Business

 by: Alicia Forest

To boost your online sales, create partnerships with colleagues, and increase the overall value of your product or service, add a bonus (or several) to your offering.

Here are 5 ideas for bonuses you can use to increase your sales:

1. Offer a special report.

Take several of your articles with a common theme that complements your offering and compile them into a special report. If you don't have articles that seem to fit, think of additional information that you did not include in the original product and write it up as a special report. Use your word processing software to write it, then convert it to Adobe PDF to make it look nice (you can convert your documents into PDFs for free at http://convert.neevia.com/). Or offer a special report written by a colleague of yours with information that complements your offering.

2. Offer an audio.

If you are selling a product that is education-based, offer a follow-up teleclass to answer any questions that your customers may have about the material. Or record a special audio to go along with your product that offers some additional material that you didn't get to cover in the actual product itself, or that is an introductory or overview of the material covered in your offering.

3. Offer a resource file.

If you want to increase your customer's satisfaction with your product, offer a quality resource list, so they don't have to waste time and money searching for where to go or who to hire to follow your sage advice. Put together a list of the service providers, websites, ezines, books, magazines. etc. that you personally use (or that come highly recommended to you by your trusted colleagues) and that are related to your product or service. Create a PDF of your compiled resources to offer as a bonus. For example, one bonus that comes with my 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success System™ is Alicia's 6-Figure File of Recommended Resources, which is a list with links of who and what I personally use to make my business run successfully.

4. Offer a workbook.

Just like so many self-help books do, create and offer a workbook, action guide, success journal, or the like to go along with your product or service. Pull out the main points of your material and create exercises to deepen your reader's understanding, or create sections in which your reader can add their own thoughts and ideas as they work through your information.

5. Offer a discussion list.

You can do this a number of ways, but the easiest and the one that will require the least amount of effort on your part is to create and offer a discussion list via Yahoo Groups or Google Groups. It's free and can help to build a community of people who have YOU in common, and it gives them a place to offer each other support. You can pop in and out at your leisure, maintaining and strengthening your relationship with your customers.

Another way to do this is by offering a membership site (which is an article for another issue) as a very valuable bonus. For example, with 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success System™ I offered Charter Membership spots for a reduced membership fee as a bonus.

If you haven't tried tacking on a couple of bonuses to your offerings, do so and see what happens. My bet's on increased sales... :)

Copyright 2006 Alicia M Forest and ClientAbundance.com.