Online Business

A lot of people have a problem with selling or being a marketer, better yet sounding like a sleazy used car salesman. This is a problem I have noticed that some people have when trying to make sales online. I wish I could tell you that you don’t have to sell to make any money with your business, there is really no way out. You will have to embrace selling. The good news is there is a way to market you products without having to feel like taking a shower afterwards and that is what I want to highlight with this post.

Buyers want to make informed decisions

What selling or marketing really is, is helping the potential customer to make an informed decision on whether your product is right for them or not. This is the reason why buyer’s guides are so popular. If you go to a departmental store to buy a TV, you will see brochures telling you what to look out for when buying a TV. It will list features like Refresh rates, Number of pixels, Optimal viewing distances etc. You may see a statement like, 52 inch TV’s with refresh rates of 65 Hz are hard to find. Co-incidentally, when you are about to buy the the TV and you look at the product description, you tend to see the same metrics on the product description. You end up saying to yourself. “Wow, this live jasmin TV has a refresh rate of 70Hz and it is 52 inches wide. It must be good, I think I will get one of those”.

Educate your customer

When selling a product (let’s say purple widgets), all you are doing or should be doing is informing the customer of the benefits they will gain from using a purple widget they buy from you. A good way of highlighting the benefits is to draw up a buyer’s guide. An example could be “The 20 things you need to look out for when buying a purple widget”. You can make a blog post or series of posts out of this. Make sure you highlight the features as well as the benefits that a reat widget should have before they buy it. This is helping your customer feel that they will be making an informed decision when they buy.

When you do launch your purple widget, you can now list those 20 things as features that your product posesses and add some bonuse features. Now you are in business as this will definitely help you increase your sales. Do you have any ideas on how making a buyer’s guide can help you market your product online?

If you are checking out my blog due to my guest post on The Smart Passive Income blog, you are welcome. I really had fun writing the post on the SPI blog and I hope you could get some value in it. I want to share a post with you here which I title, Ignore the Real World (thanks to the book Rework by 37 signals). As an entrepreneur, the chances are you have great ideas bursting out of your brain but the moment you share it with someone, they reply you with, “That won’t work in the real world” .

• In the real world, you are meant to go to work for someone else.

• In the real world, you are meant to work 40 hours a week doing what you are told and your creativity doesn’t matter.

• In the real world, you move up the ladder when you help “The company” achieve their goals and all you get is a pat on the back. “Thank you, because of your work, the company has made a profit of $10 million this year”, while you earn $20,000 a year.

• In the real world, you will be crazy to do what you love and earn money doing it.

• In the real world, entrepreneurs are crazy risk-takers in a cut-throat environment and only the top 5% succeed so you had better stay with your safe and secure “job”.

If Bill Gates had listened to the people in the real world, he would have thrown away his jasminlive dream of seeing a personal computer on every desk. We would have been stuck in a time where computers were the size of warehouses and we had to type our letters on those noisy, ink-based typewriters.

If Pat Flynn has listened to the people in the real world, he would have gone looking for another Architectural job after being laid off during a recession while his new family suffered the consequences.

The truth is, we are not cut out for the real world, the only reason we stick with the real world is that we feel it is a safe and secure place to be. My problem with the real world is that I am not able to do what I love, what keeps me up at night, stuff I can think about for hours without getting bored, stuff like developing solutions to real problems and seeing people get value out of it.

The great thing about the world we live in today is that the middle man has been left out of the equation. The only pre-requisite to being successful is how much work you are willing to put into your passion. If you are really passionate about what you do, it won’t feel like work at all. You can pretty much do it all with a laptop and an internet connection. You can post a video to the web that millions have access to without paying money to a TV network.

There is no excuse for having to waste my life for “The Boss”, that is why I have decided to get on the journey to the other world, where I can create freely, live, love and matter. In my research, I have discovered that there are 7 pillars you need to implement to start a successful business as an entreprenuer and if you sign up to my newsletter, I will send you 7 free reports that outline these pillars. Thank you for taking the time to read this, I appreciate it.

Is it frustrating that although you have followed the recommended steps to develop a product to sell, your sales still look disappointing? You have built a large enough list to survey about your upcoming chaturbat product, you have developed a minimum viable version of that and released it to the public, your sales are trickling in but that is all it ever does… trickle in. How do you break that glass ceiling and get a flood of sales and not just a trickle.

Start a Fire

or better yet, get a firestarter to start the fire for you. Have you noticed how the big blogs tend to do reviews of products just before they are launched? I have read a lot of gadget reviews, book reviews on blogs like Engadget, TechCrunch and the New York Times. These generate a hell of a lot of sales for the gadget or book in concern. These reviews are what I refer to as Firestarters, a term I first heard of through Mike Stelzner of Social Media Examiner.

Now you may be thinking, “Yeah right, How do I get the NY Times to pitch my product?”. It doesn’t have to be the NY Times, all you need is the attention of about 5 bloggers or publishers that cater to the audience your product targets. I will get to how you can connect with firestarters in a minute but first let me explain the importance of starting fires and how this can help you break the glass ceiling and get more a flood of customers for your product.

2 Reasons Why You Need the Fire

The main reason why you need to connect with major bloggers is that they can get your message to many more people than you possibly could. I always use this analogy of the microphone. If you need to get a message across to many people, you could do it by shouting at the top of your voice but I am sure you will get many more people to listen by using a leveraging a microphone to get your message across.

