I was watching an interesting video online by James Lavers who terms himself the Lazy Coach. He sets up coaching sessions and trainings for coaches online while living out in the countryside. While personally I found that his marketing is heavy to the point that it began to be just annoying and turned me off the site, he certainly has some useful ideas and I don’t mind advertising him a little further through this post 🙂 Here’s a quick selection related to selling over the Internet.
1. Plan your intended lifestyle first so that you can build the right business around it.
2. Don’t have any black boxes in your business. You can outsource stuff later, but it’s generally good to know what is going on in every aspect of your business. For example, learn how to code a basic webpage so that you don’t have to hire a firm who will charge you a large sum to do it. You should at least know what it is that you’re paying for, so that you can negotiate with others to produce something of the same quality at a lower price.
3. Consider the actual purpose of your website. Many people still conceive of websites as “big shop windows”. The idea is that if you build a big enough shop window and make it attractive enough, customers may come and buy something. A more useful approach may be to view websites as a temporary tool to launch or promote particular products. Lavers uses this latter approach to the extent that a video that was available on one day has been replaced with a sales pitch video the next day. It is a well-designed approach that leads the potential customer on one step at a time.
4. Use squeeze pages. A squeeze page is a very simple page with information about a product but no links to anywhere else. Instead, it encourages the user to enter his email address.
This type of marketing has become more and more ubiquitous on the web and obviously it is still successful for many vendors. I do wonder, however, when saturation will set in, and how the arms race will subsequently develop!