Nine out of 10 home-based business owners I speak to are unconsciously making it difficult for people to buy their products online.
Maybe they’re secretly allergic to success, or they have negative views about money. Or they’re afraid of what Aunt Helga will think if they have a wildly successful, profitable business. Whatever the reason is …their unconscious agenda often manifests in the following ways:
“10 Ways You Make it Hard for People to Give You Money”
1. Tolerating a confusing store page layout – If I, as a new visitor, have to work really hard to figure out how the hell to place an order on your store page, I’m out.
2. Giving people too many options to choose from – More choices clutter the brain and make decision-making harder. If you want to make the sale, make things SIMPLER for the customer. As Henry Ford famously said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”
3. Lacking a sales page for each of your products – This one blows my mind. People actually think a 1-paragraph description of their product is enough to generate sales. Sure, it can bring in a trickle of orders here and there…but for maximum sales, you need a full sales page for each product you sell – complete with benefits, back story, call to action, and correct structure. Your sales page needs to provide massive educational value for anyone who reads it, regardless of whether or not they make a purchase.
4. Failing to collect email addresses on your main website – Quickly calculate the lifetime value of one customer. Now multiply that by how many people they’ll tell your products about who also end up becoming customers (friends, family, etc.). Now multiply THAT number by the number of people who visit your website, make a mental note to themselves to order something later…and then completely forget about you – because you failed to collect their name and email, and send them email marketing messages. Yeah. That’s how much money you just lost. Starting collecting email addys now.
5. Not offering a valuable free gift on your main website – If you want to get money from people, give something of value first. This is a universal law.
6. Hiding your valuable free gift at the bottom of your site or somewhere buried in the middle – What good is a free gift if no one can see it? Why are you hiding it? This would be like Chipotle offering free samples of tacos and hiding them in the storage room near the restroom.
7. Having a confusingly labeled store page link on your main website – You should only have one store link. And it should read “Shop” or “Store.” Anything else is confusing.
8. Not regularly emailing your list – At the VERY minimum, you want to be sending at least 1-2 emails to your list every week. Ignore anyone who says that’s too much…for a product-based business, that is the bare minimum (with 1-2 emails a day being the ideal). Remember, your list is comprised of people who voluntarily gave you their email addy. They WANT to hear from you! Nobody is going to read every single message you send, but the hardcore fans will love you for sending out so much killer content.
9. Posting on social media instead of creating sales funnels – If you want to make it hard for people to buy your products, then waste your time on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest…where people will ONLY see those posts if they happen to be already wasting time on those sites.
10. Go to conferences and industry events and meet lots of “nice” people who won’t buy a single thing from you – Contrary to popular belief, attending conferences is not a great business-building strategy for a home-based business owner selling products. At best, these events leave you exhausted, frazzled, over-committed, and writing emails full of apologies like “Sorry for the delay, things are hectic right now.” Scrap it.
Scrap ALL of these behaviors – and start doing the work of making it EASIER for people to buy your products online. That requires two things: great sales funnels and consistent email marketing. Oh yeah, and dropping all of the unconscious reasons why you’re over-complicating the shit out of your ordering process.
Michelle Lopez Boggs is a copywriter, copywriting mentor, and author of "The Anti-Marketing Manifesto: How to Sell Without Being a Sellout." She's helped her clients sell millions of dollars' worth of products and services online by using the MEI(S) principle — motivate, educate, and inspire, and sell. 