I remember my first ever job fresh out of school. As a factory line operator, doing 12 hour shifts and rarely seeing the light of day at the end of the 12 hour shifts. The salary wasn’t the worst in town at that time paying about $1,200 dollars. It helped to pay the bills and fund some quick getaways to neighboring islands.
But that was about it. Nothing else was great about the whole thing. I didn’t have time to be unhappy though- Not when all I could do was work as an assembly line operator and sleep the moment my head hit the pillow once I got home. I was too tired to be unhappy.
Then I discovered books by gurus of the business world.
People like….
Brian Tracy www.briantracy.com
Timothy Feriss www.fourhourworkweek.com
Jay Abraham www.abraham.com
Dan Kennedy (80% of what I know now comes from this legend) www.dankennedy.com
Perry Marshall (Traffic Generation) www.perrymarshall.com
Chris Guillebeau (This Guy revolutionised the low cost startups arena) 100startup.com
Zig Ziglar www.ziglar.com
Harv Eker
Blair Singer
What can set you apart from your peers
Remember when you last graduated from school? Remember when you and your friends were earning just about the same salary as fresh graduates from college?
Now, do a simple fact-finding session. Call these guys up. Check out their Facebook pages. If you notice, some are earning so much more than others at this point in time. Some are so far behind, they think they’re in first place.
Really, think about it. What is the REAL difference between you and these old friends from school? Are they 10 times smarter than you are? That’s impossible. Are they 10 times luckier? Luck is a convenient excuse for losers.
The real reason why some are so far ahead of you in life, despite starting from the SAME starting point is ONGOING SELECTIVE EDUCATION.
Many people, upon graduating, stop learning. They laugh at the idea of attending seminars, They make fun of friends who purchase self help or business books. They call friends who learn to make websites uncool and nerds. That’s the reason why.
If you glance through the list of authors above, you’ll see a wide array of genres. These include self-help. business, marketing, traffic generation and sales books.
The reason why ongoing selective education is so powerful, is that unlike many things in life, like a suntan, or a perfect manicure, is that it just stays and accumulates. Education is always a positive return on investment vehicle. You get to choose exactly what is it you want to learn, at your own pace, and time. If it’s a website you need to create, you can go to the bookstore and purchase books on website creation. For sales, pick up books on prospecting and sales closing.
In school, you were pretty much told what to study (generally), and this way of thinking might have influenced you throughout adulthood.
The first biggest secret then, is ongoing, selective, education. This is key to multiplying your income.
By now, you would have figured out that the fastest, most efficient way to multiply income is not from getting a job and hoping to get promoted, but to start and run your own business, no matter how small.
The rest of the income-multiplying formula
So we now know that the most important component of the formula, is to continue life-long learning.
What else?
The following provide a complete breakdown of how I did it. If you did it the way I did, I don’t see how or why your results should be any less dramatic.
1)USP
2)Landing Page
3)Traffic Generation
4)Sales Scripts
5)Follow up systems, autoresponders etc
6)Up-sell, cross sell
7)Reactivating old customers
8)Additional revenue streams of income from the same model
USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
After education, this is the first single most important thing you can identify and implement into your business to ensure a great start to your income-multiplying journey. A USP is simply a reason why your customers should choose your company, over your competitors, to buy from. What makes your company different, in a positive way?
The reason why the USP ( a term popularized by Jay Abraham) is such an integral part of any business or startup is because it represents differentiation in a crowded world. Customers are bombarded with thousands of marketing messages daily, from buses and taxi advertising, to relentless television and radio commercials.
Look at this- www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/media/15everywhere.html
Daily relentless bombarding of the consumers’ minds might lead to fatigue- As consumers, our guards are up when we see less than convincing ads. We learn to filter our mediocre ads, in favor of ads which are concise, and promises benefits to the reader.
In fact, when I first started my manpower coaching supply firm, I had a tough time differentiating my company from the dozens that are already plying their trade in schools. In the beginning, I had one coach, from the Philippines, and my total profit per month for this coach was a measly $1,100 after salary and other marketing overheads. It was hard to compete with the more established and entrenched coaching firms.
When I discovered the concept of USP, i immediately sprung into action and tried to implement one into the business. After weeks of brainstorming, I came up with one. I would only hire coaches who had national level credentials in their fields of coaching. For example, I hired the ex head coach of the Philippines Navy to work with us. I hired also the assistant coach of the Philippines Track and Field SEA Games team to come work with our company.
Before long, we were recognized as the coaching company in Singapore which hires only the most qualified and competent coaches you could find anywhere.
