If you already sell your own products, you can double your income in no time at all by adding new price points to your marketing funnel. You don’t even need to create any new products – just new services that take very little of your time. Here’s how it works…
Let’s say you’ve got one or more products in the $20-$50 dollar range that teach something you’re good at. And for this example, let’s say that your product is a book on how to make a website super user friendly so that people stay and buy, rather than getting lost and confused and leaving. (This is a major market, by the way. Hint hint.)
In addition to your book, you can add a personal 1 hour consultation for $97 to $197 to look at and give feedback on one of their websites.
You could also offer to be on retainer for a certain fee per month to check each of their websites monthly and point out the changes they need to make. This fee would depend on the number of sites they have and are adding each month.
You could further offer a coaching service in which you train people to be usability experts and charge others for their services. In this case, you might charge $1,000 or even $2,000 a month for 3-6 months to make them experts.
Whatever your niche is, odds are you can add additional service-type programs that will easily double the amount of money you’re already making.
If you sell just 5 $97 one-time consultations a month, that’s another $5,820 a year.
If you sell an ongoing service at $297 a month and you’ve got 12 clients, that’s $42,768 a year.
If you take 4 new coaching clients for 6 months at a time, twice a year at $1,000 a month, that’s another $48,000 a year.
And none of these services have to take a lot of time. In the case of the 1 hour consult, obviously it’s an hour. And your real money here will be derived from upselling one of your more expensive consulting or coaching packages.
If you’re a consultant, you might be spending a couple of hours a week on each client. If you’re a coach, you might spend an hour a week on the phone, and answer their email questions 3 to 5 days a week.
And notice that you didn’t have to create any new products to do this. You’ve already got the knowledge and expertise – you’re simply offering more of it in a highly personalized manner. Your clients get tremendous benefit this way, much more so than they could by simply buying your book.
You’re happy, your clients are happy, and here’s a bonus: Anyone that you personally work with – even if it’s only for an hour – is far more likely to buy your products in the future, regardless of price.
Do you plan to release a $997 product in six months? Offer your customers personalized attention that greatly benefits them, and you will hit the ground running with sales when you launch your expensive product, guaranteed.
Take a few minutes now and think about what you can offer your existing and future customers that A) Provides them with a tremendous amount of value and B) You can perform in a minimal amount of time. Then quickly write up a page explaining your new service, send it to your existing customers and add it to your sales funnel. You could be making new sales in less than 24 hours.
Alright, some of you are going to say I’m over simplifying and others will simply disagree, but after years of being super serious about my business, here’s what I’ve discovered:
Everything in life – EVERYTHING – is actually a GAME.
You know how you sit down with a few friends to play cards or a board game, and there’s always that one person who takes the whole game WAY too seriously? They’re getting mad and frustrated when things don’t go their way, they’re celebrating like it’s New Years when things go right, and half the time they can’t even follow the conversation because they’re too busy concentrating on the game.
Yeah, that person.
Well guess what? I’ll bet you that when it comes to Internet Marketing, you are that person.
If you’re taking every decision so seriously, then it might as well be life or death. Exactly how should you word this email? What color should your header be? Should you promote this product at 6a.m. on Tues, or at 9a.m. on Wednesday? And so forth.
These are choices that should take seconds.
Yet I was agonizing over each one like it was a declaration to declare war.
I thought I had to nail every decision and make it all perfect. Nothing could be left to chance. If it took me a week to decide something, it’s because that’s how long it should take.
Wrong.
Now I flip a coin. Seriously. If I need to make a decision – but based on all the facts I have I can’t decide – I flip a coin. Sort of like rolling the dice in a game. Because you know what? It’s better to take the wrong action than no action at all.
Sure, fast decisions can turn out to be bad ones. But guess what? So can slow decisions. But no decision at all? That will get you nowhere, fast. Every kid who rides a bicycle can tell you that it’s far easier to change direction once you’re moving. But if you’re sitting still on that bike, you’re not going anywhere.
And the long term difference between good and bad decisions isn’t even in the decision itself, or the results it produces. Instead, the difference is in how you react. If you make a bad decision and then confine yourself to bed for a week, that’s not going to help.
But when you play marketing like a game, a bad decision is simply telling you to move in another direction. You shrug off the bad choice, glad that now you have more information to head in a better direction this time.
