The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [82]
Marketing Weapon 7: Internet
In 1995, only five million people used this marketing weapon. That number jumped to 105 million just four years later. Today, virtually every one uses it. Amazon.com may have struggled in its early years, but it still took $1 billion in market share from other booksellers. Because Amazon grew with the Internet, the company reached $1 billion in sales in four years flat. Predating the Internet, other booksellers (bookstore chains) took 50 years to reach $1 billion in annual sales. The Internet can create an awesome opportunity or it can become your worst nightmare overnight if some competitor learns to utilize it better than you.
There are entire books on this subject, but here’s my five-pronged approach to tie this together with every thing else you are doing here:
Capture leads.
Build a relationship.
Interact as much as possible.
Offer a webinar (Web seminar).
Convert traffic to sales.
One of the best lessons I’ve learned about building a healthy database is the concept of the “shy yes” page taught by Alex Mandossian. My main home page, www.chetholmes.com, is packed with opportunities to get things for free. At the time of this writing, that site is getting 52,000 unique visits every month. These are generally people who have heard me speak, read one of my articles, or heard about me from someone else or from some marketing we’ve done. On every page and at the end of every article, that site offers you a subscription opportunity for a free newsletter, free mass teleconference, free event, and so on. And with all that going on, only 1 percent to 3 percent of the visitors subscribe. That’s 520 to 1,560 of the 52,000.
That site has other uses besides capturing leads, like branding and acquainting new folks with my material. But imagine how highly inefficient it would be to advertise that site on the radio, for example. I’d pay thousands of dollars to drive leads and, of those, I’d drive a tiny percentage who would register to be emailed other promotions. And then those promotions might not even get opened.
So, using the concept of the “shy yes,” we designed another site. Alex likens a Web site to trying to get a date. If you ask someone to marry you the first time you talk to her, you’re not likely to get a yes. But if you ask her to have a cup of coffee, you might get a yes. It is hard to say no to a cup of coffee when you’re in the market for romance and you kind of like the person. So it’s an easier step.
Translating that to the concept of a Web site, my main page is in your face from every direction with offers and things to do. This is not a bad thing, but the direction of the relationship is now unclear. You have to decide what you want to do on my site, and I have no control over what you choose. On that site, I also offer, right on the home page, a chance to go to a webinar. Of those who go to the site, maybe one in 52,000 will actually register to attend a Web seminar.
Rather than my articles and interviews directing people to www. chetholmes.com where there are 100 choices of what they can do, we created www.howtodoublesales.com. This site only gives people one choice: give me your email address and go look at a four-minute video on how to double your sales. At this site there is a small paragraph with an audio component of my voice welcoming you to the site. To enter the site, you give just your first name and email address. There are no other choices, nothing to distract you. Get this: an astonishing 37 percent who go there opt in. This has built my database dramatically in a very short period of time. Of those who opt in, 2 percent to 6 percent opt to go to the next step, which is to participate in a webinar. So if I’m getting 10,000 unique visits, 3,700 of them give me their email address, and, of those,