The result:
A long waiting queue for schools and government agencies who wants to hire the coaches, and multiplying the profits from this venture. Without a USP, the profits was a measly $1,200. Now, we regularly make more than $8,000 profits per month simply by changing the USP and creating an additional revenue stream of income through fitness bootcamps.
The other business that we did marketing for, a mirrors and framing shop, enjoyed a doubling in revenue after we implemented a clear USP for them. Their USP was a “same day service” to send a sales representative to their prospects’ homes and offices to take measurements and give an on-site quotation to the prospect. As far as Singapore was concerned, not many frame shops offered a same day on site visit and quotation service, so this was PROMINENTLY displayed on the website and conveyed clearly in all sales materials.
As a result of this USP, more customers came to see them as an obvious choice, for they gave an additional benefit to the customers that really made a difference to their decision making process. In fact, when marketing for them, we found that it was not always the decision maker who made the enquiries and phone calls- This was quite a revelation because this USP allowed our clients (the framing shop) to enter the vicinity, conduct a comprehensive on site sales presentation and meet with the decision maker, often the CEO himself. Just this addition of USP doubled the revenue in 2012 compared to the years before, where the revenues stagnated for years on end.
If you don’t do anything else in your business to try and improve it, there is one thing you can do to cause a massive improvement to your sales bottomline- Introduce a powerful USP. It really is worth it.
2) Landing page
A landing page is simply a one page website, that every business may not be able to do without. There was a time in the past where businesses could thrive without an online presence, but today a website is linked with 3 intrinsic assumptions from your potential customers
1)A website is needed to project credibility and show that a business is serious about its customers.
2)A website allows potential customers to find out more about a company’s offerings, allowing the company to build loyalty, and introduce upselling and cross selling opportunities.
3)A website is a fantastic way to get customers to find you. No longer do you have to situate yourself in a great cross junction of human traffic or expensive commercial real estate to enjoy walk ins. To not have a website then, is sinful.
BUT the reason why i call this component of your business a Landing Page, is because often times, a website needs only to have ONE page with ONE goal in mind. If you are selling a carpet cleaning service, it is unlikely you’ll ever make sales right off the bat online. Consumers are savvy now, they like to do price shopping, benefits comparisons and so on. If that is true, then this ONE page that the prospect lands on, will need to be compelling to get them to take action.
This goal might be simply to get them to call you, email you, or request a brochure on carpet cleaning services. It might be simply to get them to add themselves to a mailing list of sorts, so that you can later use that information to follow up a sales appointment with them.
In all of my businesses and dealing with clients, I have always endorsed a SINGLE most powerful call to action on the page. I no longer ask them to purchase right away. In fact, asking someone to purchase right away without justifying the price and adding value to their lives, actually kills sales. That is why I always aim to educate and add value to them first, and move them one step closer to the sale.
Below is a typical sales cycle.
1)Customer contacts you
2)Build the relationship (add value by educating and teaching, rather than selling all the time)
In fact, all our Profits Academy members has this implemented in their marketing system one way or another. A tuition centre we did marketing for increased their base clients by 75% in 2 months by just implementing this one feature. Instead of asking parents to call and enrol their children to their tuition centre, we created a landing page where parents could download and fill up an “assessment form” to see if their children’s profile matched the tuition centre’s style of teaching. Immediately, parents were downloading this form and sending them back to us within a day or two, expecting an assessment. Depending on the scores, we then sent them templated responses to show their suitability. Just this one step alone increased interactivity and allowed our clients to truly show and educate their prospects about their tuition services. Naturally, a higher percentage of parents enrolled their children in the program then without.
Another example
A variation of this is done by Adam Khoo. In marketing his student bootcamps, he directed parents to a single landing page, where they had to sign up for a free day seminar. These parents then attended the seminar, saw the true value of what Adam had to offer, and promptly signed up their children at premium pricing.
As you can see, you need to move away from the mentality of always closing the sale at first opportunity, and instead focus on adding value and interacting with the customer. Once the customer sees the tremendous value, he/she will then naturally ask for the sale to be made to them. That is the power of a landing page.
3) Qualify the leads- Ask them question about budget and whether they needed the products. There is no wisdom in pursuing the wrong target to try and close the sale. Qualifying early saves time, money and effort on both parties.
4)Discover the needs- As above, interact with your customer to discover their needs, and accordingly mould the sales pitch to fit with their needs. It closes at a higher rate.
5)Present a solution- Project your business as THE Obvious Choice to solve their problems.
As you can see, the whole diagram below, the sales process cycle program, is only made possible if you had a landing page that required them to take ONE single action to start with.
As a bonus to you readers out there, check out this post which teaches you 13 “magic tricks” to get even more out of your landing pages.
http://www.dtelepathy.com/blog/design/13-landing-page-tricks-increase-conversion