1. Get more customers
2. Sell more often to each customer
3. Sell more in each transaction

Get More Customers
If you do not want your business to die, you need to acquire new customers all the time. In truth, you lose customers all the time. To grow your business and get more sales, you need to find more new customers than you lose current ones.
Finding new customers is expensive and can be difficult. Many businesses do not earn a profit and even make a loss on their first sale to a new customer, the so called front end sale. They need to go a long way to find a prospect, make him aware of the offer, get his interest, nurture his desire and finally induce him to act on the offer. You need lots of effort and high expenses to guide him through his decision making process.

Sell More Often to Each Customer
It is much easier to get more sales from an existing customer, because you have built already a trustful relationship with him. You can get his attention, and it is easier for him to act on his desire, because his risk to be disappointed or look like a fool is now much lower.
How often you can sell to each customer depends on your product or service, and on your effort. The best scenario you could dream up is a product which needs to be replaced or serviced every couple of months, and you can approach your customer at the right time to remind him about the need. One simple example would be your dentist. He will send you a letter to remind you that it is time for a new checkup and ask you to call for an appointment.
The same system lies behind the riches of Gillette, Procter & Gamble and Coca Cola. In these cases, the body reminds you that you need more razor blades, detergents or drinks. To get more sales the providers of these products need just to be present in your mind as well as in the store.
In internet marketing we use social networks and email to be present in the customers mind. It is a bit more difficult to come up with products which need to be replaced on a regular basis, because we sell typically immaterial products consisting of information. But still, information needs to be up to date, which opens the door for membership sites providing a steady stream of news about a certain topic.
It may also be a good idea to drop feed your information product to your customer. This approach may increase usability in a big way. And every time you deliver the next installment of the product, you have the chance to get more sales by offering him a related product or service. If you deliver too much information at once, the consumer may feel overwhelmed, and your product may end up collecting dust on your customer`s hard disk.

Sell More in Each Transaction
If you have made a sale you have got already your customers attention and interest. He is in the mood to act. The simplest way to get more sales from your existing customers is to offer them another related product, which may increase the usability of the product they just bought. One example would be the sales man for shoes, who will inevitably offer you a shoe polish as soon as you have bought your new boots. This is absolutely legitimate, and your customer has every right to be angry with you, if you do not offer this shoe polish, travel insurance, video tutorial etc. He wants the full value of the product you just sold him, and it is up to you to offer him complementary products and services.

Recommended book:

Manage All Ads from a Single Interface
OpenX structures ad serving by defining ad spaces on a web page, and connecting the spaces to advertisers and banners. An ad can be a picture, html code, java script, flash object, or plain text. Now the adserver manages, which banner appears on which ad space how often.

Manage Ads by Viewer Location and Language
I can also display banners according to the browser language of my viewer or according to his geographical location. I do not want to bother a German visitor with an offer for a vitamin supplement out of his reach because of his government’s customs regulations. And I do not offer that Spanish language ebook to visitor, whose language preference is Russian. The better I target the ads the more conversions I will get.

Manage Campaigns by Time
If needed, I define a time frame for the display of an advertisement. A time limited offer will not show up after the end of the sale. If no ad is available for a zone, e.g. because the maximum number of impressions is exhausted for each ad, nothing will be shown. But I like to use my ad space. So I define a Google Adwords banner as a default ad for the zone, and display Google ads if no other banner is available.

Pick the Winners, Drop the Flops
But there is more: The adserver generates a set of statistics. I know now in detail each banner’s impressions, clicks and conversions. Using these stats, I can easily determine, which banner is profitable, and which one is a waste of time and space.
The statistics allows me to set up a formal banner management. I ad and remove banners and affiliate programs based on real information, not guesswork. This improves my negotiation position with the advertiser. I know how many visitors I sent to him. And I have a clear idea, what I can get, if replace his offer.

Hide Affiliate Links
The adserver has an additional advantage: My visitor cannot see the affiliate link. If he wants to see the offer behind the ad, he has to click on it. This means I will be credited for the lead or sale.

Let me give a short recap:

An adserver allows me to

• rotate ads from different vendors
• limit the time frame of campaigns
• limit the number of impressions for an ad
• measure the performance of each ad
• if Ihave access to the sale page, measure conversions for each ad
• manage ad impressions by location of my visitor
• manage ad impressions by language of my visitor
• hide the url of the landing page of the ad.

Easy Instrallation
I need just a hosting account with php and mysql to run my OpenX server. Installation of OpenX is about as simple as installing WordPress. Basic installation without plug ins does not even take 30 minutes. You can get the server for free at http://www.openx.org

• Signup rate from people coming from my blog: 15%
• Signup rate from people coming from Google Adwords: 5%
• Signup rate from people coming from Twitter: 0%

I got lots of traffic from Twitter, and people seemed to be interested. But no conversion! Adwords remained at 5%. From my blog the traffic numbers went naturally down. I cannot write posts promoting the same offer day by day.

Putting Myself into Twitterers’ Shoes
I was scratching my head for several weeks, hoping to get at least one or two conversions from Twitter. After a while it seemed that even the click rates from Twitter went down. Naturally, because my followers knew the offer, as my blog readers did. Anyway, I was careful enough not to damage that Twitter account, it is still growing.
So, what does that mean? Is Twitter traffic useless? I do not think so, and I know that other people get conversions, signups etc. from Twitter.
I drew two conclusions: The page must be reasonable for people coming from search engines, and for people coming from my mailing list and blog, but not for Twitterers.
Thinking about the reason, I came up with the following conclusion: The signup page was, as thousands, driven by flash videos. But further investigation let me to conclude, that a Twitter link is rarely leading to a video.

Mobile Users Have Different Priorities
A little further brain wrenching reminded me, that even the emails with video links I get, do not work, as long as I open them on my mobile device, because the handset does not show flash.
In fact I use the email on my Palm to skim through the emails, to see if there is something I need to respond quickly. But all these video emails are left to my desktop, and I check them, if and when I have time and desire to do so.
Twitter is strongly geared towards mobile users. They may have difficulty to watch a flash video. And a Twitter user has often a very short span of attention. He may just to get a glimpse about what’s going on in his arena, between leaving the plane and picking the luggage. And unlike emails, tweets go away. They are not saved for later inspection.

Landing Page Must Correspondent to Traffic Source
This consideration seems to explain why my video page did not work with Twitter. And, while investigating, my brain reminded me that I should copy the ones, who get already results. Many of them seem to promote their blogs on Twitter, and then using their blogs to promote their money making stuff.

What do you think? Did you observe the same phenomena? How did you solve the problem? Please share your insight and leave a comment.