Internet Home Business Articles

Is it really possible to earn a 6 figure income on the internet? The answer to that is yes, but not everyone will do it! WHY?

The biggest lie told everyday on the internet is you can make money at home doing nothing.

“Join my program and I will build your downline for you. I do all of the work. This is so easy anyone can do it in their
underwear. Buy my book and you will be successful.”And on and on…. We have all fallen for this at one time or another.

My book shelf is full of books I have bought online and never finished reading. Who has time to read all of this stuff and
still actually work at making money?

Here are the only 2 books you need to make money on the internet.
1. “The Insiders Secrets To Marketing Your Business On The
Internet” By Corey Rudl.

This is in my opinion the bible for making money online. While it carries an expensive price tag if you never bought another book these 1,000+ pages would be all you ever need to earn how to make money online. I use it everyday.

2. “Super Affiliate Handbook” by Rosalind Gardner

Without a doubt the best book ever written on making money at home with affiliate programs. Rosalind Gardner explains in detail how she makes over $400,000 dollars a year selling other people’s stuff. I read this 3 times on vacation in Mexico and still refer back to it over and over again.

Learning to earn is a big part of the make money at home formula. None of us have the skill level when we first get
started making money online. Either one of these 2 books, (or both), will be all you ever need to get started and move forward making money online.

If you have money to spend on promotion you are going to want to do pay-per-click advertising and Google AdWords campaigns eventually. This is a very targeted way to build your business, but should not be attempted by a newbie. Once you have the basics listed below you can branch out from there. To learn more about pay-per-click advertising go here:

http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com

But to get started right now let’s summarize what is the best way to set up your week doing things that will actually move
your online business forward on limited budget, and have you making more money than you spend.

Here is a simple outline for budgeting your time every week. Try to spend 2-3 hours or more everyday building your business. If you don’t have that much time everyday then make it up on days when you do have it. Expect to spend 15-20 hours or more every week working on your business. The more properly spent effort you put in the more money you will make.

Here’s a good way to schedule your week.

Monday

Research and write an article on a topic related to your business. If you are not sure how to write an article read this short article here:

http://team-schuman.com/howto/write.html

Tuesday

Submit your article  to the following directories. Here is an article I wrote on tips for submitting your article:

http://team-schuman.com/howto/submit.html

If you can afford it have it submitted for you here:

http://www.submityourarticle.com

http://www.thePhantomWriters.com

http://www.ezinetrendz.com

If not then submit your article yourself to these article directories.

http://www.advertisingknowhow.com

http://www.articlecity.com

http://thewhir.com/find/articlecentral

http://www.article-emporium.com

http://www.authorconnection.com

http://www.click-partners.com

http://www.connectionteam.com

http://www.ebooksnbytes.com

http://www.ezinearticles.com

http://www.family-content.com

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.ideamarketers.com

http://www.impactarticles.com

http://www.internethomebusinessarticles.com

http://www.internetnewsflash.com

http://www.lyonsinternational.com

http://webmastertraffictools.com/articledirectory

http://www.workoninternet.com

Wednesday

Exchange links with possible partners. This is hard to do just one day a week. You will find yourself spending a few minutes here and there when you have time. Because exchanging links is so tedious that is actually a better way to do it then to sit down and spend several hours at a time.

Here are 3 excellent link directories to get quality link partners.

1. http://www.linkmarket.net/
2. http://www.infowizards.com/
3. http://value-exchange.sitesell.com/

Larry with Linking101.com has an great website to help you learn the basics of linking.

http://www.linking101.com/

Thursday

Post in at least 5 forums. To start with forums are a great place to ask questions and learn how to make money at home for
free. The nice thing is that you can add a free short classified ad about your product along with the link to your website at the end of your post. This is a great non-threatening way to increase your traffic as well as one way links back to your
website.

Forums are also a great place to get ideas for your weekly article. Look at the type of questions people are asking. Do
some research and formulate an article around the answer to these commonly asked questions.

