But, if you don’t have time for that, there is a simpler, not-so-exact way, but it should also have a major impact on your ratio between sales and avertising expenses:

1. Take a summary of your sales sorted or grouped by country, of say, the last three years. Most ecommerce providers have such reports.

2. Make a list of countries which you make sales in. Don’t include countries where sales numbers are very low compared to the size of the country.

3. In your Google-Adwords account, select only the countries from your list. (If you have many campaigns then I suggest to use the Google Adwords Editor and use the copy-paste feature

Depending on how fast you work and on how many campaigns and sales you have, this exercise usually takes between 15 Minutes and one hour.

But it can help a lot with your bottom line because it eliminates all those countries from your advertising expenses where you do not make any sales at all or where sales numbers are way too low to be able to make a profit there.

Especially nowadays, where sales-conversion can, in some markets, be severely affected by the current economic crisis, you have to do much more to optimize and keep your advertising focused on activities which bring in paying customers. It may make the difference between making a loss and making a profit and it may determine the survival of your business.

Also, acting fast is necessary because you can’t tolerate cash-bleeing of your business nowadays for even a short time. Therefore, a crude, fast exercise as outlined above can be much more effective than doing a perfectionisic exercise over the course of many months (or procrastinating about it because it takes soo much work.)

If you wait too long, there may be no business left to be saved. So, forget about perfectionism and do what works right now.

I hope this helps some of you,

Chris

P.S.: I just did this exercise today. Maybe I’ll post some results here…]]> http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/03/22/a-simple-exercise-in-geo-targeting/feed/ http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/02/14/beware-of-spammers-who-want-you-to-resell-their-products/ http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/02/14/beware-of-spammers-who-want-you-to-resell-their-products/#comments Sat, 14 Feb 2009 10:18:11 +0000 admin http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/?p=73 If you have a (halfway) decent Internet Business, you will probably get unsolicited proposals from product vendors to sell their physical products.

If you don’t have any experience, these proposals may look good to you. But following these proposals may get you into deep trouble. In this post I’ll analyze the potential dangers and propose a way to deal with this.

First let me describe how these proposals usually look like: It is an email praising some physical products, usually electronics, with offering you a whopping 15% reseller discount.

Now, let’s analyze that proposal:

• A 15% reseller discount is ridiculously low:
  • It won’t even pay for your logistical effort ( time and money ) especially if you are not a big catalog company with a well-optimized logistics infrastructure.
  • And it will of course not pay for your marketing or for the value of your customer relationship.
• Reselling products puts several serious risks on your shoulders:
  • If the product has quality issues, the relationship with your customers is damaged. (This can mean a huge financial loss in terms of lost future profits)
  • You, as the reseller are responsible for warranty replacements etc. Usually this is also a legal responsibility, but in any case it is a moral responsibility which you must fulfill in order to maintain a good relationship with your customers.

    Now let me explain what this means:

    • If your customer returns a defective product for warranty replacement or full refund, you depend on the vendor of that product to provide you with the warranty replacement or full refund.
    • If the vendor does not do that, you have to refund your customer out of your own pocket. In case of a 15% reseller rebate, your loss is 85% of the end-customer price plus all of your expenses related to transactions, logistics, marketing etc.
    • This is a huge financial risk, if your vendors sells lousy products and then the vendor kind of magically disappears.
    • So, since you take a lot of risk, this risk has to be factored into the reseller rebate.
  • If the products cause harm, such as starting to burn and causing a whole building to burn down or similar things, you as a reseller have a big problem, especially if the vendor disappears or does not pay for the damage for some other reason.

    You may be able to resolve the legal ramifications without having to pay for a burnt down house, but it will cost you lots of time and possibly lawyer fees.

    But, in any case, there is a huge damage to your reputation. And that can outright kill your business.

    Plus the moral issues may cause you to not sleep well for some lengthy period of time.

Now that we have analyzed the risks associated with such a proposal, let’s look on how to mitigate the risks:

• You have to do your due diligence to make sure that the vendor is reputable and dependable.
• You have to check any proposal to make sure it fits the need of your customers.
• You have to factor in all costs ( including risk compensation ) for determining which reseller rebates are acceptable.
• You have to check all products to see whether they meet the quality requirements which you think are necessary to support a good relationship with your customers.

You see, that checking everything costs a lot of time.

