• T-shirts and common articles of clothing
• Baby clothing and accessories
• Wedding favors and gifts
• Bed and bath products

But what’s wrong with these products? What characteristics do all of these categories have in common?

For one thing, these categories are all extremely broad and vague. The second thing is that most of these products are commodity goods with extremely high levels of competition.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I also get students who want to sell very obscure products, products with little or no competition and absolutely no demand.

So where do you draw the line? What makes a niche attractive from a small business standpoint? Today, I’m going to show you an easy way to estimate demand and competition for an online store niche before you launch.

Keyword Research

By now, you’ve probably heard the term “keyword research” thrown around quite a bit. Keyword research in the context of ecommerce is the process by which you can assess product demand based on what people type in when they use the search engines.

Using my online store as an example, the search engines make up for a decent chunk of my shop’s overall traffic and conversions so analyzing search traffic is a great way to assess the overall demand for a product niche before you begin.

While most people have a tendency to discuss keyword research in the context of building a niche site or an affiliate marketing site, an online store is different because you don’t need as much traffic to make a decent amount of cash because you make more money per conversion with an online store.

Keyword Research Video Tutorial

Today’s video is going to provide a systematic and quantitative method of evaluating your online business idea for profitability using the popular software tool Market Samurai

If you would like to follow along with today’s video tutorial, please click here and sign up for the free 12 day trial of Market Samurai. There is absolutely no obligation or info required outside of your email address and it’s free to try.

And later, if you ultimately decide that you want to purchase the tool, you can use coupon code: hza9104 to get 33% off the retail price.

Enjoy the video below!

Key Takeaways

So what did you think of the video? Here’s a brief summary of how to analyze demand and competition of a niche in case you missed some of the details from the video.

• Use the “Generate Keywords” function of Market Samurai to generate all the different permutations of keyword phrases based on your seed keyword
• Use the “Keyword Analysis” function to determine the number of clicks per day that a keyword phrase gets but make sure that “exact match” is selected for your initial research.
• Estimate the potential revenue by multiplying the SEOT parameter by the conversion rate (2-5%), by the estimated revenue per sale and by your profit margins. Is this enough money for you?
• Change the match setting to “phrase match” and “broad match” to get an idea of your potential long tail traffic later on down the line
• Use the “SEO Competition” function to assess the competition from a search standpoint
• Perform research on your competitors to make sure that you can add value and create a better shop than what is out there

In the process of doing your niche research, sometimes it can be difficult to find keywords that receive enough traffic and have a low level of competition in order to make an acceptable level of profit. But keep in mind that search is only a fraction of the overall revenue that you will generate with your store.

For example with our hanky store, word of mouth and direct traffic sales are on par with search engine sales. In addition, we get a lot of referral traffic as well from various related publications and social media which converts as well.

So do the necessary research and run the numbers. But when it comes down to it, sometimes you just have to go for it. Good luck!

photo credit: SalFalko

Step 1: Get the Basics Right

I know it’s not particularly exciting, but in order for you to build a sizeable Twitter account you must first ensure that your profile is set up appropriately. You can boil this down to three things:

1. Your Name
   
2. Your Photo
3. Your Bio (and URL)

First, consider this: generally speaking, people want to connect with other people on Twitter. Sure — there are plenty of branded Twitter accounts around and that is often a good route to go, but when appropriate you should look to represent your blog or business in person. So if you are happy to do so, use your own name on your Twitter profile.

You should follow a similar tack for your photo — a picture of a human face is often a lot more endearing than a logo.

Finally, ensure that your bio is suitably descriptive and clearly conveys the benefit that your business or blog has to offer. You should include your website’s URL both in the bio box and in the URL field (as the latter is not shown in all displays.

Here’s my profile to serve as an example:

Step 2: Give People a Reason to Follow You

A lot of Twitter newbies eager to get followers will make it their first priority to follow people in the hope that they will reciprocate. There’s a problem with this: what reason do those people have to follow you?

While you may already have a great website, you do not have a great Twitter account. And although the end goal may be to funnel people through to your website, your Twitter profile should stand alone as an interesting and engaging outlet.

Therefore, before you start adding followers you should look to start tweeting some interesting stuff. And make no mistake — what you tweet has a hugely influential impact on the success of your Twitter profile in the long run. Your approach may vary depending upon your field but I like a mix of the following:

1. Links to related articles (on other sites)
2. Links to related articles (on my site(s))
3. Tidbits of interesting information

If you want to build a Twitter account you’re probably best off avoiding the “what you had for breakfast” type tweets. You can get away with them if you have built a solid personal brand, but until that day, keep it relevant and engaging.

Step 3: Build a Base of Followers

Next you’ll want to get hold of some “easy” followers, such as:

• Your friends, family and co-workers
• Readers and subscribers from your blog, other social media outlets, etc

Don’t be afraid to openly advertise the launch of your account. Send an email to your list, publish a blog post, and so on — get the message out there!

The purpose of this is two-fold:

1. To give your profile a nice head start to get it up and running
2. To establish a positive following:follower ratio

The second outcome is particularly important because you don’t ever want to be following more people than you have following you — it just doesn’t look good. So if you can start with a nice initial wave of followers that gives you a base from which you can build.