You can find hundreds of forums here:

http://forumcity.org/links/dir

Here are some more great forums to join and post in.

http://biz-whiz.com

http://www.howtocorp.com/forum

http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com/forum

http://www.link forum.com/index.php

http://www.ozemedia.com/cgi-bin/webbbs/webbbs_config.pl

http://www.siteownersforums.com/index.php?

http://www.smallbusinessbrief.com/forum

http://WillieCrawford.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi

http://www.Zeromillion.com/

Friday

Add fresh content to your site. Maybe a new article or another sales or training page. Over a period of time you will have a website with hundreds of pages and you will see it on page one of the search engines for your most popular keywords and keyword phrases.

RSS feeds are all of the rage right now. I have found a simple way to add fresh content by adding a few lines of javascript to a page. Here are a couple of places to get fresh content scripts.

http://www.articlewarehouse.com/ArticleHeadlineSyndication.aspx

http://thewhir.com/find/articlecentral/tracker.asp

http://www.topdesignfirms.com/site-free-content.php

Saturday

Catch up day. Return emails, research a new product or program to sell. Plan your next week.

Sunday

Take the day off.

This article should get rid of any notion you may have that you will get something for nothing when it comes to making money online. It is hard work. It takes patience. You have to have a long range view of what your goals are. Making money from the comfort of your own home is not going to happen overnight.

But the good news is if you will do the things above over time you will see your income growing and eventually you will be making more money at home than you do at your full time job.

I remember watching the greatest player to ever play the game of basketball, six time NBA Champion Michael Jordan.
On many different occasions Michael Jordan clearly stated that determination, focus, and persistence is what helped
him reach his amazing accomplishments.  There was one feeling in particular that gave Michael the strength, power, and desire to succeed as the greatest player to ever play the game. PASSION.

Webster’s dictionary defines the word passion as a powerful feeling or an outburst of strong feeling towards something.
This powerful feeling towards something can motivate us to accomplish anything.  Passion is also the same feeling that
has allowed hundreds of individuals run a successful online business.

Think for a moment of the many different occasions that a friend, coworker, or family member has told you that you didn’t have the ability to accomplish something.  After they tell you that your plan will not work then they advise you to move on to something else.  This is the first obstacle that anyone who wants to start an online business has to bypass.

Here’s the big question.  Are you going to pick a business that your peers recommend or are you going to pick an online business that you are passionate about?  There are two important questions that must be considered before you start an online business.  Is the business or product marketable, and do you feel passion for it?  If you can answer yes to these questions, you can start building an online business.

Over 90% of individuals that start an online business fail.  There is only one way to fail.  You fail when you quit. Some of the responsibilities of starting an online business include:

Finding or creating a product
Finding a web host
Creating a web site
Finding a domain name, plus much more.

More than 70% of the time that you use to run your business should be spent marketing.  In the beginning you will have
to keep your regular job and run your online business part-time. You have to set up a strict schedule and you must follow it.

Education is another important aspect of running an online business. You want to stay up to date with your competition
and new marketing techniques. During the first few months of your business you may not see any profits. Any profit
that is earned during the early stages of your business should be reinvested in the business.

Working when you are tired is another obstacle that you must bypass. There will be many occasions that you will feel like sleeping after working a full eight hours on your regular job. Friends and family can be another obstacle. You have to include your friends and family in your schedule and at the same time reserve time exclusively for your business.

All of the factors that we just mentioned must be taken into consideration when starting an online business. It takes tremendous amount of energy to build a successful online business. Will you do it?  Only if you start with one thing. Pick a passion. Pick a business that you feel an outburst of strong feelings towards and you will fuel yourself with the intensity and power that only passion can supply.

Here’s a really simple way…  to boost your sales.

10 points you must consider to increase your sales offline
and online.

1. When you make your first sale, follow-up with the customer. You could follow-up with a “thank you” email and include an advertisement for other products you sell. You could follow-up every few months.

As you know ” the fortune is in the follow up”.

2. You could upsell to your customers. When they’re at your order page, tell them about a few extra related products you have for sale. They could just add it to their original order.

3. Tell your customers if they refer four customers to your web site, they will receive a full rebate of their purchase price. This will turn one sale into three sales.

4. When you sell a product, give your customers the option of joining an affiliate program so they can make commissions selling your product. This will multiply the sale you just made.