If you get many inquiries from vendors, you will be spending too much time for that and this time will be missing from serving your customers well.

Therefore, you have to charge fees for checking proposals and products. And of course, you should not have to pay for sample products. Au contraire, the vendor has to pay you for your time and effort needed to check the products.

And there is one additional benefit: Charging fees will filter out vendors who are not serious and just a waste of your time, Plus the fees will cause all remainig vendors to spend some time in preparing well written proposals…

Therefore, my last answer to an inquiry by a product vendor looked as follows:

Hello XYZ,

I have not given you permission to send me advertising about your business by email, so I consider your email spam. So, please delete my email from your database.

Also, if anybody wants me to sell/market something for him/her, here will be my conditions when I will have implemented my program for reselling other people’s products.

• I need a free sample of each product for checking quality etc, so I am sure, the quality of your products respects the good relationship with my customers.
• The vendor pays me a $250 fee for checking each product. The fee pays for my time required for checking the product, so it is not refundable, even if I decide to reject his product. Also, I will keep all free samples, but I may at my own discretion decide to send them back for them being disposed off properly by the vendor.
• Before sending me a product sample, the vendor sends me a description of his product in less than 100 words which also explains why the product is a good fit for my customers. There is a $25 fee for me checking this 100 words description of each product. The fee is not refundable, even if the proposal is rejected.
• Also there is a $100 fee for checking the vendor itself ( i.e. some checking whether the vendor is a reputable and reliable vendor ), and this check is done before I check anything else. This fee is not refundable, even if I decide to not work together with that vendor.
• Reseller discount must be at least 50% for single items, and 60% for quantities between 10 and 100, and 70% for quantities above 100.
• All products must have a 2 year warranty.
• My payment terms:
  1. I will pay half of the sum 30 days after I have received products in good condition
  2. I will pay the other half of the sum after the warranty period has expired, and it is only paid if you have fulfilled your duties of warranty replacements as demanded by me or by my customers.
• There are no guarantees on how much I will sell. This really depends on my customers and market tests and I cannot guarantee the actions of other people. So even if I accept your products, there is the risk that I don’t sell anything at all.

***

But, since you have contacted me in a spammy way, and since I haven’t started my reselling-other-people’s products program yet I will not even work together with you under these conditions.

However, I will setup a page on demorecorder.com where product selling proposals can be entered after paying the appropriate fees. And you will be welcome to enter your proposals through that page when it exists.

Setting up this page will probably take several months, because this has low priority for me, so please check demorecorder.com from time to time.

Best regards,

Chris

My guess is that spammy vendors which I answer in this way will never contact me again because spammers usually go the path of least resistance. If a vendor is serious, he/she may actually go through my evaluation maze as soon as I will have set it up.

I hope this blog post helps you to avoid some problems…

Also, what do you think about this topic? Please write a comment with your thoughts.

Chris

P.S. I do work together with reputable and dependable vendors and sometimes I also accept reseller rebates which are lower than 50% but these are very rare circumstances and only may happen in the case that I am the one who started the relationship by me contacting the vendor for being interested to sell his/her products.

So if a vendor who I already work with, reads this: Don’t panic. Everything is OK. This is not about you. Our relationship is intact. ]]> http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/02/14/beware-of-spammers-who-want-you-to-resell-their-products/feed/ http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/02/04/i-have-no-short-term-plans-for-creating-a-competitor-for-google-heres-why/ http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/02/04/i-have-no-short-term-plans-for-creating-a-competitor-for-google-heres-why/#comments Wed, 04 Feb 2009 09:17:20 +0000 admin http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/?p=66 My latest blog post has stirred up some interest and therefore I think I have to clarify something and explain something more:

First, I have no short term plans for creating a competitor for Google. Here are the reasons:

• Reason 1: I am currently working on several interesting projects, and those projects demand all of my time. Those projects include the following
  • My DemoRecorder business, where I have a loyal customer base and I enjoy working with my customers and further developping the product.
  • PancreatitisCookbook.com which will be an eBook where I will share what helped me to completely heal Pancreatitis while eating well-tasting food despite a strict diet regime. (This project is in it’s early stages but I am very motivated to get this finished as it has the potential to provide positive change for many people while also having the potential of an interesting business opportunity. So, creating win-win on all sides.)
  • A course on how to start a business without loan or venture capital. ( I did some market test and already have created some parts of the course. )
  • A course on how to optimize Google Content Network campaigns. Maybe also provide a software service for automating parts of that strategy. ( I have developed a method which I have successfully applied to my demorecorder.com business and I have some ideas on how to structure the course.)
• Reason 2:

  Google is still doing a terrific job. And a terrific job for all major groups which Google is involved with, i.e.,

  • searchers,
  • advertisers
  • and website-owners who display Google content ads.

