Profit Funnel Ideas, The Profit Funnel Plan

Cool Low Ticket, Mid Ticket and High Ticket Product Ideas That You Can Create And Profit From!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Profit Funnel Plan

A quick overview on how a successful Online Business Profit Funnel looks like – and how you can model your Online Business after it!

Low Ticket Product Ideas

Earn your prospect’s trust quickly at LOW risks and HIGH volumes with these amazing low ticket product ideas that you can quickly and easily develop for your own!

Mid Ticket Product Ideas

Make more money from your repeat customers, establish substantial credibility and expand your product empire!

High Ticket Product Ideas

The true vehicle to massive riches as used by TOP Internet Marketers and Online Gurus from around the planet!

In Closing: What Is Your Ideal Profit Strategy?

How to put these ideas into action for maximum results!

 

The Profit Funnel Plan

Nothing warms the cockles of a salesperson more than getting a new client. Often you are able to secure that new client because you have a quality core good or service that is provided at a competitive price.

While you may not make a great deal off that initial offering, there will no doubt be the chance to build on your initial rapport with your new client and engage in the task many sales people know as “up-selling.”

That is where the concept of the Profit Tunnel comes into play.

The Profit Tunnel is your pathway to building a relationship with your customer that begins with the purchase of initial goods or services. Once that initial relationship is established, you build on that relationship by evaluating the needs of your client and identify other goods or services that will also benefit your customer.

As you are able to acquaint, interest, and finally sell additional and often higher priced items to your customer, your profit margin will increase. The Profit Tunnel model works very well whether you are working with a brick and mortar business or going strictly with an online presence.

In both instances, the task involves winning the confidence of the prospect, identifying entry level products or services that will be of interest to the prospect, selling the prospect on the goods or services, and then continuing to offer additional products or enhancements that will make life even easier for that former prospect that is now your customer.

Low Ticket

When it comes to winning the confidence of a prospect, nothing speaks louder than a good deal. Persons who are responsible for securing goods and services for their employer love to save the company money.

 It enhances his or her reputation with the officers and owners. At the same time, no one wants to end up with a low cost service that ends up being a dud. This means the good or service needs to perform well along with being cost efficient.

Your job is to match low cost quality goods or services with the business type of your prospect. Once you demonstrate how one of your low cost offerings will consistently outperform the competition and save money for the prospect’s employer, you will be poised to help roll out your low cost offering throughout the organization, making your profit in volume distribution initially.

Once your offering is functioning throughout the organization, you may find that not only do you have the ear of your initial contact, but now you have the ability to interact with persons throughout the organization that may be interested in other offerings that you can supply.

Providing additional goods or services that are in a similar price range will be another way you will increase the profit margin. This is sometimes referred to as lateral selling.

Simply put, you are not really pushing items with a higher price tag, or even enhancements to services you have already sold which would increase the profits. You are simply broadening your current situation to include more of the same, from a charge perspective.

There is nothing wrong with lateral selling. In fact, it can be quite profitable. However, in time it reaches a point where there is no more room for more of the same and you need to move on to the next level.

Mid Ticket

Now safely ensconced with several low cost offerings, you can begin to look at other needs of your customer. Chances are you have goods or services that may be used on a less frequent basis, but carry a higher price tag.

With your low cost items working just fine for your client, you will easily be able to gain attention for these mid priced offerings.

As part of your presentation, it is important to demonstrate not only what you have to offer today, but also be prepared to present the attributes of the offering in such a way that your client can begin to brainstorm possibly uses within the organization.

You may want to have one or two ideas ready, just to prime the thinking process, if necessary. But the more your client can come up with possible uses, the greater his ownership of using the mid ticket item will become, and the closer you will be to another sale.

Be prepared to have to wait until the timing is right to spring your mid ticket item on your client. If the item is only going to be used a few times a year, the interest level may not be there until the time is growing near for the next relevant event.

By all means introduce the item but if your client wants to put off the discussion until closer to time, lock in a date and time to renew the discussions.

High Ticket – Extremely High Ticket

The dream of selling high ticket good or services is often the goal of the salesperson. After all, who would not love to be able to sell five thousand dollar items in one afternoon, rather than spend the entire week selling hundred dollar items in order to make the same commission?

Of course, you want to be on the alert for any chance to introduce and sell a high ticket item.

You have a couple of things going for you at this point in your relationship with your client.

First, there is the matter of the proven track record of the low ticket and mid ticket offerings they have already tried and found to be great for their business operations. Nothing breeds confidence in a supplier the way that an ongoing record of excellence will.

Second, you have demonstrated a continual desire to bring their attention to goods or services that have relevance to the business. You are not laying your entire product line out on the table and asking them to figure out what they need. You are someone who does the legwork first and then brings items to their attention. That you care enough to understand their business and do some legwork on their behalf says a lot about your integrity.

What his means for you is that when you call your contact about arranging a demonstration of a high ticket item, you are already more than halfway to making a sale. The attitude will not be “prove this is worth my time,” but “let’s find out how we can use this.”

When you go into a live or virtual demonstration with your client working with that type of mindset, your chances of closing the sale are very high indeed.

The Profit Tunnel helps you understand that your relationship with your client works on several levels and in several phases.

Building upon the sterling reputation you establish with low ticket sales and rolling it into the sale of more profitable sales will not only ensure you a great commission, but also will provide you with a working relationship that will last for many years.

Low Ticket Product Ideas

When you think in terms of low ticket products or services, you are talking about items that usually carry no more than a $27.00 price tag. The most common average range for a low ticket item would be in the $5.00 to $9.95 range.

There are many of online and brick and mortar businesses that consider low ticket items to be the bread and butter of the business, the way that you keep the lights on every month.

Of course, in order for those low ticket items to keep a steady flow of basic revenue, there is the need to promote your offerings and entice new clients to give them a try. Here are a few ideas that may help you promote your low ticket offerings to fresh faces.

Special Reports

Spotlighting the low ticket items that are your biggest sellers to a wide range of customer demographics is a great way to get the attention of prospects.

A special report is going to essentially focus on two things: first, this is a product or service that has is being successfully used by hundreds of thousands of people right this very minute.

Second, this product or service can make a big impact in the quality of your life and work. Once you have it, you will not understand how you ever got along without it.

These types of special report promotions are meant to spotlight all the positive attributes of your offering. You want to talk about the great performance, the low maintenance, and of course the low price.

One thing that can help dress up a special report is charts and relevant graphics. Most people are visual in the way they relate to the world, so using a simple chart to illustrate a point, or inserting some other type of visual that is related to the subject matter will help to enhance and hold the attention of the reader.

Testimonials from current clients also are a big part of a successful special report. If at all possible, vary the industry types that are represented in your testimonials.

The broader the use of your offering in various parts of the business world, the more likely a prospect is to see the need to investigate a little more closely.

Special reports are relatively easy to produce and extremely cost effective to have available. The content can be used in a direct mail piece that can be reproduced cheaply.

The special report can be posted online, with a unique URL that can then be distributed far and wide by both manual and electronic means. The result is an effective promotional tool that has a very lost cost to create and has the potential to yield big returns in a very short time.

Short Audio Sessions

Have you ever listened to those short audio clips that are on many web sites? They often are informative and can spur people to look more closely at a product or service.

Short audio sessions are not anything new. For decades, businesses have employed fifteen-second audio sessions to promote their products while callers were on hold, waiting to speak with a customer service rep.

Theater owners have employed them to get in a plug for concessions that are sold in the theater lobby. Who among us have not heard a short audio session while in the grocery store or in a discount retail store?

Given the history of the success of short audio sessions, it is no wonder that they are also working on the Internet as well.

To a degree, a short audio session makes the sales process via the Internet a little more personal, as the prospect hears a human voice. That alone makes the session an appealing way to reach a certain part of the populace.

Of course, a successful short audio session is going to be to the point and informative. It will give the prospect enough to ensure he or she will progress to the next level and seriously consider the offering, rather than simply scanning some text and moving on to another web site.

Settle on the subject for the session, make is crisp, clear, and easy to understand. Then shut up before you get too wordy.

Trial Membership Offers

Everybody wants to get a bargain, but there are those that will sit on the fence forever before making a decision. A trial membership offer can be just what you need to get them to commit.

There are several things that are very attractive to a prospect. Among them are:

• There is no long-term commitment. If I don’t like what I see during the trial period, I simply move on.
• I don’t have to pay full price. Most trial offers will be at a discount, so very little revenue is invested. 
• The trial offer gives me the chance to test drive and show the offering to other people who would be using it. I can find out up front if they see any advantages to using this new offering
• This gives me the chance to think of questions that should be answered before a commitment is made. I may think of something while in the trial period that I would not think of during a simple demonstration. 

If you offer a trial membership, make sure you provided specific terms, as well as a way for the prospect to convert the trial membership into a full membership at any time during the trial.

Trial Software Offers

If software is involved in your product or service offering, you may also want to provide a demonstration version of the software that is good for a limited amount of time. Think in terms of some of the free electronic trail games you can download.

Many of them will allow the player to access and start a new game session for a specific number of times before the software becomes inoperative and they player will have to purchase the full version in order to continue.

Trial software should be representative of what the full version does, but you want to make sure that the software cannot be reconfigured to get around the limited time usage.

This is not a difficult task for anyone who develops software; all you will need to do is provide the perimeters of the trial time and you are all set.

As with the trial membership offers, you want your prospect to be able to upgrade from trial to permanent software at any point during the trial time, so make sure you include that in your package as well.

Promoting your low ticket items will keep your company moving along, providing the operating capital that you need to enhance your offerings and also develop more high priced offerings as well.