5. Sell the reprint/reproduction rights to your products. You could include an ad on or with the product for other products you sell. You could make sales for the reproduction rights and sales on the back end product.

6. You could cross promote your product with other businesses’ products in a package deal. You can include an ad or flyer for other products you sell and have other businesses selling for you.

7. When you ship out or deliver your product, include a coupon for other related products you sell in the package. This will attract them to buy more products from you.

8. Send your customers a catalog of add-on products for the original product they purchased. This could be upgrades, special services, attachments, etc. If they enjoy your product they will buy the extra add-ons.

9. Sell gift certificates for your products. You’ll make sales from the purchase of the gift certificate, when the recipient cashes it in. They could also buy other items from your web site.

10. Send your customers free products with their product package. The freebies should have your ad printed on them. It could be bumper stickers, ball caps, t-shirts etc. This will allow other people to see your ad and order.

As competition in many fields has grown, it’s become more difficult to turn prospects into customers Many ways have been invented to sells things over the internet. Following these principles online & offline is the process to keep the “High Touch” with your prospects, your customers  and finally increase your sales.

Are you a headless newbie?

I know I was when twelve month ago when  I started looking into setting up an online business.  Whichever way I turned people were willing to offer me advice, e-books, freebies, newsletters, amazing money making opportunities, advertising, search engine placement and much more.  This was great but my head started spinning and my credit card started to melt and worst of all I wasn’t making a cent.

I learn a lot during this time and have started to see my commission cheques increase so here are my top 5 tips to help
the newbie with the credit card rush to stop sit back and actually start earning some money.

1: Before you sign up for anything read the sales page fully and see what you are actually getting for your money.  Many of these pages contain a lot of information and the tendency is to skim them for the interesting parts ie: How much does it cost.  This is exactly what they are designed to do,  so slow down and read everything fully.  When I first started I signed up for several programs just because they seemed to offer a lot for not a lot of money, this was true but none of it was at all useful.

2: Join some relevant forums and ask questions about the affiliate programs you are interested in.  People are only too
happy to help and you will get some good honest feedback both good and bad.

3: When you decide on a program give it time and if it doesn’t work straight away keep going.  One of the biggest mistakes is to jump from program to program to find one that will work. As with any business it takes time to build and see results so stick with it and keep telling yourself what brought you to internet marketing.

4: Decide on a monthly budget and make sure you stick to it. With the ease of online credit card transactions you will often be tempted by amazing one time only offers, these are designed to get a snap decision from you.

5: Don’t keep checking your emails for sign ups.  Firstly you will be disappointed if you don’t have any and secondly you will be sent lots of emails offering you the world.  Its very easy when you are down to try something else and this often involves your credit card.

That’s my top five but the biggest piece of advice I have been given lately is to take the odd day off and don’t do anything,
especially at times when you are down and nothing seems to be working.  I did this recently and came back to five sign ups, the feeling was great and I went about my business with new vigor.

Some marketing experts would have you believe that the key to a successful home business is limited to a select few and that this chosen bunch have tapped into vast secrets where riches are to be found in abundance.

Others will push forward the idea that their product or service is all you need to make a monthly residual income a reality.

Statistically only 5% of budding entrepreneurs will make it online.

To be perfectly honest I don’t know which if any of these ideas are true but I do know what has worked for me and I believe it can work for anyone who is willing to take a risk, invest the little cash it takes and make a consistent effort for the next year or two to build their own work at home business. Note I am not saying that this will work overnight, I’m not even saying 6 months. Yes I did indeed say a year or two.

Having worked online for over five years now I believe I have finally found a PROVEN system for building a successful home business which will continue to grow year after year and, because it is MY business, it can be passed on to my children and children’s children.

This is not a new idea but it took me a long time to realize it and just as long proving to myself that it works.

How do we know it works Mal and you’re not just spurting us a load of old cobblers?

Well the proof IS in the pudding and the fact is that the five websites that I own all have a Google rank of PR6 and feature in the top pages of all the top search engines including Google, Yahoo and Altavista for many popular “home business”/”work at home” search terms and it is all down to my strategy.

