Turn That First Sale Into The Next Sale

Posted on  by



If your online shop is awesome, but no one is around to see it, does it make a sale? After taking all the time you need to set up your store, it can be easy to hit a brick wall when you get to the whole how-do-I-sell-this-stuff part. There’s no magic “That Was Easy” button when it comes to making your first sale, but there are a ton of tips and tricks that can help you get there. Here are some 14 tips to help you tackle the “how to make your first sale” part of an e-commerce business.

1. Use the right wording

This might not be the single factor that gets someone to buy something, but using the right keywords will make your shop easier for people to find. Using Google’s Keyword Search tool to pinpoint what keywords your niche is looking for will help give you ideas for copy and product titles. If you have a little extra money to spend you can try paying for Google AdWords, which uses keywords people search to connect them to your site. It’s like advertising by utilizing keywords.

It’s surprising how many sales opportunities fall through the cracks due to lack of follow through. Don’t expect sales to happen on the first pitch. According to HubSpot’s data, 44% of sales people give up after one rejected pitch, but prospects require more than a simple transaction. In fact, 80% of sales need five follow-up interactions. I think getting a home ready for sale that the owner has been in for many years, is a bit like the over weight person successfully loosing a lot of weight. The house needs to look like the lean model house but has years of ‘acquisitions’ in it.

2. Optimize your site for search engines

Having rich keywords is part of having a strong SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The better your site ranks on Google and other engines the more opportunity you have for new people to discover your shop. Learn more about making your SEO awesome here.

3. Google Shopping

This is another way to make a sale but you’ll have to add some budget to it. Having your stuff appear to people searching on Google Shopping is a great way to get people finding your product and on the way to your first sale. This is where keywords come into play, because usually with Google Shopping people aren’t searching for “t-shirt.” They’re searching for “Squirtle riding a surfboard t-shirt.” Here are some of the biggest mistakes people make when getting an ad ready to show up on Google Shopping. And read more about how to frugally use paid ads here.

4. Give Stuff Away For Free

When people see their friends wearing or buying something cool, they figure “Oh, that looks great. Where can I get one?” Want to try to reach an audience outside your sphere? Reach out to influencers who might be interested in your products and designs and see if you can send them some. In exchange for free swag you might convince them to promote your shop on their social channels.

5. Take Some Pictures

Got a cool brick wall? Have some fun friends who are willing to work in exchange for a 6-pack of beer? Boom. You’ve got models and a set.
You don’t need a photo studio to get some amazing lifestyle photography. All you need is a decent camera, good lighting, and an interesting enough or relevant surrounding. Sell the lifestyle you want to promote – whether it’s living a nerdy life or an adventurous life – and start sharing your photos online. Pro tip: Sunlight is the easiest way to take good photos.

6. Make Your Shop Look Awesome

Turn that first sale into the next sale event

“Never judge a book by it’s cover” is a great phrase if taken metaphorically, but a crap phrase otherwise. Because I don’t know about you, but I’m not reaching for a book with a crappy cover. The better your shop looks, the more enticing your products will look. BTW, Artist Shops makes it easy to set up a site, while still being customizable and comes out of the box looking great.

Turn That First Sale Into The Next Sales

7. EMAIL

Email your friends, family, people at work, etc., about your shop. Be proud of it! Get excited about your shop and ask others to spread the word. Spread it like the flu in February.
Another helpful thing to do is use marketing software like MailChimp to create an email list. Email is a great way to let people know about upcoming promos, provide exclusive sneak peaks and to make that first sale.

8. Comment, Comment, Comment

Next
When I first started writing on Medium, I gained 300 followers in my first couple of months starting from zero. A big part of that was commenting on other peoples’ work. I never commented saying “READ MY STUFF.” I got involved with the conversation.
I’ll throw in that quote again, “Don’t be a salesman, just provide great content.” Commenting on forums, groups, blog posts and articles, etc. can spread your name and get online shop noticed. Getting involved in a conversation gives you a foot in the door – people get interested in you which leads them to your first sale. Think of it as that line from Django Unchained: “You had my interest…now you have my attention.”

9. Post, Post, Post

I can’t stress this enough: utilize. social. media. It’s called social media for a reason, it gains you an audience. You won’t get any sales if you have no one to sell to. So get to posting and growing that audience!

Here are some tips on what kind of content to put on social media.

10. #Hashtags

Using hashtags isn’t a way of being the most #millennial you can be. It helps people discover new things that aren’t in their feed. But there’s an art to hashtagging for your art. Super broad hashtags, like #art, #illustration or #shirt for example, are too general.
Try going through Instagram, looking up certain hashtags to see what comes up, and looking at what your target niche is using for hashtags. You can also throw in a few fun hashtags or jumping onto relevant and trending hashtag trends (think #TBT). All these help connect your product with people who might dig it.

