Tag: strategic internet marketing

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Sales & Marketing

What Information Products Can Do For Your Business

After spending the past few issues talking about mistakes entrepreneurs make creating and selling information products, I thought maybe it was time to talk about why you want to bother with this whole mess to begin with.

Well, let me give you 5 reasons why you want to add information products to your business:

1. An additional income stream. If you’re just making money selling your services, adding information products gives you a passive or leveraged income stream. It also can help stabilize your cash flow. If you’ve been in business for a few years, you notice there’s an ebb and flow to sales — offering a variety of packages, products, services, etc. helps minimize those cash flow “ebbs.”

2. Options for your prospects. If the only way your prospects can invest with you if through your services, you’re limiting yourself. Some people aren’t going to want to invest in your services — either it’s not right for them now or not right for them at all. But an information product may be exactly what they want. However, if you don’t have one to offer, you’ll lose the sale.

3. A way for your prospects to “try” your services. Sometimes your ideal clients need to “test you out” before they invest in your full services. An information product lets them do that — they can go through your product and if they decide they like what they see, they’ll take the next step with you.

4. Options for marketing. If you have information products, it opens up doors for you. You can sell your information products on teleclasses, you can sell them at the back of the room for live events, you may even find other opportunities falling into your lap. It’s amazing how much you can expand your marketing once you have an info product to sell.

5. A way to uplevel your entire marketing. If you have information products you can do things like have a product launch (or relaunch) or a sale. And every time you do a launch or a sale, not only do you have the opportunity to make money right then from that product, but you’ll also gain visibility, grow your list, and probably sell your other products and services as well. Best yet, the more launches you do, the more you’ll see your overall business grow.

Info products can be a great addition to the other programs and services your business offers. But, remember, none of the above 5 things just “happen” — you still need to take the time to properly market and create them. They’re not a magic bullet but over time, they CAN transform your business.

Categories
Sales & Marketing

3 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When They Start to Sell Information Products

Recently, I wrote about the big mistakes entrepreneurs make when they create information products.  Unfortunately, there are more mistakes to avoid when starting to sell them!  Here are the biggest 3:

1. Your expectations are out of whack with reality. I once had a self development consultant tell me he wanted to sell a million dollars of his $497 product in one year. So I ran the numbers for him on what he would have to do to get that. He got very, very quiet.

Look, I’m all about thinking big. I’ve thought big my entire life. But if you want to do more than simply think big and actually accomplish big things, you need to understand what it takes to get there.

Let me give you a quick example. Let’s say you want to sell one information product a day off your web site. If you have a 1% conversion rate on your sales letter (and that’s not a walk in the park to do, but we’ll start there because the math is easy) that means one out of every 100 people are going to buy your product. To sell one a day, means you need 100 people looking at your sales letter a day. (Note, I don’t mean 100 people looking at your web site a day, I mean 100 people looking at that sales letter a day.) That means you need to get 3,000 visitors to that page a month. And if you’re not getting 3,000 visitors a month, you probably won’t sell an information product a day.

So let’s say you’re this entrepreneur. You just finished your product, you wrote the sales letter and stuck it up on your site and are now sitting back and waiting for the sales to pour in. And instead of getting one sale a day, you’re lucky to get a sale a month. Or every 6 months.

And when this happens, you’re probably feeling very frustrated and discouraged. But you shouldn’t be. Because if you understood how the numbers worked, you would know what was realistic and you would ALSO know what you needed to do in order to sell one a day. (Note, for more information about this, check out my “Why Isn’t My Web Site Making Me Any Money?” product —

http://www.michelepw.com/10easysteps.html)

The problem I’ve found is entrepreneurs create their first info product sure this is their ticket to easy wealth. Then, when the days, weeks and months go by and it doesn’t sell, they get frustrated and give up. And giving up is the REAL problem. Not the lack of sales. (Lack of sales CAN be fixed.)

2. You don’t spent the time and energy selling it as you did creating the product. Sending a couple emails to your list is NOT putting a lot of time and energy into selling your product. Or, worse yet, throwing up a sales page and expecting people to flock to it and buy is also not putting enough time and energy into selling it.

Products are great, don’t get me wrong. And while they can be passive income, what they mostly are is leveraged income. Making sales every day from your site is NOT magic. Nor is it an accident. It’s a combination of doing the right marketing tasks to drive warm visitors to your site, collecting their contact information, and starting a relationship with them with an ezine or some other communications. It’s about doing visibility activities. It’s about doing product launches to up your visibility and take your marketing to another level.