By utilizing these and similar ideas, you can effectively increase your client base without investing a huge chunk of your profits into public relations endeavors.

Mid Ticket Product Ideas

Having established yourself with some of your low ticket offerings, you will want to investigate the potential for up-selling your client by creating interest in your mid ticket products and services.

For the purposes of the discussion, you may want to think of mid ticket items as being priced in the $37.00 to $67.00 range per unit.

There are plenty of methods you can use to promote your mid ticket offerings. Here are some examples of methods that have proven track records of generating interest among existing clientele as well as garnering some attention from new customers as well.


E-Books

It seems that no matter what the type of product or service that is offered, an electronic book will be an ideal way to generate interest. Why? There are actually several levels on which an E-book attracts us. Here are three examples:

• In spite of the hype, most of us do like to read. We will read everything from sonnets to the backs of cereal boxes.

• E-books are easily stored. We can download them onto our hard drives and read them any time we like.

• E-books are often free or available at a fraction of the cost of a hard copy book.

When using an E-book to promote your product line, you will most likely have it available as a free download.

Providing a few online excerpts from the book as “hooks” will entice people to take the few moments needed to download the book and will also increase the chances they will actually read it after downloading.

You may want to also give them the chance to read a few pages before they perform a download, assuming you have the bandwidth required for this sort of activity.

Another potential way to keep the relationship going is to have a sign-up page where basic contact information is collected before the download commences.

This will give you the chance to follow up on everyone that downloaded the book and perhaps close a sale very quickly, due to the obvious fact of your diligence.


Paid Membership Sites

When you run a paid membership site, one of the things you must do in order to maintain and grow your client base is provide something that makes people feel like that monthly membership fee they pay is worth the cost.

As an example, you may include a short weekly or monthly newsletter as one of the perks of being a member of the site. Don’t fill it with mindless fluff that circulates around the Internet constantly.

Make the information relevant to your customers, to your product line and most of all worth the time to read about. Use it to talk about upcoming enhancements to favorite products, do a spotlight on one of your customers and the work he or she does.

Along with the newsletter, make sure there is access to online pages that capture the attention of your customers. Perhaps you can arrange for them to download a coupon they can use locally as part of a promotion campaign.

You may supply a message board where clients can talk about how they employ the goods or services you sell. The point is to make the membership perks something that people will want to engage in often enough that they want to maintain access to those perks.


Software / Scripts

Software that fills a need with your customers can be a great thing. Depending on where you draw your majority of clients from, this can be just about anything from software that helps to catalog plants to software that helps to design a home accounting systems, to software that can be used to track sales efforts.

In short, you identify and anticipate needs within your client base and then come up with the software that will meet those needs.

Now, do you develop proprietary software or do you partner with someone and act as an agent for that partner? It all depends. If you can entering into an agreement that allows you to make a decent profit from the sale of the software and still offer it to your clientele at a price that is better than what they can get it for themselves, the answer is yes.

If you can barely get a better deal than standard retail, forget it and try to develop your own software products. If the profit is not there for you, and the savings is not there for your clients, then the project is of no value to either of you.

Keep in mind the software can cover just about any subject you want. For development ideas, why not query your current clients?

Ask them what type of software they would like to see, and what types of bells and whistles would be attractive to them. You may be surprised at how easily you can fulfill those wishes.


Audio/Video Sessions

Once upon a time, companies trained new people at large gatherings. These days, new employees attend audio and web conferences via the Internet, saving time and money to all concerned.

Audio and video sessions have applications in all sorts of ways. Did you know that there are churches that conduct Sunday School classes with audio and video links, so that members who are unable to get to the actual church can attend and participate?

One a denominational level, there is a denomination headquartered in the Mid West that broadcasts both worship and business sessions of its bi-annual denominational conference to members all over the world, via live feed and data streaming.

Audio/video sessions using the Internet can revolve around all sorts of subjects, from how to fix a flat tire to detailed sessions on fixing broken relationships. They can include travelogues to exotic and distant places, helpful guidelines in dealing with a legal matter, and even something as simple as preparing a meal in twenty minutes or less.

Persons are often willing to pay on a per access basis or even a monthly subscription to have access to these types of sessions.

Selling this sort of service is not hard at all, once you identify the sectors of the population you wish to go after. Then it is a matter of securing the types of audio/video sessions that will click with your customers and making it easy for them to connect with the sessions.

Again, you may find it cost effective to partner with someone else, or it may be in the best interests of yourself and your customers to develop the sessions in house. You can evaluate your resources and make a sound decision on which way to go.

Mid ticket items are a great way to grab both a larger chunk of per unit profit, as well as create reliable revenue streams that you can depend on from month to month. Get some input from your existing customers and develop a nice suite of mid ticket offerings. You will be glad you did.



High Ticket Product Ideas




No suite of products or services is complete without some “diamond” level of offerings that are of interest to your customers.

While these may not appeal to more than a core group of your client base, the fact that you enjoy such a strong relationship based on the performance of your low ticket and mid ticket offerings will help them to trust you with these high ticket products as well.

When you think in terms of high ticket products and services, an average of $297.00 to $997.00 is a nice average range. Of course, there is nothing with going for high ticket products that are $1,000.00 or more, depending on how they relate to your other products and the demographics of your client base.

Here are some ideas for high ticket offerings that may be a great fit with your business model.


Coaching / Mentoring

There is plenty of demand these days for professional coaches and motivational speaker. All across the country, people whose entire purpose is to inspire, instruct, and help people identify where they want to go in life are raking in very nice fees.

Motivational instructors and mentors are making their money with in person classes, but they are also doing very well with audio and visual sessions as well. Generally speaking, a class will be promoted and persons will be invited to register and pay a flat fee to attend.

Generally speaking, that fee will depend on the number of sessions that will be included in the series. Upon registration, the attendee will receive instructions on how to access the sessions via phone and/or the Internet.

The session will often allow for some degree of interaction, with the frequency and mode of interaction controlled by the mentor.

How does this relate back to your product line? Chances are you had to identify some specific applications for your offerings before you ever got your first sale. Some of your mentoring can be to help people understand how your other products save them time and money and in some cases help them to make more money and expand their business.

In a related note, if you have a number of customers who work in companies where dealing with customers is a daily thing, you can most certainly fill a void.

Among the mentoring sessions you could offer are such topics as how to defuse an angry customer, how to get a customer to tell you what is really bothering them and how to bring a former customer back into the fold.

You can draw on your own expertise as well as your experiences and come up with some motivational style mentoring classes that will be sure to be of interest to your customers.


Tele-Seminars

Like mentoring sessions, tele-seminars are something that more and more people are comfortable with. They save time, definitely cut back on travel expenses, and allow attendees to get back to work more quickly, which helps to keep productivity high around the office.

When it comes to tele-seminars, you can offer subject matter you create and host in house, or you can become a means of providing a special guest speaker for a tele-seminar. Perhaps you can snag a best selling author who has written an exciting new book on Internet marketing.

Arrange for a one time tele-seminar where the author discusses his book and entertains questions afterward. The audience will pay a flat fee to attend and have the ability to participate in the question and answer session. For additional revenue, you can make the proper arrangements to record the tele-seminar and make copies of it available after the fact.


Exclusive Membership Sites

Everyone likes to feel special. One of the easiest ways is to create and manage an exclusive membership site. You can put together something that is specifically for a select group of persons, such as CEO’s, chief financial officers, executive directors of non-profit organizations, or any niche market that is composed of people who could benefit from networking with their peers and can afford to pay a nice figure for that privilege on a monthly or annual basis.

Include in the membership discounts on items of interest such as trade magazines geared toward that market or savings on attended tele-seminars and mentoring sessions that are relevant to this exclusive group. By providing networking opportunities as well as the discounts, you can find yourself with a nice way to move high ticket offerings with no trouble at all.


Lucrative Service Such As Copywriting

Support services are something that will always make an impact with businesses. By offering to take over such tasks as writing copy for new ad campaigns or sales and marketing collateral, preparing brochures, and editing other basic types of correspondence that the company uses regularly, you can save them a bundle and make a nice bit of profit for yourself.

Here are some reasons why outsourcing to you would be advantageous, rather than keeping it all in house:

• They do not have to pay your taxes. You are not an employee, so Payroll does not have to keep up with you. 
• There are no perks such as insurance, retirement, or vacation to calculate. Working essentially as a consultant, none of these factors enter into the picture. They save money.
• The company can focus on its business without devoting a lot of resources to ancillary matters. You are dealing with all that. 
• No time spent in development. They simply have to approve the finished product.

While it is true that consulting does not come cheap, it still ends up being much more cost effective than keeping someone on the payroll. Between the salary and the benefits that would be required by someone talented enough to do what you are offering to provide, you could be talking about saving tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a year.

The fact is that you can make quite a tidy profit by pitching a deal that requires an opt in payment up front, with several smaller payments as each of the action items or projects are completed. This means some immediate profit for you, with the promise of more as the tasks are finished.

When it comes to providing high ticket offerings, knowing what your resources are and how well those match up with needs within your client base will help lead you to that type of high ticket products you can provide immediately, as well as help you prepare a laundry list of others that you hope to have set up and working in a short time.

In Closing: What Is Your Ideal Profit Strategy?

When it comes to developing your ideal profit strategy, there are several things you can learn from the basic Profit Funnel. Let’s take a look at those elementary principles:

You Have to Start at the Beginning

Getting your foot in the door with a new customer is your top priority. We all know that they sales cycle can take a long time in some cases. But if you are going with a product or service that is relatively inexpensive and can be identified immediately with a need, then you can shorten than cycle a great deal.

Don’t worry about making a huge profit off that first sale. Just get the sale and make sure the product works right. Your reputation and your future opportunities with that client rest on providing them with a quality product as a price they are happy with.

