How to Make Money Online

If you have a particular market niche where new products come out all the time, you will want to cultivate the early adopters to make faster sales. Technical market niches tend to rely on early adopters to help drive sales, and once the word is out, if the product is good it will fly off the shelves. So, how do you go about cultivating early adopters?

Identify The Big Promoters

It isn’t just enough to have a contact list with people who love technical gadgets or cookies. You have to identify people who can quickly promote your products, if they like them. One way to do that is to find blog owners who are within your market niche who have a big following. Ask them if they would like to review your product, either for pay or for the product itself. If it’s something of interest to them and their readers, you won’t have much trouble twisting their arms to get them to comply, especially if you find ways to sweeten the pot. The goal here is to get your product reviewed by an expert in the market niche and promote it by getting the word out as soon as possible to as many people in that niche as possible. Getting people who already have cultivated that audience and are willing to share it with you is a clever way to reach many multiple early adopters.

Email Market To Prior Customers

Who on your contact list bought the earlier version or similar product to the new one you are now promoting? That’s the best place to start selling the newest version. Early adopters may have many of the same products in their home, but what sells them isn’t the product itself, it’s being the first to own the product before it hits the mass market. And, if you’ve taken the time to cultivate the buying behavior of your customers you should have a ready list of people to market via email. Just send out notice that you have a new product in the works and that you will offer them a sweet deal for placing an order to reserve theirs before anyone else.

As long as you have permission to solicit people on your email list, they won’t consider it spamming. In fact, they’ll probably be excited to get a peek of the new product before anyone else. Let them know what all the features and benefits are, just as if you were marketing a new client, and also how it differs from any similar products they bought from you before.

Offer A Recycling Program

This is one way to snag new customers who may have other products, even some of your old ones, and give them an incentive to trade them in for the new product. If you can find a way to swap and still make a good deal, you will have created demand for people who already have an interest in the type of product your are rolling out.

How many websites have a home page where you have a search engine with a catalog that a buyer can browse? Many of them do now, and this is a standard way to market your products online. It may be a bit boring, but it does have its place in online marketing. But, what if you were able to add some fun to your home page and sell your products at the same time? Wouldn’t that make your product promotion more memorable than the rest? Probably so.

Interactive Fun

People who are online are generally familiar with interactive elements like radio buttons, multiple choice boxes, and clicking with a mouse, right? So, why not engage your customers by teasing them with fun games and activities when they hop online? An example of this might be pop up boxes that offer a funny cartoon or video related to the site and promotes a product. Or, it can be a survey that asks people to participate in exchange for a discount coupon.

Polls

Polls are very popular, both on social networking sites and on private websites. They are easy to use and people love to answer and question and see how they compare to others who gave their opinion. It can be a great way to generate community and add some spark to a discussion too.

Quizzes

What if you have a bit of a competitive streak in you? Well, you can develop quizzes for people to gage their level of expertise in a topic and see how they rank against others who completed the quiz. You can even use that as a spring board to offer infoproducts that discuss more about the topic of the quiz or help to improve performance in that area.

Virtual Tools

If you create a virtual tool that allows your customers to imagine how buying a particular product will impact their lives, it will help to sell the product more. For instance, if you were selling wigs, you might create a tool that allowed you to upload an image of your face and then adds the wig on in a virtual try-out of the product. Of course, it will take some development work, but this is the type of interactive tool that can really increase your sales.

Chat

This feature is good for a membership site, where people want interactive features to help them connect with others. It can also be used to provide customer service help for customers who have questions or problems. Anything that allows more real-time interaction with other people is a great plus, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be contact with you directly. It can be contact with other members, contact with online sales representatives, or technical troubleshooters. As long as they are engaging your website in ways that engage them completely, you will have more and more of their attention. Ignore them or keep the same stale site, and you will be very hard-pressed to generate interest on solely the strength of your products alone.