To make organic sales online you need to attain your traffic for free! That’s no mean feat and it can take some time and effort to achieve it. But when you do it means you’re not laying out any marketing budget in order to get those sales. Those sales come in free: which means 100% profit is yours! What’s even better about organic sales is that once you have done the work you’ll have a pool of content which gives you an ongoing “draw” of traffic which grows exponentially over time.
In this post I’m going to outline the steps needed to build content which can give you a consistent flow of traffic. This is an ongoing process and I do it using blogging, but you can also use videos/images or other content depending on your preference. Once you start to get people visiting your blog/channel/profile, you turn that traffic into leads by offering a freebie giveaway in the form of a lead magnet. A lead magnet could be an ebook, a course or some other valuable giveaway you can offer to your visitors.
How To Make Organic Sales Online – Your Customer Avatar
You won’t make an organic sale online without people coming to visit you somehow so you need traffic. But before we get carried away building traffic we also need to define the kind of visitors we want. After all, we aren’t just interested in traffic, we want sales too. That means we need to investigate who exactly we want to attract – out customer avatar. The customer avatar worksheet will help you define who your target audience is. When you are clear on who they are, you’re in a much better position to create content which serves their needs.
When you create content which isn’t a good match for your perfect customer, you’re wasting time by attracting people who are less likely to buy. An example of a good piece of content might be a product review. A review is something someone reads just before they buy something. So for an organic sale, attracting people with a review makes a lot of sense.
How To Make Organic Sales Online – Writing Content
The next step is to write content for your customer avatar and put it on your website. But again, we want to write content which gives you the most traction. Without sharing your content, nobody will see it so you definitely want to promote it as much as possible. But if you could also get your content ranking on the search engines, it would make a massive difference to your traffic.
To do this with any level of certainty is pretty difficult, especially if you’re blogging in a popular topic which has lots of competition. So you’re going to need to be smart about it and find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. You can do this using Google’s keyword planner. Type your main “seed” keyword into the planner and look for long tail derivatives of it.
With a longer tail keywords (3,4 or more words) it can be easier to rank your content because there’s much less competition for longer tail. You can find these keywords using the keyword planner and then write content for them.
Content Promotion
Share and promote your content because it might not rank and that means zero traffic! Keep writing new content and make a habit out of it. Over time, Google will reward you if it thinks your content is useful and of high quality. This can take a while so be patient. It’s not uncommon for it to take months of work before you start to appear in the search results. So sharing your content yourself is a very good idea. Share your posts on social media sites and use automated software which helps you to do this. See best free blog plugins for WordPress for some of the plugins I’ve found helpful.
This all takes some time and effort and for a while it may seem like it’s for nothing. But remember your goal here – making organic sales! When that happens you’ll be glad you stuck at it.
Another strategy other than ranking for long tail keywords is to write attractive headlines which get a lot of shares on social media websites. Use Buzzsumo.com to identify top trending articles which go viral on social media and use that information to write your own sharable article titles and content. Then post your content throughout your social media presence. This tactic can help you get organic visitors through social media platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter (X) and so on.
How To Make Organic Sales Online – Visitors Into Leads
Turning visitors into leads has already had a mention. Create a lead magnet which is useful for your customer avatar. Give it away on your blog website and make sure you list the main benefits of accessing it on every page of your website. So wherever your visitors come from, they will see your offer and can easily opt in to your email list.
Not every visitor will subscribe but some will. Once you get a website visitor to subscribe to your email list give yourself a pat on the back! Celebrate small wins because they will lead you to the big wins of making organic sales online!
A lead magnet must be clearly visible and explain the main benefits of subscribing not the features. A feature of a free ebook might be that it’s 28 pages long, for example. But the visitor doesn’t care about most features they only care about WIIFM – What’s In It For Me! So explain in a short headline the most important benefit.
How To Make Organic Sales Online – Leads Into Sales
Once you start capturing your visitors’ emails you can follow up with email messages over a much longer time period. This just isn’t possible directly from a website as most website visitors only stick around for a few minutes – hardly long enough for them to begin to trust you.
An email list gives you the opportunity to build trust with your subscribers over a longer period of time. Don’t go for the sale in every email. Deliver value first and sell later. Without trust the subscribers won’t even be opening your emails, so you’re hardly going to be able to sell anything to them!
When subscribers trust you they are much more likely to buy from you, if you’re offering something that’s actually useful to them. Here lies another important factor in that you must choose a product which is actually of huge value to your customer avatar. Otherwise, it’s going to be difficult to sell it. Make sure you believe in what you’re promoting through your email messages. Otherwise your scepticism and doubt will come across in your messages or your copy.
Summary
The process of turning organic traffic into online affiliate sales is done through:
- Identifying your target audience
- Creating content which helps them and which has the potential to rank/get shared on social media
- Tuning those visitors into leads – getting them on your email list by offering an enticing free offer in exchange for their email
- Promoting products which align with the needs of your audience
There’s a lot of work to be done in this process but remember what you get at the end! Free traffic, leads and sales. that means you’re not paying for advertising. This can be tough initially but over time your work compounds and you are essentially creating multiple strategies to bring in new customers with each piece of content you create. You can improve on your results by choosing to promote high ticket affiliate products which pay out recurring commissions. If you use this kind of product, you earn more for each sale you make, increasing the potential of your efforts.