Michael Oliver Consulting

It’s time to check out the competition!! In school it may have been called cheating, but in the business world it’s just good old-fashioned market research! Find out where your competitors are advertising, spy on their sales funnels, and see how you can replicate any of their good ideas that appear to be working well. There are many online tools to find out what ads and keywords your competitors are using. There’s also a couple of basic ways to see what your competitors are up to - follow them on social media and subscribe to their blogs and newsletters. If they have smaller priced items, you may choose to purchase one of their items to see what their purchase process is like, whether they offer upsells, what those are and what their follow up process is to a sale. See what they are doing really well and look for how you can replicate it or adapt it to your business. For example, if you sign up to a competitor’s newsletter, you can see how they nurture a lead and turn it onto a sa...

Don’t you hate it when you’re searching for an item, find it at an amazing price, then see that shipping is going to cost you an arm and a leg? One way to increase your sales, especially over a short period of time, is to reduce the cost of your shipping, or offer a sale period time where shipping is free. By putting a time limit on when you make free shipping available, you add a sense of urgency, encouraging customers to buy now, as opposed to at a later date. It’s also a good way to encourage customers who may have been on the fence to make a purchase now. For example, say you have a business that sells gardening supplies online. Reach out to your customers and let them know that for any supplies ordered by midnight on Sunday, you’ll offer free delivery. If you have regular customers that place large orders with you, you may even want to reach out and call them. On your website, make sure it’s clear that you have this offer available for a limited time - it may be a pop u...

One common and popular phrase that has stood the test of time is "content is king" why? Because it has remained true despite hundreds of other factors like SEO practices, social media, and many other modern trends influencing online businesses and marketing. SEO experts have begun to adopt the philosophy that content is the most crucial factor of the ranking of any website. Despite the fact that the importance of content is emphasized in many high places, too many aspiring online entrepreneurs have not fully understood and embraced this idea. Many will miss out on the benefits that great and original content can bring to a page. There are many to consider. First of all, though, it is essential to be familiar with what content actually is. There is no short answer to this question. Content is everywhere and it's used in everything. In blogs, posts and articles you can find it along with web content like an “about us” page or a page describing products and service...

There is no doubt about the fact that unique and attractive content is an essential part of your website and social media profiles. Excellent content, along with a well-thought out social media marketing strategy, will help your website stand out in the crowd and attract more users to your brand. Initially, it may seem a straightforward and smooth process to write content for your website as you have to add a few pages and blog posts to your website. In actuality, the writing process is time-consuming and even exhausting to some people. Your content must be adequately planned and written for your site and social media page. You need to content to draw the right viewers in. The quality of content primarily determines the success of a website. Other factors like design, theme, multimedia, and any others that influence the website play a secondary role. The content on your site should be done with aftermarket research and follow a reliable keyword research plan. Content Is Used...

Businesses of any kind can be quite challenging. There is a lot of saturation and variation in different industrial sectors. It all requires careful research and cautiously formulated strategies. To ensure the success of your business, it is necessary to make your brand stand out from competitors through effective promotion strategies. Here are the crucial steps in marketing your new business: Conduct market research Market research is a crucial component in establishing a marketing strategy for a new business. It includes collecting data about the market in which you are going to establish your business. The data is thoroughly analyzed to determine the needs and requirements of potential customers, prime locations for the business, and the estimation of the budget and pricing of the products and services. Moreover, market research can also include sales predictions, monitoring latest market trends, and studying the business models of your competition to make sure you ad...

Offering a guarantee is a great way to make it easier for customers to buy. It takes the risk out of the purchase for them, as it gives them an out if they don’t like the product. Psychologically, it also gives them confidence in your product - as why would you be offering a guarantee if you weren’t confident in your product? Now, to be clear, make sure you do offer a great product before you whack an awesome guarantee on it! For example, if you have a mattress company, you could offer a guarantee and word it like this: “Try our mattresses risk free for 30 days - In the unlikely event that you’re not 100% satisfied with your mattress we will give you 100% of your money back.” A guarantee like this takes the risk out of buying for your customers and gives them confidence in your product. Most people won’t take advantage of the guarantee and the amount of returns you’ll have versus the increase in sales will be well worth it. And having said that, it’s often best to...