  So, there is almost no reason for a competitor to exist, except for the political aspects of being a competitor which includes the fact that competition is good for customers and society etc.

  But I don’t base business decisions on politics. If I create a business, there must be a strong unique selling proposition, i.e., a reason to exists because of what the business has to offer to the market place.

  Having said that, I see some potential that

  • Google might unconsciously go in an undesirable direction, so, maybe there will be reason to exist for another search engine. I will write more about that topic in my next blog post.
  • It may be that I come up with some new edge about search or content advertising which may create a unique selling proposition and therefore reason to exist even in today’s marketplace. If there will be something like that, I will announce it here in this blog.

So, stay tuned,

Chris]]> http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/02/04/i-have-no-short-term-plans-for-creating-a-competitor-for-google-heres-why/feed/ http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/02/01/its-about-time-to-create-a-viable-competitor-to-google/ http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/02/01/its-about-time-to-create-a-viable-competitor-to-google/#comments Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:46:19 +0000 admin http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/?p=54 If you read Perry Marshall’s newest blog post you’ll realize that Google starts to show more ugly monopolistic behaviour in that it decides by itself which industries it allows on their Adwords platform.

This means that if you use Google Adwords for advertising *any* business, you can never be sure whether you will be able to get traffic from them tomorrow, at reasonable cost or at all.

So, your investment of time and money in building your well-oiled Adwords campaigns may be worth nothing overnight, and, contrary to past Google-Slaps, there will be no way to work around it. If your industry is deemed bad by Google, and if Adwords is your only traffic source, this means Game Over.

So, we small-business Internet Entrepreneurs have to find another solution.

One solution may be other forms of marketing, but that’s hard and in many cases it’s not possible for a small business.

Another solution may be to create an alternative search engine.

This can be done on a shoestring budget if it uses computing power and network connectivity provided by many people on the net in exchange for a share of the profit. This can use a technology similar to SetiAtHome…

That’s already a serious technological challenge, but it looks solveable.

The real challenge is to get it accepted by the market, both by searchers and by advertisers. Obviously this cannot be done by advertising it with PPC on Google Adwords because Google does not allow to advertise competing search engines. So this must use alternative methods such as social marketing, viral marketing, writing press releases for getting the media involved etc etc etc

But I guess that it’s about time.

We cannot tolerate to have just one single source for the most important traffic for building businesses nowadays, i.e. Pay per click from search.

You might say that there are still Yahoo and MSN. They could be a viable competition but these companies don’t seem to get it. They look more like big buerocratic behemoths who try to play catchup but have shut down their own creativity completely.

If you want to compete with Google, you have to be more creative than them and be more connected to the market than them, not just copying what you see on the surface of their business. The surface of their business is just 10% of their business. If no own creativity is involved, then you are doomed to failure by just copying 10% of their business.

My guess is that if some search engine succeeds in competing with Google, then it will be something completely different from Google. It may look similar on the surface but everything else, the essential 90% which make it work, will be different.

My guess is that a competitor to Google with come out of a small business or out of a cooperation of multiple small businesses because that’s where creativity is concentrated. Big corporations like Microsoft and Yahoo tend to drive away creative people and tend to destroy the least bit of creativity in those people who decide to stay.

What do you think?

Please post your ideas,

Chris

P.S. It may even be me who starts such a competitor. Why?

1. I have extensive knowledge in both marketing and computing technology,
2. My businesses are still running besides an employee job, so I can afford the risk that Google shuts down all of my adwords campaigns,
3. I have an education in computational linguistics, which seems to be a key technological ingredient for getting high quality ranking work.

Actually I have been thinking about such a project for a long time…

Now it seems that I have to switch gears to the next step… ]]> http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/02/01/its-about-time-to-create-a-viable-competitor-to-google/feed/ http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/01/11/if-you-want-to-improve-conversion-fix-your-product-the-smart-way/ http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/01/11/if-you-want-to-improve-conversion-fix-your-product-the-smart-way/#comments Sun, 11 Jan 2009 09:42:56 +0000 admin http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/?p=48 I know that every business owner is interested in improving his/her sales-conversion rate.

