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How to Generate Multiple Income Streams
By Marty Foley
©2004 All Rights Reserved
I'm going to share with you an important strategy that can dramatically improve the odds of online success in your favor: Diversifying your line of products and services around a common theme.
In most cases, you're less likely to succeed when you market one (or just a few) products and services. Even if you come up with a product that is enormously successful on its own, you can still benefit by diversifying and expanding your product line.
Consider several reasons this is true:
Diversity gives your prospects more choices.
When you offer a variety of related products and services, prospects are more likely to find something they want to buy.
Diversity helps boost the average order size.
Offering prospects and customers a variety of things to purchase from you also makes it more likely they’ll purchase multiple items, thereby increasing the average amount of profit per order.
A Note of Caution: Diversity can confuse prospects in some cases, so it would be wise to test in order to find which approach works best in your circumstances. Some marketers find it better to initially focus on making one sale without any other offers that might confuse a prospect, and following up with related offers at a later time.
Diversity helps you take maximum advantage of the lifetime value or your customers.
Many marketers are content to sell one thing to a customer, one time, and forget about that customer forever, only to continue their quest for new customers elsewhere. However, such a strategy overlooks the lucrative profits through repeat sales to existing customers.
The best customer is one who already trusts you and is satisfied with previous dealings with your company. Since people prefer to do business with those they know and trust, additional sales to existing customers meet with less sales resistance.
You’ve invested precious resources to acquire your customers, and perhaps had to overcome a bit of initial distrust when they first bought from you. If you keep delivering solid value through related offers, and keep customers happy through good customer service, many will buy from you again and again.
Diversity reduces marketing and fulfillment costs.
Consider the following ways that diversity reduces marketing and fulfillment costs:
- Many marketing costs are the same (or nearly so) whether you promote one product or several. Per-item marketing expenses are reduced as each new product or service is added to your line, because each shares the marketing costs with all the others.
- No customer acquisition cost is involved in selling to existing customers, making such sales more profitable than initial ones.
- Processing an order for multiple items involves nearly the same amount of labor costs as a single-item order.
- Per-item shipping costs are reduced when you ship a multiple- item order in the same shipment.
Diversity reduces business risk.
If you diversify your line instead of putting all your eggs in one basket, a dip in sales in one area of your business (due to seasonal variations or other reasons) will have less of an impact. You won’t be totally dependent on a single income stream.
Some entrepreneurs who recognize the value of diversity tend to promote a disconnected mixture of totally unrelated goods. But the real benefits of diversity come from expanding your line of offers around a common theme.
A Proven Way To Diversify Rapidly
In the long run it's usually best to market at least one core product or service that you have exclusive control over. However, acquiring or creating your own quality products usually takes a lot of time and effort.
One way to diversify rapidly is by reselling quality products and services of other suppliers. Ideally, they should relate to the interests of your existing clients and prospects.
One option open to you is to set up drop shipping arrangements with suppliers who will ship products to your customers. This eliminates the need to invest in or to stock inventory.
Another option is to join online affiliate programs. These are the online equivalent of drop shipping, without as many hassles involved. You can locate proven affiliate programs at:
http://AffiliateProfitInfo.com/
In short, once you’ve struck Internet gold with one winning product or service, you can extract more gold from the same mine shaft, so to speak, by diversifying and expanding your line of offers around your chosen theme.
MARTY FOLEY
reveals uncommon e-commerce success strategies in his highly-acclaimed resource, Internet Marketing Goldmine:
http://ProfitInfo.com/catalog/v3/
He also helps Internet entrepreneurs boost profits through his members-only web site:
http://ProfitInfo.com/catalog/v5/
Click now to discover his proven strategies for using information to generate income and tons of free publicity for your online business:
http://profitinfo.com/catalog/r1.htm
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