How can you price your product in a way that psychologically impacts your customer into believing they’re getting a great deal? When people see the difference, between your normal price and your sales price, it influences their decision to purchase. By having a “normal” price listed it creates the impression that the deal they are getting is awesome. They’re getting all this value at a price that is way less than “normal”. People love to believe they are getting a bargain and by listing both your normal and sale price side by side, it highlights the value they’re getting for their money. For example, when you list your pricing, write it as, "Normally $197 -- Only $97 Today!" You can also come up with reasons to have such discounts listed. These reasons can be mentioned next to the discounted price as well. These could be things like a holiday special, inventory closeout, end of year special pricing, manager’s special, etc.. Any reason works and makes it ...

With the passage of time, consumers have become highly conscious of the marketing strategies being used by businesses all over. Most consumers are able to differentiate between an authentic business and one that is exaggerated and hyped through artificial marketing. As a result, people tend to spend their hard-earned earnings on very particular products and brands. In such a highly competitive business environment, businesses face the difficulty of increasing their sales, or even worse, just to maintain a steady sales income. As a result, the capital of such companies starts dwindling within a few years, and it can lead to the catastrophic failure of their business model. If you want to keep your head above those choppy waters, you need to keep in mind the following five marketing tips. These tips should be adopted by all businesses to drastically improve their sales: 1. Identify The Market And The Problems. Not enough can be said of the great importance in choosing a...

Too many business owners and marketers will only create one version of an offer, sales page, opt-in page, ad, etc., and simply hope that it works. If it does, they’re happy. If it doesn’t, they think that the offer simply doesn’t work. That’s a horrible way to go about it. If your first attempt doesn’t work, you’ll want to create several different versions of all of those to see if maybe it’s something in your sales copy. And even if you get lucky and get a winning offer right off the bat, you’ll want to constantly test new things in the sales copy to see if you can increase clicks to your ads, lead conversions to your opt-in pages, sales to your sales page, and upsells to your upsell pages. It doesn’t have to be hard. Even just changing around headlines or little things here and there can often have drastic effects. For instance, you might find that changing a headline and shortening down the length of an opt-in page might boost your lead conversions from 20% to ...

Looking for new customers? Or a way to make a whole bunch more sales? You’re going to love this strategy then! Think about other business that you could partner with, that you don’t directly compete with, where you could offer value that will make you both a lot of money. Think about the customers a business already has, and whether those same customers would be interested in your own product or service. Now, think of how you can make your offer a win-win for you and the other business. This is a great way to access a whole new database of potential clients for yourself, and give the business you’re partnering with an opportunity to upsell their current clients by offering them your service (for a cut of your fee). For example, if you sell homemade candles, reach out to boutiques to see if they'd be willing to sell your candles (even without them buying them first - just sharing in the sales). Or if you sell a social media management or SEO service, reach out to web design firm...

Every entrepreneur is well familiar with the importance of marketing in today’s era of extreme competition. Marketing through various channels has become essential to make sure a business is able to thrive in the market. Without a proper marketing strategy, a company will not be able to gain new customers and expand their reach. Are you looking for tips and techniques to create better sales funnel for your business? If so, you are in the right place. What Is A Sales Funnel? A sales funnel is a marketing concept that provides a schematic of the process through which a customer goes through while making a purchase. The term ‘funnel’ is used as an analogy because most of the people who know about a business are its potential customers and represent the top, most significant part of the funnel. This might also be described as your “warm market” and may include those who are on the fence about your brand, or barely even giving it a thought. These people are on top. The people w...