11. Start a Blog

Almost every clothing store or brand has a blog on their site. Look at Jac Vanek; She started as a blogger whose blog became famous, and now she her own clothing line.
A blog is a great way to get your product out there and offer content to people rather than pushing them to buy buy buy. Craig Ballantyne at earlytorise.com said it best when talking about his first sale: “Don’t be a salesman, just provide great content”.
Write about whatever you want to talk about, or put together WIP posts taking people behind the scenes. Doing “Outreach Posts” highlighting cool people in your niche acts as cross-advertising. You feature them, they share your work through their channels and to their audience. Same goes for doing a guest post for someone else’s blog – it’s content for them, and you get the benefit of their audience.
You can even reach out to relevant bloggers and influencers by emailing them about your blog. Mention your shop and ask them if you can send them some free swag to rep and talk about.

Turn That First Sale Into The Next Sale Items

12. Start with Friends and Fam

A sale’s a sale, right? Even if it is to your Grandma. But your family and friends are your biggest fans – sell to them first and have them spread the word. Email them, text them the URL, FB message them, etc., to let them know about your shop. They’re your friends and family – they want to support you, so let ’em do it!
Example: My Aunt sells essential oils, and she’s very forward and salespitch-y about it. Pretty soon, my family unit had dropped several hundred dollars on Patchouli, oils and diffusers. Partly because she sold us on her product, but we also love her, and fam wants to support fam.

13. Sell Locally

Do you make Yogi-ish designs? Talk to a local yoga studio or teacher and see if they’d like to buy a shirt or pair of workout pants for themselves, or to sell to their pupils. Make geeky designs? Have you checked out your local comic book store lately – how are their shirts lookin’? Have rad hipster minimal designs? You KNOW there’s a garage band in your area that might want to rock your stuff.
You can even try talking to local business to see if they’d want to team up and collaborate on a shop WITH you. Example: if there’s a local coffee shop that you like, it might be cool to make some shirts for them to get your first sale.

14. Experiment and Don’t Give Up

Don’t. Give. Up. When something doesn’t work, it’s not a failure – it’s an experience to help you figure out what ELSE you should try. Don’t be afraid of something not working – experiment, try different ways of getting your work out there. It helps you find out what works and what doesn’t so that you can build on the stuff that’s working and scrap the crap.

SOURCES (and, in turn, resources for you!):

  • “How Did You Get the First Sale in Your Online Store?” – Shopify
  • “How I Made My First Sale” – EarlytoRise
  • “25 Ways to Make Your First Online Sale” – Kissmetrics
  • “How to Make Your First 10 Sales” – Shopify

. . .

Don’t have an online store just yet? Try Artist Shops for a free online store.

We’re an artist community built on the power of helping each other succeed — if you’re reading this and have tips of your own to share, please do so in the comments! Thank you!

Illustrations done by the dope Katie Lukes

Related Posts

There are so many different ways to get traffic, build sites, and pick products to promote when starting your online business, as Ryan Lee an entrepreneur and success coach shares with us yesterday in part 2.

Ryan is the author of 2 books “The Millionaire Workout” and “Turn Your Passion to Profits”. Today, lets take an inside glance at some of his suggestions to making your first online sale.

*******************************************

Craig: Right, fantastic. Something that that guy said, he said he spent three months doing his product and I hear that all the time from people. It’s a huge mistake, even if you’re creating the right product. So why don’t you talk about how quickly people should be able to create a product, get it out there, and make that first sale.

Ryan: Well, I’m like you. Depending obviously on the product and how much research is involved, there are obviously different things at play, but I personally don’t think there’s any reason why it should take more than a week to create a product, especially if it’s something you know pretty well.

One of the easiest way I do it, I like multimedia products. You can create a multimedia product just using something like PowerPoint. What I recommend is you create a presentation of the product in PowerPoint. You have all the different slides and the handouts and all the different screenshots. If it’s fitness, you do the pictures of exercises and all that kind of stuff in PowerPoint. You record it right through your computer as you’re giving the presentation. You could use a screen capture video program like Screen Flow or Camtasia, and now you’ve got video.

You can then get a program that can take the audio right off of that so now you’ve got MP3s you can give out. And then you take all those handouts of the PowerPoints, you turn them into a PDF file, and now you’ve got handouts. You could even go a step further and then have the whole thing transcribed and now you’ve got more text.

So you’ve got audio for the aural learners, you’ve got the video, and you’ve got the text for the people who like to read and the handouts. You’re getting all the learning styles. You can get it done in one day and there you go. You get the product out. It doesn’t have to be perfect but you start testing it. You start testing the market to see what‘s working and what’s not. I’ll give you a little trick, not really a little trick but a little piece of advice.