It is for that reason that these entry-level efforts are so important. Sure, the big profit is not there, although you may end up with a nice amount of profit if you are able to move a product or service in bulk.

But make sure you see this as laying a foundation for things to come and not just the beginning and the end of your efforts with this customer. If you handle the situation right, you will soon be in a position to make a great deal more inroads with this customer.

Once in the Door, Look for New Opportunities

Now that you have a satisfied customer who likes what he has bought and now has a reason to trust you, the time has come to look for other ways to broaden your business dealings with your client. Identify mid level products that you can offer to your customer, helping him to get ideas about how and where in the organization they may be effective.

Let your now excellent reputation precede you as you offer enhanced services that work with the original product offering, as well as more upscale services and products that can meet other needs within that company.

Keep in mind that as you expand your presence among various contacts associated with your main contact, there will be additional opportunities to begin the same process as outlined by the Profit Funnel with them. In addition, you will find that your clients are more than happy to act as references for you once you have provided them with multiple offerings that are doing a great job for them.

Anticipate Needs that may Happen Infrequently

You may have some high level services or products that will make a great impact on something your customer does once or twice a year. This is where your rapport with your client has come in handy. You know about these opportunities because you are trusted.

As you become aware of these chances to get involved with your high level offerings, make sure to demonstrate the value that you bring to the table. It is not just that you can save them more money, and most likely in these cases a great deal of money. You also can offer them at least as good and most likely better, than they have made do with in times past.

Keep in mind that though these high ticket chances may not come your way every month, the fact is that people remember when you had a hand in making them shine to their constituency at a critical moment.

Thus, if you offered consulting services that helped your client organize a successful week long conference with persons coming from all fifty states to attend, your client will remember you very fondly and you will no doubt be called upon to provide those same services next year.

Above All, Deliver What You Promise

Always keep in mind that all the goodwill that you have built up as you moved through the low ticket to mid ticket and finally high ticket offerings can be blown completely away with one simple failure to deliver what you promised.

There used to be a saying in the movie industry about a director – he was only as good as his last picture. That is also often the case with vendors who supply goods and services as well.

You can avoid disappointing your clients by making sure you do not promise them anything that cannot be delivered immediately. Far too often, salespersons say, “yes, we can do that” knowing full well there is nothing in place currently to deliver.

The result is that those that are backing you may or may not be able to come up with a solution. If they can’t you have torpedoed your reputation with your customer, destroyed any hope of getting good word of mouth that could have opened doors for you elsewhere, and probably damaged the reputation of your company right along with your personal reputation.

Be honest about what you can provide and stay away from promising that which you know you don’t have in place right now.

A Final Word about the Profit Funnel

The concept of the Profit Funnel provides a common sense approach to selling. You start at this point and continue to build on that success. But don’t get the idea that you take one company through the funnel and you are done with them. Over and over again, you can use the Profit Funnel to create new contacts within an existing client, perhaps at different locations or different departments.

You may even be at several points simultaneously with one single contact, as you identify more and more opportunities within the realm of his authority. By keeping the model of the Profit Funnel in mind, you will never find yourself in the rut of going only after the lowest hanging fruit on the tree.

You will scoop up that fruit of course. But you will also continue to reach upward as you progress from one level to the next, maximizing the time and assets of your customer, making a profit for your company, and getting an ever nicer commission for yourself.

In the end, you are in complete control of developing your persona ideal profit strategy. No matter what your product or service offerings, chances are they fit the mode of the Profit Funnel. Incorporate the concept into your profit strategy and use the Funnel as a way to measure your current level of success.

You will find it an excellent tool for helping you to stay on track as you reach for your goals.

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Profiting From Web 2.0 Sites!

Profiting From Web 2.0 Sites!

Leverage Your Business & Marketing Power On The Latest Wave On The Internet!

Web 2.0 Sites Exposed!
What Web 2.0 exactly is and why it is the latest wave of the Internet that is totally here to stay!

Blogging
Join the Online Journal craze and learn how a network of web logs can offer a huge boost of popularity, leads and income to your Online Empire!

Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking is a recognized way to store, classify, share and search links through the practice of folksonomy techniques on the Internet. Learn how you can use it to your advantage!

Social Networking
Find out how you can have fun and do some serious business at the same time in this increasingly popular Web 2.0 as used by infamous sites such as Friendster, FacE-Book, MySpace, and more!

Audio/Video/Podcasting
In the advent of wide establishment of broadbands and wireless networks throughout the world, these digital entities become more recognized and useful than ever. Here’s how you to use it to maximize your business profits and advantage!

Leverage Your Business & Marketing Power On The Latest Wave On The Internet!

Web 2.0 Sites Exposed!

You witnessed, were a victim of or have at least heard about the bursting of the dot com bubble in the fall of 2001. Fortunes that had been made overnight were lost overnight.

The sky was falling. It was a very scary time for a lot of people. Some said that the World Wide Web was just a flash-in-the-pan idea that had been over-hyped and that the crash was irrefutable proof of that fact.

There were, however, some survivors of the 2001 dot com bust. The survivors had a few important commonalities and there were those who insisted that the World Wide Web was more important than ever and had a very bright future indeed.

One of those who saw the results of the 2001 dot com bust as a ‘glass half full’ rather than a ‘glass half empty’ was a man by the name of Tim O’Reilly. O’Reilly (of O’Reilly Media) met with Dale Dougherty of Media Live International in 2004. Out of that meeting the term ‘Web 2.0’ was born.

The definition that Tim O’Reilly gives for Web 2.0 is: "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them."

Web 2.0 can be viewed as an upgrade to the World Wide Web. It is still the web but it is a new and improved version of the web.

New technologies such as blogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts and RSS feeds are just a few of the technologies that are helping to shape and direct Web 2.0.

The Web before the dot com crash is often referred to as Web 1.0 now but only since the coining of the term Web 2.0.

Some of the more obvious difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 are: DoubleClick replaced by Google AdSense, Britannica Online replaced by Wikipedia, Personal Web Pages replaced by Blogs, Content Management Systems replaced by Wikis and Directories replaced by Tagging.

These are only a very few of the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 but they are major ones.

You will notice, if you look carefully that the commonality of many of the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that Web 1.0 was driven and controlled by the ‘powers-that-be’ and Web 2.0 is driven by users.

That is a huge difference and the one that is making Web 2.0 more and more user friendly not to mention more and more profitable for just average people. You might even call it a power shift of seismic proportions.

Once the websites that could be accessed on the Internet were built and controlled by only a few and were certainly not ‘interactive’ but today anybody with an idea, a few dollars and just a little know-how can build a Web 2.0 website that is completely interactive and turn it into a money-making enterprise if they choose to.

The technology is there. It is easy to use. It is accessible and it is relatively cheap....some of it is even free.

Many websites that started out as static websites are now adding features like blogs and forums and propelling themselves into the future of Internet commerce. Those websites who continue be ‘old hat’ are falling further and further behind.

Just regular people now expect to be able to ask questions and get answers from websites and they expect websites to be at least somewhat interactive. The Internet has always been and still is a platform for information but with Web 2.0 is has also become a platform for participation.

Let’s look at just a few of the innovations of Web 2.0 and how these innovations have changed the way that all of use the World Wide Web:

Blogs: Blog is a term that is derived from the blending of the two words ‘web’ and ‘log’....Blog. Fairly early in the history of the World Wide Web people could build personal web pages. It is true that not many people did build personal webpages but it was, nonetheless, possible.

Still, these personal webpages were static websites. The owner of the website could post information about himself or his interests but others could only read the information that the owner of the website posted.

He could keep an online journal that he could allow others to read but it was ‘read only’.

Then along came technology. Blogging software was developed. Now those who had personal websites could not only post about themselves, but they could allow their visitors to comment on what had been posted or ask questions. It was a huge advancement.

Because of that technology, today blogging is very big business.

People visit and post to blogs all over the Internet about any and every subject that they are interested in and the owners of these blogs have figured out that they can make their blogs very, very profitable indeed.

Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking is more or less a by-product of blogging but it is based on the same basic technology.

Social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, allow their users to upload their own favorite site bookmarks so that everybody else in the world can see and use those bookmarks.

When a user uploads his favorite site bookmarks into his online account, a backlink is created to that site. When enough people click on the link, the site that has been book marked gets indexed and gains a rank by search engines.

It is a form of user driven advertisements that is far more successful than any kind of paid-for advertising can ever be.

There are a great many social bookmarking sites on the Internet now and new software is being developed all the time that makes these sites more and more productive as advertising tools and traffic driving tools.

Wiki: A short definition of Wiki is “Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.”

In short Wiki technology allows editing of material posted on a website by the poster or by others.

The best example of Wiki technology is action on the Internet is Wikipedia. In the old Web 1.0 way to doing things the owner of a website had full control over all material that was posted to the website and only website owners could edit material posted on the website.

With the advent of Web 2.0 that idea has gone the way of the horse and buggy.

RSS Feed: The acronym RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is yet another Web 2.0 feature that allows the web to be driven by people rather than by the powers-that-be. Those who use RSS content use reader or aggregator technology. Users subscribe to these feeds.

The reader or aggregator then checks the user’s website and when the site has new content, it is picked up and sent to the user. That is a rather simplified explanation but that is basically how it works.

A client based reader or aggregator is a stand-alone program that is attached to an existing program such as a web browser or an email reader.

A web-based reader or aggregator makes the user’s feeds available on any computer with web access.

Podcasts or Webcasts: As broadband internet connect connections and wireless networks become more and more common throughout the entire world, the podcast or webcast is gaining in popularity.

