A valuable lesson about overcoming obstacles related to both buying and selling – you may be hitting these speed bumps right now and not even know it.
When we first started our business, we needed a way to collect payment from customers across the world. We were literally making sales on day 3 of our new venture. We hadn’t even formed a corporation yet. So the quick and obvious solution was PayPal. It seemed easy enough and would work just fine for our needs…at least that’s what we thought initially.
Over time we found that not only was the checkout process cumbersome for our clients, we ourselves didn’t want to go in and create a unique money request for each and every client. I won’t tell you how long we ran our sales like this. I’m turning red just writing about it.
Long story short, we finally got hooked up with a gentleman by the name of Paul Lonsford. I had sold Paul Infusionsoft years ago when I was still with the company. He really hooked us up. Here’s what you really need to know though:
Once we had our merchant account in place, it streamlined the way we processed credit cards. Here we were Infusionsoft Mavens and we weren’t using the shopping cart for what it was really designed for. We were losing out on all sorts of automation with PayPal.
We didn’t realize it, but we had been neglecting our sales efforts because of the difficulty in processing the actual transaction once a deal had been closed.
Here’s the really clincher – when we switched from routing sales through PayPal to our new merchant account, we almost doubled our revenue in the first month! It’s like there was some unknown barrier to our success processing sales the old way. Thank heavens for Merchant Processing 2.0.
If you are running your business with Infusionsoft, using only PayPal and not a merchant account, I’m calling you to repentance. Wink. Wink. You are going to face the exact same challenges we faced. Learn from our experience:
1) When you make it easier for a client to pay you, they are more likely to do so.
2) When you make it easier to close a deal, you are more likely to do so.
3) Storing credit cards on file for payment plans and subscriptions is priceless.
4) Having a cart skin/theme that is branded with your site curbs the shopping cart abandonment you get when throwing people over to PayPal to complete a transaction.
Since the time of our transition we have referred 12-15 clients asking for merchant recommendations over to Paul. We’re pleased to say that each and every one of them have come back with rave reviews of his unmatched pricing and customer service.
We recently partnered up with Paul to provide our clients as well as Infusionsoft Users a unique package to help them get up and running (and doubling sales) in no time. We really have put together the sweetest merchant account deal for internet credit card processing. Absolutely no one can beat this offer.
But don’t take my word for it – see for yourself. Check out: http://infusionpay.com
~ Jarrod Morris
P.S. Did I mention that our rate dropped from 3% with PayPal to 2.09% with InfusionPay?
When the doctor says you need a “second opinion”, you get it, right? So why wouldn’t you do the same for your business?
Let me tell you a little about the The League of Extraordinary Minds…
Two of marketing’s top players, Jay Abraham and Rich Schefren just brought 53 of the business world’s finest expert minds together for a six-week long, brain trust experiment that’s unprecedented anywhere else in the business world.
Jay and Rich have purposely put this group of extraordinary business minds together and focused each expert’s content on ideas and advice that will quickly help any business out there that’s suffering from:
* Poor marketing * No distinction or preemptive advantage * Ineffective sales efforts * Poor marketing message * Lack of credibility, trust in marketplace * Limited capital to market.
The League of Extraordinary Minds brings together power-house panels of experts all specializing in one major business building skill. In each session, these different panels will talk about the most important profitability issues, challenges and questions your business is facing and they provide the most actionable answers, ideas and solution you’ve gotten from anyone, anywhere, ever before.
One panel consists of seven world famous marketers: Another has six celebrated mega-bestselling business authors. Another has internationally renowned legendary mastery in dealing with business competitors. Still, another is a legendary master icon in the field of persuasion and infamous prominent consulting giants who charge $250,000 a day to share their prized perspectives.
Hey, I even took the time to show you some of the extraordinary minds:
| Tony Robbins | |
Fran Tarkenton | |
Neil Fiore | |
Stephen Covey | |
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| Michael Gerber | |
Joseph Jaffe | |
Jay Conrad Levinson | |
Al Reis | |
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| Paul Zane Pilzer | |
Brian Tracy | |
Jack Trout | |
Gary Vaynerchuk | |
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| Kevin Hogan | |
Russell Granger | |
Dan Hill | |
Michael Bosworth | |
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| Pam Danziger | |
Christope Morin | |
Ori Brafman | |
Robert Cialdini | |
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| Dan Ariely | |
Bert Decker | |
Sergio Zyman | |
Paul Cherry | |
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| Vicki Kunkel | |
Bo Burlingham | |
Eric Flamholtz | |
Kerry Patterson | |
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| Lou Adler | |
Brad Smart | |
Marilyn Tam | |
Jan Yager | |
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| Julie Morgenstern | |
Nancy Ratey | |
Dave Crenshaw | |
Jim Murphy | |
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| Josh Waitzkin | |
Spencer Johnson | |
Dan Millman | |
Kathy Kolbe | |
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| Tomy McCarthy | |
Marshall Thurber | |
Michael Masterson | |
Marshall Goldsmith |
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Why not see if Jay and Rich’s League of Extraordinary Minds six week experiment interview Brain can be just the solution you’re after? Remember, it’s totally yours, gratis, for the entire six week experiment/try-out period.