Just do a search for the term HOME BASE BUSINESS on Yahoo or Google and you will see my site(http://www.freeadvertz.com) at number 3(At the time of writing).

Try doing a search for WORK AT HOME BUSINESS in the same search engines, see my site (http://www.workfromhomebiz.biz) at number 6(At the time of writing) and climbing.

How about BUSINESS TIPS or BUSINESS NEWSLETTER, and again my site (http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com) is number ONE(At the time of writing) for both terms.

These results are repeated across all the major search engines.

Have you seen enough? Do you need any more evidence that this works? These are only a few of the terms that we rank highly under. We are actually in the top rankings for scores of other “home business” search terms.

I could easily put this evidence and info into e-book form and sell it but I neither have the time nor know-how to do so(If you can help me out in this area then get in touch). So I’ve chosen to write this article and tell you exactly how you can build your own business to great success in three easy steps.

You have the proof now here is the plan:

In a nutshell the best way to build any online business, and the least expensive, is through a twin track approach of website search engine optimization and reciprocal link building. As I mentioned above this is not a new idea but you now that you have proof that it works, do you have the conviction to follow through?

Here it is in 3 easy steps:

1. Register and host your own domain name: http://www.workathomebiz.info/hosting.html (Put some home business keywords in your domain name, ie workathomebusinesssuccess.com)
Or:
Get a FREE website with hosting here:

http://www.workathomebiz.info/pluginprofitsite.html

Please don’t settle for a FREE domain name as this will NEVER be your own and can be taken away from you at any time or if the company goes bust you have lost all your hard work in building your web presence. Register your own business name.

2. Download web position gold, optimize your site for your keywords and submit your website to all the major search engines:

http://www.webpositiongolddownloads.com

(You can download a free trial from this site. You will need a full version to work this strategy.)

3. Start building those reciprocal links using links manager: http://www.workathomebiz.info/linksmanager.html
(Put your keyword terms in your linking text when exchanging links)

I currently get around twenty reciprocal link requests per day, and this will increase with time. At the beginning I barely got two daily. It may be slow at the beginning but as your business gathers momentum after a few months it will be like a steam train at full throttle, absolutely unstoppable.

I am a 31 year old father of two from Ireland who started from scratch, so if I can do it anyone can.

Believe me people it doesn’t come any more simpler than this.

So if you are serious about really building a successful online enterprise then DO IT NOW and tell me about your success in the coming months.

One more thing before closing. If you are going to give up on this strategy when you don’t see immediate results then please don’t even begin. The key to building success is PERSISTENCE PERSISTENCE PERSISTENCE.

When considering life insurance, you’re planning and preparing for an event almost all of us prefer to not believe about. But life insurance shows a critical stage in handling your personal finances and ensuring your family’s well-being.

The Two Methods to Setting Life Insurance Policy Amounts

You could use one of two ways to compute how much life insurance you must obtain: the demands procedure or the replacement-income strategy.

Using the demands strategy, you estimate the amount of life insurance necessary to cover your family’s financial required should you pass away.

Using the replacement-income strategy, you estimate the amount of life insurance you must equal the income your loved ones will lose. Let’s look briefly at each approach.

You may need how much?

Using the demands approach, you sum up the amounts that signify all the needs your loved ones will have immediately after your death, including funeral and burial expenses, uninsured medical expenditures, and estate taxes.

However, your loved ones relies on you to pay for other demands, like your child’s college tuition, venture or personal debts, and food and housing costs over time.

The demands procedure is somewhat limiting.

The task of identifying and tallying family demands is tough, and isolating the true required of your family from what you wish for them is generally impossible.

Replacing Income

Using the replacement-income approach for estimating liability insurance requirements, you assess the life insurance proceeds that would replace your earnings over a specified number of years after your death.

Life insurance providers sometimes approximate your supplement income at four or five times your annual income.

A more precise evaluation considers the specific amount your loved ones members need annually, the number of years for which they will need this amount, and also the desire rate your family will earn on the life insurance proceeds, at the same time as inflation over the years in the course of which your family draws on the life insurance proceeds.