If you put the product out and you’re not sure it’s going to sell, here’s what I recommend you do. Put it out and offer it as, “Hey, I just created this new product. We’re going to be selling it soon but I need some feedback. So I’ll be giving it away to the first 50 people who email me and tell me why they want a review copy. But in exchange for you having this program, you have to promise to give me some type of review, good or bad, whatever. What that’s going to do is a few things. It’s going to give you really good feedback to make your product even better and here’s what it really does. If you can’t give away 50 copies of your product for free, how the heck are you going to sell it?

Craig: Right, great point.

Ryan: If you can’t give it away for free, you’re not going to be able to sell it. If you find you’re like oh my god, I have this greatest program, it’s called Stop Sweating 101, people are going to love it, and you can’t give away 50 copies, there’s no way you’re going to be able to sell a thousand or ten thousand of them. That’s what I recommend.

Craig: That’s really great. I’m absolutely with you. You can create a product really fast. You should be creating a product on something you already know and people just want great content. It was really amazing how you walked through delivering it in every learning style. The other tip that I would throw in is that one thing that you’re doing with the live seminars, you put money on the line. You can’t back out. And I found that doing that, a different version of the method you use, where you actually go and you hire a videographer and you film a seminar, even if it’s just you in a hotel conference room, you’re at least on the hook for a couple of hundred bucks, and you’re going to get the content ready, and it’s actually going to get done by that deadline day when you booked the videographer. So that’s another way to light the fire under someone’s butt to actually get it done.

Ryan: It’s funny because I do talk about that a lot, about setting external deadlines. I’m a huge proponent of that. When I did my first fitness DVD, that’s what I did. The first thing I did was hire the videographer. Even with this event, the first thing I did, the very first thing I did was open my calendar saying here’s the date I want. If I’m going to kind of run you through the process, that was I had the idea, I let it kind of roll around in my head for about 24 hours, I always want to sleep on it. Sometimes it sounds really good today, and tomorrow I’m like what the hell was I thinking? But I don’t let it sit for more than that. I let it sit for 24 hours.

First thing I did was say okay, I want to do this live event. I open the calendar. “Okay, what kind of date and timing is going to work? I didn’t overthink it. I didn’t look at every single holiday in every country. Well, it’s beer day in Germany, I can’t do it. Enough with the excuses. Obviously, you don’t want to launch it on Super Bowl but besides that, just roll with it. I got it in the calendar then immediately I found the space. I called three to four different spaces, I drove around, I looked at all the space and I found the one space that’s going to work. I negotiated, I locked in the space and then I got the videographer. So now you’re right. I was on the hook. I had that external deadline and come hell or high water, I’m putting it together because I have no choice. You have to.

It’s almost like when I used to have a job where you would work and you knew at Friday at 5 o’clock, you’re going on vacation and you had something to get done. You’re going to get that thing done by vacation and you’re going to work like a mad man to get it done. I’m with you 100%, setting those external deadlines and even putting some money in it. Knowing you have to get it done is a great motivator.

Craig: Absolutely. Now what about the next step of having like an upsell or a back end product, where does the beginner-intermediate go with their next level?

Turn That First Sale Into The Next Sale On Amazon

Ryan: So obviously, you want to try to have some thought about it, sitting down first and looking at kind of what’s going to be your mix of products. Essentially, you’ll want to divide it. If you want to get really kind of the most simple version of it, you want to have some type of front end and some type of back end.

The front end is going to be that first product people usually buy. I’m saying usually because I had people come in and the first thing they’d buy is a thousand dollar workshop with me. It used to be more the rule when it was direct mail and you’d just mail someone and they’d buy that first thing, but essentially, people are really going to buy maybe a $40 or $50 or maybe a $100-type product, usually under $50, and that’s just to get your buyer.

From there is where the big money is made and that’s the back end. Then there’s going to be products anywhere from $99 to like $500. That’s what I call kind of the mid-range products and the bulk of your sales is going to be there and that could be combinations of home study kits and webinar programs and training and multimedia courses. So that’s again between the $100 and $500. Then for $500 and up is going to be usually be more coaching-type programs, inner circles, the more expensive continuity programs.

So you want to look at it as a little bit like a funnel. People call it the marketing funnel although I don’t necessarily think it has to be a funnel. But the thing is, the most difficult thing to make is that first time sale. The person who doesn’t know you, getting them to your site and buying is the toughest thing to do. But once they’re in, once they’ve purchased and assuming they have a good experience, you deliver what you promised, they see that you really care about them, then selling future products is simple. You barely even have to rely on sales copy.