Jay and Rich can only accommodate a maximum of 1000 people on each one of the nine separate panel interview sessions they’re conducting. They’ve got over 150 other list owners, bloggers and major business publications all nominating and including people from their list to participate, too.
That means hundreds of thousands of people won’t get to hear any of those nine interviews, because they won’t get inside fast enough.
So, if you want to be one of the 1000 people who DO get to listen at no charge to all nine interview sessions over the next six weeks (for nothing), you need to register (no charge) right now.
Here is my cleverly disguised affiliate link: https://schefren.infusionsoft.com/go/loemo/autom8/ And yes, if you buy something from Rich or Jay in the future, I may receive a small commission for it.
P.S. You’d have to seek out additional products though because there’s no selling and no pitching whatsoever. It’s simply the most powerful business-building content you’ll ever hear, all focused on helping you and your business get back in the black.
After using 4 or 5 of the “top hosts” over the past couple of years, it has become blatantly obvious that one hosting company absolutely blows its competitors out of the water.
When speaking with other entrepreneurs and business owners there is one company that continues to pop up in most conversations…GoDaddy. I like to ask, “so why did you chose GoDaddy for your host? or Why are you going with GoDaddy?”
The response rarely has to do with features, thresholds or service. Actually, the response usually consists of three words, “I don’t know.” “Let me guess, you saw their Super Bowl commercial.” The common phrase, “sex sells,” has never been more apparent than in GoDaddy’s racy campaigns. The company is gaining popularity at a rapid rate (not necessarily on account of its product offering).
GoDaddy is definitely not the top web host for entrepreneurs. So who does Marketing Mavens recommend as the top web host? Hands down the award goes to BLUEHOST!
This post isn’t meant to be a moral slam against GoDaddy, so I’ll keep my opinion of GoDaddy’s Marketing & Advertising strategies to myself. BUT, a quick look at the raw thresholds will show you that what GoDaddy offers in the form of scandalous women, requires you to sacrifice in service.
That’s right. Those girls don’t come cheap. A decent portion of what you pay GoDaddy goes to ginormous advertising budgets as opposed to a better product and service.
GoDaddy: $6.99/month
25 MySQL
500 Email Accounts
50 FTP Users
150 GB Disk Space
1,500 GB Monthly Data Transfer
2 Shopping Carts
24/7 NOT toll-free phone/email
FAQ, Knowledgebase, Help Guides
Tutorials, Glossary, Forum
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BlueHost: $6.95/month
100 MySQL/100 Postgre SQL
2500 Pop3/2500 IMAP Email Accounts
1,000 FTP Accounts
Unlimited Disk Space
Unlimited Transfer
Free Domain For Life
4 Shopping Carts
24/7 toll-free support (phone/email/chat)
Open ticket, knowledgebase, and FAQ
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BOTH: Unlimited external domains, subdomains, FrontPage, WordPress, Joomla, PHP, Python, Java, Ruby on Rails, and CGI.
BlueHost offers a live demo of their products prior to purchase.
GoDaddy also lets you test their products. Some benefits to GoDaddy is that they are an ICANN approved domain registrar, there are no long term contracts, and they offer discounts for 12, 24, or 36 months.
Here’s the biggest deciding factor for me though: in addition to a free domain for life and unlimited thresholds, BlueHost offers CPanel 11 (incredibly intuitive and user friendly) while GoDaddy offers their own heavily customized version of Plesk that is far more restrictive.
Take a look at how simplistic yet robust BlueHost’s CPanel is…
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When making changes anywhere in BlueHost, updates are seen instantly. When making changes in GoDaddy, I would often wait hours for their systems to recognize the update. This just killed productivity.
There are even more arguments as to why BlueHost is the top host, but I need to get back to work – and so do you!
Best,
Jarrod Morris
While wrapping this up I want to be fair and open about other great hosts. Here are a few others worth mentioning: Host Gator, Lunar Pages, Host Monster, IX Web Hosting, Green Geeks, Just Host.
