The Psychology of Selling Online And Setting Up Shop

I’m not going to lie to you here. There is plenty of money to be made online. Several of the top level internet marketers are making 7 figures consistently, sometimes in just one launch – seriously. But this is not the realm I’d like to discuss today.

No, I’m talking about ethical selling – doing what you love and making a living out of it. BYOB is all about your ability to take your existing business or talents and move it online to build alternative revenue streams, to give you the flexibility to lead the lifestyle you want. Right, now we’re clear on that, let’s talk about the psychology of selling online.

Selling successfully online is all about positioning, packaging, branding and marketing savvy. It’s also about hustling.

All those “overnight” success stories you hear of people making it big online are almost always coupled with several years behind the scenes, that included a lot of hard work and several failures before they hit the right formula. The formula that allowed them to build momentum, a huge list, an engaged audience, a credible business model, or revenues of thousands of dollars per month.

Trust me, I’m not making this up. Aside from experiencing it myself, I’ve been hanging with a diverse range of people over the last year making serious money online, half a million dollar launches and 7 figures in one year.

Aside from being smart people they’ve also worked relentlessly to get where they are. They’ve invested a lot in learning, in growing their skills and they’ve put in the hard earned miles. Whenever I get to chat to them I just get straight down to business – when the discussion heads that way, and ask them the nitty gritty questions:

How long have you had your online business?
How long did it take you to start making enough revenue to live off per month full time?
What was the tipping point for you when the hustling started to pay off?
What’s been your biggest overall success factor that you can point to?
How much are you making per month/ per product launch/ per year?
What are your costs and how big is your team or is this a solo operation?

Granted I ask a lot more questions than this and the conversations are often fascinating. We share and swap stories and every single time I learn something new to take away and apply to my own business. But more often than not, aside from the odd anomaly who got online, picked the right niche and started crushing it within months, most have the same advice and experience. I’ll be sharing a lot of this in an upcoming initiative.

The Real Story Behind Making It Big Online

It seems 2 years is the approximate point where things started to take off. Often they had tried and failed many times with different variations of selling online before hitting on the method that most aligned with their values, their audience, and their sweet spot. The most important point – they kept at it.

It was a culmination of continually honing their skills, creating better quality offerings, understanding their niche market needs, crafting their messaging and branding to resonate with the right people, and working out their pricing.

I’d like to share my own experience in my efforts to create product offerings that benefited the growing tribe I had, because seriously I could write a book about what not to do and what works and what I’m still learning.

Don’t be afraid to fail

I have high expectations for everything I do and after 9 years in the corporate world in product and brand management roles, launching numerous product lines across a diverse range of industries, I figured I had honed my skills really well due to the successful results I’d brought these companies.

Yet nothing really prepares you for the online world. My first attempt at actually having something for sale for my community absolutely bombed! And I’ve had some near misses and some great successes since.

Lesson Learned: Learn that failure is your friend if you use what you learned and keep experimenting. Never think that one product or service that didn’t resonate with your customers, or meet your sales goals, means you should give up. Working purely online is not a place for the meek – be strong, believe in what you do, do it with your best ability and stick with it.

Know your audience

If you’re not asking your potential and existing customers what they want and why they buy from you then you are missing out on the most valuable information to help you build out your online empire. With my first failed program I clearly had not done enough valid research or asked the right questions of my community at the time. They didn’t want general business coaching, they wanted how-to advice, in digestible formats that solved their specific need.

Lesson learned: You need to know your niche. You need to know exactly what keeps them up at night, what worries them beyond belief, what they just can’t wrap their head around, what they’re dying to have or know right now. Then you need to solve those problems – succinctly, swiftly and beautifully.

Partner wisely

While I do a lot of work alone, I am a big advocate of joint ventures and strategic alliances and I think they are one of the most powerful ways to leverage our skills and talents with that of others to build the most wonderful products and services.