While people do still read, they are better at looking and listening to information thanks to television, hence, the advent of podcasts or webcasts.

You can find and tune into podcasts or webcasts on almost any subject imaginable today. Those who have blogs are making use of this technology to sell products and to promote their websites in record numbers.

Web 2.0 is definitely here to stay and those who are still trying to do things the old Web 1.0 way are falling behind this wave of today and of the future. Will there be changes to Web 2.0?

Well, of course, there will be. Web 2.0 is fluid and it is every changing. New technology will be developed and as it is developed people will use it. People are, after all, the driving force of Web 2.0.

And, you might ask, just who will benefit the most from Web 2.0? It will be those who embrace the new technologies as they become available and it will be us...all of us.

The internet no longer belongs to the few and the privileged. Big business has lost its edge. The Internet and Web 2.0 has leveled the playing field.

All of us (you, me and all those who have access to the Internet) can now compete and win.

Blogging

Blogging is hot right now. It might even be called a buzz word. But it is also the wave of the future for Internet marketing. ‘Blog’ is a term that is actually a combination of two common words.

Those two common words are ‘web’ and ‘log’. They have been combined into the term ‘blog’ which is short for web log.

Blogging is the result of the use of the new technology that collectively makes what is known today and Web 2.0. You will see the term “Web 2.0 websites” used frequently but what exactly does that term mean?

Back in the murky, dusty past of the Internet (a few years ago) in 2001, there was a happening that is now referred to as the dot com bust. People who had a great deal of technical know-how built websites, promoted them and made millions on speculative ideas that were not founded in reality.

The internet was a one-way street. Those who had the technical know-how to build websites posted what they wanted their readers to know and nothing more. The Internet was a relatively new thing and people bought into this one-way communication but only for a short few years.

Fortunes were made and lost overnight. There are those who blame the dot com bust on nothing more than technological break through....and it could be that they are right.

As technological advances started making building websites easier and easier, more and more people built websites and jumped on the Internet marketing bandwagon.

They began sending out millions and millions of unsolicited marketing emails daily. These emails were known as SPAM.

SPAM got so bad that the Congress of the United States actually passed the CAN SPAM act in late 2001 and it became the law of the land in early 2002. This was actually the final puncture to the already deflating Internet bubble that let the rest of the air out.

Internet marketers were required to get permission from recipients before they could send out marketing emails and many of the companies couldn’t survive the blow. Those who did began building opt-in lists.

Opt-in lists are a big part (maybe the biggest part) of all successful Internet marketing operations that are alive and well today and that need for an opt-in list is not ever going to go away but it has been supplemented.

It has been supplemented by blogs. Now Internet marketers who have blogs can give potential opt-in list members the one thing they all want...a voice.

Blogs are now discussed in the same breath and given equal weight among successful Internet marketers as opt-in lists.

You can, of course, have one without the other but it is of far greater advantage to have both and a blog is one of the best ways available to build a long and impressive opt-in list.

People have been keeping journals of course for centuries but the Internet version of journal keeping that we call blogging is far different. Rather than it being just the details of a personal life or the musings of a single person, blogging is more a source of shared information today.

Blogs are dedicated to specific topics. These topics are as varied as the people who have blogs. Let’s make up a fictional blog website and see how it works.

The owner of this travel blog might post the details of trips that they have taken, invite questions but those planning on making similar trips, and provide information about products and services for which they are affiliate marketers.

We all know that website traffic is one of the keys that unlocks successful Internet marketing. The secret of creating an astounding amount of traffic to a blog website is social bookmarking.

There are many social bookmarking sites on the Internet. These sites allow users to upload their favorites to lists where others can click on the links in those lists. Users are able to categorize their lists and create tags for each link within their lists.

Each time another user clicks on a link in a user’s list a back link is created. As the back links multiply, indexing is accelerated.

Many of those who have created very successful (and profitable) blogs make use of such Web 2.0 advancements as RSS feeds, podcasts and webcasts to enhance and promote their blog websites.

Blog software is often part of web services but it can also be purchased separately at very low rates.

When a blog is created by a user there are many choices that must be made. The first and most obvious choice is the topic of the blog. For those who plan to monetize their blog, the choice of topic is a very critical one.

If a user is already an active Internet marketer in a particular niche market, then the choice is easy but if a user is only just beginning in Internet marketing, the choice of a topic can be a lot more difficult.

Research is necessary. It is important to choose a market that is viable. There simply will not be much money made from a topic like under water basket weaving.

One of the better ways to research and find a viable topic is by visiting other blog sites and forum sites on the Internet.

You might consider going to one of the social bookmarking sites like Delicious to find out what others are concerned about or topics for which they are seeking information.

Once a topic has been selected the next step is to actually build a blog. There are many web hosting companies out there and many of them offer blogging capabilities.

There are even web hosting companies who specialize in blogging websites. One of the better known ones is Word Press but there are a great many others out there.

There was a time when only gurus could build websites. It was necessary to be proficient in the use of HTML among many other things but that is simply no longer the case.

Web 2.0 technology now allows even novices who have never even thought of building their own website to do exactly that and to do it very quickly and very efficiently.

There are, of course, some things that one needs to know but these are things that are very easily learned and there are even blog websites that teach you how to build a blog website.

Once a blog website is up and running, then it is important to get the search engine spiders to visit the site so that it can become indexed and appear in searches made on search engine sites. This is the place where social bookmarking comes into play.

There is software out there that makes it very, very easy to list your site with many social bookmarking sites all at the same time. It can be done quickly and easily.

Owners of blog sites have learned to help each other in a sense. They can ping one another’s sites and create back links for both sites that are picked up by the search engine spiders.

Web 2.0 websites are user driven unlike the old Web 1.0 sites. The owner of the blog does have control of content but he also allows visitors to his blog website to add content and some even allow content to be edited by users.

Where Web 1.0 websites were constructed so that information and ideas flowed only one way (from the website to the visitor), Web 2.0 websites allow for information to flow two ways.

Many even brand new blog website builders use RSS feeds, podcasts and webcasts to enhance their blog websites. Of course people still read but people also like to get information via audio and video.

Bloggers don’t even have to record their own audio and video products. There are websites out there which will supply audio and video products...some of these are even free of charge.

The old idea that a blog is simply a web log or a journal are a little behind the curve. Blogs today are far more than that. Today’s blogs are rich with information that is constantly changing.

You can find very active blogs that discuss controversial topics like politics and religion and you can also find blogs that are dedicated to nothing but pure pleasure like travel, fishing, hunting, gold, sewing, needlecrafts, boating, etc.

There are blogs that are devoted to business concerns. There are blogs about blogs. It would not be likely that you could think of a topic that holds any interest for human beings in general and not be able to find more than a few blogs that are currently discussing them.

Yes, blogging is a buzz word and it is a ‘hot’ topic of today but it is also the wave of the future where Internet marketing is concerned.

Find a topic that you are interested in...even passionate about....and go out there and start your very own blog. If you construct the site well and if you pursue social bookmarking, you can begin to create your own online empire.

Social Bookmarking

What is Social Bookmarking?
 According to Wikipedia, social bookmarking is defined as: “Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others.

Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others - a personal knowledge management tool.”

Actually, the idea was first launched back in 1996 as ‘itlist’. Other similar sites quickly followed but that all went belly-up with the dot-com bubble bust in 2001. The idea is new again now with the advent of Web 2.0 and this time around it is thriving.

Who is Using Social Bookmarking?

In a word....everybody! Researchers have found social bookmarking sites to be an invaluable tool as they conduct research and find the need to share information about research with their colleagues.

Professionals like doctors, lawyers and engineers are using social bookmarking services in record numbers.

But social bookmarking is far more than simply a tool for research. People from all walks of like are using social bookmarking.

Users of popular websites like Friendster, FacE-Book and MySpace have found that it is very easy to share information about websites that they find to be of mutual interest.

Networks of friends can be set up so that whenever a new posting is made to a social networking site other members of the network are notified immediately by RSS feed.

With all of this instant communication happening, you can see why those who are involved in Internet marketing are very much in touch with social bookmarking sites.

These innovative marketers join such sites as Friendster, FacE-Book or MySpace and while they are having a lot of fun, they are also selling their products and services.

They are getting visitors to their websites. They are improving their PageRank. They have found that social bookmarking is one of the very best search engine optimization tools that have come along in a very long time.

How Does Social Bookmarking Work?

The basic concept of Web 2.0 is that it is user-directed and social bookmarking is a part of Web 2.0 so it is, of course, user directed. Social bookmarking is a way of organizing and categorizing information with the use of ‘tags’.

Tags are user generated and are based upon key words that identify the bookmark so this is a true user-directed way that information is organized and categorized.

When a bookmarked site is clicked on, the social bookmarking site identifies the person who created the bookmark and provides access to other sites that the same user has bookmarked.

Now, the person who created the bookmark and the tag is also provided information about how many times the link has been clicked on as well as who clicked on it.

This system makes it very easy for like-minded people to make social connections and to identify others who have the same interests. Over time a community of users develops.

As a community of users develops, they sometimes develop a very unique set of key words that define resources of common interest. These unique sets of keywords have come to be referred to as ‘folksonomy’.

Wikipedia defines the term, folksonomy as: “Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories.

In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams.”

How will Social Bookmarking Impact the Web?

Actually, it is pretty clear right now that social bookmarking is having a huge impact on the way that information is being classified, categorized, stored and exchanged.

It is impossible to believe that in the future the impact will be even stronger. Web 1.0 was static but Web 2.0 is fluid. The face is ever changing.

The technology that social bookmarking is based upon is really rather simple...there isn’t anything complex about it. It is user friendly. The level of knowledge needed to gain huge benefits from social bookmarking is low.

