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Creating Your Own Internet
Marketing Success Story

Part Four: Diversifying Your Line of Offers

© 1998, Marty Foley

Another common element I've found among most other successful Netpreneurs is that they diversify their businesses by marketing several related products and services, rather than one or just a few.

I wrote about diversifying along a central theme in a report on catalog marketing a few years back (which applies toward any business). To quote from it: "The most successful catalogs have a theme. Every offer in them is connected to, and reinforces, all of the others."

Marketing a line of products and services that relate to one another - that cohesively fit together along a central theme - has many important advantages over "one-shot" sales. Consider the following.

Diversity Enables You to Take Advantage of Lifetime Customer Value

Many are content to sell one thing to a customer, one time, and forget about that customer forever, only to continue their quest for new customers elsewhere.

However, a customer is a valuable asset. The best customer is one that trusts you and is satisfied with his or her past dealings with you. Since people prefer to do business with those they know and trust, additional sales to existing customers meet with less sales resistance.

Your customers are like gold. You've invested precious resources to acquire them, and likely had to overcome a bit of initial distrust when they first bought from your company. If you keep delivering your customers solid value through related offers, and keep them satisfied through good customer service, many will be glad to buy from you again and again, perhaps even indefinitely.

Some marketers that have calculated the lifetime value of their average customer are even willing to lose money on customer acquisition, knowing they can earn all of it back, and then some, in the future. (Not recommended if you don't know what you're doing and don't have sufficient capital resources.)

Diversity Increases the Likelihood of a Sale

When you offer a variety of related products and services, prospects are more likely to find something they want to buy, buyers are likely to spend more per order, and previous customers are more likely to become repeat buyers.

NOTE: There is a possible exception to the above statement: If a customer gets confused about too many options to choose from, they may not buy at all.

Diversity Reduces Marketing Costs

Since there is no customer acquisition cost involved in selling to existing customers, such sales are more profitable than the initial sale.

What's more, because most of your marketing costs are the same (or nearly so) whether you promote one product or several, your per-item marketing expenses are reduced as each new product or service is added to your line.

Diversity Reduces Business Risk

If you diversify your line of products and services instead of putting all your eggs in one basket, a dip in sales in one area of your business (due to seasonal variations or other reasons) will have less of an impact. You won't be totally dependent on a single income stream.

NOTE: Too much diversity too soon can be detrimental if diving into another project spreads you too thin and prevents you from getting the previous one working smoothly.

Conclusion

No matter what goal a product or service is designed to help your clients achieve, or what problem it's designed to help them solve, there are always additional related goals/problems within their field (related to the theme of your line of offers) that they want to achieve/solve. One of your jobs should therefore be to find out what these are, and then find or develop other products or services designed to help your audience achieve what they want.

Unless you stumble across one of those relatively rare products or services that is enormously successful on it's own, you will need a line of related products to make any real money (and even then you can increase profits by diversifying).

In short, once you've struck "Internet gold" with one profitable product or service, you can extract more gold from the same mine shaft, so to speak, by presenting other related products and services to your prospects and customers.

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