Look around and you will see people partnering left right and centre – Chris Guillebeau and Pam Slim, Pam Slim and Desiree Away, Corbett Barr and Adam Baker, Adam Baker and Karol Gadja, Danielle LaPorte and Marie Forleo, Marie Forleo and Laura Roeder, Natalie MacNeil and Natalie Sisson – yes more on that soon.

My point is two heads are better than one, and with that comes all the other bonuses of combined audiences, budgets, investment, ideas, networks and not to mention support and motivation. The above examples show you can partner with multiple people and kick some serious butt but not be tied down to one partner in crime.

Lesson Learned: Choose a partner, or team that has a like-minded audience and values. Make sure you both have an audience or platform from which to launch from and market too. Yet know that your tribe buy into you. Any partner you introduce needs to have their own trust and credibility and audience too.

The Price Is Right

In addition to knowing your niche, and creating a fantastic solution, how do you know what to charge? What are people willing to pay? These are questions I hear all the time from you and that I ask myself. I’ve yet to find one person in the online world who has the answer to that – because the fact is – there is no magic answer.

Take my Passport to Business Freedom Program where I offer 3 price tiers to cater to First Class members through to those on a budget with Economy. Price points are $77, $197 and $297 with increasing value in what you got in return. The members who joined were split fairly evenly between all price points. My point is you can never fully factor in every decision that makes someone buy from you.

The Ultimate Toolkit eBook I priced at $47 and the Premium Site at $97. Far more people have bought the premium option because it’s such good value. Perhaps underpriced.

Lessons Learned: At the end of the day, I price according to what I believe the value of my creations are, what I’d be prepared to pay and what I’d be happy with receiving in return for the time, effort, knowledge and love I’ve put into them. As you hone your skills and become more brilliant you can put your prices up to cater to the audience you want to work with and get paid what your worth – make sure you deliver though!

Pricing Guidelines for Those Starting Out

Product prices ending in 7 seem to work really well in terms of conversion. That’s why eBooks, manifestos and guides have price points of $27-$47 and up.
More complex products with MP3 recordings, videos, checklists, workbooks can range from $77-$97 and up.
In depth programs, with coaching elements or an ongoing element such as a resource can be priced upwards of $100 and really the sky is the limit.
Once your pricing goes over $100, there is a psychological barrier that effects the purchasing of your customer – in other words, there’s more skin in the game in their investment.
Over the $100 mark you start seeing price points of $395, $495 that also work well, and even better when split out into payment plans – commonly two-three payments of lesser amounts.
Lately, there have been a spate of product launches at $1,997. Once you get to this amount, you invest some serious money in marketing, incentives and content creation that reflects the price point.

But really, all this is meaningless without me knowing who your audience is and your product or service offering. You have to value it at what you think it’s worth. I’ve tried low end and high end and frankly I’m sick of people expecting everything for free. I stay away from low-ballers. I want a tribe that is willing to pay for top quality products and programs because they know they’re worth it. That’s the honest truth.

Do not undersell your stuff – you’re an artist.
Don’t assume your market doesn’t have the budget for high ticket items.
Factor in the time and money you’ve invested to build your expertise into your pricing.
Do not offer discounts from the get go (only your tribe at launch time if it makes sense).
Market first and if people buy, build it later*.

*Contentious though this may seem, I’ve seen a lot of people do this very successfully. You’ve had the concept building in your mind. You’ve surveyed your audience and you believe they will like what you’ve designed for them. So you don’t spend a lot of upfront costs, instead you write an amazing sales page – in your own words. You put a price point on it and a buy now button and then you market it. When people start buying it in droves you build it asap. There’s no better motivation than a motivated audience buying something you haven’t yet produced – and no better feeling when you’ve hit the sweet spot and know people want what you offer.

Important note: The above statement depends on what your product is. I’m talking eBooks, audio recordings, a set of 3 videos, a coaching program – not a fully fledged membership site or directory that requires planning, infrastructure build and testing.

