It is important to realize that when you are selling a product, you are including other components as well.  So when you are creating your offer, remember that your product is the core, but there are plenty of things that you can wrap around it to make it more appealing to potential customers.  Let’s take a look at some examples.

If you go get a haircut that is only one part of the process, as the beautician will also have a variety of products to offer you from shampoos and conditioners to hair gels.  It’s a total package that they are offering, not just a simple haircut.

You also have to consider deliverability.  How quickly can you get the product to your customer and in what fashion will you deliver it?  If I’m buying a book online, I expect it to arrive in a matter of days, and I’m not going to pay $1 less to get it a month from now.

You can also charge more for a product if you offer superior support.  If a customer can get in touch with someone on your sales team quickly and get their questions answered, that increases the chances you make the sale.  If there is a problem with the product and they know they can get a replacement quickly and without any problems, that’s boosts your value as well.  Is your warranty clearly stated on your site?  It needs to be.

If you want to run a successful business, then you can’t compete solely on price.  Offering the lowest price and hoping to make it up in volume is the easy way out, the lazy person’s guide to increasing sales and it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to turn more of profit.  If you really want to grow your business and make more money, then you are going to have to figure out ways where you can charge more money for your product and to do that you are going to have to differentiate from your competition.  There are several ways that you can set yourself apart other than price, so let’s take a look.

1.  Associated Products – Can you bundle additional products to go along with yours, thus increasing your total profit on the sale?  If you are buying a hot tub, normally they also try to get you to buy all of the spa products that you need to use.

2.  Deliverability – If you are offering an informational product, what forms are you delivering that content?  If you competitors are all selling ebooks, maybe you can offer the same thing in audio files, or better yet, video and charge more for these upgrades.

3.  Support – Do you have customer support readily available on your site?  Can the customer call, email, and use live chat?  Hit all of the options so you allow them to get in touch with you however they feel comfortable.

4.  Guarantee – Are you confident that your product will deliver?  You can translate that confidence into a guarantee, which can lead to you charging a higher price.

All of these things work to set you apart from the competition, plus there are plenty of others.  If you have any tips then I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Everybody who sells a product or service knows that if they can keep their costs the same, and they can get just as many people to buy their product or service, then by increasing price you will increase profits. The trouble is that in every simple economics class you learn about the supply and demand curves. If you increase price, then you decrease the number of people who are willing to buy from you at that price. Still, there are things that you can do in order to sell just as much product for a higher price, you just have to work a little bit harder. Here are some tips how:

1.  Make it FREE - Now I don’t mean give it away.  I mean that make it appear that they are saving so much money by purchasing for you that it isn’t costing them anything.  Let’s say it’s a hybrid car for example.  Would you rather pay $10,000 for a car that you are going to have to fuel up for $1,000 per year over five years, or $12,000 for a car that you NEVER have to fuel?  Right, you are charging $2,000 more in order to give the consumer a FREE $3,000 in saved fuel costs.

2.  Increase the Value – Some people want the bare bones, and some people will pay more for the finer things in life.  One way to increase the price of your product is to add something of value that consumers are actually looking for.  Let’s take a look at the car example again.  You can sell a bare bones truck for $2,000, but if you put in an air conditioner that costs you $200 you can sell it for $2,500.   Most people are willing to pay for the air conditioner, so by adding that value you just made yourself more profits.  It’s not just addition functions or products thrown in, but it also goes for higher quality and increased durability.

3.  Demonstrate a Return on Investment – This is even more important when you are dealing with a business-to-business transaction, but it applies to consumers as well.  Let’s say you are comparing two products, one shows that it can increase your business by 10% and the other by 20%, you obviously are going to go with the one that increases your bottom line by the bigger amounts.

4.  Branding – This is tough and not something I really recommend. Research shows that it costs a LOT of money to establish a brand in a market place.  If I’m going shopping for medicine I know I also fall for the brand name trap over the generics, but I’ll give myself some credit and say I want to maximize the placebo effect. =)

I know that a lot of you don’t want to put a lot of time into marketing or SEO, but instead want to focus on running your online business.  Hiring someone to come on board isn’t for everyone, especially if you are just getting started and don’t have a lot of cash to throw around.  For those of you looking for a quick fix, Conversation Marketing posted 9 quick SEO upgrades that you can make today in order to help you make a jump up the rankings.  Let’s take a quick look:

1.  Directories – If you can, get yourself listed in Yahoo or other major directories.  The important thing is an editorial review so spam sites are not included.

2.  Reduce Links – Every page of your site probably does not need to link to an about us page, contact us, privacy policy, terms of service, etc…  This wastes valuable link juice that you could be sending to paging you actually want to rank well.