What are the characteristics of the Best MLM Leads? This is a good question to ask before you spend any money buying leads to build your MLM business. Before we get to that let’s take a look at why you would want to buy MLM leads in the first place.

Over the years the multi-level marketing business has gotten a black eye because of the over hyped promises of money and freedom. Very few people have ever achieved a high level of success in any MLM business. And even fewer have ever been able to maintain the level of achievements over a period of time.

That does not make MLM companies bad. Nor does it make the opportunities they afford the average person as a way to make extra money or even as a way to drastically change your lifestyle. It can be done and using MLM leads is a great way to do it.

There are 2 big benefits to buying MLM leads.

1. It gets you away from approaching your friends and relatives. If you have been in more than one MLM business over the years you may have already approached them and used up your credibility when you were unsuccessful.

2. This is a duplicate way to build your business that you can pass on to your downline. Any successful network marketing  business will tell you that one of the main components of success is duplication. Anyone can buy leads and work them over the phone or thru the internet with the use of an autoresponder.

If you are unsure of how to work a lead over the phone I would suggest getting the book “Recruit Your Way To Millions” by Fred Stegge. After reading this book you will be able to explain what you do and what you offer to a new prospect in 30 seconds or less.  http://www.team-schuman.com/recruit-your-way

If you are unsure of what an autoresponder is or how to use one read this article I wrote “How To Effectively Use An
Autoresponder.” This is an absolutely essential business tool if you are going to succeed online with your MLM business.

http://team-schuman.com/articles/article15.html

Now that you understand some of the benefits of buying MLM leads and how to market to them let’s take a look at what are the characteristics of the Best MLM Leads.

1. How many times are the leads sold? Many MLM lead companies sell their leads over and over. You will be contacting a
prospect that has already been marketed to. Personally I like leads that are exclusive to me.

2. How old are the leads? Would you rather contact a prospect that has expressed an interest in the past 48 hours or in the past 48 days. Being able to strike while the iron is hot so to speak is a great benefit of a fresh lead.

3. How many leads do you get for your money? Obviously the more leads you can get for the best price the more leads you can buy at a time. This is especially important when you are first starting or when you are helping your downline get started.

4. What is the quality of the lead? Nothing compares to a lead that contains both a phone number and email address along with a few qualifying answers to questions like “How much can you invest to get started” or “How soon do you want to get started” or When is the best time to contact you?” If a prospect is answering these type of questions you are getting a much better quality lead than if you just have a name and email address.

5. What is the response rate? This will improve as your skill level at working your leads improves, but the fresher higher
quality leads will give you a better response rate even when your skill level is low.

6. Do your leads come with any extras such as an autoresponder, training on how to work leads, pre-written email marketing letters, phone scripts, your own website, flash presentations, etc.

These are the top qualities of the Best MLM Leads. Be careful when choosing a place to get your leads. Not all MLM Lead
companies are created equal. It is going to be the single most important decision you make when trying to grow your MLM Business. Make the wrong choice and you will waste your time and money as well as the time and money of your downline. Make the right choice and you can be building your business successfully for years to come.

First off all let’s define what is a link exchange? A link exchange Internet marketing campaign is the process of exchanging hyperlinks with a quality site that is somehow related to a company’s product or service.

It is easy to get link exchange partners when you have a website that is getting a lot of traffic and has a high page rank with Google. What proves to be a little harder is getting a quality link partner to link with your site when you have little or no page rank and little or no traffic.

I have found that giving incentives will help get the link exchanges flowing and as your page rank increases so will links with websites that have a higher page rank.

Here are 20 things you can do to get people to link to your website.

1. When you visit a web site you’ve enjoyed a lot, write a review for the site. Write about the benefits you gain from the web site. Tell them they can publish it on their web site if they link to your web site.

2. Market your web site as a free web book. Design your web site with a title page, table of contents, chapters, etc. Just allow other people to give away the web book by linking to your web site.

3. Offer other web sites free content to post on their web site. Include your link on all of your content. The content should related to your web site because it will be in front of your target audience.

4. Allow other people to publish your e-zine on their web site. Include your web site’s ad and link in each issue you publish. This may also help you increase the number of people that subscribe to your e-zine.