Step 4: Find New Followers

You get new followers by referral or by finding them yourself. Referrals will come in time but while you’re small you will need to do some manual work.

My favorite free tool for doing this is ManageFlitter. Its powerful search features allow you to locate Twitter users whose specific interests match what you have to offer. By following these people and reaching out to them, they are far more likely to follow you back.

The process here is really simple — just search for accounts by particular relevant keywords, select those users you discover that may have a relevant interest, and follow them! All this is possible with just a few clicks from within the ManageFlitter app:



The advanced search functionality allows you to filter the results in various ways (e.g. name, location, number of followers). Just log in periodically (whenever it suits you) and follow more people, but remember to always stay below the number of followers you have.

Step 5: Maintain Your Account

Finally, you need to maintain your account so that it can continue to grow. This essentially means two things:

1. Continuing to publish interesting and informative tweets on a consistent basis
2. Adding and removing followings

Because the number of people you follow should be less than the number of people following you, you must periodically unfollow those people who are not likely to follow you back. For instance, you can use ManageFlitter to remove inactive Twitter users (those who haven’t tweeted in 30+ days) or suspected spam accounts.

Furthermore, you should consider unfollowing people who haven’t followed you back after a certain time. There is no right and wrong here in terms of when you do it and your actions may be dictated by the growth of your account (i.e. if you are growing faster you can afford to be more lenient on those who do not follow back promptly).

Follow the Process

Once you have repeated the above steps you will want to repeat steps 4 and 5 ad infinitum. And that’s it! Before long your follower account will begin to grow. That growth is likely to be relatively slow at first, but you will find that the pace will pick up as gain more followers.

While there is certainly more you can do to grow your Twitter account, I consider the above steps to be the absolute basics in terms of getting started. Stick to the fundamentals and you won’t go wrong.

Just remember that patience is the name of the game — it took me around six months to get my first 500 followers (when I had no idea what I was doing), and then another twelve to get an additional 10,000 or so. If you persist, your efforts will pay off!

The Wrong Way To Address Showrooming

Here’s a script that Ron Lieber, the Your Money columnist at the Times, came up with to prevent customers from showrooming.

I appreciate the value of your dollar, but we are a local retailer bringing vibrancy to this district. If everyone did what you did, we could no longer afford the Main Street rent that those Web retailers do not have to pay, and we’d be out of business. Then this space becomes another chain drugstore or branch of a megabank. Is that what you want?

Now I don’t know about you, but if someone came up to me and used that script in a brick and mortar store, I’d probably never go back. When I go shopping, I need to feel comfortable with the environment.

In general, I don’t like to be accosted by aggressive sales people. I don’t like being hovered over as I walk through a store. And most definitely, I don’t like being shamed or pressured into buying anything.

Being accused of “showrooming” and given a lecture would not only make me want to leave but I’d also tell all of my friends about the experience. Heck, I’d probably even blog about it and make it a permanent fixture on Google search.

If you take away a single thing from my post today, remember that sales are never made by “confronting” or “shaming” a customer into buying from you. Period!

A Better Approach

Now let’s take a look at an alternative way of selling that exploits the inherent advantages that a brick and mortar store has over an online shop. First and foremost, every brick and mortar store has REAL people working the floor.

And the advantage of having real people and a tangible shopping environment is that you can engage a customer much more effectively than a canned ecommerce website. Brick and mortar shopowners need to emphasize this fact and provide a superior shopping experience.

Now you’ve probably heard the terms “superior shopping experience” and “adding value to customers” thrown around quite a bit. But I’d like to give you a real life example of a situation where I gladly paid 30% more to make a purchase at a brick and mortar store.

In fact, I would gladly pay 30% more over and over again. And if you ask, I can easily give you many more examples where price isn't everything.

Taking Advantage Of Reciprocity

But before I tell you my story, I thought I'd mention an important aspect of human nature that brick and mortar stores need to emphasize, reciprocity. If a store goes out of their way to help me or provide me with a great shopping experience, I will most likely buy from them even if their prices are higher.

A while back, I was in the market for a pair of running shoes because I was determined to get into shape. So I shopped online for a bit and read various shoe reviews but I decided that it would be best to try on real running shoes in person to determine the best fit for my feet.

After asking around for brick and mortar store recommendations, I ended up at this small boutique shoe store in a nearby town. Now I must confess. In the back of mind, my plan was to try on some shoes and then go online to find the best possible price.

But something strange happened when I walked into this running shoe store. Since I was a running newbie, I ended up asking a lot of questions about the different types of shoes.

And I was completely blown away by the sales people's level of knowledge and their willingness to help. In fact, I felt like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman as I was helped by 3 different experts who each specialized in different forms of running.

Much to my surprise, every single employee of this boutique was either an ex-collegiate runner or a running enthusiast. Not only did they thoroughly answer my questions but they also had me do what they called a "running fit" test.

Basically, they had me remove my shoes and socks and watched me run on a treadmill for several minutes to determine the mechanics of my running form. Then, they gave me a foot exam to see what my arches were like.

Now I don't know about you, but anyone who is brave enough to touch my stinky feet deserves the sale. In fact, this shop already had me before I hopped on the treadmill.

Long story short, I ended up paying 30% more for a pair of running shoes and I left the store feeling fantastic! I did not even think about the extra money because I had such a great shopping experience.

