If your goal is to generate passive income, then you might well be hoping to accomplish that by selling a product. This could be a product you've made, or it might be a product that you are promoting as an affiliate marketer. Either way, you'll likely have set up a sales page, creating an ad campaign to send visitors there and then hopefully begun to rake in the profits!
The problem is that it can be tough trying to convince people who visit your page to buy. Your success in this endeavor comes down almost entirely to your conversions and the percentage of visitors that end up buying from you.
And to this end, many marketers will jump straight in with the hard sell. That means that they'll heavily push all the positives of their product and try to get the visitor to click buy as soon as they get there.
This doesn't tend to work. Although you probably want to make your sales process as simple and automated as possible, it's absolutely essential that you don't try to go straight in for the kill. Far more effective is to try to capture leads first instead. Here's why.
Why Cold Sales Don't Work
Just because you're making money passively, that does not mean that you should be impatient about how you are collecting your sales.
If you try to convert your visitors as soon as they land on your page, then this is the equivalent of walking up to someone you like in a bar and asking them for their number, without saying hello or even introducing themselves first. Or it's a little like walking up to someone in the street and offering to sell them a watch for KES 500. Would you be receptive to that sales technique?
Of course not! And the reason is that you know nothing about the person selling, you know nothing about the product and you have no reason to trust that what they're offering is as good as they say it is.
If someone lands on your page and you try to sell to them right away, then they'll think your site is essentially spam and they'll be frustrated at the lack of value. Chances are they'll leave.
How to Convert
So instead, talk to them about how they can get free information by signing up to your mailing list, or provide them with an article and then offer to share more through your Facebook.
Now you have the opportunity to build that relationship and to build trust and eventually, you'll find that this puts you in a position where they are more likely to want to buy from you!
You might be wondering how this model is still passive. In fact, though, it still can be: there's no reason you can't use automated emails for example through an auto-responder. Or you can write a ton of blog posts and then schedule them to post over time.
You can still make your model passive. Just don't go straight in for the kill!
