Business Basics: There Are Only Three Ways to Increase Revenue

Increasing revenue solely depends on one of the following three things: 1.) Increase the number of people that see your product offering. 2.) Increase the number of people who, after seeing your offer, buy it. 3.) Increase the number of existing customers who buy from you again. There are no other ways to increase business revenue. Keeping these principles in mind during your daily decision making process or when doing a task list will help you drive revenue.

I. Increase the number of people that see your product offering
This can be thought of as the external marketing you do to get people to your website. The more people you get to your website, the more opportunities for conversion you will have.

Paid Options:
- Google AdWords
- Other Ad Platforms

Free Options:
- Directory and Business Listings
- Article and Content Websites
- Community or Niche Communities
- Partnerships

Search Engine Optimization and Marketing
- SEO
- SEM

II. Increase the number of people who, after seeing your offer, buy it
This is the conversion ratio of your sales pages. Getting a visitor who is reading your sales page to buy your item is the goal, called “conversion”. Increase the ability of your page to convert visitors into buyers and you will increase revenue.

Product information:
- Clear, concise product description
- Product Images or Samples
- Instructions for Use

Support Information:
- Ask Seller a Question
- User Reviews
- Contact Information

Purchase information:
- Payment Types
- Refund or Guarantee Policies
- Shipping and Delivery Costs and Times

Site Omptimization
- Page Load Speed
- Navigation
- Sales Funnel


III. Increase the number of existing customers who buy from you again
A person who has purchased from you previously is many more times likely to buy from you again vs. someone who has not bought from you. Selling to your existing customers is the lowest cost means of increasing revenue.

Related Products or Services:
- Create a Complimentary Product (upgrades)
- Offer a Required Product for the Primary Offering (batteries)

Communicate to Customers:
- During Primary Purchase Checkout
- Order Confirmation Emails
- New Product Announcements
- Newsletter Announcements
- Discounts

Marketing and Branding of your Virtual Goods

Simply speaking, most of the value a virtual good has is in the value of its brand. This is the idea behind how a name-brand soda tastes better than the store-brand even though the two beverages have exactly the same ingredients. The brand of a particular product will sometimes satisfy a customer more than one without any brand recognition. The stronger your virtual good’s brand is, the more you may actually sell. This is something that PayLoadz can help with.

An excellent way of marketing and branding your virtual goods is to start off by providing free or low-cost versions of the product. This will help you reach out to potential clients and give them a taste of what your product is all about. As a payment gateway between customers and sellers, PayLoadz can help you at this pivotal stage in your marketing campaign. You can easily offer your discounted or free virtual product samples through the PayLoadz platform. We also offer free product sales worth $50 every month to enable sellers promote and sell their products without incurring any cost.

Virtual retailers often need a way to set themselves apart. For instance, why would a customer want to purchase your particular virtual good? Often, sellers will add features to their virtual goods that may not be possible on their physical counterparts. Examples of such features include interviews and additional media like changing colors and complex technologies.

Remember, traditional marketing and branding techniques can be used for virtual goods. If you’re lucky enough to already have the budget for a celebrity endorsement, go for it. However, you may be more interested in guerilla marketing schemes, viral campaigns, basic advertising on television, radio, online, and print, different media placements, sponsorships, and even charitable activities. As a virtual retailer, you may even have the advantage in using such traditional marketing methods because you will likely have a clear understanding of the local market and intended audience.

Just remember, in order to market and brand your virtual goods successfully, you should also be innovative. Just like any other brand, a virtual good brand must successfully position itself on the cutting edge. When you have a strong brand, customers will be willing to pay for the product, even if there are other competitors that are just as good. Featuring your product on different platforms will definitely help your brand. Very soon, PayLoadz will be offering sellers an ability to promote their goods on several social media sites through its upcoming platform PowrPub.

As technology evolves, payment and purchasing platforms such as PayLoadz also become an excellent way to market and brand your virtual good. The e-commerce industry is constantly changing, which means that traditional companies may be losing their edge. With a consistent and distinctive identity, your virtual goods will surpass the competition. By featuring your products on PayLoadz, you will be offering your customers a safe and reliable way to purchase your goods.

How To Use Google to Sell Downloadable Goods, Part 5: Google AdWords

This is the 5th and final installment in our series on How To Use Google to Sell Downloadable Goods. In the previous post, we discussed using Google Base to publish your items in Google's shopping catalog. This installment will cover the basics of using Google AdWords to sell your downloadable products. At PayLoadz, we use Google AdWords to drive new user signup for our services, sellers on our service use AdWords to increase sales of their goods.

Google AdWords is possibly the most technically simplistic of all Google tools to use, but the most complex when it comes to mastery in relation to achieving an effective campaign. Because there is so much involved with managing an AdWords account, I will make the goal of this post to convince you to simply get started using Google AdWords. The only way any of these tools are going to help you, is if you just get started and see what happens. It doesn't have to be perfect, so do just sit there, go and sign up for a Google AdWords account now!

For those of you that do not know, Google AdWords are those text areas to the top and to the right of your Google search results. They are paid placements that can cost mere pennies to have displayed. That is key. You set the amount you want to spend to have your ad displayed. It actually doesn't cost you a thing to have your ad displayed, they only charge you when your ad is clicked- as little as 10 cents I believe. Even if you ad is not clicked, it is still shown and that alone is pretty good exposure.

The true power of AdWords is that you have motivated buyers actively looking for a specific result in terms of a product to purchase. It is not the organic search traffic or link traffic that you have to convince they want to buy your item. In most cases, they already do want to purchase your item, they just need to be taken to your purchase page. AdWords does this. There is not a single successful publisher of digital goods that I am aware of that does not utilize AdWords to some degree.

As mentioned previously, I'm not going to go into extensive detail on managing individual campaigns. If you are completely lost, I will just give you some tips for keywords. Open a text file and enter one keyword or phrase per line, like the following:

ebook
philosophy
eastern religion
zen
...etc.

Do that until you have 10 or so keywords, be specific as possible. Once that is done, create every combination you can think of from your keywords above. One combination example for ebook, will be as follows:

ebook philosophy
ebook eastern religion
ebook zen
ebook zen philosophy
...etc.

Duplicate that process for each keyword. You should be able to come up with 100 or so keywords and phrases when all is done. Btw, there are programs (even free ones) out there that can help you with this process. Don't worry about those to start just yet, focus on creating your first ad and then revisit later.

After you have created your ad(s) and Google AdWords, set it and walk away for a week. Be sure to set a daily budget you can live with, else you may come back to a big $ surprise. After the week, you will be able to see the keyword performance in your AdWords account. That will allow you to see the effectiveness of each phrase. During this process, focus on creating additional keywords and phrases closely related to the best performing keywords in your account. Rinse and repeat. Eventually over time, you will have hundreds of effective keywords for your products. Creating additional ads with variations on text is also important as well during this process.

The point is, you need to be using AdWords. The risk is low since you can set your own budgets and the reward is high through driving motivated traffic to your site. Give it a try!

Cheers,
Shannon