In many cases, it’s the marketing which needs to be improved.

But, it is not always the marketing side.

It may also be your product which needs a fix or an improvement. (Especially if your prospects can try out your product before purchasing it)

Now, there is a dumb way of fixing your product and a smart way:

• The dumb way is to start improving things which you think need to be improved.
• The smart way is to ask your potential customers for feedback, and then act on that feedback.

  Why?
  Simple: You will concentrate your energy on fixing those issues which are relevant to your customers. (If you don’t ask them, you will probably waste your energy on improving stuff which is irrelevant.)

  In my DemoRecorder.com business, this is how I started to make sales:
  Six months after I started with capturing leads and asking them for feedback and acting on that feedback, I started to make my first sales.

  And I have a huge amount of feedback which I still have to act upon…

Please tell me what you think about this topic and post a comment.

Chris

P.S. If you are a real seasoned marketer you will probably tell me that the product is part of the marketing, and you are perfectly right with that.

However, I think that it’s easier to get the point across by polarising…]]> http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/01/11/if-you-want-to-improve-conversion-fix-your-product-the-smart-way/feed/ http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/01/10/what-i-am-doing-now-doubling-the-number-of-new-leads-within-two-months-while-keeping-the-cost-per-lead-almost-constant/ http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/01/10/what-i-am-doing-now-doubling-the-number-of-new-leads-within-two-months-while-keeping-the-cost-per-lead-almost-constant/#comments Sat, 10 Jan 2009 12:31:32 +0000 admin http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/?p=37 or Mastering the Google Content Network …

In accordance with my Crisis-response strategy ( as described in an earlier post on this blog ), my current marketing project for my DemoRecorder.com business is to double the number of new leads per day (while keeping the cost per lead roughly constant) and to achieve that goal within two months. I have started that project in end of November and the results I have achieved so far look very promising.

If you do not know it yet, Google Adwords is a great way of getting quality traffic to your website. It is not free, but it is definitely worth it, if you master it.

(That is, if you master it, you will be able to make substantially more with sales than you spend with advertising on Google Adwords. Actually I think that Google Adwords is the easiest and most reliable way of getting traffic and should be the starting point of any Internet Marketing project. I will reveal more about the basic Internet Marketing Formula in a later post. If you want to get started with Google Adwords and get a continuous in-depth and broad education in it I highly suggest that you check out this resource. It ain’t free but such as Adwords, it is definitely worth it. )

Now, what I am starting to reveal here is neither broad coverage of advertising on Google Adwords nor an introduction to it. Rather I will cover a special, narrow topic and <>I assume that you already have the knowledge taught in readily available kits and courses.

If you know something about Google Adwords, you probably know that it really consists of two advertising offers which behave very differently:

1. Search Network: Ads which are displayed on search result pages of Google or its partner search engines.
2. Content Network: Ads which are displayed on other websites. (You have probably seen Google ads boxes somewhere.)

Now, by my experience it is much easier to get good results in forms of leads and sales from the search network, so for several years I have restricted my advertising to the search network.

But the search network has one problem: There is only a limited amount of traffic available.

So, for my goal of doubling the number of leads per day, I have to look elsewhere. Since I already know something about the Google content network, this was the logical place to start. ( I got my knowledge from various places, including experimenting myself or my primary education source for Adwords related stuff)

So, for the start I have just duplicated my search-network campaign and let it run on the content network.

This “kind of” worked:

• I have got plenty of clicks.
• Google proposed higher daily budgets than I have set and continued to increased its proposition thereafter.

  –> this is an indication that Google is capable of serving a lot of traffic from the content network if you just allow it to happen.

  Why do the budgets increase constantly? My guess is that when you increase the budget, Google probably ads additional tests on more websites to the schedule of its statistic modules and if these tests yield good results, it can serve you more traffic…

  So I can essentially get unlimited traffic from the content network.

• But there was a big problem: The lead-capture rate was much lower and therefore my cost per lead was much higher than on the search network:

  Between Nov 30 and Dec 15:

  • Search Network: $0.55 per unconfirmed lead
  • Content Network: $9.41 per unconfirmed lead with a total of 4 leads.