Price Isn't Everything

When it comes to showrooming, there will always be a small subset of people who will be looking for the best deal no matter what the circumstances. But these are not the customers you want to be targeting for your business.

After all, if your store is competing purely on price then you've got major problems on your hands. Instead of focusing on price, you should instead be focusing on what value you can provide to your customers.

Further Reading: What To Do If A Competing Business Undercuts You In Price

After critiquing many websites over the years as part of my online store course, I've found that the biggest problem for most shops (whether they be online or offline) is that they don't have a well defined unique value proposition.

Once you've discovered what sets your shop apart from the rest, the sales experience should go much smoother whether customers decide to showroom or not.

photo credit: Johan Larsson dhammza Libertinus evoo73

About Getting Things Done

For those of you who don’t know, Getting Things Done is a time management methodology created by David Allen. Over years of productivity consultancy he learned the power of storing and referring to Projects and Next Actions within a singular trusted system.

The concepts of Getting Things Done are far too numerous and broad to tackle in this post, but if you haven’t read the book I strongly recommend that you do. When I first read it some six years ago it made a truly phenomenal impact on my professional productivity and effectiveness.

Although Getting Things Done is marketed as a complete productivity solution, I do not agree with all of its principles and have customized it to suit my own preferences and workflow. One such area of the system that I have adopted and adapted is the Someday / Maybe lists.

Below I have split my process for handling and implementing new business ideas, inspired by Getting Things Done, into four simple steps. Enjoy!

Step 1: Sleep On It

When I was recently on vacation in Colorado, I had an idea for a new website that I thought was truly ingenious. I thought it had huge scope and was incredibly excited by the prospect of its potential for success. I literally wanted to start work on it that moment.

Fortunately, I adhered to my own rule when it comes to any new idea: “Sleep on it.” The next morning I still thought the idea was a good one but had concerns about originality and commercial value. I still have that idea filed away but I have not taken action on it — some six weeks after first dreaming it up.

The reasoning behind this step is simple – it takes time to objectively assess the value of an idea. If you act immediately you:

1. Don’t allow yourself adequate time to form a rational opinion of the value of your idea
2. Neglect your existing commitments (i.e. things that you are already working on)

Neither of which is good. So when you do get a new idea, be sure to give it time to breathe by sleeping on it. You’d be amazed at how a night’s sleep can completely change your perspective.

Step 2: Decide Whether or Not to Take Action

If you wake up the next day and are still convinced at the genius of your idea, it is time to form a rational and objective assessment of whether you should take action. I do this by asking two key questions:

1. Is this idea more important than anything else I am currently working on?
2. Do I have the time to implement the idea?

Regardless of how wonderful your idea is, there is no point in taking action if it is simply not as big a priority as what you are currently working on. A proactive entrepreneur will drop an existing project to make room for another if he or she feels that it will benefit their business better, but simply piling on more work because you like the sound of an idea is not the right way to go.

Furthermore, consider not only your immediate time investment but the long term demands of the idea. Take time to calculate the potential repercussions of embarking on a new project and what it will be mean for your workflow on an ongoing basis. This is again a moment at which you must not be blinded by enthusiasm — that enthusiasm is temporary, but the workload may not be.

Step 3: Take Action or Store

If you are convinced that the idea is ready to roll then you have nothing left to do but take action. Good luck!

If however you decide that the idea is good and worth consideration in the future but not ready for the prime time yet, you need to store that idea in a trusted system. It is not important what your system is — personally, I use The Hit List for Mac.

You could use another To Do app, Evernote, a simple notepad, or something else entirely. What really matters is that your system represents a collection of all your ideas that will be regularly maintained and reviewed.


Within this system you should create a list of your ideas — nothing more complicated than that. You may wish to split your ideas up into categories, but I would recommend that you err on the side of simplicity.

The end result should be a system in which every single idea relating to your business potentially worth working on is stored in one location. This gives you the freedom to move on from your next best idea (that isn’t ready to be started on right now) without feeling like you are going to lose it.

Step 4: Review

The key to working with a clear mind is to remove all of the clutter. When it comes to business ideas, you do this by storing them all in a trusted system (which we have just covered) and then reviewing them on a regular basis.

With that in mind, this final step is vitally important and must not be skipped. If you do skip this step then you’ll likely lose faith in system and it will become redundant.

How regularly you review your ideas is up to you — I like to do it once a week, when I’m planning out my work for the next seven days. At that point I go through my ideas list and check if I have time to incorporate any of my ideas into that week’s workflow.

I am not blinded by the newest and most exciting idea that I have — they are all considered equal.

The System Works

I have been using iterations of this system for a long time and am confident that it is an effective way of keeping track of business ideas. Do not underestimate the importance of having such a system — after all, your ideas represent the potential for your business’ growth. Without them you will stagnate.

I’d love to know what you think about my system, so if you have any comments or questions please fire away below!

This post was written by Tom Ewer, a regular contributor for MyWifeQuitHerJob.com.

I am spending a lot of time reaching out to mommy and daddy bloggers to review our product or try to convince them to write about us and so far that has been pretty successful. From an SEO perspective, we are already on page 1 of Google on about 75% of our keywords.

Quite frankly, I love getting emails like this and I was feeling pretty good about myself too until I heard from this student again later in the month during office hours.

