Maybe you are a marketing guru, or maybe you have never heard of half of this stuff before. That means either you already know about backend sales OR you are just learning about them for the first time. In short, backend sales are where you make your money. Let's face it, many of the promotional techniques we've talked about required some money to put in. You either paid for an ad or you put in the time to create the ad or get the link. It takes money and/or time to get people to your site.

That's why once they are there, it is vitally important that you KEEP them there and that you find ways to "capture" them so that you can invite them back! Thus we have talked about various ways to do this: newsletter or other special online promotions such as linking partners that allow you to have access to their email address and therefore have the power to invite them back.

Now there is a reason we went to all of this trouble. In two words: Backend sales.

What are backend sales? They are simply anything you sell to a customer after they have made the initial purchase.

Let's say you're an author (hello, all you fellow authors out there, isn't publishing fun!). Your first book comes out-woohoo! You set up your website, publicize it, get reviews, send out press releases, and say you sell 500 books. (You've got a list of, oh, say 100 people.) Now your second book comes out. If you did the first book right, you are not starting over from square one because you already have a list of people who have read that first book, loved it, and are ready to read the second book. At least you should have this list-if you've put the work into the email captures like we've discussed.

This is where you build your backend business. Now let's say you are on your third book release, except now your list of people has grown to 500. You are now in the position to sell books both ways. For example, you make an announcement to your newsletter list that says, "Hey, my new book is out! Come get your copy now!" These people who are already interested, come and buy a book. 500 sales out of the box.

But don't forget, some of these people may not have read your first book. So you wait a month or so, and you email back, "I just thought for those of you who might be interested in reading another book by C.J. Fabulous, my first book is also available." Ah-ha, a few more sales. Couple months later: "It has occurred to me that some of you may not have read my second book…"

You have monetized a subscriber list. This is the beauty of backend sales. Once you have their email (and their trust), you can then publicize and make money in other ways-on other products coming and on those you already have control of that you can remarket at various intervals.

It's the reason you've done such a great job to this point! Use the work you have already done. Only one small word of warning here: Don't email people every day with offers. They will get tired of you and unsubscribe. Plan and think out your offers. If you don't abuse it, this technique can be gold.

Where To Go From Here:

--Continue working to build your email capture list. Can you think of other ways to do this? Possibly offer a free article to those who subscribe or offer some small sample. Where else on your site can you post a subscription invitation?

--What products can you backend now? How would be a good strategy to do that?

By this point in the course you may have found that certain daily tasks are taking up the lion share of your time-to the point that you begin to wonder, "Why did I do this in the first place?" The few among us who just love daily tasks are few and far between. To them, I say, "Enjoy." For those of us who hate the little chores like answering email and confirming, tracking, and sending orders, automation is the answer.

Fortunately computers are absolutely fabulous at this-provided you give it the right software and set up time. Otherwise, you should be prepared to read and answer all of your email at least once a day and do the paperwork as well as the work of sending out your product and keeping track of sales every day.

The problem with doing all of this by hand is that your brain power will be used for the little tasks instead of focusing on the big tasks of dreaming up new promotion ideas, reading promotion materials, coming up with new products, devising new areas to sell those products, and generally making even more money.

Basically you are stuck doing more work, putting in more and more time, and having less and less fun. This wasn't the point of doing this in the first place. World renown financial author, Robert Kiosaki, in his book "How to Get Rich Young," says that the trick to owning and running a successful business is to always come up with ways to do "more and more for less and less." That's what these two lessons are about.

First, let's talk email. Face it, email is the single best reason to do business on the web. It is faster, more efficient, and far less aggravating than going through a ground letter carrier. In fact, email is probably the biggest reason that they say the Internet has shrunk seven years of effort into one. It's great because you can establish contact, negotiate a deal, work out the details, and have an established partnership in a few days at most. Off-line it would take three or four days for the initial contact letter just to get to the other person.

However, with all these instantaneous messages flying back and forth, it doesn't take long for the email monster to rear its ugly head. Maybe you have yet to experience the joy of turning on your computer and panicking when it says, "You have 82 messages." If so, just wait. Your day is coming. It is vital that you respond to customers upon their request, but sometimes that is nearly impossible.