3.  Set up Google Webmaster Tools – this will help you find any errors Google has seen on your site.  From duplicate titles and meta tags to crawl errors.  Plus you can add your sitemap to help get more of your pages indexed.

There are six more valuable tips over at Conversation Marketing, but these were my favorite three.  If you have anything to add, let me know in the comments.

Last year Twitter was supposed to be the next big thing in internet marketing, and in social media, but things are starting to look at little bleak for the platform.  There are some interesting studies being posted that say that only 17% of twitter users are active, and new user signups are decreasing.  Marketing Pilgrim posted some interseted statistics that anyone relying on Twitter should worry about:

• Number of new users per month is down 20% since it’s peak in July of 2009
• The average Twitter user has just 27 followers, down from a peak of 42 (they must not have read my post on how to get people to follow you on Twitter)
• 80% of Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times (means they sign up and lose interest fast)
• The percent of active Twitter users is down to 17%

What does this mean for the future of Twitter?  Well it isn’t really taking off like a lot of people thought it would, and to be honest I see the Facebook status updates being a lot more potent tool.  There is too much noise on Twitter and not enough real information, with too much following people you don’t know just in the hopes of getting more people to follow you back.  Unless something changes, I don’t see this being a serious platform any time soon.

The Oatmeal had a funny little list of the different kinds of people that annoy the hell out of everyone else on Facebook, so I thought it would be a good list to point out.  If you are into Internet Marketing then you need to pay special attention to “The Desperate Marketer” who spams the hell out of all of their friends to join their fan pages and what not.  Trust me, if I hardly know you to begin with and as soon as we are friends on Facebook you start bombarding me with this crap, you will be defriended immediately.

Of course, you should probably avoid any “Horrible Photo Taggers” if you want to land a job or maintain any respect in a professional capacity.  There have been a few untimely snapshots taken of me in a less than sober state, and not only do I untag myself but kindly ask my “friend” to refrain from embarrassing me in the future (to which the common reply is, “quit embarrassing yourself.”  Touché).

Personally, when someone goes crazy inviting me to play games, I just block the application.  I haven’t gotten into any of them and can’t see how bugging the shit out of your friends should reward you in any shape or form.

If you have any other words of wisdom on what not to do on Facebook, let me hear about them.

Google doesn’t exactly tell you what formula they use to determine quality score, but there has been plenty of testing done by experienced marketers to give us a few guidelines.  If you have a quality score of 0-3 that is considered “poor” while 4-7 is just “OK.”  The scores of between 8-10 are “great” and it means you are definitely on the right track.  If you are in the 0-3 category then you might need a major revamping of your whole website, but a few simple tweaks can turn those OK ads into great ones.

1.  Improve Your Click Through Rate - How do you do this?  By split testing your ads, waiting until you get at least 30 clicks and then throwing out the loser.  Then test the winner against a new ad you create.  Rinse and repeat until you have the ad with the highest possible CTR.

2.  Put Your Keyword In Your Ad – Are you using one ad for several different, related, but not totally similar keywords?  Then get more specific with your ads, putting the keyword somewhere in the ad.  This will also help your CTR as the keyword will be in bold.

3.  Check Your Landing Page – You need a lot of keyword-relevant content on your landing page.  This again goes with your keywords, if you are sending a lot of related but not similar keywords to the same page you could be hurting your score.  Maybe it’s time you create a specific landing page for a tunneled down version of your keywords.

4.  How Quick Your Visitors Leave – Are you matching your visitors needs with what you are offering?  Give them plenty of options with links to other sections of your site.  The days of just having an opt-in page are long gone.  You need the visitor to stick around and not hit the back button or just leave and go elsewhere.

Follow these four simple steps to improve your quality score and to help keep you from receiving the dreaded “Google Slap”.

Getting your site to rank high in the search engines is not a quick and easy process.  It takes a lot of work on your part and it takes time for the search engines to find your site and then trust it enough to rank it high in their results.  If you want to get a jumpstart on using Google, Yahoo, Bing or other engines then the quickest way to get your site out there is to use pay-per-click advertising.  I personally prefer Google Adwords, since they are the biggest and have the most tools available to advertisers.  This will help you test out what ads work and which do not before moving your campaigns over to different properties.

1.  Educate Yourself – There is a pretty steep learning curver so make sure you read or watch all of the information in Google’s learning center guide so you know your way around the Adwords interface.  If you want to really become an expert in pay-per-click marketing though, try Perry Marshall’s definitive guide to Adwords.  This five day program will have you ready to get started in no time, and will have you prepared to dominate your niche.