As I was getting ready to give my weekly online webinar, he frantically told me that all of his search engine traffic had dried up practically over night. What the heck happenned?!?!

The Dreaded Black And White Animal

Right away, I had a feeling that this student had been slapped by Google so I did a quick analysis of his backlink profile. And low and behold, this is what I saw.

Note: The domain age for this student’s shop is relatively new and under a year old.



The first thing that struck me in the above diagram was that the number of backlinks grew tremendously from mid-April to the beginning of May. The second thing that struck me was the sharp hockey stick like jump in referring domains. Something fishy was definitely going on.

How the heck did my student build all of these backlinks from so many unique domains in such a short amount of time?

First off, I just want to make it clear that I don’t teach any “black hat” SEO techniques in my class. So my first reaction was that my student had dabbled with the dark side of SEO.

But after questioning him for a good period of time, he assured me that he did not take part in any illegal linking schemes or use any mass backlink generating software. So how could this have happened?


The answer became much more clear once I saw his anchor text distribution. As you can see in the diagram above, most of the backlinks that point back to his shop are using exact match anchor text keyword phrases. His site was hit by the dreaded Penguin algorithm.

How Did He Get So Many Backlinks So Quickly?

After questioning my student some more, I finally got down to the root of the matter and what he actually did to trigger the penalty was fairly innocent. He was just not aware of the possible ramifications of his actions.

So what did he do exactly? He held a product giveaway on a 3rd party raffle site.

Quick lesson: When your online store is brand spanking new, you have to be careful of a few things.

First of all, you have to be cognizant of your link velocity. If your site doesn’t generally accumulate backlinks at a fast rate and then you all of a sudden get a large influx of links, it looks unnatural.

Second of all, you have to be extremely careful that you don’t overuse your keywords in your anchor text. It also didn’t help that the domain age of my student’s shop was under a year old either. You put all of this together and things probably looked quite suspicious in the eyes of Google.

In any case, the main mistake that my student made was that he used 3 exact match anchor text links in the description of his product giveaway. Then, well over 100 blogs decided to participate in his giveaway and simply cut and pasted his description into their blog posts.

Practically overnight, his shop gained over 100 exact match anchor text backlinks from many different domains. And this is what triggered the penalty.

How To Recover From Penguin

The first thing that I told my student to do was to check his Google Webmaster Tools account. While most people are afraid of getting the “unnatural links penalty” message, I was actually hoping to see one on his account.

Why? It’s because if he got the dreaded “unnatural links” warning, it would indicate that he was hit with a manual penalty. And with a manual penalty, all he would have to do would be to clean up the backlinks and then file for a reconsideration request and the penalty would be lifted.

But unfortunately, he did not get any such warning which meant that his site was hit by an algorithmic penalty.

Here’s what I told him to do.

• Contact the 3rd party raffle site and get a list of blogs that participated in the giveaway
• Send a message to each and every blogger to take down the offending post. In an ideal world, you would want them to remove all of the exact match anchor text and leave a single branded link back to your site. Under the circumstances though, I thought that it might be too much to ask.
• Follow up with as many blogs as you can. For those that do not respond, you may want to consider using the Google Disavow tool to disavow any backlinks from spammy blogs that took part in the contest
• Try to build additional backlinks to your pages with non matching anchor text to help balance out the exact match links

Unfortunately, the upshot of all of this is that he will still have to wait until Google decides to refresh the algorithm again which could take some time.

The good news about this student’s site is that his domain is extremely new and that he hasn’t built up a terribly strong domain just yet. Worse case scenario, he could simply buy a brand new domain and start from scratch.

But hopefully, it won’t come to this. I’ve seen and read about many sites that have successfully recovered from Penguin and I hope that my student’s prompt attention to fixing the problem will allow his rankings to recover sooner rather than later.

Moral Of The Story

When you are first starting out with a brand new website, you want to take things slowly. Don’t try to build up links too quickly and always approach each new backlinking opportunity one at a time. I know that it can be extremely tempting to take shortcuts and try to do things faster, but it can ultimately harm your site.

The other thing to be aware of is that if you are a newbie to SEO, don’t worry about anchor text at all. With Google cracking down on keyword rich anchor text, you could end up hurting your site if you don’t know what you are doing.

Ultimately when it comes down to it, it’s the backlink itself and the page relevancy that matter the most when ranking in the search engines. So don’t get too hung up on the technicalities and try to proceed at a nice steady pace.

What Building Relationships Can Do For You

I have been blogging for around two years now, and in that time, every single major event that has boosted my blog’s exposure has been directly due to the relationships I have established. Here are a few examples:

• I was named a ProBlogger “Blogger to Watch” for 2013 (resulting in loads of traffic and brand exposure).
• I was interviewed on FreelanceSwitch (great exposure for me as a freelance writer).
• I was published on Lifehacker (1,000+ referrals and counting).

All three of the above events transpired as a result of relationships that I had built.

Relationships are how you get links. They’re how you expose your brand to a wider audience. They’re how you build a reputable and well-respected blog. If you neglect networking then you are missing out on the greatest opportunity to build your blog.