Laughing at your bad choices is a good idea, too, because it’s a game. It’s all a game. LIFE is a game.
If you’re down two goals in football, do you over think what to do next? No. You get the ball and start moving it down the field. If you encounter something new and surprising in a video game, do you shut it down? No, you try different things and see what works. At most you pause the game, go online and find out what to do. It takes you 5 minutes at most before you’re back in the game, fully armed with the knowledge you need to win.
Any difficult obstacle you face can be thought of as a game. And just shifting your mindset to game mode can make all the difference.
I had a friend years ago who went to military boot camp. He looked at the whole thing as a game, and afterward he reported that boot camp was one of the easiest things he ever did. Other people in his camp took the training so seriously, they were literally getting sick from fright. Same boot camp, two different mindsets.
I had another friend in the U.S. who was facing an IRS audit. Scary stuff, and let me tell you, he was deeply frightened and ready to do anything – including signing over a big check – to make it go away. Then he changed his outlook. Now instead of quaking in fear, he declared, “It’s a game, me against them. Let’s see how we can win this.” His fear vanished, he took action, and at the end of the audit the IRS paid HIM.
Do you want to start an online business? Launch a new product? Approach 25 gurus in the next 25 days? Make it into a game and 4 things will happen:
First, you’ll relax – and people do their best thinking when they’re relaxed.
Second, you’ll have fun – and people do their best work when they’re having fun.
Third, you won’t feel stressed – at least not the negative kind of stress – and you’ll literally live longer and be happier.
Fourth, when it’s all done and regardless of the outcome, you’ll be eager to do something else because you’ll want to have even more fun in your game.
“Yeah, but this is serious business and I’m a serious person!”
Really? Or is that simply how you choose to look at things and who you choose to be?
Life is a series of choices, and one of the biggest choices we make is deciding how to frame what we’re doing.
Me, I choose to make it a game – one I can’t wait to get up and play each morning. A game that just happens to also make me money. Lots of money.
Regardless of what people might think of the Walmart we know today, there is a lot to be learned from Walmart’s founder Sam Walton. In fact, if Sam were starting in business in 2020, he would almost undoubtedly be starting that business online.
So what can we glean from the guy in the old pickup truck who loved retailing?
Don’t worry about what others say about you. At JC Penney’s, his first full time job out of college, the personnel director told Sam, “Walton, I’d fire you if you weren’t such a good salesman. Maybe you’re just not cut out for retail.” No one remembers that man’s name, but Sam built an empire no one is likely to ever forget.
If people are telling you that you’re not cut out for online marketing, just remember Sam and smile.
Go with your strengths. Sam wasn’t good at accounting, he had poor organizational skills and he was hopelessly disorganized. But one thing he could do really well was build a team of people who could handle these things for him.
Focus on your strengths and outsource the rest.
Build relationships. In college, Same wanted to be student body president, so he discovered a trick that he would use for the rest of his life:
“I learned early on that one of the secrets to campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I did that in college. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them, I would call them by name, but even if I didn’t I would still speak to them. Before long, I probably knew more students than anybody in the university, and they recognized me and considered me their friend.”
Sam made friends everywhere he went, and you can do the same thing online. Talk to everyone in your niche because you never know who is going to be your next customer, your ally, your promoter, your affiliate or your next joint venture partner.
Be a learning machine. Sam never stopped reading books and taking courses because he understood that the next great idea could come from anywhere.
Choose 5 or 10 proven online marketers to follow, and then read everything they write. Read a marketing book each week, and develop a curiosity for everything related to your field. Keep an open mind and know that your next great idea is hidden right in front of you – you just have to uncover it and act on it.
Learn from your competition. When Sam bought his first store, he realized the store across the street was doing twice as well. So Sam spent time everyday checking out his competitor to see what he was doing, right and wrong. Later he checked out Kmarts, who were ahead of him at the time. Then he visited the headquarters of other retailers who didn’t consider him to be serious competition. Little did they know…
Carefully watch and analyze what other online marketers are doing right and wrong and learn from them. Make friends with them. Ask questions. Bribe them, buy their courses and do whatever it takes to find out what’s already working.
Continually experiment with your business. Sam was continually applying what he learned elsewhere to his stores. Said Sam:
“I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of my biggest contributions to the later success of Walmart.”