That's where a few automation tools come into play. One of them is an email program called Eudora. Eudora is a Qualcomm product and can be either purchased or used free of charge if you don't mind a few ads popping up on your screen (you probably won't even know they are there). This program is not all that different from other email programs; however, it does tend to work well with some of the other automation programs we will talk about.

In Eudora, you can set up different folders by clicking "Mailbox" and "New." Then as new messages come in, you can store them in their proper folder for reference later on, or action, or whatever you need them for. This is a handy little program, and it's free.

Another type of automation service that I would recommend looking into is an autoresponder. There are several free services (upgrades available to be able to do HTML and ad-free emails). Two of these are www.sendfree.com and www.getresponse.com. These programs are designed with the busy, overwhelmed netpreneur in mind. They can be set up to handle routine emails such as newsletter subscriptions, automatic responses, and courtesy emails such as thanking a customer when they place an order. They can also be set up so that on a rotating basis they will automatically email your customers back-great for backend and up sell strategies.

Say for instance that you want to re-email a customer ten days after they ordered to make sure that they had received your product. With an autoresponder, when the product is first ordered, that email address goes into a que to send out a previously written message from you saying, "Thanks so much for your order. We wanted to make sure you had received it and make sure there were no problems with the product." Customers, of course, will be impressed and this follow-up can alert you to problems early (and keep customers happy and wanting to come back).

You can also program your autoresponder to send out another message 20 days after the sale with something like, "We really hope you are enjoying product X, and we just had to tell you about product Y…" Doing this by hand with every order would be impossible. With an autoresponder, it takes the time to set it up and get it running.

A third option that you might want to check out is Corey's autoresponder at: www.myemailmanager.com

Autoresponders are well worth the time and effort to check out-especially if you don't want to be chained to your computer forever!

Where To Go From Here:

--Check out the Eudora mail program at www.eudora.com

--Check out autoresponder programs: www.myemailmanager.com , www.getresponse.com , www.sendfree.com. (To get more information on how Autoresponders can help you, send a blank email to: auto@stacistallings.com

Beyond email, there are several other automation programs that you might want to consider. By now you've had a chance to try out some of the promotion strategies and see which are the most effective for you. I'm sure you've also had some that you would've liked to try, but because of time, you simply couldn't. Here are three automation ideas from Corey's course that you might want to look into.

Web Position Gold-- http://www.web-positiongold.com/- If you are having trouble submitting to search engines and keeping track of what's where, this might be for you. WebPosition Gold will submit your site to the search engines and will then track where you are placed based on the keywords you specify. If search engine placement has become vital to your marketing campaign, this might be worth looking into.

Classified Ads Submitters--http://www.marketingtips.com/classifiedad.html - If you have found your pot of gold in submitting classified ads, this is the program for you. This will allow you to submit ads to 2,000+ sites in minutes rather than hours. One thing though: You should have ads that have pulled well in tests before you use this to submit an ad that won't do much for traffic or sales anyway. Please check this out before January 23, 2003.

E-book www.ebookswriter.com - For those writers out there, maybe you have short stories or compendiums of poems that you would like to sell for a few dollars each from your site. You can even have your autoresponders send these e-books out as soon as they are ordered. Customers will be free to read the material from their computers, but they won't be able to print it out or to make new copies.

Pick and choose which types of promotion you want to focus on and then see if there is a way to automate that promotion.

Where To Go From Here:

--Visit Corey's site at www.marketingtips.com for more information on these and other automation programs.

If you've been on the 'net long, you've heard about affiliate programs (or associate programs). For those of you who are a little confused by this term, here is the lowdown:

A business can decide that in addition to or in place of paid advertising (per click banners for example), they can offer a percentage of any product purchased to the site where the "ad" ran. So, Site B puts up a banner for Site A, and if Customer 1 clicks on it and buys something, Site A gives Site B some of the profits. However, if Customer 2 clicks on the ad but buys nothing, Site A owes Site B nothing.

This is the basic idea behind Affiliate programs. Having an affiliate program to sell your products can be a smart way to market your products provided that:

· You pay the way you say you are going to (which can become a headache as well as expensive if you've got to issue thousands of checks each month for very small commissions)

· You keep careful track of what orders came from which site

· You offer some type of training to your affiliates so they can be successful in having your program on their site

· You make sure (through careful testing) that your ads pull customers to your site. A thousand ads out there does no good if potential customers won't be interested enough to click through.