According to a survey conducted in the United States a stunning 90% of businesses were active in some way on social media in 2017. Facebook alone, has close to 1 billion users, equal to the total population of India, all over the globe. The world has progressed to the point where everyone wants everything right at their fingertips. They want what they want constantly and they want what they want NOW. That is the number one rule of social media. If it's used effectively the rewards are great. You want a social media page that • Is active • Has a large, engaged, and growing following • Speaks to a large, relevant audience that translates into business conversions. Using social media in a way that accomplishes these things can be tricky, but it also can be done. Consider some of the following guidelines: 1: Headlines Matter: You may have heard this famous proverb “don’t judge a book by its cover” but let's be honest with ourselves. We are visual creatures w...

Want a way to make sales without paying for any ads and with zero risk of losing money in doing so? The obvious answer is a big YES, but very few business owners take advantage of running their own affiliate programs, which can do exactly that! Affiliate programs are where you offer others a cut of any sale that they send your way. When this is done online, there’s traditionally special “affiliate links” that they get from you. When they send people through those links that later buy from your site, they’d get credited for and paid a percentage of the sale. You can do a similar concept offline just by letting others refer your prospects directly (and manually crediting them), or even by handing out special “unique” coupon codes to others to hand out to their prospects so you know where they came from. This could be a special coupon that you hand out, with a code or ID on it, so you know where it came from. Regardless, in either case you only pay them after a sale is made, wh...

In terms of cost-efficiency, the most crucial method for attracting traffic to your website is through organic searches. They allow you to reach people who don't even know about your site initially but are searching for a specific product or service related to your website. The primary factor of the success in organic searches boils down to the ranking of your website on search engine results pages (SERPs). There are a ton of factors that may contribute to your website may not be ranking well on search engines. Some of these reasons are: A Slow Website Millions of search results are available to the user as soon as they enter a keyword into a search engine like Google. With such a massive amount of data available on the Web, it's become challenging to hold users' attention for extended periods of time. Pages that load faster not only provide excellent user experiences but also play a huge role in SEO ranking. Site speed is an official search ranking algorithm in...

Offering a free gift, with a purchase over a certain amount (or just with any particular item), is a great way to encourage people to buy from you, but also to spend more per sale if they have to spend a certain limit. A great way to take this strategy a step further is to make your free gift a sample of other products you want to promote, or a new product you want to encourage your customers to try so as to buy in the future. For example, beauty brands use this strategy regularly, and to great effect, offering a selection of sample size beauty products in a cute looking case, when spending over $50, $70, $100, etc. in one transaction. Not only does the free gift encourage their customers to buy more beauty products in one transaction, it also allows them a chance to introduce their customers to new products or items they may not have bought previously, without the chance to try them first. A twist on this method that we used with great success in building a coup...

People often overlook this very simple, very easy way to increase their business’s profits: increase your prices. Most people tend to undercharge for their services, so try increasing your prices, as a test, and see what happens. Funnily enough, most people perceive something that is higher priced as being of higher quality, which can encourage people to buy your product or service. As you increase your prices, you’re also receiving more per sale, increasing your profit margin. Take this strategy a step further and target higher value clients. For example, if you run a business coaching company, and you currently charge $200 an hour for your time, increase your rates to $1000. With the perceived higher quality and value in your coaching, target businesses that make a lot of money vs. those that are barely getting by. In this example, one client would be worth 5 of your clients in the past. Not only have you raised your hourly rate, but you’ve decreased the amount of work you nee...

So how can you charge more for your services? How can you increase your price tag and still have customers lining up to buy from you? One easy way is to change your offer from a simple product/service to a done-for-you offer. What does this mean? Check out this example below. Say, instead of charging $5 to write an article, you instead charge $497 to $997+ to write five articles, create a blog, post the articles up, optimize it for their keywords, and have a custom graphic or two. If you were to outsource a $5 article for $3, the first example only gives you a $2 profit, or if you were to write it yourself, you'd be trading $5 for 30 minutes, at best, of your time ($10 an hour on the higher end if you’re super fast).  However, if you were to offer the second, more premium example, you could outsource the articles for $15, allocate $10 for some custom graphics on Fiverr.com, and put in $25 to $50 to outsource the custom blog with SEO (blogger.com blogs, for instance, can be m...