Building Your eCommerce Platform

Up until now, I’ve primarily been talking about creating art, packaging it and selling it based off your knowledge and skill set. But don’t worry I haven’t forgotten that plenty of you have physical goods to ship and sell, distribution channels and warehouse inventory. I’ve been there done that when I was managing 11 Salon Haircare brands for Schwarzkopf Professional and hundreds of product skews.

Crafting a website that attracts and converts like crazy, as well as maintaining an effective and efficient e-commerce presence is often a daunting task for entrepreneurs and small businesses. So let’s break it down into five easy-to-manage functional areas. Do this right and your website revenue potential can be limitless.

Treat Your Website Like Your Physical Store

Just like a shopfront window you need to lure in visitors who land on your website with enticing promotions and products on offer.

Keep it updated and present specials that entice your customers to buy 2 for 1 or up-sell them
Have fresh information to keep your visitors engaged and compelling content
Develop an online marketing plan so you know what promotions are happening when and what content goes with that.
Tie this into your sales goals and overall objectives for the month and quarter
Track and analyze where your website traffic is coming from, click through rate and conversions

Help Potential Customers Find You

If you’re business is not on Yelp or Google Places then you’re missing out. And this is just the start. You have to maintain your local listings and research what people are searching on to find you.

Invest in search engine marketing optimization strategies.
Build trust with your consumers by featuring large amounts of content relevant to them on your site like an FAQ section, How to videos, an entertaining blog etc.
Engage customers where they hang out regularly like forums and social media sites and drive traffic back to you by providing insights, reviews and coupons.
Use your newsletter or email list to send out regular marketing messages promoting your products, specials and company news.

Enrapture, Engage and Capture Your Leads

Naturally, I hope you’re using Google Analytics to gather, track and engage every lead that comes onto your website, right? So you know which sites they’re coming from, what keywords they’re putting in the search engine to find you, and where they are in the world?

Maximise the number of ways you’re gathering information on your website – Contact Us page, Request a Brochure, Call our freephone, Sign up for our specials email
Make sure you automate your response e-mails to online customer inquiries so they feel they can trust that you’re going to get back to them in an appropriate time frame.
Use a tool like Zoho CRM to maintain the key information on your unique and wonderful customers and use this information to create targeted advertising and promotions.

Understand What the Heck Are Your Customers Doing

The beauty of Google Analytics is that you can tell what pages are getting the most attention on your eCommerce site.

Check out what pages people are visiting frequently on your site, how long they’re sticking around and what they’re clicking on and then give those more prominence.
Identify the high-traffic areas of your website and advertise popular and high-margin items in that space. Listen to your lovely customers.
Data is your friend so collect it on all searches performed through your website and review it every 1-2 weeks depending on your business and identify what people want to find that isn’t crystal clear on your website.

Make It Simple for Your Customers to Buy from You

I have to admit from making some great cock-ups on my site when it comes to buy now buttons that don’t function, discount codes I’ve set up that run out before they should, and e-Junkie checkout codes linked to the wrong products – even with testing!

Be sure to include a clear and obvious product search box for visitors to use to get right to what they want on your site.
Offer coupon discounts based on how much they’re spending – you’ve witnessed it on Amazon, buy more books and get free shipping. Entice them to buy slightly more in order to get the benefits.
If you have a diverse range of products then make sure you make the categories really clear or segment your products catalog style with search results that show ongoing sub-categories they can explore.
Cross promotion is smart – if you like this then you might also like to add this to your cart. The ladies at LunaPads do a great job of this.
Finally, offer flexible, trusted payment options such as PayPal, or Google Checkout or use ready built eCommerce sites like sexy Shopify or 1ShoppingCart.

I think that’s more than enough for you to take in for today. Let me know in the comments if it helps or what else you want me to cover. If you want to get this whole series as a free eBook with bonus templates then pop your details in below.