Learn something and apply it. Make it your mantra: Learn something – innovate. And test, test and test some more to see what is working best. In no other business model in history has it been easier to innovate, test and discover exactly what is working and what needs improving than in online marketing.
Don’t reinvent the wheel – adapt it to your own use. According to Sam, “…most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else…”
There are plenty of proven online marketing business models you can choose from, so don’t think you have to invent the next revolutionary thing. Instead, take what’s already working and make it even better.
Make mistakes and then move on. Sam didn’t understand the terms of his first lease or how to buy a business. He borrowed money and went into debt to overpay for a failed Ben Franklin store in Newport, Arkansas. After 5 long years of grueling work and long hours, he had quadrupled sales and he had the most successful Ben Franklin store in the region. That’s when the landlord booted him out to give the store to his son to run. There was nowhere else in town to locate Sam’s store, so he drove across four states looking for a new location. He found one in Bentonville, Arkansas and started over.
It’s okay to get it wrong the first time. In fact, you’re probably going to make mistakes and that’s terrific, because it means you’ve started. You’re moving, you’ve got momentum and you’re making progress. Mistakes aren’t roadblocks, they’re bumps in the road to success.
Don’t dwell on your mistakes. Says Sam about being thrown out of his own store, “I’ve never been one to dwell on reverses, and I didn’t do so then…. I know I read my leases a lot more carefully after that, and maybe I became a little more wary of just how tough the world can be …. But I didn’t dwell on my disappointment.”
Every moment is a fresh beginning and an opportunity to take what you’ve learned – good and bad – and use it to your advantage.
Enjoy the process and your victories. In his autobiography, which was written on his deathbed, Sam wrote, “Walmart No. 18 … opened in 1969, and it marked our return to Newport … nineteen years after we had basically been run out of town. By then, I was long over what had happened to us down there, and I didn’t have revenge in mind…. As it happened, we did extraordinarily well with our Newport Walmart, and it wasn’t too long before the old Ben Franklin store I had run on Front Street had to close its doors. You can’t say we ran that guy—the landlord’s son—out of business. His customers were the ones who shut him down. They voted with their feet.”
Sometimes success can be a long time in coming, so remember to enjoy the process and the victories along the way. There were 17 successful stores prior to No. 18 and no doubt Sam enjoyed them all. At first, even your smallest successes should be celebrated, whether it’s your first website, your first sale, or your first $10,000 day.
When it comes to success, Sam Walton may have said it best:
“Celebrate your successes. Find humor in your failures. And remember that high expectations are the key to everything.”
Expect to succeed, act as though you are already successful, do the things you need to do to succeed, and the rest will take care of itself.
What’s the easiest way to make money online, without having to create a product or a sales page? Affiliate marketing, of course. 🙂
So, why is it that most affiliate marketers never make nearly what they could make? Anyone has the potential to make HUGE money in affiliate marketing, yet 90% or more of affiliates make a pittance (I’ll wager the number is closer to 98%, in fact.)
Think about this: If you earn an average of $50 on each sale in a sales funnel you promote, and you make 6 sales, you’ve made $300. Sounds good, right?
But guaranteed, there is someone else who made 600 sales and walked away with $30,000.
Why did they make 600 sales when you made just 6?
There are reasons why a handful of affiliate marketers do amazingly well, and everyone else barely makes a profit.
And marketers who understand this will always have a tremendous advantage over marketers who don’t.
1: Build a Relationship
I know you’ve heard it before, but are you doing it? People buy people, not products.
If you want them to open your email and click your link, or visit your Facebook Group and click a link, you’ve got to have a RELATIONSHIP with your people.
This is so simple to do, yet few marketers take the time.
Start with a blog post that is all about you, and then send new opt-ins to the post so they can get to know you. Make the post silly, funny and most of all REAL. Talk about the stupid stuff you’ve done, the mistakes you’ve made, where you live and so forth.
Do you have a strange hobby or unusual taste in food? Include that. Do you have 17 pets? Talk about them. Do you work until 3 in the morning and sleep until noon? Mention that.
Reveal the real you. Not the details people don’t want, but the ones that amuse and interest. You’re looking to make a real connection, not give a resume.
And above all else, don’t make your life seem like a series of magnificent accomplishments. No one is going to relate to someone who turns everything they touch into gold.
But they are going to relate to the time you bought Bitcoin when it was worthless and sold it just before it took off, or the time you thought you could fly and jumped off your uncle’s barn into the manure pile.
