Everyone's heard the saying:
The first sale is always the hardest
How long did your first sale take? 1 week? 1 month? 1 year?
Mine took me 18 long, hard, months.
I remember that day like it was yesterday.
The date was May 15th, 2012, 9:30am.
I woke up, looked at my smartphone and in my inbox was an email from my affiliate saying I just generated my first sale of $25.
$25 isn't a lot but at the time I felt like I had just won the lottery.
From that day on, I have been making sales consistently and I'll be showing you how.
What if I've yet to make a single sale?
Even if you haven't yet made a sale, you should still read this article as you'll be able to implement the simple but overlooked tip to snowball your first sale into 100 more.
So then, how do you go from 1 to 100?
Identify the converting channel
Your sale didn't come out of thin air. The customer found your website or business from any number of mediums and then made the purchase.
They may have found your website using organic search in Google, a thread on Reddit, a Facebook ad or one of your listings on Google AdWords.
If you have setup your conversion tracking correctly on Google, you can pinpoint which traffic medium every sale or lead came from:
Locate where your sale came from because that's the place you're going to find your next 100 sales.
How To Scale Correctly
My first sale came because of SEO.
The customer searched for a keyword, landed them on my website, upon reading my content they then went on and bought the product I was promoting.
If SEO can get me 1 customer, I knew it could get me 100 (well thousands) more.
To get more sales I needed to scale my online search presence which meant writing more articles around the product and getting them to rank higher on Google.
I went ahead and spent a good few hours finding the most relevant keywords and created 52 blog titles for articles that I needed on my website.
I was working a full-time job at the time and didn't really have the time to write 52 1,000+ word articles, nor did I have a large budget to outsource.
I created a schedule that on every Tuesday and Saturday I would write one article. On the other days I worked on trying to obtain more links and increase my website rankings in Google.
Within the space of 3 months my website traffic grew and so did my sales. Then I got myself into a position where I could hire others to write articles and upload them at a faster rate, here's a screenshot of one my websites where I did exactly that:
In January 2016 my website was receiving a little under 2,500 sessions per day. By simply scaling my biggest acquisition channel I increased my website traffic by 80%.
Needless to say my sales increased dramatically and are increasing month after month.
“But What If I Got My First Sale From Facebook Or Email?”
The same model applies.
For example, if you generated your first sale because of a Facebook advert leading to a product page. Then invest more time in running those types of ads. Please don't think it's as easy as running more adverts to get more sales because with paid search it's not.
If you're generating sales from paid adverts, you really need to hone in on the demographic of your customers. After 20 sales if you find that all your customers are men aged between 34-45, then refine your targeting options to reflect that and invest more money to ad spend.
If your first sale came as the result of an email then look at your current method of email acquisition and scale it.
The first sale is typically the hardest because it's the time when you build your sales funnel.
There are many parts that need constant adjustment but once a customer goes through each step and comes out buying your product, you have found the winning formula.
To get your next 100 sales you simply need to streamline and scale that process that got you your first customer, to get your next 100, 1,000 and 10,000 sales.
If You Can Make 1 Sale – You Can Make 10,000
If you can find one person who is willing to buy what you're offering, then you can find thousands more.
For my business it just happened to be SEO and I decided to spend months learning SEO to increase growth. If you find it to be Pinterest or Google Ads, then take the time to learn the platform better.
You must be committed to put in the same amount of work too if you want to take your business to the next level.
