One of the most valuable skills you can learn in life is how to sell – not only sell your products, but yourself and your ideas. Being able to persuade someone to take a given action is extremely powerful, and this should be a skill you are constantly looking to develop.
The truth is, you are selling yourself every day. When you talk to someone, you are selling your brand. When you give someone an opinion, you are selling that idea to them. Whether you know it or not, almost every interaction you have with other people is a sale in some way.
As bloggers and as entrepreneurs, there are certain things we can do to sell more effectively. This article is going to lay out 7 rules you must follow to build up your inner salesperson, make more money through your blog, and close more deals – particularly if you are selling mid to high ticket offers.
1. Commit
Rule number one of selling is to commit to the sale. Go for it. The opportunity is there to make money from every single person that visits your blog.
Think about it.
People come to your website because they have problems that they need to solve. Forget what you think you know about competition and pricing – if you offer a solution, I promise that people will pay whatever it takes to acquire that solution if the value is there.
I sell my courses for $97. Every single person that visits my website is capable of paying that amount. If they don’t yet have the money to pay for my products, they can borrow money with the use of a credit card, or do freelance work online to earn the funds.
Knowing that each person has the capability to buy my products, there is no good reason not to commit to making the most out of every person that visits. Again, remember why people go to your blog. They have a problem that they need to solve.
Your job is to commit to providing them a solution.
2. Get Them One On One
The problem with blogs is that they do not actually work incredibly as an engine for direct sales. People think that we make money blogging, but the truth is that most of us earning a good amount make money with what our blogs do for us.
Our blog is part of the system. It is not the system itself, and this is true even for those monetizing with display ads.
Unless you already are massively influential and have built strong brand awareness over an extended period of time, you’re going to need to do something to speak with the visitor on a more personal level.
I truly believe that email is by far the most personal platform available, second only to talking to somebody on the phone or meeting them in person. No social media account or website can ever offer the personal touch that email can.
Without some sort of two-way connection between you and your potential customer, it is going to be hard to make a sale. Although the internet has been around for a while, it can still be a scary place and trust must be built before sales will be made.
Move away from talking ‘to’ your visitor on your blog, and instead talking ‘with’ them through your email list. This will set you up for numerous sales later down the line.
3. Believe In Your Products
Would you buy the product you’re offering for the price you’re asking? If not, you really have no business selling that product.
Think about it. How can expect someone to sell something you wouldn’t even buy yourself?
It is fundamental that you truly believe in the products you’re promoting. I am in the process of recruiting affiliates to sell my courses, and I do not let anyone promote the courses if they have not gained value from the products themselves.
Some say I am relentless in selling my products. Some say I am pushy, or promote too much. However, I feel like have a moral obligation to sell these products because I believe in them so strongly. If you know your products can truly help your visitors, than you are doing a disservice by not making that sale. If you know for a fact your product offers the solution they are looking for, you owe it to them to show them the value of that product and close the deal. Letting them go would be robbing them of a serious opportunity to improve their life.
4. Connect Further
As you sell more and more valuable products, you will run into more and more barriers. Remember that these barriers are not permanent and they will not mean a sale is impossible. Nearly everyone has the financial capability to buy whatever it is you are offering if they want it badly enough.
It is your job to connect with the prospect further to break down these barriers. You’ll find that as you speak with more and more people, you’ll run into common themes. Perhaps they are trying to rationalize the value offered for the price. Perhaps they know that they need the product, but aren’t sure if now is the right time. Maybe they don’t know if the product is right for them, and need you to convince them that it is.
This is why it’s so important to know your audience and to believe in your product. You need to know your product so well that you’re able to close the deal regardless of the objections you face. As you sell to more and more people, you’ll be able to use the common objections you’ve received to build a more effective sales page, making your job easier as time goes on.
5. Follow Up Relentlessly
Most people will not buy the first time you present an offer to them. This is a fundamental fact of sales that you must accept. And as you would expect, the more a product costs, the more the buyer will need to be exposed to it before a sale is made.
Here’s something interesting – 90% of salespeople will give up after presenting an offer for the 4th time and still not closing the deal. However, 80% of sales will be made after the 5th offer.
You know what that means? 10% of people are going to make 80% of the sales. And the people that make all of those sales are going to be the people who follow up their prospects relentlessly.
For a long time I made the mistake of presenting a product only one time to my email subscribers. Did I make sales? Absolutely I did. However, throwing products against the wall and hoping they’d stick was not a winning strategy. When I started marketing a product over an extended period of time, not only did my sales for that product go up, but I ended up making far more additional sales from satisfied customers for other products that I had available.
For us bloggers, this means sending out multiple emails over a period of time presenting an offer. This may even mean getting someone close on the phone to close the deal.
However, don’t underestimate the power of simple exposure. I talk about my products regularly here on my blog. Do I expect to make sales from these casual mentions? Not directly. People don’t tend to buy from my blog itself. However, my leads do read these articles, and having them see and think about the product moves them one step closer to that sale.
6. Never Lower Price
When faced with objections, one of the most common things I see salespeople do is lower the price of the product.
This is one of the worst sales mistakes you can make. People do not actually care about a product’s price as much as they care about a product’s value. This is why people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house and $2 for a burger at McDonalds. The value of these two products is substantially different.
If you believe in your products and know that your original asking price is less than what the true value of the product is, than it does not make any sense to ever lower your price for the sake of closing a deal. The proper course of action if you are facing objections is to build the perceived value of the product instead, showing the prospect why your product is the best solution to their problem.
7. Close The Deal
If you’ve followed all of other rules laid out here, closing the deal should be easy – regardless of what it is you’re selling.
However, many bloggers are taught that asking for a sale is a bad thing – that you should wait for the visitor to make that decision rather than pushing it on them. Yes, it’s bad to be overly promotional and pushy, but you still need to ask for the close. So many bloggers are afraid to directly ask to move forward, and it’s mind-boggling to me. Do you want to make money or not?
I think there is an art and a science to closing, and it’s a skill that needs to be built up over time. Although it’s too large of a topic to cover here, I’d love to help you work on this further. You’re obviously the type of person who’s committed to making more sales, and I want to make that happen for you.
So here’s the deal. Sign up for my free traffic building eCourse by clicking here, and start building up the number of people visiting your blog each day. While you do that, I’m going to be creating a brand new course solely on the topic of selling, covering everything from finding leads to closing deals. You’re going to be the first person to know about it, and when that happens, you’re going to take all of that extra traffic and make more money than you’ve ever made before.
Sound good? I thought so.
You can help me out simply by sharing your thoughts with me. What do you think about the rules I’ve shared with you here? What problems have you had when it comes to making sales? Having read what you just read, what are you going to do differently?
Be sure to take this seriously, because you are a salesperson whether you know it or not – and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Looking forward to speaking with you,
– James McAllister
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