Now I’m not saying your sales copy should be terrible, it should still try to be good, but you really don’t have to work that hard. You can probably do it, Craig, and I could do it. Once you have someone in and they’re buying, you can easily then do a $200 or $300 product with one page of sales copy or even a short video. I’ve done a videos sitting at my pool with my kids, talking for two or three minutes and selling a multi-hundred or multi-thousand dollar product. Just concentrate really two things, the front end, low priced, get them in as a buyer.

Turn That First Sale Into The Next Sale Online

Then you’ve got the back end stuff.

Craig: That’s awesome, man, really great. Now what about when somebody comes to you and just joins your free list. What approach do you take to help them see that there’s more value in your products? Do you do autoresponders? Do you get into webinars? What’s your best way doing things there?

Ryan: You know, I’ve gone back and forth with so many different things. I’ve gone the whole autoresponder out, I understand the power and I know they work. However, what I’ve been doing lately? I stopped my auto-responders and all I do is once someone subscribes, because I am prolific and I’m always putting out new content, once they subscribe, they’re just in my daily updates. Almost every day, I send new content. It’s always fresh. It’s always topical. That way, right in, they kind of get the voice of what I’m saying. I send them to my blog, they comment, they start interacting. So for me, right off the bat, I get them into the content funnel, essentially.

Craig: But then how do you communicate with people? Is it mostly written words still? Are you doing half and half with video? Or mostly video?

Ryan: It’s s still mostly written. For a long time, I was doing almost all video and I know video works really well. The only reason I stated doing written is because I started working from Starbucks more because I just find I’m more creative when I’m working at a coffee shop and it’s really hard to do a video in a coffee shop. Even though it might not be that loud, it picks up, the camera and the audio picks up everything and it’s really loud. So that’s why I started doing written and I just find that people really like the written. They could read it anywhere. They could read it at work. I am going to be doing some more video. I’m going to be doing some more audio but for now, it’s mostly written.

Craig: Yeah, when it comes to your products though, it changes, right?

Turn That First Sale Into The Next Sale Event

Ryan: Yeah, my products are mostly, they’re usually multimedia. Like I was saying before, it’s audio, video, and text so I get all the different learning styles. And the sales process of the products, I’m always trying different things. One time it could be a video sales letter. Another time, like I said, it could be me sitting at the pool. If you look at WorkAnywhereLIVE.com, depending when you go, if you go there now, it’s a video of me in my home office, it’s like three minutes long and that’s it. I’m always trying to change it up. I don’t want them to ever, always say, “Okay, here’s Ryan. Here’s what you’re going to do. Here’s how’s he’s going to sell me.” I want to keep them kind of guessing and keep it fun and fresh as well.

Craig: Yeah, I mean that’s one thing about you. Search for text in files cmd. You’re just like a really super fun guy and that’s your personality. That’s your approach that comes out here. Now what do you teach people who are a little less extroverted? What do you teach them and how do you guide them towards having success through their personality?

Ryan: That’s fine. I don’t expect everyone to be like me, always joking around and having fun. There are people who are successful who are definitely more introverted. You’ve just got to find your voice and if you’re really bad on video then don’t do video. Then just stay with written word. If you have a terrible voice and no enthusiasm, then stay away from audio as well and stick with the written. It’s also tough because if you’re building a whole brand around, let’s say—just because we know fitness so well—let’s say you’re fitness guy and you’re whole brand is you know hey, I’m a boot camp guy and I’m going to kick your butt and blah, blah, blah and you’re like, “Hi, my name is Jonathan,” and you’re like dry as toast, there’s a real disconnect between what you’re saying and what you’re doing.

As long as there’s continuity between your message and you then I think it’s okay. If you’re a financial analyst, people want you to kind of be a little bit more serious and if that’s the tone. You just have to make sure the tone matches. If you’re reading my emails and you’re reading my blog posts and then you see me on video and you hear me on an interview, I’m the same guy. It’s the same voice. Sb audigy 2 zs ports. It’s the same words. It all kind of connects and it makes sense. It’s congruent essentially, as opposed to me being up one time and really serious in an email and then joking around. It just feels kind of goofy. I hope that makes sense, Craig.

Next

Craig: It totally does. Being yourself is really what it comes down to and being around Ryan Lee is something that a lot of people want to enjoy every day. That’s one thing that’s really great and you’ve done a great job of leveraging your personality.

We’ll be back more tomorrow with more tips on how to make money online.

To your success,

Craig Ballantyne

Craig Ballantyne

If you want to double your income, work less, and become the ambitious millionaire you've always wanted to be.. Craig Ballantyne is the coach who will help you do it. With more than 20-years of experience as an entrepreneur and five 7-figure businesses under his belt, he specializes in helping 'struckling' entrepreneurs get out of the mud and build the business of their dreams. To see if you qualify for Craig's 'Millionaire Coaching Program' send an email to support@earlytorise.com with the subject line 'Millionaire'.