People do not have to be computer gurus to make use of the technology at all. The technology is so simple and the system is so easy to use that it will continue to grow in popularity into the foreseeable future.

Because of this inevitable growth of social bookmarking and the easily used tagging of such things as multimedia files, it may well be just as inevitable that the design and function of databases themselves will also change drastically.

They may have to change just to be able to accommodate this new way of managing information.

How is Social Bookmarking Affecting Education?

Teaching and learning are the two components of education. The objective of transferring information and knowledge from one person to another person or a group of persons is being greatly affected by social bookmarking.

The exchange of information and the coming together of like-minded individuals into loosely knitted online communities are both impacting education as a whole.

For so many centuries education suffered from slow communication. Today the internet itself has greatly speeded up communication and social bookmarking has doubled that speed in the last few years.

Social bookmarking has created a method whereby bibliographies, papers, etc. can be easily and quickly shared and accessed by multiple people at the same time. These same resources can be altered or edited in real time.

Why is Social Bookmarking Important to Internet Marketing?

There are several ways in which social bookmarking is having an affect on internet marketing. It would be hard to determine just which effect is having the greatest impact.

The ability to create tags using key words which social bookmarking sites allow is very attractive to internet marketers.

It didn’t take the internet marketing community long to figure out that these links and the backlinks that are created when the links are added to other favorites lists cause search engine spiders to visit websites and that PageRank can be dramatically increased along with the number of visitors to a website.

The more visitors, as any internet marketer worth his salt knows, means more sales of products and services.

So social bookmarking sites provide free advertisement, increase the number of visitors to a website and are a great search engine optimization tool to boot.

Another asset that internet marketers quickly became aware of that social bookmarking sites provide is that they are great research tools in and of themselves.

For example: a website owner might find that a ‘sailing’ tag is also associated with a ‘boat repair’ tag. That information can open doors for business expansion.

Is There a Down Side to Social Bookmarking?

If there is an up-side, you can bet there is always a down-side for anything and everything and social bookmarking is not the exception to that rule.

The very fact that social bookmarking is user driven is one of the potential down sides of it. Users are not professionals. Users are just people and the ability to use social bookmarking sites for fun as well as for profit does not require a great deal of technical knowledge.

As a matter of fact, it requires almost none. And because users are ‘amateurs’ (for lack of a better word), key words used in tags are not consistent. The information is sometimes scattered and key words that seem logical to amateurs don’t necessarily lead to related topics.

Yet another potential down-side and one that is happening more and more frequently is that users are abusing the system. Since it is a user driven system it is more susceptible to abuse and misuse.

There are spammers out there that are bookmarking the same site multiple times.

The idea, of course, is that the more times the link appears the better the search engine spiders like it and the more apt the link is to be clicked on and the more apt it is that the site will be visited.

More visitors always equal more sales of products and services.

What is The Bottom Line of Social Bookmarking?

The bottom line is that social bookmarking is here and it is here to stay. People are using social bookmarking sites to make social connections as well as to form communities.

From the internet marketing point of view, social bookmarking is a tool that can be used to increase search engine optimization, the number of website visitors and ultimately increase sales but there is also the possibility of the system being abused.

Like everything else...the more social bookmarking is abused, the less effective it will become.

Internet marketers are learning that they can have a lot of fun by using sites like MySpace, FacE-Book and Friendster and social bookmarking sites and make a lot of money in the process. It’s what is known as a win/win situation and one that internet marketers are flocking to in droves.

Social Networking

Social networking isn’t a new phenomenon. It wasn’t invented in the twenty-first century. Every Elks Lodge, Lions Club, Chamber of Commerce, Church, Sewing Circle, Book Club, etc. that ever existed afforded an opportunity for social networking. Some social networking groups are secretive.

They have passwords and secret signals that help one member identify another member. Others may be more open but they are aware of who is and who is not a member in good standing of the social networking group.

The members of any social networking group identify with and help other members of their group. They provide information to one another that is mutually beneficial.

They tell each other when something of interest or something of concern in happening that is interest to or a threat to their particular social network and the members collectively pursue the interest or ward off the threat.

These social networking groups can be either very close knit or very loosely organized or even have no apparent organizational structure at all. The organization is of a great deal less importance to the members than the benefits that each gains from it.

Many times social networking groups are work related.

For example: you have very likely heard of the way that law enforcement personnel stick together and ‘watch each other’s backs’ so to speak.

This social networking group is often referred to as ‘the long blue line’.

Another work related social networking group is long distance truck drivers. By using their CB radios, they stay in contact with one another and warn each other of road hazards. If one of them has a problem, others go to his or her aid.

No, social networking was not invented in the twenty-first century and it didn’t come into being with the advent of the personal computer.

It has been around probably since the beginning of time in some form or another but the advent of the personal computer certainly put a new spin on social networking. Web 2.0 has really kicked social networking up several notiches.

No longer is social networking limited to people who work at the same jobs or who live in the same communities. Social networking is now world wide and easily accessible to everyone who has access to a computer and an internet connection.

It all started with the advent of instant messaging technology but it has grown far beyond that limited ability. With instant messaging it was necessary to let others see your email address and so you lost much of your anonymity.

In today’s Web 2.0 world, social networking and complete anonymity are both possible.

The online dating sites are a very good example of this compatibility. People can register and pay for memberships on online dating sites and conduct an entire relationship for many months without either party knowing the other party’s real name, ISP email address or the name of the city in which they live.

All communication is conducted on the online dating website itself thus affording both social networking and anonymity.

There are Web 2.0 websites that are dedicated to nothing BUT social networking. One of the better known ones among the younger set is MySpace but there are at least a hundred different social networking sites on the internet and probably a lot more that that.

Web 2.0 social networking sites are divided in many different ways.

There are social networking sites that are dedicated to specific ethnicities; BlackPlanet.com is for African Americans, Babbello is for Australian teenagers, FaceBox is for European young adults, Gronco.net is for Poland, iWiW is for Hungary, Migente.com is for Latinos, Mixi is for Japan are just a few examples.

Social networking sites are also divided sometimes by interests. For example you can find such social networking sites as CarDomain for car enthusiasts, Flickr for photo sharing, Gaia for gamers, Gopets for virtual pets, Joga Bonita for football or soccer, or Last.fm for music.

These are only a very few example. There are a great many more.

Most social networking sites, however, are not dedicated to a specific group. They are general membership sites and the members themselves divide themselves into appropriate groups according to interests and compatibility.

Almost all of the social networking sites are free to join. There are just a few that have membership fees. The site owners make their money from advertisers rather than from users. A few sites are only open to those who have been invited to join by other members.

Most of these social networking sites provide you with your own blog when you join the site. You can make posts to your blog and you can invite others to post to your blog. The trick here is to also use the social bookmarking sites and upload links to your blog posts into them with the appropriate tags containing key words.

The blogs on social networking sites are in addition to and not a replacement for blogs on your own website if you are an internet marketer and the social bookmarking sites should be used to upload links to both blogs.

Social networking is easy and it is fun. It is a way that you can enhance your online business and have a lot of fun in the process. You can meet some of your very best potential customers on social networking sites. You can make friends and influence people as well.

It has long been a well established fact that more business is actually conducted in social settings than in offices.

More deals are made on golf courses than in board rooms in the real world and more sales are made through the use of social networking sites on the Internet than through all of the paid-for advertising combined.

People HATE commercials but they don’t mind hearing their friends recommend a product or service. Not only do they not mind...they even go to a lot of trouble to seek out that information.

In addition to being a great way to advertise a business social networking sites are also a great research tool and one that should never be overlooked. Rather than having to conduct a lot of expensive and time-consuming surveys for example, you can simply look through a social networking site and find out exactly what people are thinking about.
You can find out what their problems are and what measures they are taking to solve those problems. You can find out what their interests are and how they go about pursuing those interests.

By using social networking sites as research tools, you can likely get more and better information in a single hour and for free than you could get by spending hours on sending out surveys and trying to decipher the results.

One very interesting social networking site is called 43 things. That is the name of the site. On this social networking site people list their goals and then other people with similar goals discuss how to best achieve those goals.

Some goals that have been listed are ‘learn a foreign language, be a good parent, improve my memory, get in shape, lose weight, be a better gardener and the list just goes on and on.

As a research tool it would be hard to beat 43 things to find out what people are interested in and concerned about.

Web 2.0 is great! It is driven by those who actually USE the internet and not by people who are sitting behind desks at large companies and who are out of touch with the real world.

Social networking is simply a group of like-minded people exchanging information that is of mutual interest. That is all it is and all it has ever been.

It is important that when you are using social networking sites that you remember this and conduct yourself accordingly.

If you join a site and start just posting blatant advertisements, you are not going to be doing social networking.

You are simply doing advertising...which people hate. If you establish yourself as part of a group, then you are social networking and you will find that those who are members of your online social circle are the best help you can find anywhere.

Social networking is valuable in and of itself but it can be made doubly valuable by using social networking in conjunction with social bookmarking.

Join a social networking website. Find a group of people who are interested in the topic of your website but don’t start out advertising that.

Make posts to your own blog on the social networking sites as well as to the blogs of others. Add those links to your social bookmarking account. Be certain that you use the appropriate key words in those tags otherwise they are worthless.

Altogether this is an excellent marketing strategy. It is a way to market your website and your products or services and have a lot of fun at the same time. You will meet people that you really do like and even admire and respect.

Friendships are not made for the purpose of profiting from them but they usually are profitable.

Audio/Video/Podcasting

Why do I Need Audio, Video or Podcasting on My blog?
Successful internet businesses all depend upon one common factor. That common factor is traffic. Traffic equals sales. Sales equal profit.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a successful business must make sales and a profit and in order to make sales and profit it is essential that there are customers.

