projects I’ve been sitting on for months!

Writing this post is the first step towards one of the goals, which is to communicate more through this blog, and post valuable information that you can use to help your own business.  If you haven’t sat down recently and assessed everything you are doing online, I suggest you do so soon.  The New Year is a great time to do it, but there is never a bad time.

All the best to you and yours in 2011!  You’ll be hearing from me again soon!

For months, I’ve been planning how best to tackle the local market, and I’ve finally made some good progress with recruiting local clients. I’ve realized for years that local markets are virtually untapped, and not nearly as competitive as the online world. The biggest hurdle for me is that I’m the world’s worst salesman.

For me, working online means communicating by email, receiving payments online, and never having to sit in traffic.  It also means little or no rejection.  I do all my marketing online for a low cost, and customers come to me from all over the world.  The local market involves actually meeting face to face with potential clients, talking on the phone, and sitting in traffic occasionally.  It also involves a much higher chance of rejection.

It’s working pretty well so far though.  I’m already pulling in several hundred dollars a month from local businesses, and since I bill monthly, every new client I recruit adds to that total.  I have some marketing ideas that I’ll put into place next week, and I hope to triple my client base in the next several weeks.  With some luck, I’ll have a large enough client base by next Spring that I can hold off on recruiting new clients, and simply maintain my business in a few hours a day while I travel around Europe again with my family.  Now that would be great! 

I’ve read a lot on the Warrior Forum and other places about local marketing, but I haven’t come across any good information about exactly what I’m doing.  I’m sort of winging it so far, but through trial and error, I’m learning a lot, and I’m growing the local part of my business.

I have a lot of other projects going on right now as well.  I’ll post more about them soon.

–Robert

p.s. – For a preview, check this out – Free PLR Articles – It’s a concept I’ve been testing with pretty good success so far.

I’m heading to bed, but I wanted to share something quickly.

I’ve had a membership site, the Online Marketing Toolbox, for several months now.  I promoted it through various advertising, and to my customers who bought websites from me, and though I had occasional signups, membership was very low.  With the economy in trouble, and revenue dropping, I made a commitment to make the Online Marketing Toolbox a site that every serious online marketer would want to be a member of!

One of the main changes I made was to the layout.  I had hastily designed a quick layout when I started the site, and though it looked pretty nice, it didn’t make customers say “Wow, I want to get more sites from this guy!”.  At least, I would imagine it didn’t.

Anyway, after discarding over a dozen potential designs, I finally came out with one I was exceedingly happy with.  Of all the website designs I’ve ever created, it’s by far my favorite.

What I found over the next month, is that potential customers like the new design too – enough to increase my conversion rate by over 400%!

It was hard for me to believe at first too.  Not only did my signups increase, but the biggest increase was from my website customers.  These customers saw my work firsthand, and yet only a handful were interested in joining before.  Now, five times as many were eager to signup.  It was truly amazing!

As a web designer, I’ve always felt like a good design can really change the perception of a potential customer, and now I have living proof!

Goodnight, and God Bless!

Robert

I’m sure I’m not the only small business owner who has been struggling a bit recently. Over the past few months, my online revenue has dropped significantly, especially from the source of income I was relying on the most.

Of course, this provides a good lesson that I’ve always known, but never got around to heeding fully – don’t put all your eggs in one basket!

Now, I pull in revenue from several different streams of online income, but since one of these streams was doing particularly well, I spent most of my time cultivating it. Now that the revenues from that stream have scaled back considerably, I’m left scrambling to bring up my income.

There is a silver lining though. I think in a year or two, I may look back to these few months as the catalyst for making my business grow to unprecedented levels. Without the revenue I was relying on, I’ve been forced to push the limits of what types of services I offer. I’ve had to leave my comfort zone, and I’m already seeing great results.

The first thing I did to try and earn more revenue was to promote my custom website design. I had built a website months ago called Porcupine Website Design, mostly to assuage friends and family who occasionally ran across people who needed a website and wanted to know where to send them. I was making enough money by pre-designing websites and selling them, that I didn’t have much time to do custom work.

Promoting that has opened me up to several new customers, generated tons of great website ideas in my head, and really expanded my view of what’s out there, and what people are looking to create.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had to take a hard look at my business model, and determine how I can not only make money online right now, and how I can build my profits to make sure my business is secure in the future.  I think I’m well on my way.

I have a special place in my heart for Yanik Silver.  I think his hype can be a bit over the top sometimes, and the price for most of his products is quite high, but if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be writing this blog.

Seven years ago, I bought a copy of his book ’33 Days To Online Profits’, and that was the start of my internet marketing career.  The methods in the book didn’t apply very well to what I was trying to sell at the time, but I learned things about the world of internet marketing that I had no idea even existed.  That book opened the door for me, and eventually led to an escape from my “Day Job”.

I recently joined his Maverick Business Insider newsletter.  It sounded interesting, and Yanik always seems to be at the forefront of the latest marketing trends.  With the package came his short, but interesting book – “34 Rules For Maverick Entrepreneurs”.

Rule #3 intrigues me, but goes against the way I usually do business.  Rule #3 states that you should always charge a premium price for your product or service and then over-deliver.  Though I agree that going above and beyond your customer’s expectations is a great way to keep existing customers coming back again and again, I’ve always been of the mindset that you should charge a price that makes the customer think “How could I not take advantage of this awesome deal?”

Recently, a lot of my income has come from custom web design and coding.  I create website layouts and graphic design, do a bit of coding, install scripts, etc.  Since people can hire anyone in the world, this is understandably a competitive market.  I charge what I believe to be a fair price, but one that potential customers will see as a bargain.  And it’s worked.  I’ve gotten quite a few customers recently who were attracted to my low prices.  It’s hard for me to justify charging a lot more when it’s clear that my customers sought me out because they wanted a low price.

Of course, Yanik’s a millionaire many times over, and I’m not, so I think if anyone’s mistaken here, it’s probably me.  I’ve been studying Yanik’s methods, and I’m definitely going to make a few changes to the way I do business, now and in the future.

Back to the first product I ever bought – I followed up my purchase with a similar but more extensive product of his a few weeks later.  That product came with a special benefit.  Yanik would personally review your website once you finished it and give you pointers.  I never cashed that in.  Maybe I’ll send him here once it’s up and running a bit more and see what he thinks

I’m sure I’ll discuss more of his rules in future posts.  What do you think about Yanik Silver’s rules, his products, seminars or anything else he does?  I’m really interested to hear what you think.