Up-Selling and Cross-Selling

If you’ve never heard about up-selling and cross-selling, it’s not because you’ve never experienced them. An up-sell occurs when a customer "buys more of the same." A waitress who persuades you buy fries with your hamburger is making an up-sell. So, too, is the car dealer who offers premium upgrades at a discounted price.
Cross-sells involve purchasing an item in an altogether different category from the product that you are prepared to purchase. The two categories are connected, however, because someone who wants an item in the first category probably needs products in the second one.
When I buy potted plants at my local nursery, they always ask, "Do you need potting soil to go with your new plants?" Potting soil and potted plants are two entirely different product categories. But there’s a high probability that a person who buys plants also needs potting soil.
Any well-designed sales strategy includes a purposeful design to facilitate up-sells and cross-sells. These sales tactics routinely raise profits significantly. A ten percent increase is not uncommon, and in some businesses the added profitability can be several times that amount.

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Killing Several Marketing Birds with One Cost-Free Stone

Web designers increasingly turn to video to tell their story. They know that internet users are now conditioned to glean much of their information about products and services from visual presentations. Done professionally, however, online video demands resources which may be beyond the capabilities of a small startup. However, SlideShare videos embedded on a web site provide much of the impact of video and can be produced with nothing more than PowerPoint software.
You can think of SlideShare as the slideshow equivalent of YouTube. It’s a searchable site, which people use for research on hundreds of topics. For research, in fact, SlideShare has certain advantages over YouTube. With an actual video you must watch for several minutes before you know whether (or how well) it’s going to address your concern. With a slideshow, you can quickly navigate through the content and determine its usefulness.

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SlideShare: Marketing with Online Slideshows (Part 3)

Even though its relatively simple, from a technical viewpoint, to create online slideshows, they need to be designed and created with care.
They must be visually engaging, concise,and easy to follow. And users must be able to navigate the entire presentation in three minutes or less.
In addition, the small display size of the slideshow in typical web page configurations requires larger font sizes, fewer words, and close attention to spacing and margins.

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SlideShare: Marketing with Online Slideshows (Part 1)

Online slideshows provide a simpler and less costly alternative to video producing for telling your story in images on web pages. Slideshows do not require expensive equipment or elaborate editing software, as is the case with video. And they are far less time-consuming to produce.

Since these slideshows can be created in PowerPoint and uploaded to free sharing sites, slideshows can be created with minimal expense and a limited investment of time.

Thus, for cash-strapped startup businesses, online slideshows may be a preferable alternativein creating a rich graphic presence on their website.

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Using Split Testing to Improve Your Advertising Effectiveness

Split testing is a technique which allows you to determine how small changes in your advertising materials impact your response rate. While very popular with internet-based businesses and advertising on the web, split testing can be utilized with almost any type of advertising medium.

To be effective, split testing needs to honor certain guidelines which are outlined in this article. And it depends on the business owner’s willingness to gather and analyze metrics tenaciously. Split testing requires a significant investment of time and effort, but the payoff is continuous improvement in the success rate of your marketing campaigns.

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3 Critical Design Considerations for Your Business Card

Your business card may be small, but it makes a BIG impression. In all likelihood you will hand it to hundreds of people. And for most of them it will be their first opportunity to make judgments about the quality and professionalism of your business.

In this issue I want to look at some considerations which should go into the design of your card. These best practices will help you create a business card that leaves the kind of professional impression that you want your business to have.

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Avoid This Rookie Mistake If You Sell Business to Business

Success in selling business-to-business depends on knowing who the ultimate buyer is in the company to which you are presenting your product or service, then doing everything possible to delay offering a price until you have had an opportunity to present what you offer in a meeting face to face with that individual or committee.
Here is a story from my own recent experience that illustrates this principle in a striking way.

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Putting Your Online Sales Platform Together

Are you thinking of selling goods or services online? Or have you started that process, only to find yourself confused by all of the terminology, acronyms, regulations, and fees associated with credit card processing? You’re not alone.
In this article I walk you through the behind-the-scenes process of accepting online payments. My goal is to clarify how the pieces of this process fit together. That way you can make more informed decisions in creating your online platform.

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Great Advertising

All businesses have one thing in common. They must have customers. And finding enough customers relies primarily on effective marketing and advertising. Unfortunately, most encore entrepreneurs do not come into business ownership with a strong background in either discipline. They may have never written an advertisement in their life. Now their lifeblood depends on successful ad campaigns.

Let me show you, therefore, how the five vowels — A, E, I, O, and U — can serve as a roadmap for writing powerful and compelling advertising..

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