Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

I just completed a great podcast interview with Collis Ta’eed from the NorthxEast blog, although the focus was not on that blog, it was on his newer blog, Freelance Switch. Freelance Switch is all about freelancing and skyrocketed in popularity in a matter of weeks, nearing 4000 RSS readers at one point - not bad for a three week old blog!

We talked about how he managed to grow the traffic to his blog so quickly and it turned out to be a very good interview with lots of cutting edge blog traffic tips. I’m only releasing the podcast to my Blog Mastermind members (sorry readers - I do have to have something premium for my members), so if you want to hear the full interview you better be on the early notification list to get into the mentoring program.

After talking with Collis and his success with a blog about freelancing I started thinking more about the whole freelance industry. I suspect there are quite a few freelancers who read Entrepreneurs-Journey.com given that working as a freelancer is often considered running a business. Personally I have never wanted to be a freelancer, although I have certainly worked from time to time on freelance projects, especially during the days when I ran a web hosting company.

What Is A Freelancer?

Freelancers, as far as I understand it, are individuals - talented creative types usually - who chose not to seek permanent employment with a single company but instead take on contract projects working for many different businesses.

The idea is that by not committing to a full time job you gain some semblance of freedom and more control over your working lifestyle and income. You take on only as many projects as you need/want to, you can work from home and you don’t have any boss telling you what to do.

That all sounds good, but is freelancing really the best option if you are looking to improve your working lifestyle?

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Now we head into the meaty section of the Sales Funnel, the back end, where the big profits are made. If you haven’t read the first two parts of this series make sure to catch up, starting with the sales funnel explained and a look at front end marketing.

As I discussed in the last article, the front end of your sales funnel is all about capturing the attention of prospects, people inclined to desire want you provide. Potential customers are called “leads”. The expectation is a certain number of your leads will convert into customers and a small but very responsive group, will buy up everything you offer. This last group are called your “hyper-responsives” and it’s this group that is responsible for a significant proportion of your profits because they fuel your back end sales.

Pricing Points

Your back end is made up of your higher priced items, products and services that present significant value - or at least perceived value. Essentially we are talking about meeting the same need (or needs within a niche), just with different media. This might include information distributed via audio (CDs/DVDs/MP3s/Podcasts) or visually (Video/Movies) or live (Conferences/Seminars/Workshops/Retreats) or privately (Phone Calls/Coaching) or even common front end media such as ebooks, newsletters (electronic and print), subscription services and teleconferences.

The specific distinction between the front end and the back end is all about the type of customer and the price paid. In the back end all your customers have traveled through your front end, sampled your free materials, purchased an entry level product or service (or several) and have enjoyed significant value from what you offer, so much so, that they are eager to buy more from you.

At this point it becomes much easier to make sales, although since the idea behind a sales funnel is to filter prospects to find hyper-responsives, you don’t have nearly as many people reaching your back end as you do entering your front end. In many cases it’s common that only a small percentage, say 1-2% of the overall people entering your front end make it through to the back end. That’s okay because that small group are spending big bucks.

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I’ve compiled a bunch of notes from the Rich Schefren conference and also the videos he’s been releasing in the lead-up to the launch of his next program. You can get the free videos here - Strategic Profits Videos.

I was pondering over how to release them to you and I’ve decided to extract the key lessons and present them to you in this series.

The order may not make complete sense since I’m combining my notes from different sources and skipping a lot of points in between. What I have provided are some really great lessons and tips on how to successfully build and manage an Internet business, thanks to the mind of Rich Schefren and filtered by Yaro…

Multiple uses for the same content

Rich was up on stage doing his presentation explaining that he had “stolen” away an employee from (Donald) Trump University to act as his product developer. This person’s role is to take all of Rich’s materials, his audio, stage presentation and written words and come up with content packages to sell (with some help - there is more than one person on the product development team).

The idea here is to make use of every thing you produce in multiple ways to generate the most cashflow and front-end sales mechanisms. In Rich’s case he has a ton of materials to play with, but even if you are only getting started it’s worth remembering that you can combine any podcasts or blog articles you produce and make them into products. The same goes for reports or ebooks, whitepapers, interviews and presentations. Everything is marketable if there is someone out there who sees the value.