And don’t stop with your ‘about me’ page, either. Use this relationship building in your lead magnet, your emails, your other blog posts and so forth.
Always inject a little bit about yourself. Not so much that you bore people, of course, or make everything seem about you. But just enough to keep it real.
Think about relating an event to a friend. Aren’t you going to give your own perceptions of what happened, as well as tell about how you got out of your car and stepped in the mud puddle just before your big presentation?
Use this same method of personal, one-on-one friend communication with your readers as well.
Post on your blog as often as possible, and we’re talking every day or two. Encourage your list to subscribe to Feedburner or the equivalent so they know when you add a new post.
Your readers will realize you’re a real person who isn’t out to pitch them a new product every 5 minutes. And they’ll gladly read your sales emails much more readily when they know there is a real live human being who is sending them these messages.
2: Use Your Own Voice
How many emails do you receive that say something along the lines of, “Buy this product – this product is the greatest product ever – you will be sorry if you miss this – so rush right over and buy it now.”
Yeah. Same old stuff, over and over again.
There is a marketer (or maybe several, but I’m thinking of one in particular) who sells MASSIVE quantities of this exact type of emails as a swipe file to new marketers.
Like a brand-new marketer couldn’t write their own 25 word email that basically says, “GO BUY THIS NOW!”
People are TIRED of getting these emails. You’re tired of getting these emails. I’m tired of getting these emails.
Same phrases, same message, same B.S.
If you’re not going to stand apart from the crowd, then you’re going to have to share the same crumbs they’re getting.
Instead, take 30 minutes and write your own promotional email in your own voice.
Forget hype. Be sincere. Be honest. “Hey, this product isn’t for everyone. I don’t even know if it’s for you. But if you have this problem, then maybe this is your solution. Check it out and decide if it’s right for you, because I know it’s worked like crazy for some people. And it’s on sale right now, too.”
I’ve written emails where I basically tell people not to buy something unless they really really want it or need it. “Don’t buy this if you already know how to do xyz.” “Don’t buy this if you’re not going to be doing this type of marketing.” This is only for people who want (fill in the blank.) It’s like I’m trying to talk them out of it, which paradoxically often results in more sales, not fewer.
But the point isn’t tricking them into buying; it’s to be honest. Because you know what? That latest, greatest product you’re promoting ISN’T what everyone on your list needs. Some of them, sure. The rest of them, no.
Do you have any idea how refreshing it is to open an email that says, “Here’s a new product, thought you might want to know, but please don’t buy it if you’re not going to use it.”
The first time I got an email like that, I bought the product without even reading the sales letter. True story. I was just so happy that someone wasn’t ramming a sale down my throat, that I jumped at the chance to buy it.
Weird but true.
My point is, be you. Be honest. Talk to your readers as though they are your best friends and you don’t want to lose your best friends by acting like a carnival barker who is here today and pulled up stakes (vanished) tomorrow with their money.
3: Email a LOT
This is the one where people like to argue with me, and I understand that.
You’ve heard over and over again that you shouldn’t email too often, or you’ll upset your subscribers, right?
After all, every time you email, there is the potential that a subscriber will hit the unsubscribe button.
Do you know what the potential is when you DON’T email? Nothing. No opens, no clicks, no sales… not even any relationship building.
Do you want people to open and read your emails? Then send out those emails EVERY DAY.
Here’s why:
First, almost no one will see every email you send out. Let’s say you’ve got a sale on one of your products. Don’t you think your readers might like to know about it? But if they miss the one and only email you send that lets them know, then they’ve missed out on the discount and you LOST a sale.
Second, send emails at different times. I opened someone’s email just yesterday, decided I was VERY interested in the new membership he was selling, clicked the link and discovered it was no longer available.
What happened? This particular marketer only sends out emails at 1:00 a.m. my time, so I don’t even see most of his emails in the avalanche of mail I get before I wake up.
Third, if you’re sending email once a week or once a month, your readers are forgetting who the heck you are. And when you finally do send an email, they think it’s spam.
Fourth, if you mail more often, you will make more money. Don’t take my word on this, just do it for one month. Send out one email per day, every day, for 30 days. Put a promotion in each one. See if you haven’t made more – a LOT more – money during that time period than during the previous month.
