Boost Sales By Adding More Products

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Whew! I am still catch­ing up from a whirl­wind WEVA Expo show in Orlando two weeks ago, fol­lowed by some other engage­ments I had in Florida.

I had to hit the ground run­ning when I got home. As soon as I got back I had to spend some time learn­ing to oper­ate a new dis­tance learn­ing video set up (IP Video Con­fer­ence Recorder) for a job I’m doing for the Col­lege of Engi­neer­ing at Cal Poly. As much as I wish I was able to just pro­duce spe­cial inter­est videos (SIVs), we have a sud­den abun­dance of well pay­ing client work com­ing our way, so I can’t com­plain (but I still do).

My wife and I didn’t fly home as soon as the con­fer­ence ended since my folks live in Mer­ritt Island, about an hour out­side of Orlando. While there, I was able to accept a liter­ery award for my dad in St. Augus­tine. The rea­son I men­tion it here is that video I did on my dad is the prod­uct that launched me into sell­ing my videos over the inter­net, which led me to learn­ing how to design and build my own web­sites, inte­grate a shop­ping cart to process orders, work with Google and other search engines to get my sites found on the inter­net, etc.

Before that, I worked strictly through dis­trib­u­tors, cat­a­logs and direct mail mar­ket­ing, which is very expen­sive. Since I started sell­ing on the inter­net, my busi­ness has increased sig­nif­i­cantly every year, so much so that that lit­tle site ded­i­cated to my father’s DVD and books alone gives us a good annual income. Check it out at PatrickSmithOnline.com.

One of the impor­tant lessons I learned from that was why it is impor­tant to expand your prod­uct line. If I only sold the DVD my sales would not be as high as they are because once a cus­tomer bought the DVD I would have noth­ing fur­ther to sell them. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of my sales are now due to the books I added. I only make about 45% profit on the books, but then I just have to stock them for the web­site. I didn’t invest any time in pro­duc­ing them, so they give me a good sales boost for lit­tle effort. I always encour­age peo­ple to find related prod­ucts to sell along with their SIVs. As if to empha­size my point, as I wrote this a large order just popped up in my email that con­sists of a com­bi­na­tion of DVDs and books. That thrill never gets old!

I’m happy to report that even in this slow econ­omy, my busi­ness is up 50% from last year at this same time. One of the key rea­sons is that with the price of gas, peo­ple are shop­ping more online as a con­ve­nience. This applies to my con­sumer web­sites. My busi­ness ori­ented web­sites, like HowToSellYourVideos.com and oth­ers, are grow­ing because I work hard to pro­mote them, and peo­ple per­ceive that they are get­ting good value, and they are.

No mat­ter how great your prod­uct is and how cool your web­site is, you won’t sell much if you don’t spend the time to mar­ket the site. Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) is an indus­try built around get­ting your web­site found among the mil­lions of sites on the inter­net. I’ll have more infor­ma­tion about SEO in the future. It is an impor­tant and com­plex topic.

In the mean­time, I hope you are either think­ing about pro­duc­ing your own SIV prod­ucts, or per­haps are already in the process.

Until next time,

Rick Smith

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