My 3 Step Process

Reaching out to people can seem like an intimidating process, especially if you feel like you should be asking for something in order to boost exposure to your blog. And that is why so many bloggers fall down at the first hurdle when reaching out to influencers in their niche — they ask for something.

The simple fact is this: you do not build genuine relationships with people by asking them to do something for you. If you do they may choose to help you out, but they’re not likely to feel particularly enamoured with you or feel compelled to help you again in the future of their own accord. We’re not looking for a one hit wonder here — we want to establish long term relationships with people so that they can help you time and time again down the line.

You do this by helping them. Reciprocity is the key. If you give selflessly then you build genuine relationships with people that are only too happy to help you out. Not only that, but the process of doing so is entirely painless as you never have to act in pushy manner to get what you want.

I have applied the following three step proces countless times and find it to be very effective in building relationships. You’re not going to get a result every time, but if you apply yourself consistently then you’ll soon see positive results.

Step 1: Get to Know the Influencer

The first step is as much about what not to do as what to do. What you absolutely must not do is immediately get in contact with an influencer and start running your mouth off.

No — what you should do first of all is get to know them. Subscribe to their blog and follow them on Twitter and Facebook. Become a fan and a follower. Invest time in understanding why they do what they do and what drives them. Read their content and become well-versed in the kind of topics they address.

This is a step that many people skip, but getting a good understanding of the influencer’s motivations is absolutely key to establishing a genuine relationship.

Step 2: Do Something for Them

Once you have spent some time getting to know your influencer (from afar), it is time to help them out. This is where a lot of beginner bloggers get stuck — after all, how can they help an influencer if they barely have a presence to speak of?

But thinking in such a way is missing the point entirely — it’s not so much about what you do, but the message it sends. By selflessly helping another person you are demonstrating a kindness that is almost always appreciated. The effect is less important than the intention.

So how can you help a blogger out? The most obvious ways are to share their content via social media and link to their blog from your own. Other less common ways are to let them know about typos or broken links on their blog. My preferred method is more direct – I email them asking if there is anything I can help them with in terms of sharing and/or promoting their content. No strings attached; just a genuine offer to help.

Email is my preferred method of contact as it is more personal than social media. You will find that many people will not reply, but don’t take it personally. These guys are busy and may not reply to all emails. Just keep them on file and try again in the future, but in the meantime focus on those people who do reply. Help them out in any way that you can and they’ll soon be very appreciative of your efforts.

Step 3: Ask Questions

You may be thinking that this final step is the point at which you ask them to do something for you. Well, I hate to disappoint you but asking directly for help with boosting your blog’s exposure is not included in this three step plan.

No — the final step is simply to ask questions of your new blogger friend. Ask them if they think your design is up to scratch. Ask them if they think a particular post is well-written. Ask them if they have any tips for promoting your blog. Make your questions concise and precise — don’t make them think hard about how to answer.

The benefit of doing this may not immediately be obvious, but in asking the influencer questions related to your blog you will be drawing their attention to it. That is the point at which your epic content needs to make its mark — if you truly are producing great content then the blogger will feel compelled to share it without you having to ask. Once you’ve reached that stage, it’s mission accomplished.

A Passive Way of Building Relationships

The whole point of the above three step process is that it can be carried out without you feeling like you are an unwelcome presence. You never directly ask for help — the whole point is simply to expose your blog to the influencer and let your content do the rest. And trust me — if your content is good enough then this process will do the trick.

I’m not saying that you should never ask for anything from your newfound blogger friends. But doing so is stepping over a mark that you cannot retreat back over, so do so with caution. Generally speaking, I have found there to be a direct correlation between the amount you give and the positive results you achieve as a result. The more you try to take, the less you actually get.

What are your thoughts on the above process? Are you going to put it into practice? Let us know in the comments section!

photo credit: photosteve101

My Big Pricing Fiasco

As far as pricing screw ups go, I made plenty of mistakes early on with my online store course. Those of you who have followed my blog for a long time probably remember that I launched my online store course a couple of years ago with multiple tiers.

• The first tier was priced at $199 which included my 400 page ebook along with unlimited email support.
• The second tier was priced at $299 which included the ebook along with live office hours, email support and 24/7 access to a library of tutorial videos.
• The third tier, which never saw the light of day, was supposed to be priced at $999 which included everything above in addition to a custom installation of the shopping cart and template by yours truly.

Just so you know up front, I really did not want to support 3 pricing tiers and I only did so at the influence of my colleagues. Not only is offering multiple tiers a major pain in the butt, but it can also be an implementation and administration headache as well. But here was the rationale and it made perfect intuitive sense at the time.

By offering multiple options, the theory is that you are changing the mindset of your customer into deciding “which product to purchase” as opposed to “whether to make a purchase altogether”.

The other reason for having 3 tiers is that you can influence a customer into buying a specific tier while still catering to your low end customers. In my pricing scheme above, I wanted most people to signup for the $299 tier 2 package so I priced it slightly higher than tier 1 but drastically lower than tier 3.

Sounds like a pretty good plan right? But just hours before launch, I got cold feet about having to support tier 3 customers and decided to remove the tier 3 option altogether. And what ended up happening was that I launched my course with only 2 variations priced at $199 and $299 respectively.

The problem with having only 2 choices is that more customers will gravitate towards the cheaper package and that is exactly what happened. My sales for tier 1 ended up much higher than expected which was absolutely not what I wanted.