Getting website traffic is exactly what all the fuss is about when marketers are discussing SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

The higher a site ranks in the search results that search engines provide to those using key words to find products and services, the more visitors will visit. More visitors = more sales = more profits. It is just as simple as that.

Blogs have proven themselves to be very, very useful tools in the drive to creating more and better website traffic. People love blogs. Web 2.0 is built upon the idea of a user driven web and users want a voice.

Blogs give them that voice. It is a simple technology and it can even be found free on the internet. If you don’t have a blog site or a blog on your website, you are simply missing the SEO boat.

The popularity of blogs has, of course, increased the number of blogs on the Internet many fold over this last year or so.

With the increase in numbers of blogs online comes an increase in competition for visitors to those blogs and, of course, stiffer competition for PageRank by search engines.

So, the question, “Why do I need audio/video/podcasting on my blog?” is one that can be answered rather easily. You want visitors. You want a high PageRank. You want sales and profits. That’s why.

Successful blogs are all about content. You’ve been told a million times that, on the internet, content is king and it is true. Search engine spiders consider content as one of the factors that determine page rank and there are two parts to content that are considered.

The first is how often the content changes. This is why it is very important that posts be made to blogs every single day...multiple posts are better than one long post. Key-work density is the other content factor that is considered by search engine spiders.

Links found on the Internet to your website by search engine spiders is another factor that determines PageRank. That is the reason you should always make use of social bookmarking sites and add the links to your blog posts.

Each time you make a post the search engine spiders count it but the number of links to that post is even more important.

You can create one link but when others pick that link up and add it to their own favorite’s lists more links are created for search engine spiders to count.

You probably already knew those things but did you know that the duration of visits to your site is also considered? Most visits to websites last thirty seconds or less. You can even actually see this statistic in the web-stats for your blog or website.

Search engine spiders like for visitors to websites to stay longer than thirty seconds and you like that, as well. The fact is the longer a visitor stays on your website, the better the chance is that he will make a purchase.

That begs the question, ‘how do I get them to stay longer than thirty seconds?’ The answer to that one is audio/video/podcasts. It is a very simple calculation.

If a visitor is watching a video that lasts for say two minutes, how long will they stay on your site? Two minutes! Videos and podcasts are mesmerizing.

When a visitor begins to watch either, they will stay awhile. Search engine spiders love that and the longer they stay, the longer they are exposed to your advertisements for products and services that you sell. The longer they see the advertisements, the more likely they are to make a purchase.

Now you should be aware of the fact that search engine spiders cannot ‘read’ audio and video content.

That is audio/video is not going to aid you in search engine optimization but it will help with the length of the visits made to your website.

The fact that search engine spiders can’t ‘read’ audio and video content also eliminates the duplicate content problem.

How do I get audio and video for my blog?

Just to set your mind at ease right away, you don’t have to shoot your own video or record your own audio.

You can do that, of course, if you want to and if you have the equipment and the know-how but you really don’t have to.

There are an abundance of sites on the internet that will happily (and freely) provide video and audio for you. All you have to do is download them, upload them to your site and tag them. That is pretty much it.

Google has videos that you can use. The link is right there on the Google search page. Recently Google purchased YouTube for a reported one point six billion dollars.

You can find free videos there on almost any topic that you can imagine and likely a few topics that you would hope to never imagine.

You can find videos on topics that are related to the topic of your website or your blog that will be of interest to your visitors and when visitors are watching videos they aren’t surfing away from your site.

How Do I Get Podcasts For My Blog?

Now, podcasts you do have to create yourself. The good news is that is a fairly simple process that can be done without a lot of technical knowledge or ability.

The term ‘podcast’ was actually coined by Ben Hammersley in the Guardian on February 2004. The word is a blend of the two words, ‘ipod’ and ‘broadcast’ but you don’t have to have an ipod to see a podcast or even to create a podcast.

Very simply; podcasting is a way to publish audio and video online which lets software automatically find and download new broadcasts over a period of time by using RSS feeds that contain a link to the multimedia broadcast file.

You can create and publish your own audio program or video program or audio/video program and feed them to your audience who can then listen to or view them when they have to time or are so inclined.

With nothing more than a personal computer, some software and a webcam if you are doing video, anybody can create a podcast and publish it. It isn’t rocket science.

What Will My Blog Visitors Think About Audio, Video or Podcasts?

The short answer is that they are going to love them. A term that is sometimes used is ‘User Enhancement Optimization’.

You know what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is but it is possible that UEO (User Enhancement Optimization) is equally or maybe even more important.

Remember...it is all about content. Content is what keeps a visitor on your website and content is what makes them make return visits to your website. It is a well known fact that purchases are seldom made on initial website visits.

A customer will likely return to the website up to seven times before he actually drags out his credit card and buys something.

You have to get them to come to your website for that first crucial visit but keeping them making return visits is just as important.

I can’t really think of a better way to keep them coming back that giving them something as attention getting as audio or video or podcasts. Can you?

While it is true that people do read blog posts, we are a nation that is more geared toward audio and video than toward the written word.

We watch television...a lot. One picture really is worth more than a thousand words in today’s technologically centered world.

Web 2.0 has created an internet that is user driven. The users are the ones who determine the success or failure of an internet business.

They are the determining factor of the way that websites are constructed. It once was said over and over that ‘the customer is always right’. That is still true but in the Web 2.0 world of internet marketing, the user is not only right, he is in charge.

Web surfers no longer simply go to websites to read information. They go to websites to GET information and the love for that information to be delivered in audio and/or video formats.

Your blog website has got to be outstanding. It has got to be original. It has to give the user a reason to visit in the first place and a reason to return often.

Think content, content, content and SEO as well as UEO and you can make your blog website successful. Audio, video and podcasts are the quickest, easiest and most efficient way to reach that goal.

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Profit Funnel Ideas

Cool Low Ticket, Mid Ticket and High Ticket Product Ideas That You Can Create And Profit From!

Profit Funnel Ideas

Profit Funnel Ideas , The Profit Funnel Plan

A quick overview on how a successful Online Business Profit Funnel looks like – and how you can model your Online Business after it!

Low Ticket Product Ideas
Earn your prospect’s trust quickly at LOW risks and HIGH volumes with these amazing low ticket product ideas that you can quickly and easily develop for your own!

Mid Ticket Product Ideas
Make more money from your repeat customers, establish substantial credibility and expand your product empire!

High Ticket Product Ideas
The true vehicle to massive riches as used by TOP Internet Marketers and Online Gurus from around the planet!

In Closing: What Is Your Ideal Profit Strategy?
How to put these ideas into action for maximum results!

Cool Low Ticket, Mid Ticket and High Ticket Product Ideas That You Can Create And Profit From!

Nothing warms the cockles of a salesperson more than getting a new client. Often you are able to secure that new client because you have a quality core good or service that is provided at a competitive price.

While you may not make a great deal off that initial offering, there will no doubt be the chance to build on your initial rapport with your new client and engage in the task many sales people know as “up-selling.”

That is where the concept of the Profit Tunnel comes into play.

The Profit Tunnel is your pathway to building a relationship with your customer that begins with the purchase of initial goods or services. Once that initial relationship is established, you build on that relationship by evaluating the needs of your client and identify other goods or services that will also benefit your customer.

As you are able to acquaint, interest, and finally sell additional and often higher priced items to your customer, your profit margin will increase. The Profit Tunnel model works very well whether you are working with a brick and mortar business or going strictly with an online presence.

In both instances, the task involves winning the confidence of the prospect, identifying entry level products or services that will be of interest to the prospect, selling the prospect on the goods or services, and then continuing to offer additional products or enhancements that will make life even easier for that former prospect that is now your customer.


Low Ticket

When it comes to winning the confidence of a prospect, nothing speaks louder than a good deal. Persons who are responsible for securing goods and services for their employer love to save the company money.

 It enhances his or her reputation with the officers and owners. At the same time, no one wants to end up with a low cost service that ends up being a dud. This means the good or service needs to perform well along with being cost efficient.

Your job is to match low cost quality goods or services with the business type of your prospect. Once you demonstrate how one of your low cost offerings will consistently outperform the competition and save money for the prospect’s employer, you will be poised to help roll out your low cost offering throughout the organization, making your profit in volume distribution initially.

Once your offering is functioning throughout the organization, you may find that not only do you have the ear of your initial contact, but now you have the ability to interact with persons throughout the organization that may be interested in other offerings that you can supply.

Providing additional goods or services that are in a similar price range will be another way you will increase the profit margin. This is sometimes referred to as lateral selling.

Simply put, you are not really pushing items with a higher price tag, or even enhancements to services you have already sold which would increase the profits. You are simply broadening your current situation to include more of the same, from a charge perspective.

There is nothing wrong with lateral selling. In fact, it can be quite profitable. However, in time it reaches a point where there is no more room for more of the same and you need to move on to the next level.

Mid Ticket

Now safely ensconced with several low cost offerings, you can begin to look at other needs of your customer. Chances are you have goods or services that may be used on a less frequent basis, but carry a higher price tag.

With your low cost items working just fine for your client, you will easily be able to gain attention for these mid priced offerings.

As part of your presentation, it is important to demonstrate not only what you have to offer today, but also be prepared to present the attributes of the offering in such a way that your client can begin to brainstorm possibly uses within the organization.

You may want to have one or two ideas ready, just to prime the thinking process, if necessary. But the more your client can come up with possible uses, the greater his ownership of using the mid ticket item will become, and the closer you will be to another sale.

