Easy Shopper

Something that really grinds my gears - I'm sure that you've experienced it too. You get to a shop, to a website, call the order line or whatever and its really difficult to find out how to buy.

It's insane. This week I called a theatre in London to book some tickets, I was on the phone for 2 hours trying to get through to give these people my money. It makes you wonder how much value these people put in sales. If sales are important to you then it should be extremely easy for people to part wit their cash for your product or service.

Think of it this way, the longer it takes for you to receive their funds, the more time you are giving logic to kick in and for your customer to talk themselves out of buying. As I addressed elsewhere, buying decisions are based on emotions and impulse. If you allow them to buy at the moment they think 'I want that' and you take payment before logic has time to kick in then you succeed.

Make it easy and straight forward for people to buy from you.

Classic 'Supply and Demand' Rule is a LIE

In business studies one of the things you are taught is that to start your own business you find something that people need and give it to them. This is WRONG.

I will tell you why and then I'll give you some examples to back it up. My major interest is in psychology and psychologists know that decisions are made not by logic, but by emotions. You see something you want and you buy it, its not until a moment later that your logical mind kicks in and asks 'do you really need this' and lists the consequences of your decision. Emotions come first - so if that is the case then buying decisions must be made in an instant, using emotions - which is what you WANT not what you NEED.

Two examples for you. Boy racers. those young guys who have their Novas with their blacked out windows, no seat belts and loud dance music pumping out of their cars at the weekend. What do they need? Seat belts. Yet they don't have them. What do they want? Blacked out windows and they do.

Here is a more common example that I am almost certain you can identify with. How many people decide they want to go out for a drink with friends, even though they have that bill to pay? They need to pay the bill otherwise their telephone will be cut off, but they want to go out to the party. We've all done it t some extent, chosen something we want over something we need.

That is because buying decisions are made based on wants, emotions. So make your selling process, your marketing packed full of emotions to increase your sales.

THE Most Important Thing Online

At the moment, almost half of the people online are looking for videos. So if so many people are using the internet to find these then it would be insane for us not to use that as marketers. You can easily use video to drive new traffic to your website, and I've tried it.

Back in January I was set a challenge by a marketing friend of mine - Dean Hunt. My task was to record a new video every-single-day for the entire month. I did it. It took a lot of commitment and time but every day I sat down with my little camera and recorded something. Some days it was an interactive thing, some it was a comical piece and others it was just a blog update on what I'd been doing.

The reaction was MASSIVE. I only wish I had the time now to start doing ti again because the response to this constant updating was views of my, what I thought were boring, videos that exceeded 2000 individual views in just that month. That's more than 2000 new people looking at me, watching me and then hearing about my website.

I'm going to show you my secret weapon when it comes to getting more views and getting those videos in front of MORE people in less time - coming next!

Tis the Season

Its a great idea to tie your marketing in with seasonal and social events. Simple examples would include a special for Christmas, Halloween and the New Year. However there are other things you can theme things to, like if you're a therapist you can send out a special for 'national stop smoking day' and the like.

Tying your marketing to an event like national awareness days, public holidays and the like gives you an excuse to send information to people that appears to be you helping them out. Imagine you are own book shop and it's coming up to Christmas you could send out a mailing saying 'a great gift for Christmas is one of our book vouchers. A £10 voucher will only cost you £7.50 when ordered this week". You could send that out at the beginning of November.

Think about tying in your marketing with world events too, like elections, charity appeals etc. It will give you some great reasons to contact people.

Dreams Don't Exist

What's your dream job? If you could do any job what would it be? Let me tell you about the one thing you can do to dramatically change your life. Seriously, as soon as I realised this and thought it through it completely transformed the way I think of things and achieve them.

If you have a dream job a dream income, a dream lifestyle then you can almost guarantee that you'll never achieve it. Like a boy in the classroom dreaming of lunch, like the dreams you have of flying through the air - dreams are figments of your imagination - they are intangible fantasies who live in the realm of your subconscious and can never be achieved.

The simple change I made was to stop calling things 'Dreams' and call them my goals, the things I wanted. This takes them from the realm of fantasy in tot he real, tangible world where they can be achieved.

Try it and I am certain you will be surprised at just how much this transforms the way you achieve your desires.