Online Marketing Secret Number Twelve:

Your repeat customers are the lifeblood of your business.

You’ve skimmed your eyes across this secret many times and never realized it. So let me say it plainly. You don’t need 10,0000 people to buy your $10 product. You need 1000 people to buy your $10 product once, and then your $90 product, and then another $10 product, and then some of them buy a $200 product, and so on.

That’s one of the biggest secrets, though no one is attempting to keep it from you. It’s just that it is so simple, when you get a glimpse of it; you think to yourself “it can’t be that easy.” And you move on.

Think about it for a moment. What is worth more money, getting 1000 people who have already bought from you before, to buy a ten dollar product every month for a year, or getting 120,000 new people to buy a $1 product one time? You might think it’s the $1 product at first glance. After all, how hard is it to sell something for a dollar, right?

Wrong. Studies have shown that, especially on the internet, it’s harder to get a brand new person who doesn’t know you to part with even one single dollar than it is to get someone who has already bought from you to keep buying from you.

The person who doesn’t know you isn’t sure if your typical product is any good. They don’t know if your sales system will drop them in the right place. They have no idea whether you’ll be available after the sale if they have questions.

(And, if it’s about as hard to sell a $1 product as it is to sell a $20 product, shouldn’t you sell a $20 product anyway? We’ll talk about that another day.)

The person who has bought from you knows your products are superior, that you have great customer service, that your phone number comes with every order, that you have a help desk ticket centre if they have questions, that whatever money they part with will be well worth it, and that you’re going to over-deliver, every time.

So, of course, getting new business is fantastic. But when you get to your 100th or 1000th client, think about how to balance the time you spend finding new people with the time you spend making the clients you already have deliriously happy all over again.