Be prepared to have to wait until the timing is right to spring your mid ticket item on your client. If the item is only going to be used a few times a year, the interest level may not be there until the time is growing near for the next relevant event.

By all means introduce the item but if your client wants to put off the discussion until closer to time, lock in a date and time to renew the discussions.

High Ticket – Extremely High Ticket

The dream of selling high ticket good or services is often the goal of the salesperson. After all, who would not love to be able to sell five thousand dollar items in one afternoon, rather than spend the entire week selling hundred dollar items in order to make the same commission?

Of course, you want to be on the alert for any chance to introduce and sell a high ticket item.

You have a couple of things going for you at this point in your relationship with your client.

First, there is the matter of the proven track record of the low ticket and mid ticket offerings they have already tried and found to be great for their business operations. Nothing breeds confidence in a supplier the way that an ongoing record of excellence will.

Second, you have demonstrated a continual desire to bring their attention to goods or services that have relevance to the business. You are not laying your entire product line out on the table and asking them to figure out what they need. You are someone who does the legwork first and then brings items to their attention. That you care enough to understand their business and do some legwork on their behalf says a lot about your integrity.

What his means for you is that when you call your contact about arranging a demonstration of a high ticket item, you are already more than halfway to making a sale. The attitude will not be “prove this is worth my time,” but “let’s find out how we can use this.”

When you go into a live or virtual demonstration with your client working with that type of mindset, your chances of closing the sale are very high indeed.

The Profit Tunnel helps you understand that your relationship with your client works on several levels and in several phases.

Building upon the sterling reputation you establish with low ticket sales and rolling it into the sale of more profitable sales will not only ensure you a great commission, but also will provide you with a working relationship that will last for many years.

Low Ticket Product Ideas

When you think in terms of low ticket products or services, you are talking about items that usually carry no more than a $27.00 price tag. The most common average range for a low ticket item would be in the $5.00 to $9.95 range.

There are many of online and brick and mortar businesses that consider low ticket items to be the bread and butter of the business, the way that you keep the lights on every month.

Of course, in order for those low ticket items to keep a steady flow of basic revenue, there is the need to promote your offerings and entice new clients to give them a try. Here are a few ideas that may help you promote your low ticket offerings to fresh faces.

Special Reports

Spotlighting the low ticket items that are your biggest sellers to a wide range of customer demographics is a great way to get the attention of prospects.

A special report is going to essentially focus on two things: first, this is a product or service that has is being successfully used by hundreds of thousands of people right this very minute.

Second, this product or service can make a big impact in the quality of your life and work. Once you have it, you will not understand how you ever got along without it.

These types of special report promotions are meant to spotlight all the positive attributes of your offering. You want to talk about the great performance, the low maintenance, and of course the low price.

One thing that can help dress up a special report is charts and relevant graphics. Most people are visual in the way they relate to the world, so using a simple chart to illustrate a point, or inserting some other type of visual that is related to the subject matter will help to enhance and hold the attention of the reader.

Testimonials from current clients also are a big part of a successful special report. If at all possible, vary the industry types that are represented in your testimonials.

The broader the use of your offering in various parts of the business world, the more likely a prospect is to see the need to investigate a little more closely.

Special reports are relatively easy to produce and extremely cost effective to have available. The content can be used in a direct mail piece that can be reproduced cheaply.

The special report can be posted online, with a unique URL that can then be distributed far and wide by both manual and electronic means. The result is an effective promotional tool that has a very lost cost to create and has the potential to yield big returns in a very short time.

 Short Audio Sessions

 Have you ever listened to those short audio clips that are on many web sites? They often are informative and can spur people to look more closely at a product or service.

Short audio sessions are not anything new. For decades, businesses have employed fifteen-second audio sessions to promote their products while callers were on hold, waiting to speak with a customer service rep.

Theater owners have employed them to get in a plug for concessions that are sold in the theater lobby. Who among us have not heard a short audio session while in the grocery store or in a discount retail store?

Given the history of the success of short audio sessions, it is no wonder that they are also working on the Internet as well.

To a degree, a short audio session makes the sales process via the Internet a little more personal, as the prospect hears a human voice. That alone makes the session an appealing way to reach a certain part of the populace.

Of course, a successful short audio session is going to be to the point and informative. It will give the prospect enough to ensure he or she will progress to the next level and seriously consider the offering, rather than simply scanning some text and moving on to another web site.

Settle on the subject for the session, make is crisp, clear, and easy to understand. Then shut up before you get too wordy.

Trial Membership Offers

Everybody wants to get a bargain, but there are those that will sit on the fence forever before making a decision. A trial membership offer can be just what you need to get them to commit.

There are several things that are very attractive to a prospect. Among them are:

•  There is no long-term commitment. If I don’t like what I see during the trial period, I simply move on.
• I don’t have to pay full price. Most trial offers will be at a discount, so very little revenue is invested.
• The trial offer gives me the chance to test drive and show the offering to other people who would be using it. I can find out up front if they see any advantages to using this new offering.
• This gives me the chance to think of questions that should be answered before a commitment is made. I may think of something while in the trial period that I would not think of during a simple demonstration.

If you offer a trial membership, make sure you provided specific terms, as well as a way for the prospect to convert the trial membership into a full membership at any time during the trial.

Trial Software Offers

If software is involved in your product or service offering, you may also want to provide a demonstration version of the software that is good for a limited amount of time. Think in terms of some of the free electronic trail games you can download.

Many of them will allow the player to access and start a new game session for a specific number of times before the software becomes inoperative and they player will have to purchase the full version in order to continue.

Trial software should be representative of what the full version does, but you want to make sure that the software cannot be reconfigured to get around the limited time usage.

This is not a difficult task for anyone who develops software; all you will need to do is provide the perimeters of the trial time and you are all set.

As with the trial membership offers, you want your prospect to be able to upgrade from trial to permanent software at any point during the trial time, so make sure you include that in your package as well.

Promoting your low ticket items will keep your company moving along, providing the operating capital that you need to enhance your offerings and also develop more high priced offerings as well.

By utilizing these and similar ideas, you can effectively increase your client base without investing a huge chunk of your profits into public relations endeavors.

Mid Ticket Product Ideas

Having established yourself with some of your low ticket offerings, you will want to investigate the potential for up-selling your client by creating interest in your mid ticket products and services.

For the purposes of the discussion, you may want to think of mid ticket items as being priced in the $37.00 to $67.00 range per unit.

There are plenty of methods you can use to promote your mid ticket offerings. Here are some examples of methods that have proven track records of generating interest among existing clientele as well as garnering some attention from new customers as well.

E-Books

It seems that no matter what the type of product or service that is offered, an electronic book will be an ideal way to generate interest. Why? There are actually several levels on which an E-book attracts us. Here are three examples:

·         In spite of the hype, most of us do like to read. We will read everything from sonnets to the backs of cereal boxes.

·         E-books are easily stored. We can download them onto our hard drives and read them any time we like.

·         E-books are often free or available at a fraction of the cost of a hard copy book.

When using an E-book to promote your product line, you will most likely have it available as a free download.

Providing a few online excerpts from the book as “hooks” will entice people to take the few moments needed to download the book and will also increase the chances they will actually read it after downloading.

You may want to also give them the chance to read a few pages before they perform a download, assuming you have the bandwidth required for this sort of activity.

Another potential way to keep the relationship going is to have a sign-up page where basic contact information is collected before the download commences.

This will give you the chance to follow up on everyone that downloaded the book and perhaps close a sale very quickly, due to the obvious fact of your diligence.

Paid Membership Sites

When you run a paid membership site, one of the things you must do in order to maintain and grow your client base is provide something that makes people feel like that monthly membership fee they pay is worth the cost.

As an example, you may include a short weekly or monthly newsletter as one of the perks of being a member of the site. Don’t fill it with mindless fluff that circulates around the Internet constantly.

Make the information relevant to your customers, to your product line and most of all worth the time to read about. Use it to talk about upcoming enhancements to favorite products, do a spotlight on one of your customers and the work he or she does.

Along with the newsletter, make sure there is access to online pages that capture the attention of your customers. Perhaps you can arrange for them to download a coupon they can use locally as part of a promotion campaign.

You may supply a message board where clients can talk about how they employ the goods or services you sell. The point is to make the membership perks something that people will want to engage in often enough that they want to maintain access to those perks.

Software / Scripts

Software that fills a need with your customers can be a great thing. Depending on where you draw your majority of clients from, this can be just about anything from software that helps to catalog plants to software that helps to design a home accounting systems, to software that can be used to track sales efforts.

In short, you identify and anticipate needs within your client base and then come up with the software that will meet those needs.

Now, do you develop proprietary software or do you partner with someone and act as an agent for that partner? It all depends. If you can entering into an agreement that allows you to make a decent profit from the sale of the software and still offer it to your clientele at a price that is better than what they can get it for themselves, the answer is yes.

If you can barely get a better deal than standard retail, forget it and try to develop your own software products. If the profit is not there for you, and the savings is not there for your clients, then the project is of no value to either of you.

Keep in mind the software can cover just about any subject you want. For development ideas, why not query your current clients?

Ask them what type of software they would like to see, and what types of bells and whistles would be attractive to them. You may be surprised at how easily you can fulfill those wishes.

Audio/Video Sessions

Once upon a time, companies trained new people at large gatherings. These days, new employees attend audio and web conferences via the Internet, saving time and money to all concerned.

Audio and video sessions have applications in all sorts of ways. Did you know that there are churches that conduct Sunday School classes with audio and video links, so that members who are unable to get to the actual church can attend and participate?

One a denominational level, there is a denomination headquartered in the Mid West that broadcasts both worship and business sessions of its bi-annual denominational conference to members all over the world, via live feed and data streaming.