Business owners often do more talking than listening. When it comes to making sales, often it’s best to do more listening than talking. Instead of overthinking and brainstorming what your prospects might want, why not just ask them? You’d probably be surprised at how easy it can be to sell them what they’re already telling you they most want/need. For example, if you’re selling a variety of online marketing or web services, instead of trying to force them to buy a particular SEO package to help rank their site, why not ask them what they think their biggest issues are right now with their business? You might find that they really don’t care much about their ranking but might instead be focused on their social media, e-mail list management, or some other service that you could easily do for them. Once someone tells you what their issues are, ask them what they think that would do for their business if those issues were solved, and then ask them how much more they t...

One way to show value and highlight the great price you’re offering your customers is to point out when you are giving a discount or savings, as this lets customers know you’re giving them a great deal and lots of value. A discount also has a psychological effect - we feel we are getting a better deal and are more likely to buy. Seeing that an item is discounted not only is an incentive to buy it now, it can also encourage new users to buy that might otherwise have not considered it. For example, when listing your price, you might write: "$97 --- 50% Off Today!" This makes people feel they are getting a great deal, helps them justify the purchase to themselves and is more likely to push them over the line. If you have several similar offers that are slightly better or more/less expensive than the other, instead of just listing off the benefits of each one next to their price, you can also not only list off the savings, but say “Good Deal,” “Better Deal,”...

Sometimes it’s hard to see the benefit of something we haven’t seen in action or tried first. Offering a free trial period, or a demonstration of your product, can be a great way to alleviate a potential customer’s fears and make them confident the product will work for them. Also, once someone has tried something free they often feel obliged to reciprocate by purchasing from you - it’s the principle of reciprocity in action. For example, if you have a software product, offer a free 30 day trial, so customers can see how it works, use it and see the results they get from it. You’ll get customers who may have sat on the fence or not purchased previously all of a sudden be ready to buy because they can get a chance to experience how great the product can actually be for them. There’s one tip we’ve learned over the years that can greatly increase your retention rate here (or essentially how many stay on past the trial period), and that’s to offer a free trial, but re...

It’s often a lot easier to sell to your current customers than to get a new customer. They already like and trust you and know your product/service works. Tap into that opportunity by looking at what else you can sell to your customers that compliments what they bought previously. For example, if you have a resume writing service, you could go out to recent customers and also offer an additional service where you submit their resume to X amount of job ads and write a customized cover letter for each ad, and also submit their resume to several recruitment agencies. One of our followers once had a tech business where he sold server management services, and he was asking me how to increase sales. After pointing out how it’s often much easier to sell to existing customers than get new ones, I asked him what kind of stuff or things his current customers seem to want or ask him for. As I suspected, they were often asking for things like websites, ranking help, etc. amo...

Most businesses tend to practically ignore their prospects and even their best clients. This is a horrible thing to do, as you’d be leaving a ton of money on the table in doing so. One thing that you can do to help remind your prospects and customers about you is to send either an e-mail or a card with something like a thank you note along with an incentive to take some further action (like a discount or a freebie leading into a sales offer of yours). For instance, if you have leads that haven’t bought from you but who’ve expressed an interest of some kind, you can either automatically (via an autoresponder) or manually follow-up with them by writing an e-mail saying how you haven’t seen them in a while, want to thank them for previously reaching out, and then letting them know about either a freebie you’re currently offering, which can lead into a paid offer, or a discount or other incentive/deal that you currently have. This can help revive old, “dead” leads in...

In the past few years, social signals have become an essential part of a business' website ranking. These trends have only increased as the use of social media has become highly popular around the world. A well-executed social media marketing strategy can greatly boost your business. Social media is essential for businesses to keep in direct contact with their customers, especially their most loyal ones. Through social media, existing, as well as potential customers for your brand, will have direct access to information about all of the critical updates and additions to your business. For a strong internet presence, you need to make sure that your business's social media accounts are updated frequently and consistently. Engaging and consistent social media content will establish steady interaction with customers and visitors to the page. If you have a business and you are not using social media websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to promote and market your bus...