To make matters worse, I was getting questions from both tier 1 and tier 2 customers and I had to keep track of who signed up for what because there were different levels of support involved with each type of customer.

Long story short, I eventually ended up upgrading all of my tier 1 customers to tier 2 and decided to consolidate everything into one all encompassing option to reduce my burden of support.

Lesson learned: If you are going to offer multiple tiers, make sure you are prepared to deal with the additional headaches of segregating your customers. My biggest mistake was that I wasn’t really prepared to support both groups differently. And eliminating my third tier at the last minute completely destroyed my “price anchoring” strategy.

Dealing With Customer Issues

Even though I had what I considered to be a successful product launch, I was getting a good number of customers who would signup, download my ebook and then ask for a refund almost immediately. And needless to say, this made my blood boil because they were essentially stealing my product.

When I consulted some of my colleagues, a good number of them told me that I was pricing my product way too low.

For what you are offering, I’d charge around a thousand dollars.

A thousand bucks!!! That’s preposterous! The reason I priced my class the way I did was because I wanted it to be accessible to a wide range of people which was part of my rationale for offering the cheapest tier in the first place.

Plus, I wanted to launch my product with a bang and I strongly felt that having a higher price would be a huge detriment to sales. But little did I know that my pricing scheme was one of the biggest contributing factors to my refund rate.

The Counter Intuitive Effect Of Raising Prices

Once I had a decent number of videos in my library, I finally listened to my colleagues and increased the price by $100 to $399. It was still a far cry from a thousand dollars but it was a step in the right direction.

And to this day, I still remember how I felt when I made the announcement via email. As I typed up my newsletter, I felt extremely uncomfortable. I felt that my sales were going to completely dry up. I felt that my refund rate was going to skyrocket.

But then a strange thing happened. Instead of sales decreasing after the price increase, sales actually shot up! Perhaps at that point, word of mouth had already spread about the quality of my product, but it still seemed kind of odd that sales would suddenly increase after raising prices by 33%!

And what was even more odd was that the number of people asking for refunds was drastically reduced as well.

Here’s another strange trend that I’ve noticed over time. The quality of students enrolled in my class has improved with every increase in price!

Whereas I use to have freeloaders signup only to ask for refunds because they didn’t have the motivation to begin, I started getting more students who were determined, hungry and serious about starting their own shops.

Lessons Learned

Those of you who’ve followed me for several years know that I run my course for fun. While the money is a factor, I mainly do what I do because I like the challenge and I like interacting with motivated people. And it is in my best interests to attract the most motivated students possible because quite frankly I want to see everyone succeed.

Here’s what I’ve learned from pricing my course over the years.

• The price that you set will determine the type of customers you will receive. If you price your product too low, you will attract the bargain hunters and the cheaper customers. If you want to attract premium customers, you need to set prices accordingly and your price should reflect the quality of your product
• Be prepared if you plan on using psychological pricing tactics on your customers. First and foremost, you need to to assess whether offering and supporting different price tiers is worth your time and effort. Second of all, if your sales page comes across as salesy and gimmicky with lots of “bonuses”, you’ll tend to attract lower tier customers as well.
• Don’t be afraid to increase prices over time as your product improves. If the quality of your product is up to par, then your sales will not be affected and may even increase
• The prices that you set for your product will establish a perceived value among potential customers. By setting prices too low, you may be driving away your target market because they may think it’s too cheap to be any good.
• Audio and video material has a higher perceived value. Furthermore, if you hold any sort of live office hours or live webinars, you can command even higher pricing.

Overall, setting prices for your information products is more than just supply and demand. There is a definite psychology involved and you have to figure out ahead of time what type of customers you want to attract.

Next week, I’m increasing the price of my course because I want to provide value to those who are serious and determined to succeed with an online business. If you are motivated to learn, I promise that I will give you my best effort in helping you launch a successful online store.

Further Reading – Pricing: Psychological Mind Games That Stores Play

photo credit: Alex E. Proimos Corey Leopold

Make Up The Rules As You Go Along

First, by ignoring the traditional, artificial rules. If you want to publish your book but everyone is saying no, publish it yourself. If you want to record your album but no record label wants to sign you, record and distribute it yourself.

If you want to start your business but no one will give you a loan, find a way to skip that step and start it for cheap, scale it down if you have to. Go find a customer already.

In other words, if no one is validating what you want to do, giving you permission to move forward, then say “screw them,” and do it yourself. You don’t need anyone to tell you it’s OK any more.

You don’t need to follow the traditional routes to get to where you want to be. The gatekeepers no longer have bite, they are just barking behind their diamond encrusted steel doors. I’m more afraid of a friendly chihuahua than of them.

Keep On Trucking

Second, you have to keep pressing forward, despite setbacks, despite the rejection, despite all the obstacles that are going to fly out from left field and smack you right in the face. One of my favorite quotes of all time is from, of all people, Mike Tyson:

“Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face.”

How true is that? The way I see it, if you’re not willing to get punched in the face, then you shouldn’t be in the fight. Not that it has to be a struggle, but the reason everyone on this planet isn’t rich is because it’s hard. Lots of people line up to smash you in the face when you step outside the lines of the walking dead and try to do something on your own.