Audio/video sessions using the Internet can revolve around all sorts of subjects, from how to fix a flat tire to detailed sessions on fixing broken relationships. They can include travelogues to exotic and distant places, helpful guidelines in dealing with a legal matter, and even something as simple as preparing a meal in twenty minutes or less.

Persons are often willing to pay on a per access basis or even a monthly subscription to have access to these types of sessions.

Selling this sort of service is not hard at all, once you identify the sectors of the population you wish to go after. Then it is a matter of securing the types of audio/video sessions that will click with your customers and making it easy for them to connect with the sessions.

Again, you may find it cost effective to partner with someone else, or it may be in the best interests of yourself and your customers to develop the sessions in house. You can evaluate your resources and make a sound decision on which way to go.

Mid ticket items are a great way to grab both a larger chunk of per unit profit, as well as create reliable revenue streams that you can depend on from month to month. Get some input from your existing customers and develop a nice suite of mid ticket offerings. You will be glad you did.

High Ticket Product Ideas

No suite of products or services is complete without some “diamond” level of offerings that are of interest to your customers.

While these may not appeal to more than a core group of your client base, the fact that you enjoy such a strong relationship based on the performance of your low ticket and mid ticket offerings will help them to trust you with these high ticket products as well.

When you think in terms of high ticket products and services, an average of $297.00 to $997.00 is a nice average range. Of course, there is nothing with going for high ticket products that are $1,000.00 or more, depending on how they relate to your other products and the demographics of your client base.

Here are some ideas for high ticket offerings that may be a great fit with your business model.

Coaching / Mentoring

There is plenty of demand these days for professional coaches and motivational speaker. All across the country, people whose entire purpose is to inspire, instruct, and help people identify where they want to go in life are raking in very nice fees.

Motivational instructors and mentors are making their money with in person classes, but they are also doing very well with audio and visual sessions as well. Generally speaking, a class will be promoted and persons will be invited to register and pay a flat fee to attend.

Generally speaking, that fee will depend on the number of sessions that will be included in the series. Upon registration, the attendee will receive instructions on how to access the sessions via phone and/or the Internet.

The session will often allow for some degree of interaction, with the frequency and mode of interaction controlled by the mentor.

How does this relate back to your product line? Chances are you had to identify some specific applications for your offerings before you ever got your first sale. Some of your mentoring can be to help people understand how your other products save them time and money and in some cases help them to make more money and expand their business.

In a related note, if you have a number of customers who work in companies where dealing with customers is a daily thing, you can most certainly fill a void.

Among the mentoring sessions you could offer are such topics as how to defuse an angry customer, how to get a customer to tell you what is really bothering them and how to bring a former customer back into the fold.

You can draw on your own expertise as well as your experiences and come up with some motivational style mentoring classes that will be sure to be of interest to your customers.

Tele-Seminars

Like mentoring sessions, tele-seminars are something that more and more people are comfortable with. They save time, definitely cut back on travel expenses, and allow attendees to get back to work more quickly, which helps to keep productivity high around the office.

When it comes to tele-seminars, you can offer subject matter you create and host in house, or you can become a means of providing a special guest speaker for a tele-seminar. Perhaps you can snag a best selling author who has written an exciting new book on Internet marketing.

Arrange for a one time tele-seminar where the author discusses his book and entertains questions afterward. The audience will pay a flat fee to attend and have the ability to participate in the question and answer session. For additional revenue, you can make the proper arrangements to record the tele-seminar and make copies of it available after the fact.

Exclusive Membership Sites

Everyone likes to feel special. One of the easiest ways is to create and manage an exclusive membership site. You can put together something that is specifically for a select group of persons, such as CEO’s, chief financial officers, executive directors of non-profit organizations, or any niche market that is composed of people who could benefit from networking with their peers and can afford to pay a nice figure for that privilege on a monthly or annual basis.

Include in the membership discounts on items of interest such as trade magazines geared toward that market or savings on attended tele-seminars and mentoring sessions that are relevant to this exclusive group. By providing networking opportunities as well as the discounts, you can find yourself with a nice way to move high ticket offerings with no trouble at all.

Lucrative Service Such As Copywriting

Support services are something that will always make an impact with businesses. By offering to take over such tasks as writing copy for new ad campaigns or sales and marketing collateral, preparing brochures, and editing other basic types of correspondence that the company uses regularly, you can save them a bundle and make a nice bit of profit for yourself.

Here are some reasons why outsourcing to you would be advantageous, rather than keeping it all in house:

•  They do not have to pay your taxes. You are not an employee, so Payroll does not have to keep up with you.
• There are no perks such as insurance, retirement, or vacation to calculate. Working essentially as a consultant, none of these factors enter into the picture. They save money.
• The company can focus on its business without devoting a lot of resources to ancillary matters. You are dealing with all that.
• No time spent in development. They simply have to approve the finished product.

While it is true that consulting does not come cheap, it still ends up being much more cost effective than keeping someone on the payroll. Between the salary and the benefits that would be required by someone talented enough to do what you are offering to provide, you could be talking about saving tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a year.

The fact is that you can make quite a tidy profit by pitching a deal that requires an opt in payment up front, with several smaller payments as each of the action items or projects are completed. This means some immediate profit for you, with the promise of more as the tasks are finished.

When it comes to providing high ticket offerings, knowing what your resources are and how well those match up with needs within your client base will help lead you to that type of high ticket products you can provide immediately, as well as help you prepare a laundry list of others that you hope to have set up and working in a short time.

In Closing: What Is Your Ideal Profit Strategy?

When it comes to developing your ideal profit strategy, there are several things you can learn from the basic Profit Funnel. Let’s take a look at those elementary principles:
 
You Have to Start at the Beginning

Getting your foot in the door with a new customer is your top priority. We all know that they sales cycle can take a long time in some cases. But if you are going with a product or service that is relatively inexpensive and can be identified immediately with a need, then you can shorten than cycle a great deal.

Don’t worry about making a huge profit off that first sale. Just get the sale and make sure the product works right. Your reputation and your future opportunities with that client rest on providing them with a quality product as a price they are happy with.

It is for that reason that these entry-level efforts are so important. Sure, the big profit is not there, although you may end up with a nice amount of profit if you are able to move a product or service in bulk.

But make sure you see this as laying a foundation for things to come and not just the beginning and the end of your efforts with this customer. If you handle the situation right, you will soon be in a position to make a great deal more inroads with this customer.
 
Once in the Door, Look for New Opportunities

Now that you have a satisfied customer who likes what he has bought and now has a reason to trust you, the time has come to look for other ways to broaden your business dealings with your client. Identify mid level products that you can offer to your customer, helping him to get ideas about how and where in the organization they may be effective.

Let your now excellent reputation precede you as you offer enhanced services that work with the original product offering, as well as more upscale services and products that can meet other needs within that company.

Keep in mind that as you expand your presence among various contacts associated with your main contact, there will be additional opportunities to begin the same process as outlined by the Profit Funnel with them. In addition, you will find that your clients are more than happy to act as references for you once you have provided them with multiple offerings that are doing a great job for them.

Anticipate Needs that may Happen Infrequently

You may have some high level services or products that will make a great impact on something your customer does once or twice a year. This is where your rapport with your client has come in handy. You know about these opportunities because you are trusted.

As you become aware of these chances to get involved with your high level offerings, make sure to demonstrate the value that you bring to the table. It is not just that you can save them more money, and most likely in these cases a great deal of money. You also can offer them at least as good and most likely better, than they have made do with in times past.

Keep in mind that though these high ticket chances may not come your way every month, the fact is that people remember when you had a hand in making them shine to their constituency at a critical moment.

Thus, if you offered consulting services that helped your client organize a successful week long conference with persons coming from all fifty states to attend, your client will remember you very fondly and you will no doubt be called upon to provide those same services next year.

Above All, Deliver What You Promise

Always keep in mind that all the goodwill that you have built up as you moved through the low ticket to mid ticket and finally high ticket offerings can be blown completely away with one simple failure to deliver what you promised.

There used to be a saying in the movie industry about a director – he was only as good as his last picture. That is also often the case with vendors who supply goods and services as well.

You can avoid disappointing your clients by making sure you do not promise them anything that cannot be delivered immediately. Far too often, salespersons say, “yes, we can do that” knowing full well there is nothing in place currently to deliver.

The result is that those that are backing you may or may not be able to come up with a solution. If they can’t you have torpedoed your reputation with your customer, destroyed any hope of getting good word of mouth that could have opened doors for you elsewhere, and probably damaged the reputation of your company right along with your personal reputation.

Be honest about what you can provide and stay away from promising that which you know you don’t have in place right now.
 
A Final Word about the Profit Funnel

The concept of the Profit Funnel provides a common sense approach to selling. You start at this point and continue to build on that success. But don’t get the idea that you take one company through the funnel and you are done with them. Over and over again, you can use the Profit Funnel to create new contacts within an existing client, perhaps at different locations or different departments.

You may even be at several points simultaneously with one single contact, as you identify more and more opportunities within the realm of his authority. By keeping the model of the Profit Funnel in mind, you will never find yourself in the rut of going only after the lowest hanging fruit on the tree.

You will scoop up that fruit of course. But you will also continue to reach upward as you progress from one level to the next, maximizing the time and assets of your customer, making a profit for your company, and getting an ever nicer commission for yourself.

In the end, you are in complete control of developing your persona ideal profit strategy. No matter what your product or service offerings, chances are they fit the mode of the Profit Funnel. Incorporate the concept into your profit strategy and use the Funnel as a way to measure your current level of success.

You will find it an excellent tool for helping you to stay on track as you reach for your goals.

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