5. Give your visitors an instant article directory. Tell your visitors they can instantly add a free article
directory to their web site by linking to yours. Just place your ad or banner ad on top of the article directory for your main web site.

6. Start a members only web site. Tell visitors what’s in your members only site and what it costs to gain
access. Offer them a free membership if, in exchange, they link to your web site.

7. Trade other forms of advertising to people that link to your web site.  You could trade e-zine ads, print ads, autoresponder ads, classified ads, ebook ads, etc.

8. Allow other web sites to use your discussion board for their web site visitors. Just have them link directly to the discussion board. Include your web sites ad or banner ad at the top of the discussion board.

9. When you purchase a product and it exceeds your expectations e-mail the business a testimonial. Make sure your statement is detailed. Give them permission to publish it on their web site if they link to your site.

10. Offer your visitors a free sign up to your affiliate program. Pay them commission to sell your products or services. Just give them an affiliate link to track their sales.  People will link to your web site to make extra money.

11. Give away web space to people for free. Since you are giving it away for free, request they link to your site by placing your ad or banner to the site.

12. Create your own award site for other web sites. Give the winners a graphic or text link to place on their web site when they win.  This will link your web site to theirs and draw more traffic to your web site.

13. Create a directory of web sites on a specific topic. Give people the option of adding the directory to their web site by linking to it. Put your business ad at the top of the directory’s home page.

14. Offer a free e-book to your web site visitors. The ebook should be related to your target audience. Allow them to give the e-book to their own web site visitors by linking directly to your web site.

15. Are you an expert on a particular subject? Offer people free consulting via e-mail if, in exchange, they either link to your site. People will consider this a huge value because consulting fees can be very expensive.

16. Exchange content with other web sites. You could trade articles, top ten lists, etc. Both parties could include a resource box at the end of the content.

17. Create an online club or association. Tell your visitors what’s included in the membership and what it costs to join. Offer them a free membership if, in exchange, they link to your web site.

18. Allow people to use an online service or utilities from your web site if, in exchange, they link to your web site. The online service could be an e-mail account, search engine submission, web page design, copywriting, proofreading, etc.

19. Join or create a web ring. A web ring is a group of web sites on a similar subject agreeing to link together. To find a web ring to join type keywords “web rings” into your search engine of choice.

20. Allow people to download software at no charge from your web site, if they link to your web site. The software could be freeware, shareware or demos.

There is no doubt that getting quality link partners takes a lot of hard work. Many times the benefits are not obvious for months and months. Don’t stop with these 20 ways to get link exchanges. Come up with incentives of your own.

In the long run all of this effort is worth it. When your website is getting more free traffic, and is enjoying a position on page one with the major search engines for the keywords that define your website, you will be glad that you have done more than your competition to get quality link exchange partners.

So you have decided to start up your own home business and after hours of searching you have decided on the program you are going to join.

Now stop and take check before you rush in.

Yes there are thousands of people running their own home business and yes they are making money from them.

What you need to stop and consider is that you will be running you own business and what does any business need to make money?  You may come up with several answers but let me tell you from experience the key resource to any successful business is its employees.

You can have the best product or service in the world but if your employees are not up to scratch then you will not have a successful business.

Now a quick search of the net will bring up thousands of affiliate opportunities and companies willing to offer you the job of promoting their service or product and they require little more than you email and user name to get started.  They do not really have a lot to loose by employing you to advertise their service as they only pay you for result so no sign ups then no payments, the only real sack able offense in their eyes is spamming.

However you do have plenty to loose so consider yourself to be your first employee of your business.

What I am asking is would you employ you?
Do you have what it takes as an employee to make your business successful?

Now would be a good time to sit down and think of the questions that you would ask an interviewee before you were to offer them a job.

Here are 5 simple questions I asked myself before I committed to starting my own online business.

1) What makes you want to start your own business?

2) How many hours a week can you offer the business and do you have a quiet place to run your business from?

3) What specific skill can you bring to this business?

4) Where do you see yourself in 12 months time and what are your goals?

5) How much do you want to earn a month?