You’re friends and family are going to try and drag you back down to their miserable level. The old gatekeepers are going to tell you “no,” a lot, more than you can imagine. Competitors, or others who are threatened by your possible success are going to come gunning for you.

But you gotta press forward, ignoring them.

It’s hard sometimes, especially for someone like me who wants to rub their faces in my victory. But you can’t do that until you’re actually victorious, and by then, you probably won’t even care.

Do What You Do Best

Third, do what you need to do every single day. I know that’s vague, but only you know what you need to be doing. For me, it’s writing, every single day, whether I have something to write about or not. If I’m feeling sick or tired, I still write, I still try and develop ideas, I still think of what I need to do to get noticed.

Time waits for no one. Sorry for the cliche, it’s the absolute truth though. If you find yourself waiting around to do what you think you want or need to do, maybe it’s time to find something else to do. Don’t ignore lack of motivation. If you can’t get going, either you have no idea where to go next or whatever it is you’re trying to do isn’t what you should be.

Hit the reset button. Let your actual actions be your guide. Ask for help.

Neo finally realized the truth, that there was no spoon; nothing in The Matrix was real. In life, there are no rules, only the laws of nature and physics.

What imaginary rules are you living by that might be keeping you down?

• Your products are unique – If you sell one of a kind products, they will tend to have a high ROI on the CSEs
• Your products are attractively priced – Since your products will be listed alongside a bunch of others, if you offer the lowest prices you’ll have a higher chance of completing the sale
• Your value proposition is well expressed – If you can adequately convey the value add for your products, your conversion rate will be high on the CSEs.
• You have awesome photos – The photos you use on a CSE are crucial in attracting customers to click on your items.

Even if you are unsure if your products meet the following criteria, you should still give the comparison shopping engines a try. If they end up being profitable, then great. Otherwise, you can stop using them at anytime.

Why Comparison Shopping Engines Are Awesome

The reason why CSEs are so awesome is because the conversion rates tend to be much higher than with other forms of marketing.

For example, last month my conversion rate for Google Shopping was over 30% higher than my conversion rate with Google Adwords.

Why do CSEs tend to perform better than other pay per click services?

It’s because all the prices, photos and product descriptions are presented to a customer BEFORE they click on the ad. As a result, when a customer clicks on the link that leads to your shop, there’s a very high probability that they are interested in your product and they want to buy.

Some of the more popular comparison shopping engines include

• Google Shopping
• Nextag
• Shopzilla
• Amazon Product Ads
• Pricegrabber
• Shopping.com
• TheFind.com
• Pronto.com

Note: All of the comparison shopping engines shown above may perform differently depending on what you sell so it’s important to give them all a try in order to see what works.

How Do Comparison Shopping Engines Work?

Almost all of the comparison shopping engines work in a similar way. You need to generate a data feed, which is a file that contains all of your products, images, descriptions, prices etc… in a single document. Most popular shopping carts can generate this for you automatically.

For example, Big Commerce, Volusion, Shopify, and Open Cart all have facilities to generate product feeds for the more popular CSEs.

This feed file is then transmitted to the comparison engine in one of 2 ways. One, you can FTP the file directly. Or, you can place the file on your server and have the CSE grab it at set intervals.

Once you have your product feed setup, your goods will be displayed online and you will pay a fee whenever someone clicks on a product. Usually the fee varies depending on the type of product and how much you are willing to bid on a particular set of goods.

Does this sound pretty straightforward? On the surface it’s simple but as with everything in life, it’s easy to make mistakes if you don’t know what you are doing.

Here’s a list of best practices that I’ve amassed over the years while using these services.

Rule #1: Do Not List Sold Out Items

Not listing sold out products may sound like common sense but it’s not and I’ll tell you why. Most shopping carts out there provide plugins or special code that will automatically generate the product feed for you.

However depending on what cart you use, the automatically generated feed might include items that are either sold out or have very low quantities left in stock.

You really need to check. For example, the default product feed for my shopping cart displays goods that are active but might be completely sold out.

As a result, it’s like throwing money in the garbage can when someone clicks on a link to your shop and you can’t complete the sale.

In addition because the shopping feeds may not be updated very often (sometimes as long as once a month), it’s important to only list goods where you have a significant quantity on hand that is unlikely to sell out.

Rule #2: Make Sure You Tag All Of Your Links

As people start clicking on links from the comparison shopping engines to your online store, it’s important to track where these customers are coming from. By default, Google Analytics already tags incoming links with a referral source.

However, certain CSEs may list your products on many sites and the clicks can be coming from all over the place. For example, Shopzilla has at least 3 other partner sites and sometimes it’s hard to tell which CSE is responsible for the click. The only way to definitively tell where a click originates from is to specifically tag the link.

In order to tag your links for Google Analytics, I recommend using the Google URL builder.



By entering in the parameters displayed above, Google’s URL builder will generate a unique URL with tagging info so you know exactly where your clicks are coming from.

Once you’ve tagged your links, your analytics reports will clearly indicate the source of CSE traffic.

The other reason to tag all of your links is to make sure that your click reports line up with what you are getting charged by the CSE. If the clicks that you are paying for don’t match your analytics reports, that means that the CSE might be charging you for fraudulent clicks.