· You make it worth other site's while to put your ad on their site by offering enough of a percentage.

· You think through your policies so that if an affiliate raises a question about how you are doing business (i.e. promoting a product that they don't endorse), you know in advance how you are going to handle that problem.

In order to make your affiliate program really successful, you can offer to make it a "two-tiered" program. With this type of program, you pay a certain percentage to the site that sent the order, and a certain percentage to the site that referred that site to you. For example, Site B convinces Site C to offer your products via an affiliate banner. Site C then makes a sale. You would pay Site C say 10% and then you would pay Site B say 5% for the referral.

The downside is you have to pay two other people. The upside is that affiliate sites have an incentive to get other affiliates under them. This chain can grow exponentially so that your banners are plastered all across the web, and the only time you pay for them is when you actually make a sale.

Another facet to consider with affiliate programs is to become an affiliate site. There are sites on the 'net specifically designed to bring businesses wanting to affiliate together with sites willing to post their ads. Check out:

www.affiliatematch.com/
www.associateprograms.com/
www.webaffiliateprograms.com/
www.affiliateguide.com/
www.affiliate-programs-guide.com/

In fact, there are some sites out there that all they do is post affiliate ads in the hopes that some surfers will find them and click through to the site actually doing the sale.

One of the most recent affiliate pairings is that of Amazon with various apparel dealers such as Nordstrom. Amazon doesn't actually sell clothing. They are more like the middleman-the mall owner so to speak. They simply take the order and send it to Nordstrom. Nordstrom then processes and fills the order, ships it out, and gives Amazon a commission check for sending them the order.

Now, consider that Amazon has its own very successful affiliate program, and you can see the potential of this process. Picture this, Sally is at Joe's Book Review Site. She sees a review for a book that she thinks looks interesting. Joe doesn't sell the book, but he has a link to Amazon (whom he is affiliated with). Sally clicks over to Amazon, and while she's there, she sees the latest sweater on sale from Nordstrom's. Sally remembers that she needs a present for her sister, so she buys the sweater from Nordstrom in addition to the book she originally wanted.

Thinking through the money trail, Sally pays Amazon, Amazon pays Nordstrom and Joe, Nordstrom than pays Amazon for facilitating the order.

Where To Go From Here:

* Check out the Affiliate Program Sites listed above.

* If you are interested in putting together your own affiliate program, check out www.marketingtips.com for more information on how to do this.

By now I'm sure you are seeing how effective marketing can take time and effort. It does, but even great marketing strategies will do no good if your site isn't great. Did you know that the average page viewer is at any single page less than 57 seconds? Does your copy, navigation system, and site hook a viewer to want to explore? Or after that first few seconds do they click off in search of something else?

As I mentioned before, one truly effective way of getting and keeping traffic is to update your page frequently. How do you do that? You get programs that will help you, and then you learn tricks to make the updating automatic or as easy as possible.

The two site posting programs that I could not do without are Dreamweaver and Fireworks (both are www.macromedia.com products). Although not cheap, these two programs and a good class to help you learn them can help jump-start your site into the next gear. Dreamweaver is essentially the web-publishing program. It is highly user-friendly (although I do recommend knowing basic HTML), and I've found that taking a class that covered the Dreamweaver features was well worth the cost.

With Dreamweaver you can change your page or pages, add new pages, add content, and update to your heart's content. It's not a tea party in the beginning, but you will soon be modifying sites like a pro. Plus, you don't have to wait for a webmaster to get around to making the changes that you want. You can do it yourself!

Fireworks is an advanced drawing tool. You can draw up a graphic, save it directly to Dreamweaver, and voila! Your graphics enhance your page's look and feel. If you're going to get Fireworks, I again suggest taking a class in how to use it. There are features that will blow your mind, but finding them on your own could take a million years.

These two programs can add immeasurable peace to the process of posting a site, and they can subtract a lot of headaches once you figure them out.

Good luck, and happy posting!