And by the way, I’m not saying JUST send out a promotion in each email. Make sure you have some content in there as well, even if it’s just an amusing anecdote.
4: Think of affiliate marketing as a BUSINESS
This isn’t a hobby, nor is it an add-on for an additional income stream.
Even if you go on vacation, be prepared to send out an email every day. Schedule them in advance or write them on vacation. Either way, affiliate marketing to your list is a business that you can’t just jump into when you need cash and forget about the rest of the time.
You don’t have many support issues, since the product owners handle this. You don’t have to worry about creating products, sales pages and so forth. You don’t have to drive traffic, unless it’s to build your list bigger.
With so much you don’t have to do, there’s no reason not to focus your time and energy into building relationships with your list and promoting to them every single day.
Affiliate marketing can be some of the easiest money you’ve ever made, if you put in the time and effort to make it a real business.
Hi, it’s Claudette and this is my new website. Stay tuned… I’ll have great things to share!
For starters, here’s an article I think you’ll enjoy…
It’s called: “Make the Leap to Home Business Success”
If you are going to build a successful home business, you need 3 “intangibles.” These are things that must come from WITHIN you.
===> Intangible 1 <===
First, you must have a strong WHY.
Why must you make a home business work? What’s driving you? What is it that you CAN’T have in your life anymore and/or what is it that you absolutely MUST HAVE now?
For me, I couldn’t stand working 12+ hours a day anymore and missing the experience of my children growing up. I also absolutely HAD TO HAVE the freedom of being able to control my life and finances through a little box that I could carry with me anywhere in the world and not be tied to anyone’s time pressures or demands but my own. That was my carrot and my stick. I felt a great pain deep in my gut of missing out on my children’s lives and the incredible freedom that succeeding in this business would provide for me. I found my why. You MUST find yours.
===> Intangible 2 <===
You must BELIEVE that it is possible.
If you don’t believe that it’s POSSIBLE for you to succeed in a home business or make your living on the Internet, you won’t. It’s that simple.
For me, figuring out that it was possible was just a matter of realizing that many other people were ALREADY making great money with a home business online. If they could do it, I could too. It would just be a matter of figuring out what those people were doing and then adapting it to my situation.
There is no shortage of undeniable PROOF that people (millions of them) are making money online in many different ways. Just get online and do some research and you’ll find countless testimonials and stories of REAL PEOPLE making real money on the Internet. Or head to your local bookstore and you’ll find the same documented evidence of this fact. Truth is, it’s getting easier and easier to start and succeed in a home based business. This is primarily because of the Internet and affiliate marketing.
I’ve always said that “affiliate marketing” is the job of the future. In the “old” days, you had to go to a potential employer, apply for the position and hope for the best. Now you can simply go to any company you want, fill out their affiliate application and start work immediately. Affiliates are the new working class. Believe me, making money with affiliate programs or making your living on the Internet is WAY MORE than possible. It is pretty much (or will be soon enough) unavoidable now. Affiliate marketing is the “job” of the future that’s here TODAY.
===> Intangible 3 <===
You must be willing to MAKE THE LEAP.
Ready, FIRE, then aim… This is the operating philosophy you MUST adopt to succeed with an Internet home business.
That’s backwards for most people who like to aim before they fire. The fact is the Internet is a moving target… The only thing constant about it is change. You need to stop analyzing the game and simply jump into it. You can’t learn from the outside… You have to be IN THE RING to truly understand it.
The lesson here is that you will never really be READY to start a home based business. You simply have to start one. This is what I call “Making the Leap.”
The good news is that the cost of failure on the Internet is very small. In the “brick and mortar” world you need to evaluate things very carefully before you decide to open up a business. It’s almost always necessary to invest thousands of dollars to get an offline business off the ground. However, on the Internet you can often start a successful business for less than $100. In fact, Plug-In Profit Site is a really good example of this.
You simply need get IN THE GAME… Each moment that you stay “out there,” you’re wasting valuable time that you could be learning and skills necessary to become a successful affiliate marketer. In fact, if you’re not in the game yet, you’re ALREADY behind the times. Come on… You can do it! Make the leap to becoming a successful home based business owner today!
About the author:Stone Evans was a washed up restaurant worker desperately searching for a way to save his family when he discovered the internet and affiliate marketing… 24 months later he finally cracked the code and started earning over $10,000 per month. Now the same system that saved him is available to you here >>
