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How’s your back-end?

Guest post by: Kathleen Gage

Article Overview: What I find most amazing is how often the opportunity to build an online fan base is missed due to a few missed steps....

How’s your back-end?

One of my favorite shows is - America\'s Got Talent. I really enjoy watching raw talent come up from the ranks. There\'s great talent and there\'s... well, let\'s just say, less than great. Week after week acts are eliminated until one stands victorious as the winner.

The mere fact that a singer, dancer, magician, or any act makes it to the top ten is against the odds.

Even if elimination happens along the way contestants build a fan base due to all the visibility. What I find most amazing is how often the opportunity to build an online fan base is missed due to a few missed steps.

Oh no! She\'s not prepared

Tonight I saw a posting on Facebook from one of my favorites, Lys Agnès. The posting announced her new website. I anticipated a well developed site and was disappointed to find very little information with the final line of about six reading, \"Stay tuned for updates to this site.\"

I was saddened to see this. After all, Lys had visibility in front of millions of people over the last few months. Too bad she had not been advised on the importance of having her \"backend\" in place and ready to receive visitors.

Lys is not alone nor unique with this. Countless individuals miss incredible opportunities because they have not set up the right infrastructure for their marketing efforts.

About a year ago a contestant on The Shark Tank had a really unique product she was seeking funding for. I was so intrigued by what she created I hopped over to her website and found very little information and almost every link was dead. Whoa!!!! Another poorly developed backend.

Then you have someone like Jackie Evancho. Her website is definitely set up to optimize her fan base and online presence. jackieevancho.com

The questions that beg to be answered are:

How\'s your back-end?

Is your blog and website set up to receive visitors?

Do you have a way for people to access something of extremely high value in trade for their name and email address?

Do you have more than one way for them to do this?

Do you have your product offerings visible?

Do you have information that establishes your credibility and expert status?

Do you have a plan for follow up with those who want you to hear from you?

If you can\'t answer a resounding YES! to each and every one of these questions, you have work to do. And fast!

Anyone who knows me knows I am a stickler about consistent marketing to grow a business. However, before you begin extremely proactive marketing you absolutely must have your foundation in place.

Don\'t be counted among the casualties of those who had a great shot at building an online following but may have missed the mark. Stand among the winners!

What\'s your favorite way to prepare and optimize your back-end?

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Article Tags: blog, build an online business, internet marketing, Online marketing, website
Referred by: http://www.sandcconsulting.com