When you do all these things, you find your overall sales go up. And when you promote a product specifically, sales spike further.

3. You give up. I can’t tell you how many entrepreneurs I run into who have unrealistic expectations about selling their product, and then do little to no promoting or marketing of their product, and then give up because they don’t sell any. They incorrectly assume there’s a problem with their business, their clients, the product, themselves, etc., when it’s a problem with their marketing.

Before you decide there’s something more drastically wrong, make sure you understand the numbers and the marketing. Only then can you make a determination if there’s a deeper problem then simply bad marketing.

Categories
Business Ideas

Are You Playing to Win or Playing Not to Lose?

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You may have heard the phrase “playing to win or playing not to lose.” And while it sounds good to say “you’re playing to win” in your business, what exactly does that really mean?

Okay, well first off, let’s define these phrases. To me, playing to win means playing all out. Going for broke. Leaving nothing on the table. You’re putting everything out there to win and holding nothing back.

Playing not to lose means holding something back. Being conservative. Taking some of your chips off the table. Making sure if you don’t win, you minimize your losses.

Now is there a time for each of these? Of course. Playing not to lose makes a lot of sense in certain situations. Vegas for instance. Betting your retirement on a spin of the roulette wheel isn’t real bright. (Even if by some miraculous chance it works, it’s still not too bright.)
And if that’s the way you want to approach your business and your life (playing not to lose) then there’s nothing wrong with it. You can still be successful playing not to lose.

But typically, if that’s your approach, you’re not going to play as big as you could be. And you’re probably not going to make the kind of money you’re capable of.

So how do you know if you’re playing to win or playing not to lose? Well, here are a few signs.

Playing to win in your business:

  • You take risks (and a lot of those risks other people just don’t “get”). Maybe you invest in a high end coaching program or mentorship. Maybe you decide to launch a product that looks on the outside to be a bad idea. Maybe you decide to expand and hire a team even though you really can’t afford it right now.
  • You take advantage of opportunities even if they don’t appear to be a good idea on the surface.
  • You turn down opportunities even if on the surface they look perfect. (Ah, didn’t think I’d say that, did you?)
  • You make decisions from the place you want to be, not necessarily the place you’re at now. (Even if that’s a really scary place to be.)

Playing not to lose in your business:

  • You make decisions based on what you can afford rather than what you need. Okay, a caveat here. I’m NOT saying you should spend your life savings or go into massive debt with no way of paying it off. What I AM saying is sometimes you have to take a risk. For instance, hiring team members. What happens a lot of time is you need the help desperately but you don’t quite have the cash flow. If you never take that first step and hire someone, even on a small basis, you’ll never free yourself up to start making more money.
  • You’re ultra careful about the risks you take (or you don’t take risks at all)
  • You probably aren’t marketing as much as you should be because deep down inside, you don’t want your business to grow very big (after all, you’d start to lose control of it if it did grow to big). Or you aren’t marketing as much because what if it doesn’t work? What if you make this big public splash with your marketing and it fails? It’s bad enough it doesn’t work but now everyone will know it.
  • You don’t try a lot of new things — speaking, marketing, etc.

Now, I want to be clear. There’s nothing wrong with playing not to lose, but chances are you WILL be playing small. You’re going to miss opportunities to get your message and vision out in a big way. You’re not going to take chances where you might fall on your face (especially if you fall on your face in a public way).

Categories
Entrepreneurs

What Ohio State Football Can Teach You About Your Business

If you follow college football, you’ve probably run across Ohio State a time or two. Their football program is very old and very prestigious.

But I’m still cringing at the thought of watching them get beaten by Oregon at the Rose Bowl. (Yes I’m fairly certain they’ll lose although I do hope I’m wrong.) As a Big Ten fan, I’m really tired of watching Ohio State get hammered in these big, national games.
(Of course, if MY team, the Wisconsin Badgers, would ever actually beat them in conference, maybe all of this would be different but I digress.)

For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Why did Ohio State win so darn many games only to consistently embarrass the BigTen in big out-of-conference games? Jim Tressel is an excellent coach. Isn’t he?

Well, this year I finally got my answer. Yes Jim Tressel is an excellent coach. But he plays not to lose. He doesn’t play to win.

And that, my friends, is why he loses the big games. Because those teams come to win. And Tressel is coming not to lose. (And that’s why he’s probably gong to lose to Oregon at the Rose Bowl because Oregon has been playing to win all season.)

