Several years ago, I had a business that was starved for cash flow and desperately needed to make sales fast. I knew that I had a product that if properly pitched would convert quickly and would result in instant cash flow.
I could instantly turn the sales on and off at specific times of the day. The only bad thing about this strategy is that it shaved margins thin and required my personal effort to make the strategy work. I attempted to hire someone else to operate this program but they failed miserably and cost me tens of thousands of dollars.
Before you get started with this strategy you have to know your numbers. What's the profit margin on each transaction? When you have that number you will be able to calculate how much you can invest in each transaction and determine if you can afford to use this strategy.
The sales that were made were through my call center and required that the customer actually call us, but there are many businesses where the transaction can happen online.
What I'm talking about is bidding on Google Adwords to generate traffic to your website. You don't have to be number one to get the best results, at least in my experience. Quite often the number four spot will produce almost as good as the number one spot and the number four spot can be had for a substantially lower bid price.
Another reason to choose the number four spot is to keep from driving the prices up any higher than they have to be. Competing to be number one causes other people to want to be there and they will pay more. Staying at number four keeps one less person from driving prices up.
I'm not going to get into the mechanics of Google Adwords in this article, but I will tell you that they can produce outstanding results if you need cash flow. I took a company from zero to $750,000 per month in less than six months, and could have done it in two months had I understood the process from the start.
Even if your company is losing money on each transaction, you may benefit from this type of sale. GoDaddy has used Adwords to generate substantial sales early on and used it as a loss leader to get long term profit.
No matter what strategy you use, know your numbers and what your transaction cost is before jumping into using Google Adwords to generate sales.