Power Ideaz

By Pinaki Ghosh

Do you own an ecommerce site, or plan to start one? In that case, gear up and do your homework of understanding the 7 magic strategies to increase your profits from your online business. The strategies are time tested and proven.

1. Solid product description
If you are selling online, make sure you have excellent product descriptions that are brief, description of your products (if you are selling 50 or more articles) should be 125 – 150 words in length, and preferably written by a professional copywriter. You can get professional copywriters from sites like www.pegr.com, www.123writer.com, or www.thewritersforhire.com who can write sizzling sales copies that will sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo. If you are selling only 1 article, like an ebook or a course, the sales copy should be 3000 – 5000 words in length, and accompanied by testimonials of satisfied customers.

2. Accompanied by picture
A picture is worth a thousand words. Be rest assured that things don’t sell on the internet if they are not accompanied by pictures, since customers would like to ‘see’ what they are buying, says marketing guru Mark Luetke. Shabby pictures are worse than no pictures. Small products should be shot with a satin background or the background should be cropped and replaced with a plain color background. Large products (cars, bikes) should be shot outdoor. Ebooks should be accompanied by high quality ebook covers ($30 upwards).

3. Cross selling
Highlight your other related items just below the product description of each item so that buyers who came for specific products can also see the other related products and get interested about them. It is said that this strategy can increase sales up to 30%.

4. Free gifts to visitors to get their email address
Give out free gifts like ebooks of general interest like travel and cooking recipes to any visitor who gives his/her email address. This will create a database of email addresses of shoppers, whom you can send newsletters.

5. Newsletters
Newsletters are slightly different from spam mails. Spam mails are only advertisements, which are not liked by anyone; and thus goes to the spam mail folder of any email account. Newsletters try achieving the same purpose by in a roundabout way. They give out useful and interesting information to potential customers, and are often marked as ‘not spam’ by many who receive them. They can be used as a powerful tool to inform about new products or schemes.

6. Discount
Keep giving various discounts with the names of various schemes like ‘Winter Bonanza, 25% off’ or ‘Spring Festival-up to 50% discount’ throughout the year to boost sales. Identify your loyal customers who keep coming back. Give them an additional loyalty discount.

7. Show professionalism with your affiliates
If you are running an affiliate program, act professionally. Provide your affiliates codes for your banners, and which is most important; pay them timely. Do not make your affiliates wait for weeks to get their commission.

Additionally, you can increase your sources of earning by becoming an affiliate of other merchants (and get commission from them) and Google AdSense (contextual pay per click ads). These can give an additional earning of several hundred to several thousand dollars every month.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Business Tips, Ebay, Internet Marketing, Making Money on the Internet, Small Business, Uncategorized, ebooks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.