When you’re an online solo service professional (solopreneur) it’s crucial that you move away from the hours-for-dollars business model and create a multiple streams of income business, i.e. your income comes from a variety of different sources:
1. Passive income through the sale of information products.
2. Leveraged income by creating and running group programs.
3. One-on-one client income; this is your highest level service and you only work with a few clients at this level.
Creating passive income in your business through the sale of information products is at the heart of a multiple streams of income business. And once sales are going well you can be generating a consistent income each and every month.
Sometimes, though, you need to give sales a little helping hand, particularly if you’re launching a new product. Today I’d like to share with you three ways in which you can increase your product sales through using special offers.
1. Create a coupon. If your shopping cart service allows you to do this, coupons are a really quick and easy way to offer a discount. You have lots of options when it comes to creating coupons; you can set them up for a dollar amount, a percentage amount, a specified time period, or even a minimum purchase amount. Simply create a coupon in your shopping cart, give it a name (which is the coupon code), and then tell your customers the code they need to input at the checkout in order to get the discount.
2. Create a time sensitive discount. This follows on from the point above and involves creating a coupon; however the reason that I really like this special offer is that you can set the expiration date on your coupons too. This is really handy if you want to run a special promotion through to, say, midnight on a certain date (you know the type of offer I mean – this is very common). But what’s so neat is that you don’t have to be sat at your PC at midnight to switch the pricing over – the coupon will automatically expire and your pricing will revert to normal – completely automated!
3. Offer a bonus product. For a certain period of time you could also offer a bonus product; this could be another one of your lower-priced products, or a special teleclass or report, or anything else that you think will add value to the product you are currently promoting. Very often someone will buy your product because they’re getting your bonus too. Also set a deadline on the bonus to encourage your customers to take action. This could be purchase before a certain date or offer a limited number of bonuses.
Don’t just save these ideas for when you’re launching a new product; use them when you want to re-launch an existing product, get sales moving for one of your other products, or you simply want to give your business a boost.
(c) 2010 Tracey Lawton
Online Business Development Strategist, Tracey Lawton, teaches online solo service professionals how to create the essential online marketing and office organization systems needed so that they can create a more streamlined, systemized, and automated online business. Check out http://www.officeorganizationsuccess.com for fr.ee how-to articles, resources, tips, and tools, and sign up for your fr.ee "Office Organization Success Toolkit".