Selling Online

First, let’s talk about your ezine, or e-newsletter. If you intend to publish an informative ezine, do not expect much direct sales from it. Why is this?

Because the primary purpose of your newsletter is to establish your credibility, expertise and to create that relationship - we keep returning to this relationship thing all the time, don’t we? Do not think of your ezine primarily as an advertisement for your services or products.

In your ezine, you must provide useful content to your subscribers. 

By all means, promote your products and services in your ezine, but do not make it the most prominent part of the newsletter. Here it should be in the background, and shouldn’t take up more than about a quarter of the space.

For example, at the bottom of the newsletter you can have a section titled “About Me”, and here you can provide a brief summary of your business, and also mention that you are the author of such-and-such book, or creator of a product. Provide a link to your site where there’s more information.

Now, the most money you’re going to make is through so-called promo-emails, or some people call them solo mailings. While your ezine may have several articles, reviews, comments, recommendations, etc., in a promo email you will concentrate on promoting just one particular thing: it could be a new product you developed, a new type of service that you offer, or something like that.

Typically, your promo emails will be much shorter than your regular ezine. In case you’re sending your ezine in HTML format you may want to experiment and send the promo emails as plain text. Be sure to split-test this.

BTW, for those who are not familiar with the term, split-testing is when you send one version of your email to a subset of your list and another, different version, to a different group of the same size. You compare the results, and from then on use the format witch produced the highest response.

These promotional emails will usually have response rates that are several times higher than a response from your ezine.

The easiest and quickest way is to set up a PayPal account.

First of all, let me dismiss any notions you might have about PayPal being a Mickey Mouse solution that’s not appropriate for serious on line business transactions. There are several, successful, internet marketers who make millions on line, and they use PayPal as their payment processor, so why not you, too? I use PayPal, too.

As a side note here: You may already have a merchant account to accept credit cards off line, but the same company you currently use may not be the best way to go for your on line transactions. Many off line merchant account providers are not familiar with online payments, so make sure you ask all the right questions first.

By all means, if you have a merchant account, talk to them first and see how they compare to PayPal.

Why I like PayPal - there are no monthly fees, so you only pay a processing fee per each transaction, only when you actually make a sale.

First of all, PayPay will provide you with secure payment processing technology so you can take credit cards, but also e-cheques, and money transfers from checking accounts.

Secondly, PayPal offers a shopping cart, with enough bells-and-whistles as you need to create those lovely “PAY NOW” buttons you can use either directly in your email promotions, but also on your web site.