Why This Post Is Just The Beginning

I was holding off writing this post because I was waiting to get a few more concepts down, to get it “just right,” but tonight I’m just saying screw it, let’s work with what’s on the table. So while this post will be nowhere near complete, it’s a start. It will rise again in cleaner, meatier versions as the week goes by. But you can get your mental gears turning today (and though this series is web-marketing-centric, it can apply to any industry).

Behold, The Simplest Way To Double Your Sales

Think of your sales cycle for a moment: The cycle from your first “do something” effort to the final “ka-ching” moment where a customer’s money finds its way into your hands (and if you do it right, makes the experience find its way into your customer’s heart). That sales cycle is currently working for you in some capacity. It’s giving you some result.

• Your promotion efforts are generating some degree of traffic.
• Your sales page / website is generating some degree of reader interest.
• Your “close” is generating some degree of conversion.

That’s the simplest way I can frame the sales cycle: you compel people to stop by, you compel them to listen, and you compel them to purchase. It’s like a funnel. A hundred people may visit your site, ten may explore, one may buy. There are a million strategies to accomplish each of these, but I just want you to look at the sales cycle at it’s simplest and realize that it all comes down to these three things.

Now, to double your sales, you don’t need to do anything over the top – in reality, all you need to do is double the results you’re getting with your funnel. All things being equal, this is how it would work.

• Double your traffic and do nothing else = double your sales.
• Double your sales copy’s effectiveness = double your sales.
• Double your close’s effectiveness = double your sales.

At first glance, doubling any of these can seem intimidating – but it doesn’t have to be. Sure, it took you a lot of work to get the traffic, readers and sales offer to the place it is now, and you don’t want to double the work you put into it to get double results.

Good thing you don’t have to. Read on.

Sometimes, Success Is Just Not Sucking Quite As Badly

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you suck – far from it. But on a scale of 1 to 10, nobody is running full steam in every aspect of their business. You’re good at what you specialize in, but you suffer in the areas you don’t have a lot of focus on. For example, I’ve been focused on honing my writing skills for over 20 years, but I haven’t studied copywriting for nearly as long. I might feel like I’m a 7 or 8 when it comes to writing content, but when I started blogging I was probably a 2 at copywriting and a 1 at understanding good blogging techniques.

So there I was with a blog I was hoping would build traffic and readership, with quality articles, but not a whole lot of backlinks and a low page view count. I wanted to double my pageviews, so I was faced with a few choices:

• Double my writing skill (not feasible short term, because this was already a strength)
• Double my backlinks (challenging, because I didn’t know how to network with bloggers back then)
• Double my copywriting skill (easy, because I didn’t have much background)
• Double my blogging skills (very easy, because I was a flat-out n00b.)

Fortunately, I ran across Copyblogger and Pearsonified and made these two changes:

• I learned the basics of writing good blog headlines. (easy – took a few hours of reading and practice)
• I learned to use teaser text and work links to previous articles into new articles. (very easy – took one reading and one “aha” moment)

Within days my page count went way up – from a dull average of 1.00 to about a 2.5 average. And not because I learned super skills that made me twice as mighty … but because I learned how to counter two simple deficiencies I didn’t even realize I had. In other words, I took something I sucked at, and well, sucked less.

It’s Not That Hard To Go From A Two To A Three

So as we go through this series, we’re going to deconstruct the phases of the sales cycle, and find lots of little areas where you can take your weak points and make them a little stronger. This can make a huge difference. Just think about it from this standpoint – what if you wanted to double the number of people who read your sales copy to the end? Would you need to become a master copywriter?

Not necessarily. Learning how to write a more effective opening paragraph could solve that one for you. And with double the number of people reading your copy, your sales may have just doubled.

The Lesson Here: Find Bottlenecks And Work On Them

If your boat is taking on water, don’t bail faster – close up the leaks. That’s what this series will focus on. Simple, do-able tweaks that will take whatever you’re already doing and give you massive leverage – Million Dollar Leverage – that you can take all the way to the bank.

Now ‘Fess Up: What’s Your Weak Point?

Don’t be shy – leave a comment and let me know what are of your sales cycle you’d like to improve on first. That will give me some guidance on what to write about first.

That’s it for now … on to work on tweaking the Early Riser sale I’ve got going on now through Thursday (Take that, Christine O’Kelly! )

You know what to do,

Dave