The first words from an online connection should never be about sales. The potential for a long-term connection is immediately destroyed if you try to market to a person before you've even learned what he/she wants. It destroys trust and it turns people off immediately. This approach works for television commercials where your audience is a passive blob on a couch; it is a death sentence online where people are participating actively, especially on social networking sites. Take the time to listen to what people are discussing and get to know the contact before trying to actively market to him/her.

Having said that, it's important to listen with the understanding that you are seeking out ways that you can help create value in another person's life via your sales offerings. The conversation should be natural, and yet, it should also be targeted towards producing some benefit to both parties. For you, it can be a sale; for them, it is having some problem solved or having their lives made easier. No one is going to complain if you've managed to achieve that outcome and you sold something too while you were at it – it would be a win-win situation for both the customer and for you.

Solicit Feedback

When you first meet up with someone online, you may be tempted to market to him or her immediately. Instead, solicit feedback as to what attracted the visitor to your site. This is valuable information that can help you tailor your content and your offerings to the biggest needs of your audience.

There are numerous ways you can solicit feedback. You can put up a poll and ask people to take part. You can offer a drawing with a prize for participating in the poll. You can send out an email asking people for their opinions. You can even just invite them to a forum where other people are discussing things of importance to them. The key is to make an initial contact that is non-threatening and that also helps to set the stage for how you intend to interact with your audience in the future.

Pay Attention To Patterns

As you start to generate an open dialogue with your visitors, you will spot some common concerns that they all have and that attracted them to your site. You may be selling diapers on your site, but what the mothers who visited really would love are diaper bags that don't leak, look fashionable, and are eco-friendly. Without discussing with these visitors, you can miss out on a great opportunity to add a product that already has a ready audience waiting to buy. That's why listening is so important to your online connections.

Plan Your Income Streams

If you were a consultant trying to make a presentation to get hired to do a job for a company, you would pay close attention to what you are saying, what your customer wants, and how you intend to profit from the interaction. Yet, very few Internet marketers pay attention to exactly how they are going to create income from all of their interactions. The opportunity to meet many new people online is so large that they get caught up in the excitement of networking and building a follower base and they completely forget that they must convert those connections to paying customers to profit. Where did they go wrong? They failed to plan their future income streams.

How To Profit From Your Connections

There are a few tried and true ways to profit online. All you need to figure out is how to get your contacts to enter a sales funnel that gives you multiple opportunities to profit from their connection with you. First, let's go over the traditional ways to make money online.

-  Selling Products & Services

You can create your own products or have an inventory of retail products that you buy wholesale. Infoproducts are an excellent choice for online businesses, but anything that can be shipped is a possibility for selling online.

-  Collecting Affiliate Commissions

You can promote and sell other people's products and receive an affiliate commission on them. There are numerous affiliate banks that allow you to pick offers relevant to your content and to market them on your site by publishing a small link or code snippet within your HTML pages.

- Recruiting Others into Referral Programs

Multi-tiered referral programs offer some great ways to make money on recruiting and downline income. If you recruit a real moneymaker, you can end up with a commission on his/her sales too, depending on how the program is run.

-  Advertising Dollars

Advertisers are interested in online personalities relevant to their demographic niches and who will promote their products. Offering some advertising space in exchange for money is one way to profit from the connections that you have generated as a focused audience for their ads.

- Create Your Sales Promotions

Once you know how you are going to profit from your connections, you have to start to develop some planned sales promotions. You will want to create several lists, separating your contacts into demographics or income brackets so that you know which promotion they will respond to best. You don't want to market low-income people with large, costly items, but you don't want to offer cheap items to well-heeled prospects either. It's really up to you to decide how you will separate your lists, but generally, you should have at least three sets of categories and three sales promotions going at any one given time.

 

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