As I said these are the simple questions I asked myself, most of us have had a job interview or two so you can think about the questions you were asked and how they may relate to running your own business online.

You can also take this process one step further because as you start to succeed with your online business you will start to build your own down line.  You need to look on these people as your employees and consider do they have what it takes to help you grow a winning company.

A great way to use this is when you send out your welcome email include a few simple interview questions.  This will help you in 2 ways -

Firstly: You will learn more about you sign up and what their intentions are, this will help make any follow up more personal.

Secondly: Will they make a good employee?  If so then spend some time on them and with your help they will grow their business which will in turn grow yours.

So would you employ yourself?

If you have decided the answer is yes then its time to start your business and start taking on your first employees.

Just one last thought for you:
“By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.” Robert Frost

Are you in the middle of a difficult sales negotiation?  Follow these tips to make the process less painful and more rewarding for you and your potential client.

How many times have you heard:

* “You’ve got to drop your price by 10% or we will have no choice but to go with your competition.”

* “You will have to make an exception to your policy if you want our business.”

* “I know that you have good quality and service, but so do your competitors.  What we need to focus on here is your pricing.”

* “I agree that those special services you keep bringing up would be nice, but we simply don’t have the funds to purchase them. Could you include them at no additional cost?”

Every time you hear statements like these, you’re in the middle of a difficult sales negotiation. How you handle that negotiation will determine whether or not you close the sale and how profitable that sale will be. In order to give you a real edge every time, I have listed below some key points taken from my sales negotiation training program.

Don’t Believe Everything You See and Hear

Part of a good salesperson’s skill is to learn to read people and situations very quickly. However, when it gets down to negotiating, you have to take everything you see and hear with a grain of salt.  Buyers are good negotiators, and thus they are good actors. You may be the only person who has what she needs, but everything she does and says, from body language to the words she uses, will be designed to lead you to believe that unless she gets an extra 10% off, she’s going with the competition. Be skeptical. Be suspicious. Test, probe, and see what happens.

Don’t Offer Your Bottom Line Early in the Negotiation

How many times have you been asked to “give me your best price”? Have you ever given your best price only to discover that the buyer still wanted more? You have to play the game. It’s expected. If you could drop your price by 10%, start out with 0%, or 2%, or 4%. Leave yourself room to negotiate some more. Who knows – you may get it for a 2% reduction. You might have to go all the way to 10%, but often you won’t. A little stubbornness pays big dividends.

Get Something in Return for Your Added Value

What if you discover that the buyer wants to be able to track his expenditures for your products or services in a way that is far more detailed and complex than is standard for your industry? What if your account tracking system is set up in a way that you can provide that information at essentially no cost to you? Often the salesperson’s overwhelming temptation is to jump in and say, “Oh, we can do that. That’s no problem.” Before you do, however, think about your options. You could throw it in as part of the package and try to build good will. Or you could take a deep breath and try something like, “That’s a difficult problem that will require some effort on our part, but it’s doable.” In the second case, without committing, you’ve told the buyer it is possible. You may not be able to get him to pay extra for it but you may be able to use it as a bargaining chip in resisting price concessions. Which way you choose to go will depend on who your customer is and on the situation. However, you do have options.

Sell and Negotiate Simultaneously

Think of selling and negotiating as two sides of the same coin. Sometimes one side is face up, and sometimes the other side, but they are always both there. This is particularly true in your earliest contacts with the buyer. The face the buyer sees is that of a salesperson demonstrating features and benefits. The hidden face is that of a negotiator probing and seeking out information that may be invaluable later should issues like price, terms, quality, delivery, etc. have to be negotiated.

Be Patient

Finally, and most important, be patient. Sales is a high energy, fast moving business. Patience is one commodity that is in relatively short supply, but if you’re impatient in a negotiation, you’ll lose your shirt. If I’m negotiating with you and I know that you’re impatient, I will hold out just a little longer, no matter how desperate I am to make a deal with you. As long as I know you’re in a hurry, I’ll wait. So be patient. Take the time that you need, don’t rush to give in, don’t show your anxiety, stay cool and don’t panic. Negotiation is a process and a game. Use the process and play the game. You’ll be astonished at the difference that it makes!