Journal writing

Rich keeps a journal every day that he uses to reflect on his life, the decisions he makes and the outcomes he generates. He finds by looking over periods of his life, both successful and not so successful, he can determine, with the benefit of hindsight, experience and education, what he was doing well and why. This sort of self reflection can be very valuable to ascertain why you might be failing to gain momentum in your business today.

Outsourcing

Here is a sample of the significant roles Rich currently has outsourced/employees managing that he no longer needs to do himself.

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I finally had a chance to watch Rich Schefren’s long video (not the case studies he has been sending recently). This is the video he was intending to perform for his current clients at the seminar in Florida, but later defaulted to his proven presentation, which I had seen before.

If you haven’t see the latest videos, you can start by watching the first 30 minutes for free and then opt-in on that page with your name and email address to get the remaining 1.5 hours.

What Is The New Video About?

The new video is more of the same from what he have come to expect from Rich - he teaches exactly how to build a long term, sustainable business, that runs without you. In other words, the goal for most entrepreneurs of having stable income and other people working to keep your business running and growing.

Rich’s latest video is the next evolution of his message. It’s clear he has learnt more and tidied up his presentation, so you get a real sense of knowing what the steps are.

He’s also putting a lot of emphasis on the concept of Momentum, which I think is worth explaining in the context of a small business.

Momentum

I expect most people reading my blog lack momentum. Even in my case I’m still on the cusp and haven’t quite tipped over into a momentum phase, though I can almost taste it now - it’s just around the corner.

When you first start your business it’s just you or perhaps you and your spouse. You do almost everything by yourself and your focus is on building enough cashflow so you can start bringing in people to help you. Your goal is to go from a technician role that does all the basic jobs, to a manager role where you coordinate workers to finally a business owner where you can do other things or only perform a very top level strategic role in the business.

The problem with being a technician is that you are constantly doing the jobs you hate, like client support, basic tech jobs like website updates, server management, email accounts, affiliate software, bookkeeping, etc etc - the list is endless! All this “other” work takes you away from your core competencies, which for many of you I suspect is content creation. You do best writing, or recording audio or video or perhaps coming up with the ideas for content that you want other people to create and sell.

This is where momentum comes in. Momentum gives you the cashflow so you can begin to hand over jobs to other people and do more of your core passion jobs, thus creating more value in your business and increasing cashflow - momentum - even more. Once the momentum starts it tends to compound, since with each new employee or outsourcer you hire to help, you get more time to create value and ultimately, increase profits.

Thus for every small business out there, or really every self employed person out there looking to turn their start-up into a real business, the first goal is to attain momentum.

Rich understands this need and thus focuses a lot of time on the concept of momentum, so if you feel this is an area you need to understand better in order to reach a momentum phase, block off two hours of your time and go watch Rich’s video now.

Here’s the link again: StrategicProfits.com/startuptofreedom/

Strategic Profits Program Launching This Week

Rich is opening the doors on his next round of coaching this week - hopefully. He tends to change plans quite often during his launches, due to the very dynamic nature of his product launch process. The date may change, but my current understanding is that towards the end of this week you will be able to join and the price is about $400 USD a month - but don’t quote me on that!

As you know, I’m a current client of the program and a big fan of the proposition Rich and his company offer to the Internet marketing world. I’ll spend more time during this week relating some of the insights I’ve picked up from Rich, so stay tuned for more articles like this one.

I’m also very keen to mastermind with every person who joins Rich’s program under my affiliate link. If you want some personal contact with me after joining the program, please make sure you get in touch and let me know you are in.

Yaro Starak
Gaining Momentum

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One of the most popular articles I ever produced for this blog was - How To Make Money Online Using Niche Content Websites. It struck a cord with many because it made people excited when they realized how simple it was, at least on paper. It offered a business model that any person with moderate web skills could implement. To the average net user it wasn’t too hard a process to set-up a website, work on it to the point that it makes two to three dollars per day and then move on to do it again.

The niche content site business model is still viable on the web. It’s probably not as easy as it may have been when I first published the article, since more people are doing it now, thus increasing competition. Google AdSense doesn’t perform as well as it used to, but it’s not that hard to make $2 per day in Google AdSense income from a single website provided you find niches and build traffic. The fact is there is a long tail of niches online and we are far from saturating every niche in the long tail, or should I say every profitable niche in the long tail. I doubt we ever will and it’s not likely there will ever be enough competent niche content site builders to fill every niche, so this business model likely will always be available, just don’t expect to become a millionaire doing it.

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