  So that’s a factor of more than 17, or in percent: the cost per lead on the content network was 1610.9% higher than on the search network. ( yes that’s more than thousand percent )

  So this was not interesting in an economic way.

  Also, I guessed that the usual optimisation techniques such as split-testing ads and adjusting bids will not get me the factor of 17. ( but these techniques will help, too of course… )

So, I saw that there was some potential in terms of a huge amount of traffic but it was not useful in its raw form.

Since I am also a programmer by profession, I have more possibilities than the average Internet marketer and since I can connect the dots between marketing and technology I can also come up with ideas that pure marketers do not come up with so likely.

So, I came up with a technology and a strategy which allowed me to do stunning optimisations.

This is still going on.

Current state

Currently ( Jan 1 to Jan 9 ) I have achieved an average cost per unconfirmed lead of $1.26 with a total of 34 leads, i.e, statistically significant numbers.

This means an optimisation by a factor(!) of 7.4 within about six weeks.

In other words, between Jan 1 to Jan 9, the investment of $42.76 got me 34 leads. while between Nov 30 and Dec 15 a similarly sized investment of $37.65 resulted only in 4 leads.

So, now we are getting in a territory which starts to get really interesting from an economic point of view.

And there is a good chance that I am getting to the goal of a similar cost per lead in the content network as I get on the search network.

BTW, Here’s the comparison between search and content network of the optimised setup which looks even better for the content network because the cost per lead in the search network has increased.

Between Jan 1 and Jan 9:

• Search Network: $0.86 per unconfirmed lead with a total of 21 leads.
• Content Network: $1.26 per unconfirmed lead with a total of 34 leads.

This also means that I have already achieved, even surpassed, the goal of doubling my number of leads.

Now, the cost has to be optimised somewhat more but this seems to be achievable by continuing to use my strategy.

Some comments about the cost

You need to have a certain testing budget, i.e., during the optimisation phase you have to purchase a certain amount of traffic from Google, so you get enough data for optimisation.

In my case, my total testing budget spent on Google so far is $282.54 But it is not all exclusively spent for testing because I also got some leads during testing, especially a really nice number of leads during recent testing phases, see above for the period between Jan 1 and Jan 9.

Also, there is a very nice return of investment on the testing budget because of the high number of nicely priced leads which I can get as a result of that.

Plus, some of the budget was needed for research experiments to find out the right strategy, so if I (or you) apply the same strategy to some other campaign, a smaller testing budget may be sufficient because I (or you) avoid some trial and error detours…

BTW, I have started to gather traffic somewhere after November 15 but I started with the optimisations in December.

How does it work and how can you do it, maybe?

This strategy involves a combination of manual optimisations with automated analysis and optimisation done by software programs.

There are several things which have to be done right and which can easily be done wrong.

There is some complexity to it but once you get it, it needs only a minimal amount of time (such as about one or two hours per week. Of course it depends on how much you want to invest into it. You may achieve better results if you invest more time but according to the 80/20 rule you will soon get to the point of diminishing returns.

(The optimal point depends on the amount of traffic you get. E.g. if you get 1000 leads per day for $1 per lead, it is probably worth your time to tweak it even in tiny details than if you get 10 leads per day. Just look at the return of investment for your time…)

How can you learn this strategy and have access to the necessary software tools?

I have thought a while on how I can make this strategy available for you and other marketers.

What I have come up with is the following:

• When there is sufficient interest I will create an eBook which describes the strategy in detail in a nicely organised and structured way and which helps you to avoid pitfalls etc.
• The eBook will be available at an attractive price which will give you a really nice return on investment when you apply the strategies in this eBook.
• Also, to get you access to the software, I will provide a web-based solution which will give you as much automation as possible while being easy to setup and to start with.
• This web-based solution will be accessible for a small monthly fee which will also give you a nice return on investment. Actually, I will make this so attractive, that the decision to use that service will be a no-brainer for you.
• Of course, I will offer a bundle of the eBook and the software service.

When will this be available for you?

The speed of me making it available depends on how many people are interested in this offer. Obviously, if a lot of people are interested I will give it a higher priority.

In any case it will take at least a few weeks because everything has to be put into a nicely organised and structured form and the software has to be converted from the current prototype to an easily useable web-based solution.