While you might think this is rare, it’s actually happened to me once already with a very well known CSE. In addition, my colleague Adam Buchanan also has experienced click fraud which you can read about in his post here

Needless to say, you have to stay on top of things, otherwise you could waste a lot of money.

Rule #3: Monitor Your ROI

I make it a habit of checking my ROI at least once a month. As you gather enough data about your sales, you’ll notice that certain products sell well on certain CSEs and other products perform lousy.

If you see product clicks that simply aren’t selling, it’s in your best interests to remove these products from your data feed altogether. On the flip side, if you notice certain products that are selling very well, you may want to increase your click bids in order to expose that product to more traffic and more customers.

Often times, figuring out your selling trends takes several months and a lot of trial and error. But you need to stay on top of things and react accordingly. I should also probably note that most automated shopping cart data feeds do not allow you to mix and match products from your online store.

So if you purposely want to exclude certain items, you may have to edit the code that generates your product feed directly. In general, it pays to understand how your feed is generated so you can make edits accordingly. Every comparison shopping engine has its own feed format and may require slight modifications to your shopping cart.

I also have one other note of warning. Be wary of CSEs that have affiliate programs for blogs and other publishers. Often times, if your product ads end up on a blog, the conversion rate will be much lower. So just be careful when you sign up for any CSE that runs a publisher affiliate program as most CSEs won’t let you turn this off.

Conclusion

The comparison shopping engines are a great way to increase sales for your online store. Because the conversion rates are so high, you can potentially get a lot of bang for your buck by advertising on these services.

So give them a shot! I would start with Google Shopping followed by Amazon Products Ads first to get your feet wet. Then you can experiment with the rest. Good luck!

A Word of Warning About Split Testing

First of all, ensure that the result of every experiment you carry out on your sales page is determined by split testing. If you are unfamiliar with the process then check out this post.

Now you may have heard people waxing lyrical about split testing and for the most part it is a fantastic means of improving conversion rates on your site. However, what you don’t read very often is the “dark side” of split testing.

To put it simply, every time you start a new experiment you are running the risk of conversions dropping dramatically. This has happened to me on a couple of occasions and my sales have suffered (albeit temporarily) because of it.

So remember this: conversion rates can drop as well as increase. Keep a close eye on your split tests in their first few days to make sure that conversion rates don’t drop dramatically. If you’re carrying out a particularly risky experiment then expose it to just a fraction of your visitors. If things seem on a pretty even keel then let the experiment run its course.

2 Simple Ways to Boost Sales Page Conversions

I have listed these two methods in order of (a) time required and (b) their potential effect. Although there are a huge variety of adjustments you can make to a sales page to boost sales, I consider these to be big difference makers.

1. Adjust Your Price

Few adjustments are easier than simply changing the price of your product and it can make a huge difference.

When I pre-launched my freelance writing guide I offered it at half price: $23. Relative to the size of my pre-launch list, it sold like hotcakes — some 40% of people made a purchase within the three day pre-launch period. But come launch day, the sales were hugely subdued. My full $47 price wasn’t so palatable.

I largely overlooked this for a few months but finally started split testing the price a few weeks ago. What I found was that by reducing the price I could actually increase overall sales. It may initially seem counter intuitive, but a reduction in price attracted a higher number of customers which boosted my overall sales.

However, reducing your price may not be the answer for you — the reverse could have a positive effect. You can test big changes in price (such as from $47 to $23) or just little adjustments (such as $47 to $49.99) to see if it has a minor psychological effect on your customers.

I now offer the base version of my guide for just $19.99 and am benefiting for it — sales are up over 20% compared to the previous price points. And although price had a big part to play in that, there is something else at play too…

2. Add Options

I always had it in my mind to offer multiple versions of my guide, but I didn’t get around to doing it immediately. It was this fantastic article that eventually galvanized me into action.

When dealing with multiple price points a lot of psychology comes into play. Consider this as an example: in offering three versions of my guide, I expect the vast majority of people to purchase the mid-range offering. The three price points are as follows:

1. $19.99
2. $29.99
3. $129.99

The mid-range model is only ten bucks more than the base model but includes a bunch of video interviews and five exclusive articles. The top range model is far more expensive but offers an hour of consulting with me.

Editor’s Note: This technique is called ‘Decoy Pricing’ or ‘Price Bracketing’. For more information on pricing check out this article on Pricing: Psychological Mind Games That Stores Play

In offering these three price points I am trying to shape the buyers’ thinking process into something like the following:

$129.99 is way too much, but the mid-range offering is only ten bucks more so I’ll go for that.

The first and third price points give context to the second and make it easier for the customer to contextualize and justify their buying decision. In reality I want them to buy the second option — the first and third are to help them make their decision. And for the most part, people do make that decision: over the past 7 days, 84% of my sales have come from that mid-range price point.

The Sky is the Limit

I want to make it clear that I am literally skimming the surface in terms of sales page optimization here. Having said that, the two changes recommended above alone made a big difference to my sales.

I will continue to tweak and test my sales page for the foreseeable future and may well publish my findings down the line. But in the meantime, what are you waiting for? You have the opportunity to boost your sales right now without actually creating a new product or driving more traffic to your sales page. It’s time to get testing!

This post was written by Tom Ewer, a regular contributor for MyWifeQuitHerJob.com!