Related Forum Posts
Re: How to promote business online? - Before promoting more online, I would first determine the conversion rate for your calls. For example, how many sales can you make out of 10 customers who come to see you? If you know 4 out of 10 will sign up and bring in $400 in business, you know you can give away up to $40 of your time to break even. The problem is, that's just to break even. So now you will have to have the backend. 1) Out of 4 people sign up for your service, how many will sign up for Month 2+? 2) On average, how many month do people stick? or how often do they drop out? 3) Or how many will sign up for bigger, more intensive packages? (only show these to people who bought at least your entry level sales, make this 3 times the size of your entry level package) If you don't have any of these above, you're going to promote and will have little to show for. Once you figure this out, then you will have lifetime customer value, meaning, on average how much your customer will be worth to you. If you know you can bring in $50 for every customer who steps in your tutoring business, you'll just now need to promote enough to reach your sales goals. As I said, to achieve, this, you will probably need to employ effective backend funnels in place. Once you have this figured out, you can spend money promoting your site with paid traffic, such as Facebook ads etc -- at this point, you will still be in profit because you know your bottom line.
Re: Ever been scammed... - [quote="David Castro":19sru6ia]Have you guys ever wondered why we get so many pre-approved credit cards on the mail?[/quote:19sru6ia] ??? Pre Approved credit cards? Hows does that work? In the UK its pretty hard to get anything on credit now with the credit crunch, was easy a few years back they would give you anything!
Re: Ever been scammed... - [quote="bennyboy7":3i1zq7nu][quote="David Castro":3i1zq7nu]Have you guys ever wondered why we get so many pre-approved credit cards on the mail?[/quote:3i1zq7nu] ??? Pre Approved credit cards? Hows does that work? [/quote:3i1zq7nu] They're not "pre-approved, " they just say they are. I used to work at a call center where people would call in to try to get credit cards... and the computer would tell me within a minute if they were approved or not -- it seemed like everyone who got turned down then went ballistic because they'd gotten a "pre-approved" letter in the mail, and yet they had in actuality had abysmal credit, and were given false hope.
Your 2008 Sales & Marketing Goals? - Hi Everyone, I thought it would be fun to post our individual sales & marketing goals for 2008. This public announcement allows everyone to commit to our goals, and at the end of the year, we'll pick up this thread and report what happened. My goal -- within the year, I would like to build my internet marketing niche subscriber list to over 5000. In internet marketing industry, it's understood that every subscriber is worth $1 a month residually because of the abundance of backend products you can continue to market to the list. Some months, I net more than $1 per subscriber and some months I don't. It's a lot of work to maintain the relationship while looking for more products or information to market. But if I can build my list to over 5000 and can profit from just 1/5 of it every month ($1000), it will be really fun. What is your personal or business goal(s)? Regards, Takuya
Small Business Advice Seminar? - Small business advice seminar is pretty generic though. Unless the host has pre-existing relationship with the audience, it's kind of hard for the attendees to assess the value of a seminar in such situation. And it's easy for the rest of us to say something you see tested everywhere else so let's get something creative so that Kevin could find something he never would have thought about. Here is my suggestion... Incentive is nice, but it might draw greater number of attendance if a guru speaker can come. Instead of thanking people for attending, it'll make the seminar to look more of a priviledge to attend. Whenever you finish a seminar, the attendees would look back evaluating the ROI for the time that was spent being there. Even though the content wasn't a perfectly delivered one, the greater the influence the host would have with the attendees, the better its after effect would become. So that the bit of celebrity attendance, it would boost the credibility for the next time around. It doesn't have to be a super guru, but just a well known local one once seen on TV news or something. I don't know what your friend's budget is, but if you happen to be promoting something real high end, instead of inviting a guru speaker, you could offer Ipod, too. Now as for the email campaign ... I would pay someone in the local area who has huge database of newsletter subscriber list and approach him with can't lose offer, like paying him upfront and splitting some of the revenue from the backend. Then have him do a few promotions to his list just about the seminar while building anticipation. My friends and I have done similar what we could call "launch" to our lists of people using a few step methods. First mail invited people to click through to our first video -- this showed some "private" behind the scenes type of screen shots of what we wanted to sell with just a small lead capture form below the video to build more list. Second email had another set of short video that showed more content inside, which lasted like 5 minutes so that anyone interested would stop and watch what we had to say. Third one, forth one just kept on building up some anticipation until people said, "Umm.. it's impossible for me to physically attend your seminar (or luncheon) on Monday 12 pm, would you take our cash in advance so that we could buy your recorded DVDs?" Of course, who would refuse that! Well, this time around may not be possible to do anything like that, but as soon as this seminar is over, you might want to video some of the attendees and ask for testimonials. Before the next seminar, have people pre-register for the email list and you can send promotional emails to that list every three to four days, just showing the testimonial videos and results of the attendees. I haven't personally used this method but I know this works the same way as the method I mentioned above. At this time, the audience is thinking "I don't know what you're going to do in your seminar, would it be worth my time to attend or are you going to waste my time?" Most pre-seminar promotions sort of leave it up to the attendees to figure out if it's going to be worth or not. And some hosts mistakingly think if it's free, there is nothing to lose. But they don't realize is it still requires people's opportunity cost to attend a seminar so no matter if it's free or not, it's still costing their valuable time and the only way to really build anticipation is clearly articulating the benefit they'll receive in advance. So if your friends could come up with something super unique to say about the seminar, it could expand it from there. But if their message happens to be still generic, I think it would need the help from a guru speaker.


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