2.  Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew - If you are just learning how pay-per-click works, you are going to want to start off small in a non-competitive niche.  The goal for your first campaign will be to learn how the system works and which tools are available to you.  Don’t try bidding on weight loss keywords against a lot of experienced competitors when the cost per click is going to quickly eat up your budget.  Make sure you use plenty of negative keywords and exact matches so you really narrow down the viewers to people you know will be interested in your product.  Set up a budget so you don’t login one day to see Google has spent drastically more than you were planning on them spending to send visitors your way.

3.  Study Your Competitors – I like to use Keyword Elite for this from Brad Callen.  This way you can find out which keywords your competitors are also bidding on so you won’t be left out of the loop on successful campaigns.  Also take a look at what seems to be working for them in terms of successful text combinations.

4.  Don’t Forget : Keep Testing – Rotate different ad groups to track which ones get the most clicks, and how many of those clicks are converting for you.  Never stop testing because every little percentage increase in conversions means more money for you and your business!

If you are planning on entering into any kind of property investment, it is best to have an idea of what your end game is.  Your exit strategy should match your abilities and the situation that you are currently in, but in the end it comes down to three options: buying to rent, flipping, or assigning the contract to other investors.

1. Renting – This strategy is more of a long term plan for generating passive income.  It’s a way to build up your wealth slowing since by holding the property for a long period of time, you will see a significant return on your investment over the long haul.  You do need to put quite a bit of money down upfront so you are bringing in more in rent each month than you are paying out to the bank, on property taxes, and on insurance.  This method is best for the lazy people who don’t want to do a lot of work (or no work with a property manager), but want to sit back and watch a small amount of profit come in each month while building equity in the property.

2.  Selling – Are you a fix-it-up kind of person?  Then you might be able to buy a cheap house that needs a lot of work, do that hard work by upgrading certain features, and then putting the property back on the market for a substantial profit.  With this method you can see a quicker return on your investment, since you only have to hold it long enough to make the upgrades and find a buyer.  You will have to be able to put in the time and money to fix-up the property.  If you are not able to do the work yourself then flipping may not be the best method for you to make money.  Contractors charge quite a bit for the work they do and the more of your budget you burn through the less profit you make when you go to sell.  Of course something to keep in mind is that not all properties need a lot of work in order to make money flipping them.

3.  Assigning – With this method you can either purchase and then resell or you can assign the contract to another investor for a finder’s fee.  To use this tactic you need to have a list of investors that are in the market and looking for a deal.  It is recommended that you have at least five potential investors lined up in order to make sure you have the financing before making an offer on a property.

So before you go out and start investing in property, make sure you have an exit strategy in place detailing how you plan on making money off of that piece of real estate.

Maybe you have heard about this tiny, little social networking site called Twitter and you have come to realize that it could be a simple and easy way for you to connect with members of your audience.  If this is you and you don’t know where to begin, I’m here to help.  I’ll be walking you through everything you need to do and know in order to be ready to start tweeting immediately.

1.  Create Your Twitter Account – This is simple, just fill out your desired username, real name, password, and email address.

2.  Post a Photo or Logo – I prefer a photo here as people want to see what the person they are following looks like.  To upload your photo go to Settings, then the Picture tab.

3.  Change Background Image – Do not just select one of the default backgrounds provided by the system.  You need to have one made that is custom to your account.  This means adding a few things to the background, such as a URL, larger photo of you or your brand, and any other company information that you want to the visitor to know.  Make it look professional, and also unique so you can stand out from the crowd.  This is done by going to Settings and then the Design tab.  Check out our cool Twitter backgrounds article for sites that can help you design something specifically for you or your company.

4.  Account Settings – You want to make sure the “more info URL” points back to your site so visitors know where to find more information about you.  Also your bio needs to be short and sweet.  You don’t have a lot of space or time to engage the viewer which means you need a bio that is interesting, humorous, stands out from the crowd, etc.  This will increase your chances of the visitor clicking your follow button.  Also in the account settings section, don’t check the box that says protect updates or only your followers will be able to see your tweets.  This will inhibit some people from following you in the first place since they can’t see what you are about beforehand.

5.  Device Settings – Here you can set up your mobile phone to send tweets via text message.  I have a smartphone so I just use a Twitter app, but you can also use the web as well.  This is up to you and your own personal preference.

6.  Notice Settings – I like knowing when someone sends me a direct message so I can respond to it quickly.  If you plan on taking your Twitter marketing seriously, you’ll gain a lot of followers and getting email updates when that happens will get annoying quickly, so I recommend unchecking that box.  You should also stay on Twitter’s newsletter list so you can keep up to date with site changes.

After following these steps, you will have your Twitter profile set up to become a power user!