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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After the last, big, “mega-​​product launch,” and a bar­rage of me-​​too mar­ket­ing emails from the usual sus­pects, I’ve decided enough is enough. And it’s about time.

I’ve done some­thing I should have done a long time ago.

And I feel liberated.

I rec­om­mend you do the same.

That is, I unsub­scribed from 90% of the newslet­ters I was receiv­ing. I deleted fear­lessly. Unsub­scribed relent­lessly. Purged ruth­lessly. With­out blink­ing or look­ing back.

If you think it’s not a lot, let me give you a back­story. When I was the edi­tor of The Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Chron­i­cles newslet­ter over a decade ago (which has since been acquired by the late Corey Rudl), I sub­scribed to a lot of email newsletters.

Yes, lots. Like over-​​a-​​thousand lots.

I’m a speed-​​reader, so get­ting that many emails was never a big chal­lenge. And before you con­clude I was an email junkie, let me give you a few rea­sons in my defense.

For one, I wanted to be up on things. I wanted to stay abreast of new changes, new mar­ket­ing strate­gies, new soft­ware tools, and so on. (I still do.)

Sec­ond, it gave me a lot of fod­der while writ­ing edi­to­ri­als for the then pop­u­lar newslet­ter. I’m proud to have been instru­men­tal in help­ing them grow their list from 45,000 to 160,000 sub­scribers, and remem­ber that 160,000 back in ’98 was quite a feat!

And third, these emails served me well as they were also used for research pur­poses. As an up-​​and-​​coming copy­writer writ­ing a lot for the Inter­net mar­ket­ing crowd at the time, I wanted to see what oth­ers were say­ing, pro­mot­ing, doing, email­ing, and writing.

But this week­end, after last week’s ubiq­ui­tous mega-​​launch pro­mo­tional emails started clut­ter­ing up my inbox, it became the prover­bial straw that broke this camel’s back.

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As with sta­tic web­sites, the suc­cess of a blog depends on attract­ing a steady stream of new and return traf­fic. The dif­fer­ence is, blog pro­mo­tion tools are slightly dif­fer­ent, a bit more diverse, and largely much more effective.

Why? Because blogs are designed with inter­ac­tiv­ity and social net­work­ing abil­ity built in. They are ideal both for devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships and for mar­ket­ing your brand.

How­ever, don’t neglect stan­dard pro­mo­tional activ­i­ties in favor of blog-​​only traf­fic gen­er­a­tion meth­ods. You can and should use both.

In fact, tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing can become even more potent with a blog due to its nature.

For exam­ple, and most impor­tant, you will still want to uti­lize your email list, and use your blog to grow it, too. Ask read­ers to sub­scribe, and let them know when you post a new arti­cle just as you would with a new fea­ture or prod­uct on a sta­tic website.

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One of the many tools avail­able that I absolutely love is Amem­ber from CGI-​​Central. Amem­ber not only man­ages my mem­ber­ship sites, it also han­dles dig­i­tal prod­uct sales, deliv­ery, and protection.

For instance, it pro­tects down­load pages, offers back­end sales and automa­tion, allows pro­tec­tion of “exter­nal” fold­ers and files, and it even comes with a built-​​in autore­spon­der. (And that’s just a par­tial list.)

I use Amem­ber with Word­Press for my mem­ber­ship sites, such as, for exam­ple, the all-​​new Suc­cess Chef Uni­ver­sity, among many others.

But Amem­ber does have its flaws…

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Pre­am­ble: In response to some excel­lent rebut­tals as well as count­less com­ments I’ve received on my pre­vi­ous post, “The Real Sin­is­ter Side of Forced Con­ti­nu­ity,” I believe some peo­ple are miss­ing the point of my argu­ment, and I want to clar­ify a few things.

I’m not a lawyer by any stretch. But as a copy­writer and busi­ness owner, I do know the rules enough to know that there’s a dif­fer­ence between “optional con­ti­nu­ity,” “forced con­ti­nu­ity,” and “hid­den continuity.”

Optional con­ti­nu­ity is self-​​explanatory. Forced con­ti­nu­ity is a very com­mon mar­ket­ing prac­tice (I’m not a fan of it, but I don’t mind it). In fact, there’s noth­ing wrong with forced con­ti­nu­ity in and of itself.

What’s wrong is when it’s used in a wrong way.

The real prob­lem, I believe, is that good mar­keters, includ­ing mar­keters using “forced con­ti­nu­ity” in an eth­i­cal and legit­i­mate way, are get­ting a bad rep­u­ta­tion because some mar­keters unscrupu­lously mis­use forced continuity.

The lack of trans­parency is the real cul­prit — such as hid­ing it or dis­guis­ing it. Espe­cially when it’s done on pur­pose. That annoys me. Because it’s no longer an issue of mis­use. It’s out-​​and-​​out abuse.

But what both­ers me more is how it affects us all. And it affects us all, both cus­tomers and mar­keters alike, in more ways than you think.

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Just a quick message.

I’m going to post a new arti­cle later this after­noon. But I real­ize that some­times I don’t broad­cast an email notice to you. Either I sim­ply for­get, or I don’t have the time.

The RSS-​​to-​​email noti­fi­ca­tion is still being upgraded, so until then, the only way to make sure you’re noti­fied of any new blog posts is to sub­scribe to my RSS feed.

RSS feeds allow you to add the blog to your favorite RSS reader (like Feed­De­mon, News­ga­tor, etc), or start page (Page­Flakes, NetVibes, YahooWeb, Google Reader, etc).

I highly rec­om­mend that you add my feed.

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I have a chal­lenge, and I won­der if you have the anwswer — or can sim­ply direct me to where I can find it.

As many of you know, I have a mem­ber­ship site at The Copy Doc­tor, and use another soft­ware as a CMS (which is less than desirable).

The folks that sup­port the CMS are great guys and all, but I’ve have so many prob­lems with them — they’re slow, and their empty promises are start­ing to get the best of me… and my paid mem­bers, to say the least.

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