Online Marketing: The numbers don’t lie.

Posted on: Friday, May 15th, 2009
Category: Blog, Featured

In the summer of 1998 I hung up my food lion uniform for the last time and began my career as a salesman. Overnight, I went from an eighteen year old kid, bagging groceries to an eager, motivated, salesman, picking up the phone and calling as many leads as possible (although I preferred the term “wireless agent”). The number 1 rule you learn as a newbie to the sales game is this:

You’re either in front of a client making your pitch or you’re trying to get in front of a client to make your pitch.

You also learn sales are a numbers game. As an indirect agent, the numbers game was the ratio 100:10:3. That meant for every 100 people you actually spoke with, you’d get appointments with 10 of them and sell 3 out of those 10. And that meant I had the phone glued to my ear twelve hours a day. I can recall days where I would take a rubber band, wrap it around my head, put the phone inside the rubber band and just keep dialing. I’d carry around my book with leads to names and phone numbers. In the world of sales, you often find yourself working seven days a week. I remember calling people on a Sunday after church, because I knew that would be prime time for people to be home and I could give them my sales pitch. It wasn’t the most convenient time for me but in the world of sales you have to work when the majority of people aren’t.

Every industry/product has its own version of the numbers game. I think it’s a security thing. It helps takes the uncertainty out of being self-employed. It also helps focus your energy and activity. If I know I need to speak with 100 people this week to make 3 sales, you can bet I’ll be on the phone with at least 100 people trying to get 10 appointments.

Naturally, it’s a tad more complicated than that. Ultimately, the number of sales I make depends a lot upon the makeup of those initial 100 people. If I decide to speak with 100 people who are all over the age of 65, I’ll certainly get much worse results than the wireless phone formula suggests. If I were selling home phone service, however, those are the people I’d want to be in talking to so it is important to pinpoint your target market first before do the prospecting.

It’s not rocket science. It’s merely, knowing what market your product or service is best suited for and then doing everything you can to engage those people in a conversation. It works pretty much the same way on the web.

If you’re trying to expand your online presence, the best advice I can give along the way, is to take advantage of the unlimited resources available to you via the internet. No matter what you are doing online, there are plenty of online tools, which enable you to expand you product to various markets. One good suggestion to start off with is; start contacting as many website companies or affiliates that is relevant to the same product you’re offering. Ask them if they would like to “cross advertise”. “Cross advertising”, is when you and another entity are in an agreement to display advertisements from both parties on each other website at no cost at all, with the intent of both parties mutually benefitting from the marketing.

As I conclude this article, I would like to leave you with one helpful link that will greatly expand your knowledge of online marketing. The website is affiliatewatcher.com. This website will provide you with some great resources for search engine optimization and great commissionable affiliate programs.

If you would like to market you products or services on this website, click here to learn more about my advertising programs.