So what exactly does it mean to play not to lose? Well it means playing very conservatively. You punt the ball rather than going for it on 4th and short. You go for the field goal rather than the touchdown. You build very strong defenses. You commit very few penalties. You have a very well coached team.

It also means you don’t take chances. You don’t have quarterbacks that heave the ball down the field in broken plays that can result in an interception or an 80-yard touchdown. You also don’t win a lot of shootouts. And if your game plan isn’t working, you don’t have a lot of options because winging it isn’t something you do.

And you’re also pretty uninteresting to watch. (Sorry Buckeye fans but it’s true.)

Now, can you win games playing not to lose? Absolutely. Tressel has a very respectable record. (Much better than my Badgers.) He’s won the Big Ten Title nearly every year.

The problem happens when he gets to the big games. Now I’m not a coach nor did I ever play football but I do watch a lot of it and here’s what I think happens. If you’re not able to prevent Ohio from executing their game plan, you’re toast. If Ohio can execute their game plan, they’re going to do it very well and probably beat you.

But, if you throw a wrench in that game plan, if you throw them off, well then Ohio has a problem. They’re not good at improvising nor do they take chances. And if you don’t take a chance, especially when the chips are down, you’re probably not going to win those games.

So what about you? Are you playing not to lose or are you playing to win? Sure you can do well playing not to lose, but you’re never going to play as big of a game as you could be. Play to win, sure you might fall on your face from time to time but you’ll probably end up playing bigger than you ever thought possible.

So what does it mean to play to win or play not to lose? I’ll talk about that more in next week’s article.

Categories
People & Relationships

When Bad Things Happen to Good Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

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It’s an unfortunate fact of life (and business). Out of the blue you get a nasty email from someone. Sometimes it’s about an article you’ve written. Sometimes it’s accompanied by a refund request. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it’s tied to anything at all.

Or maybe you discover someone writing malicious things about you on a blog or a forum. Or maybe some other negative things suddenly start getting tweeted or posted to Facebook about you, your products or your business.

Stuff happens. As a business owner and entrepreneur, the more successful you become, the more you open yourself up to criticism, negative feedback or just plain being attacked.

As someone who is both a writer AND a business owner, I know all about what happens when you’re dealing with unwelcome criticism. (I write fiction so yes, I’ve dealt with my share of negative feedback.) But if this is something new for you, or even if it’s not new but you’re feeling like you’ve just been sucker-punched by something out of the blue, I thought I’d share a few insights to help you get through it.

1. Know you’re not alone.
We’ve ALL been there. And I mean exactly that. It doesn’t matter how small or big your business is, stuff like this is going to happen. So know that no matter what just happened to you, there are a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners out there who will both sympathize and emphasize.

2. See it for what it is.
All criticism is not created equally. Sometimes what someone is saying has absolutely nothing to do with you and everything to do with their own issues. Sometimes they have a legitimate complaint but the person is so unhappy with their own life they blow it completely out of portion because they just want to strike out at someone and you’re the one they picked.

And sometimes they have a legitimate beef AND they handled it fine, but you just didn’t want to hear it. An example of this is some of the criticism I’ve gotten from some of my stories. The people were thoughtful and absolutely right. And I hated them. (Until I got over myself and slunk back to the keyboard to make the edits.)

Now the third option doesn’t happen too often (unless you’re a fiction writer) but the first two do. You just have to see it for what it is. If there’s something buried in the anger and name-calling you can use to improve your products, services or business, by all means use it. But know the rest of it has absolutely nothing to do with you and everything to do with them.
(And you’ll know when the criticism is right. Trust me. Your gut will tell you.)

3. Be kind to yourself.
When these things happen, it can hurt. And that’s okay. Call a friend. Or better yet, your mother (if you can). Write about it in your journal. Take a walk. Don’t bury your feelings, let yourself feel bad and then let it go. Don’t tell yourself it doesn’t matter and let it fester inside you, deal with it. Get it out of you. And then let it go.

4. Let someone else deal with these things.
Whenever possible, have someone else in your business be a filter for stuff like this. Let other people take care of refund requests or just read the nasty emails and they can decide if there’s a legitimate complaint buried in there or not. Protect yourself, there’s no need for you to see everything or deal with everything. Yes you’ll have to step in if something big happens, but let other people take care of the small stuff. The small stuff is what wears you down anyway. Save yourself for the big things and don’t worry about the rest.