Another important advantage is you get the trust of that audience quicker and the defensive walls they have put in place are not going to keep you out. Why? this is because you are coming in through the gate and the person letting you in is someone they already trust.

I’ll give you a quick personal example, I came across a plugin that I wanted to buy for this blog called Popup Domination, but for some reason, I did not make the purchase at that point in time. Later on that week, I read a blog post from a popular blogger I follow, David Risley promoting the plugin. I made the Jasminelive.online purchase on the spot, and this happened because David Risley practically let Micheal Dunlop into my realm of awareness. Now I am subscribed to Micheal’s updates and if he delivers on his relationship with me, I will probably end up buying more of his products that I need. Can you see how you can use this simple tactic to get customers for life?

5 Steps to Connect with Firestarters

Now it’s all well and good, you know why it is important to connect with people of influence. Now I am sure you want to know the specifics of how to go about making these connections.

1. First, you need to make a list of the firestarters you want to connect with. The good thing about the social web today is that you can easily start a conversation with almost anybody that is active on social networks.

2. Get on their radar by commenting on their blog posts, retweeting their posts, answering questions that they ask on Twitter or Facebook. There is a fine line between coming across as a suck-up or coming across as a helpful member of their community. Be careful not to come across as a suck-up.

3. Givers get. The key here is to add value. People (the nice ones at least) will naturally remember someone that has helped them in the past. If your help makes sure they open an email when they see it is from you, you are doing a good job.

4. Simply ask. It is really that simple, all you need to do is ask if they would be interested in promoting your product. People do this the wrong way round and take this step first. Well if you don’t get a reply, do not be surprised. Your email could have gone past their stream just like the 100’s of other pitches the get daily.

5. What is in it for them? While taking all these steps, you always have to make them aware of what is in it for them. An affiliate kick-back, free content for their readers, a special discount for their audience. Whatever it is, make it easy for them to lift that finger and hit the send button on that promotional email. You can even go as far as writing the email for them.

As always, let me know your thoughts. What do you think are better ways to get a fire started for your product.

You have a blog, you write posts every day, or every week. You do the SEO thing, leave comments on blogs. You basically do everything you are told to do to have a successful blog. But somehow it all seems to get you nowhere. The reason for this is, you are trying to figure thing out on your own.

In this world of online marketing where there are so many scams and a 1001 ways to make money blogging, you need someone to help you cut through the crap and show how it should be done. You need a mentor that will help you figure out what you need to do in half the time. What would have taken you 5 days to figure out will be explained to you in one.

My story

I started this blog in May 2010 with a lot of high hopes. I did not want to be the run-of-the-mill blogger that would crank out post after post and comment on other blogs and not deliver value. I wanted to give something of value and make a business out of it. Then one day, I stumbled upon this post from David Risley called A Blog is Not A Business. It spoke to me personally and I added David’s blog to my RSS Feed.

The call

I had an idea for a piece of software that would help bloggers grow their email lists but somehow I was stuck in the analysis phase. I had 1001 ideas for development and marketing, but somehow I couldn’t get round to making things happen. One day I got an email from David offering a half-hour consulting for less than half the normal price. It was a no-brainer so I took him up on the offer. Before the call, I was skeptical because I thought I would need more than a half-hour to go through all my questions. There was no need for that. In that half hour, David had given me:

• actionable steps on how to release the product

• what to look out for when developing the product

• potential bugs that might crop up

• who to contact to promote the plugin

• what to give away as bonuses to get people to buy the product

• Best of all, an offer to test and promote the product

Four weeks later, which is about a a month ago. My first product Viral List was finished and ready for launch. Right now, I am in the beta-test/marketing phase. I have high hopes for the future of this product and a lot had to do with the 30 minute call I had with David Risley.

Get a mentor

In summary, trying to figure out everything yourself will only slow you down. Find a mentor that will cut your learning time in half. Your competitors are out there making leaps and bounds and you need to be on the cutting edge to succeed. You may be concerned about spending money to get help but see it as an investment in your business. You reap what you sow.

Today when looking for advice on business opportunities on the internet, you find out that you get mostly the same advice.

• If you want to be an affiliate marketer, go to clickbank.

• If you want to develop a business online, write an eBook.

• If you want to sell a website, go to Flippa.

Stop Running with the Herd

And the list continues. What you get with this mentality is called “running with the herd“. In stock investing, “running with the herd” will only get you somewhere when you are one of the first to find out about that opportunity. After too many people have jumped on the opportunity, the stock becomes “over-bought” and you will not see as much returns from that investment opportunity as the the initial buyers.

It is the same with online entreprenuership, most of these sites like Clickbank and Flippa, while they do have some gems, are riddled with low-end crappy products. This is because a lot of people on these sites have been sold the dream and think they can pump out noise and profit from it.

Think Out of The Box

To truly get ahead, you need to to think out of the box. This post was inspired by a post I read this morning from my friend, Chris Guthrie. Chris sold a website he developed for six figures. He didn’t do it through Flippa. The sale was done through an investment bank. How did he figure out he could sell a website for a premium through an investment bank? He thought out of the box. Read How to Sell a Website to know exactly how.

Mix What Works With Creativity

The lesson here is; As an entrepreneur, you need to know what works. Most importantly, why it works and the fundamentals behind why it does. This way you can be creative and put your own spin to it to make it work even better for you. The days of blueprints are over.