Today, mar­keters are scram­bling to find ways to increase cash­flow. Some will try to find new prod­ucts to sell. Oth­ers will try to drive more traf­fic to their exist­ing sales pages.

How­ever, one area most peo­ple tend to over­look is the abil­ity to increase their cur­rent sales by upselling their cus­tomers the moment they checkout.

But I’m not refer­ring to one-​​time offers or addi­tional prod­ucts offered in the same sales fun­nel. I’m talk­ing about offer­ing cus­tomers the abil­ity to upgrade their purchases.

I pre­fer “upgrade” rather than “upsell” because the lat­ter has received a bad rap of late due to a few overzeal­ous or unscrupu­lous marketers.

Sell­ing “upgrades” is an area that can become prof­itable for many busi­nesses in increas­ing their exist­ing sales. It’s by sell­ing extended ser­vices or ben­e­fits pack­ages before or at the time of check­out, also known as the “extended warranty.”

There are numer­ous ways to sell extended war­ranties (or what I pre­fer to call “extended ben­e­fits”). These silent profit cen­ters exist in almost any busi­ness, which can increase the size of a customer’s pur­chase by 50%, 100%, even 200% or more.

Very often, the sale of these extended ben­e­fits have higher profit mar­gins, too.

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As an online mar­keter, it’s impor­tant that you should take every oppor­tu­nity to elim­i­nate bar­ri­ers and chal­lenges to the deliv­ery of your mes­sage to your tar­get audience.

While RSS feeds, blogs, and social media are all the rage right now, noth­ing beats that long-​​reigning monarch of the message-​​to-​​market medium online. Good ol’ email.

As one Twit­ter user, Michael Kern, once remarked while com­ment­ing on one of my arti­cles, “Email is still king.”

For instance, at the time of writ­ing this blog post, this blog has close to 50,000 sub­scribers — grow­ing by about 100 new sub­scribers every day. How­ever, just 15% of that num­ber are sub­scribed to my RSS feed, while the remain­der are email subscribers.

My num­bers are far from being unique. They are the same with a large per­cent­age of blog­gers and social media mar­keters, let alone Inter­net mar­keters with blogs.

With the vari­ety of ways avail­able to deliver an opt-​​in email newslet­ter, such as plain text, text with images, embed­ded HTML, and attach­ments, which one is the best?

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I know Paul Hancox.

Paul is a fanat­i­cal tester. He’s also an excel­lent copywriter.

But what you may not know is that Paul is also the cre­ator of the very first split-​​testing soft­ware I’ve ever used. We’re talk­ing, um, circa 1999, I believe. It was called “Sales Page Mas­ter Pro.” (Paul has a new ver­sion out now.)

Well, another copy­writer, Paul Myers, rec­om­mended this new “report” writ­ten by Paul Han­cox. I snatched it up in a heart­beat. I did because the sim­ple title piqued my curios­ity. In it you dis­cover how to raise the con­ver­sion rate of any piece of online copy you write.

Not to 2% or 3%. Not even to 5%.

It shows you how to boost your con­ver­sion rate…

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I am not a copy­writer. I make my fair share of sales online, but I have to assume that most peo­ple buy from me because they know me and like me. Either that or they really want what I am offer­ing, and just roll their eyes and hunt for the order but­ton. Because my copy skills stink — and they stink bad.

Over the years I have read every­thing that I can get my hands on about copy­writ­ing, and I’ve even made some sub­stan­tial improve­ments. But just recently I found a much bet­ter (read: eas­ier!) way to write sales copy.

It’s a back­wards fill-​​in-​​the-​​blanks strat­egy, but it works.

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… Words out of thin air and assem­bles them into mas­ter­ful sales pages that earn more money than you can even imagine.

Sorry about the title. I just wanted to see if I could get Michel to post that title on his own blog.

It does relate some­what to what I want to talk about, though. And that’s the power of the law of reci­procity.

I was very hon­ored when Michel asked me to be a guest poster on his blog. What do I know about copy­writ­ing, which is his forte? If I knew any­thing about copy­writ­ing, I wouldn’t have had to write Glyphius and MuVar to help me fig­ure out if the words I had put on paper were prof­itable or not.

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My apolo­gies for the webi­nar being cut inad­ver­tently short. I was giv­ing out so much con­tent that I lost track of time. The soft­ware mer­ci­lessly booted me out in the mid­dle of my presentation.

This pre­sen­ta­tion was “off the cuff” and meant purely as a way to give you as much great con­tent as I pos­si­bly could. I wasn’t look­ing at my watch. (Judg­ing from the emails I received, you weren’t, either. And I’m glad!)

But I want to stick to my promise.

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Some peo­ple have asked what Web 2.0 tools do I use. Now, that ques­tion is two-​​sided. One is, what tools do I use with my copy? And the answer is, “not many.” I do use a few, and I’m test­ing a lot more, too.

Other than video and graph­ics, such as using YouTube​.com and Flickr​.com, which are the most pop­u­lar but not really impor­tant when you have your own ded­i­cated server like I do, there are some tools to allow my web­sites to be a lit­tle more interactive.

(If you remem­ber from my report, The Death of The Saleslet­ter,” I talk about the rise in “sam­pli­fi­ca­tion.” If there are any tools that I would pre­fer, other than video and audio, they would cer­tainly be those that helped to give my read­ers more proof, and to make their buy­ing expe­ri­ences eas­ier and more secure.)

I will blog about those once I get more sta­tis­tics to share with you.

But the sec­ond part of that ques­tion is, when it comes to run­ning my busi­ness, there are a few Web 2.0 tools and ser­vices that have helped my life quite tremen­dously. Here’s a list of some of them.

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