If you are interested in this, please post a comment to this blog-article where you tell me so, so I can estimate on how many people will be interested in this and therefore, how much I energy how fast I should invest into this project so it gets available soon.

Also, you may want to tell your friends and colleagues about this, so more people will express interest in it, so I will make it available sooner.

Any news about this project will be posted to this blog, so if you are interested please follow this blog regularly. ]]> http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/01/10/what-i-am-doing-now-doubling-the-number-of-new-leads-within-two-months-while-keeping-the-cost-per-lead-almost-constant/feed/ http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/01/04/i-have-got-the-birthday-blues/ http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/01/04/i-have-got-the-birthday-blues/#comments Sun, 04 Jan 2009 12:42:38 +0000 admin http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/?p=12

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This is an exceptionally long blog post, but I think that the importance of the topic warrants this:

Observations:

1. The Lead-capture rate remains completely unaffected by the crises.
2. Firesales work well. ( but don’t overdo them )
3. Payment morale is adversely affected by the crises, i.e. customers who are given payment terms such as 7 days net or 30 days net pay several weeks later. This also happened with customers who used to pay punctually in the past.

   My sample is rather small but I still think that it is significant. Also it seems to be a logical consequence of a credit crunch, which is the core effect on how the banking crisis affects the rest of the economy.

   Explanation: If it is hard to get credit from banks, then the temptation is high to get credit from your suppliers by paying them late… )

4. I have no statistically significant numbers on effects on total sales volume yet, but my guess is that sales will go down somehow when no compensative actions are taken.

Conclusions and Strategies:

A. List Building

Especially at the point in time where the current deflationary depression swings into a situation of money-oversupply and high inflation, you want to scoop as much of that money-oversupply as possible before inflation kicks in (and probably invest that money in inflation-protected assets…)
With a huge list of prospects and a good campaign at the right time, you may be able to do just that…

Also, in case that asking for physical adresses does not reduce the lead capture rate significantly, you should capture physical adresses, too.

Actually, due to stable lead capture rates and probably lower advertising costs due to competitors cutting down on advertising, your cost per lead will drop, so it is a good time to get as many leads as possible.

If you don’t know yet how to build your list, here are two important tips and resources:

1. You need a traffic source which works well for list building.

   According to my experience, traffic generated with Google Adwords works *very* well for lead generation. (It is the main traffic source for lead-generation for my website DemoRecorder.com)

   Since Google Adwords has some learning curve and since you can waste lots of money if you don’t know what you are doing, I highly suggest that you invest some time, energy and money into sharpening your skills with Google Adwords with the following resources which helped me get my business to a point where I make more with sales than I spend for advertising:

   • Perry Marshall’s 5 days to success free email course, plus a chance to purchase his great ebook which helped me to get the necessary knowledge for getting the marketing system of DemoRecorder.com working to a point where I make more in sales than I spend for marketing.
   • If you want to get deeply into Google Adwords and InternetMarketing, I suggest you join Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club You will get a free copy of his $97 ebook if you join his club ( which includes a monthly physically shipped newsletter ).

   You will save much more money due to your education than you will spend on this education. ( return of investment is probably at least 10x of what you invest )

   For example, before I learned from Perry, I wasted a bit more than $5000 within three months… (Which is now the amount which I spend within about two years, and making much more in sales than I spend for advertising…
   sales volume is at least double my advertising spend…)

   So what’s a $97 investment or a $29.95/month investment compared to saving $5000 in three months? ( The amount you’ll save may be different but you get the idea… )

2. If you don’t have it already, you need an autoresponder service for managing your email list.

   I have made very good experiences with this autoresponder service. It is affordable, reliable and they have high class, competent and friendly support. (And aweber is not the only service which I have tried out… but it is the only one which I recommend and the only one which I actively use currently.)

B. Make *One* Firesale and/or apply other Turnaround Strategies

For learning how to make a firesale and other strategies for making a turnaround, I suggest you go to Simpleology and purchase the business turnaround course. It is worth every cent and it contains detailed instructions on how to make a firesale. It helped me to make about US$1000 within a few days from my list of about 3500 prospects, and the ones who purchased the firesale-offer got a great deal which I will never offer like that. )

Don’t make multiple firesales because this will dilute your price point. (People will get spoiled and only purchase during firesales…)

You must also fix other reasons why your cash-reserves are too low. E.g. if you are wasting money somewhere, stop it.

