The latest lesson I learned from my commitment to learn more about sales is another technical one, similar to the first lesson I learned.

It’s about how to use an online tool for scheduling meetings. I’ve heard of people using online scheduling for a long time, but I’d never looked into it. That’s because I heard it in the context of a coach or consultant directing ongoing clients to an online system to schedule appointments.

My clients and I schedule the next appointment at the end of a call, or make a plan to follow up and set the appointment later. An online scheduling system didn’t seem useful to the way I work with my clients.

With my journey into sales, I discovered that an online scheduling system makes it easy for a person to schedule a first conversation to get more information. In an automated plan, a lead generating message can direct people to an online sales letter or a recording, and from there to the online scheduling system to set up a call to get more information.

Now that I’ve used the system for my sales-based business, I’ve set it up for my coaching business. Not for scheduling ongoing clients! We still do that together. But I’ve added it as a choice in the plan I use to offer people a complimentary coaching call.

I’ve just set it up, so I can’t give you any results yet. But I imagine that, at least for some people, it will be an easier step to go online and choose a time for a complimentary call with me than it is to email me or call me to set something up.

I know that having more options means I’m removing some of the resistance people will have to taking that first step. So, while it’s a technical skill I learned, it’s all about making it easier to make connections. That is what it’s all about for me!

I committed to learning sales a little over 3 weeks ago, and I learned my 1st lesson within just a few days.

And it wasn’t even a sales lesson, exactly. It was more about marketing than sales. Even more than that, it was a lesson in the power of commitment and necessity.

For the past couple of years, maybe close to 3 years by now, I have been thinking about and toying with the notion of setting up a squeeze page. A squeeze page is an online sales letter written to get the reader to take a specific step.

That step may be signing up for free information, signing up for a free newsletter, signing up for a teleseminar, or buying something. Since it’s focused on that 1 purpose, a squeeze page doesn’t have tabs at the top to take you to different pages or sites. It should only have a link to the page where the reader can take the desired action. That same link may appear many times on the page, but by design it should be the only link on the page, however many times it appears.

With my new sales profit center, I needed a squeeze page to give information about a call I was doing and to direct people to sign up or listen to the recording. I was committed to a time frame with the call set up. I finally had a very specific reason for a squeeze page, instead of a half-sketched idea of how I might use one in the future, so I was motivated by necessity. And I had urgency – I needed it within just a few days!

So I pulled together what I already knew, looked at some sites for examples, and asked Google a couple of things.

I realized I could format my squeeze page the same way I format my HTML newsletter. I opened my newsletter template, looked through the squiggly code, found things I understood, and then experimented by changing some values.

I wound up with a white page with a light gray border, exactly what I wanted, and adjusted the size until it looked right. I formatted a header (pushing my limited HTML knowledge) and then wrote the body of my letter. I put the link to the call at various points in the letter, based on simple pointers I’ve learned about copywriting techniques.

Then I went in and created a border around the text with the link and centered it to jazz it up just a touch. I don’t do showy banners, but the design was enough to grab the reader’s attention if they scan the letter.

I put in some other copywriting features (at least the ones I remember) and even broke the rule by adding a 2nd link near the end. It looked great in my web design software! But I wasn’t sure yet how to get it to show up on my site.

For this, I had to look at a simple site and remember things I’d seen before. I experimented a little, too. It turns out, at least with the web hosting company I use, an HTML document called “index.html” is the default page that shows up as the home page.

And just like that, I had created and uploaded a single-page site using just a simple, free web design program. Which is great timing, because I’ll need another one for a training product I’m creating that will be ready to launch early next year.

Want to see how a simple page created with a free program looks? Click here and be amazed – not by the quality, but by the fact I figured it out!