What I've Learned

First, I took my own advice (imagine that!), and in December, I made a concerted effort to optimize and submit my home page and a couple of doorway pages to the search engines. I went from an average of 46 visitors a day last April and 64 average visitors in December to an average of 92 visitors a day last month (February). StaciStallings.com broke our all-time visitors-for-the-month record in February 2003 with 2,590 visitors for the month! That's pretty good for a month that only gave us 28 days to work with! To me, this speaks to the power of search engine submission and placement. Any Internet Marketing effort has to start there because that's where most people start looking when they come to the web.

Secondly, I got the opportunity to take a class in Dreamweaver and Fireworks. This class changed so much about my understanding of how websites are put together. If you are serious about running your own site, I highly suggest investing in a class based on your chosen programs. I think you will be amazed how much more manageable they will make life.

Finally, I've learned the value of how interconnected the web can be. Once you get your package together for a linking strategy, use the links that you get to find places to post your articles and your banners. These sites have already agreed to take you on as a partner, now use that partnership to your advantage. It's being smart about your marketing. Of course, there is a place and time to cultivate new links and new partnerships-those will come, but don't neglect the partners you've already found. They can be of immense value!

Going forward from here, I've compiled a list of links that may be helpful to you in your continuing efforts to make your site stand out among the crowd.

Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools Central.com http://www.webmastertoolscentral.com/ 1300+ Webmaster tools to help build, promote, improve and maintain your website

BraveNet http://www.bravenet.com/ free web site building, hosting, tools, and more

NetMechanic http://www.netmechanic.com/ (be careful many of their services are not for free, but some are) A webmaster resource center

123Webmaster http://www.123webmaster.com/ Javascripts, clip art, and more

Free-webmaster-tools.com http://www.free-webmaster-tools.com/ Lots of great stuff here!

Addme.com www.addme.com Fabulous site. Free metatag generators and much, much more!

4WebmasterTools http://www.4webmastertools.com/ Find anything a webmaster could want

Tips & Tricks to being a Webmaster

Free Webmaster Tips & Tricks http://www.freewebmastertips.com/

WebmasterPro.com http://webmaster-pro.com/ezine-index.htm

Internet Tips and Secrets http://www.internet-tips.net/

Internet Tips & Tricks http://www.theologywebsite.com/peekaboo.shtml

Keldons Webmaster Page http://www.keldons.com/webmastertips.asp

Webmaster Resources

Site Point http://www.sitepoint.com/

FreeFever http://www.freefever.com/

Walshaw Webmasters Resource http://www.walshaw.com/ (Counters and Traffic Trackers-could be an alternative to Webalyzer)

1001 Free Webmaster Resources http://www.worldzone.net/ss/antelope/

DIY Webmaster Resources http://www.diywebmasterresources.com/

SiteMeter.com http://www.sitemeter.com/

Final Message from Staci

I hope you've enjoyed your time with us and that this course has given you a good jumping off place into the world of how-to market on the Internet! It's an exciting time for marketers… There's no doubt about that, and I'm glad you went along with us for this ride.

Before we depart each other's company, may I make one small request of you? I would like anyone who has gone through this course to consider linking up with my site. The fact that you've invested time into learning how to do this job right means you are in the top of the top marketers. That means you are exactly the kind of person I want to partner with! You may either put a link on your site directly to the course or directly to my site, whichever you would prefer.

Here are the links you can cut and paste to your site:

If you need a break from life's hassle and strain, visit www.stacistallings.com Staci has stories, articles, quotes, a monthly newsletter, and even a free book waiting just for you! Come on over and see for yourself. You'll feel better for the experience!

Looking for ways to promote your web site? Staci has them. A free course on Internet promotions just for you. Come check it out at www.stacistallings.com/OnlineCourseMain.htm You'll feel better for the experience!

Finally, please write and let me know if the course helped your understanding of the Internet and marketing for the web. I would like to know in particular things you have put into use that helped increase your traffic or generally brought more recognition to your site.

Finally, don't be a stranger! Keep up with Staci through her newsletter (www.stacistallings.com/newsletter.htm#Subscribe ), or send a note as time progresses to let us know how you and your site are getting along.

It's been great having you! The very best of luck in all of your endeavors-Internet and non-Internet-from here all the way Home!

Peace to you and yours,

Staci

Flight I	Flight II	Flight III
Online Promotions for Writers Course

 

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