C. Consequences of lower payment morale

1. Only spend money which you already have in your bank account. Due to uncertain payment morale, even from customers who previously always have payed punctually, you must not spend money which you don’t already have because
   • you don’t know when you will get that money and your bank may throttle your liquidity supply in the meantime which may force you to stop your business or at least stop some vital investments such as advertising.
   • you may never get the money from your customer… ( your customer may go out of business or they may cancel their order… )
2. Try to get customers to prepay ( e.g., online with their credit card ) instead of using purchase orders.

   Be sure to watch the effect of any such change on your sales-conversion rate because a customer who pays late is usually still better than a customer who does not purchase anything at all.

   Here’s a possible way on how to solve this if you can’t get them to pay by credit card:

   On DemoRecorder.com, I have always been using a hybrid approach, i.e., when I receive a purchase order, I issue a temporary license for two months, and the invoice has a net 30 days payment term. I only issue permanent licenses after the money has arrived.

   This is kind of a combination of a 30 days net payment term with a prepay term and it is usually well-received by customers because they still get their 30 days net payment term and they can start working immediately on issueing the purchase order.

   But it motivates them to pay no later than 3 weeks late… because that’s necessary in order to get the permanent license before the temporary license expires.

   So, be creative. If none of two alternatives works, there is probably a third alternative which does work. You just have to see it.

D. Watch your sales-conversion rates and optimize them

During the next months I will try several ways of boosting sales-conversion rates.

I will tell you which ones work and which ones don’t work.

E. Keep Reliable Income Sources, even if you don’t like them

Why?

It’s Simple: Having a stable income is worth a lot during an economic crisis and you may use a part of that income for aggressively investing in things like building your lists of prospects, or sharpening your marketing skills, etc So, that you have a head start when the crisis is over.

There are of course exceptions to this, e.g., if you have multiple reliable income sources you may concentrate your time and energy on the ones which work best and stop or reduce your investment in energy and time in the others…

F. Treat your customers well and be consistently reliable

Be nice to your customers and treat them with respect and show them that you are consistently reliable. This may not pay off immediately but it will pay off in the long run.
(this is also true if there is no crises, BTW)
(treating your customers well will also cause you to feel better, independently on the effects on your income…)

Especially during an economic crisis, customers become more selective where to spend their money.

If they know that they can trust you, they are more likely to spend their money with you because they know that you will help them in case of problems with your product or service, so the value of their investment in your product or service is secured.

Especially in a business-to-business environment there will be a lot of fear by decision makers or decision influencers to be punished for having made an investment which later turns out to be worthless.

And remember: You always sell to individual people, not to institutions.

So even if the corporate entity of your customer has enough funds to spend, the decision-maker which you are dealing with may have personal reasons for being very selective. Fear of losing his/her job due to bad purchasing decisions may be one of those reasons.

Actually, these fears may be well-founded because:

• Their boss may be more diligent in watching expenses.
• It may be harder for your decision-maker to get a job when he/she gets fired because in this crisis-climate, hiring by potential employers is probably reduced considerably.
• Their boss may need to reduce his/her workforce because of lower revenue, and therefore will look for some selection criteria on who to keep and who to fire. If somebody makes bad purchasing decisions, this may be just the tipping point between keeping the job or being fired.

So, you have to take these potential fears of each your contact persons seriously and you have to do everything such that his/her decision to purchase from you turns out to be a success story for him/her. (This is a good business practice anyways, but in today’s climate, it is even more important.)

And you have to communicate that before, of course.

Therefore, it is also vital to have good guarantees and services included with your products, such as I do for DemoRecorder, which you can take as an example:

Click here to show the Services and Guarantees of DemoRecorder

G. Improve your Products and Services

If your products and/or services have areas which you know should be improved, do it!

As I wrote above, your customers become more selective on where to spend their money or the money of their employer.

If you don’t know what to improve, then ask your customers… If you ask them in the right way, they will happily tell you their wishes…

I hope these tips help you to master the current economic crisis.

Stay tuned and look for my next posts…

Best wishes to you,

Chris

P.S.: You are welcome to post your comments below. ]]> http://internetmarketingpage.com/blogs/main/2009/01/03/observations-about-the-economy-crisis-and-strategies-for-surviving-it/feed/