How To Avoid Hype When You Sell
There’s an interesting challenge I’ve come up against many times, which I think most professional bloggers know well.
The challenge is how to sell something without using all that horrible “hype” that Internet marketers use.
But wait a second. Hype actually works, or at least good “sales copy” works if you call convincing people to buy what you sell your desired outcome.
The challenge is figuring out what level of “sales talk” to use when trying to sell. You don’t want to be accused of over-hyping something, nor do you want to put in such a weak effort that no one buys.
The problem unfortunately cannot be solved 100% because what is hype to one person is not to another. We all have our own internal “bullshit meter” as it might be labeled, based on all kinds of things like our personality, experience with marketing, emotional state at the time of reference, etc etc.
You can’t account for everything, but you can work with what you should hopefully know quite well – you and your potential customers- and attempt to meet the needs of both.
Membership Site Mastermind Reopens Tuesday November 3rd For 24 Hours Only
Did you read that sub-heading? I hope you did.
It might seem a little out of place, but I put it there because one of the messages I want you to take away from reading this blog post is that I’m reopening Membership Site Mastermind for one last day for all the stragglers and latecomers who didn’t join during the opening last week.
I know there are stragglers because they keep emailing me asking if they can squeeze in, so I’m giving you one last chance to take the program with me during this final run for 2009.
This will definitely be the last time it’s open this year. No more one day openings, no exceptions, if you email and ask no matter how good your excuse, you won’t be allowed in. That wouldn’t be fair to the hundreds of people who took initiative and joined when the doors were open.
You can sign up here from 11 AM EST US time on Tuesday for 24 hours only -
So, back to my original thought train…
Living The 2-Hour Workday: How To Create Event Independent Income Streams
In the previous article on living the 2-hour workday I introduced the concept of travel buffers, cash created either through saving or selling assets that is designed to give you a buffer of capital you can comfortably spend if you need to while you travel.
Travel buffers are mostly for piece of mind so you can relax while you travel or use in case of emergencies, but ideally speaking it’s better if you don’t dip into your capital while you travel. In order to facilitate this, you need some form of consistent income streams that are greater than your total expenses, including costs to travel.
What Is Event Independent Income?
My largest source of income has come from significant events, either selling an asset or conducting a launch for a new product.
There’s an inherent weakness with this type of income – you have to do something, often significant work, to get the result, or once you do it’s difficult to repeat, for example once you sell an asset, it’s gone.
Conducting a launch is definitely NOT two hour a day work, it takes a lot more than that. Depending on how you travel it’s quite possible to integrate periods of time where you conduct a launch, for example I did a reopening campaign for Blog Mastermind while traveling in Toronto, resulting in well over six figures in income. However to complete the work required to conduct the launch, I had to settle in Toronto for a summer, renting a house and effectively living there as a local.
You can choose to travel, stop and work, then travel some more, if you depend on event income like launches, but if you really want true flexibility and never want more than a two hour a day work commitment, then you need to develop some event independent income streams. In other words, you need money that is either completely passive, or nearly-passive, consistent as a result of working only two hours a day or thereabouts.
The challenge with this sort of money is keeping it consistent. So many systems for making money online are fantastic as one-hit-wonders, and they work again and again in different niches, but the problem is the amount of ongoing work required to keep things going or to get started in the first place.
Sure you can outsource much of your work (I’ve got a couple of great podcast interviews about outsourcing coming up soon), which is a great strategy especially when you have a system that is already making money, but it takes time to do this and still you have the challenge of always staying one step ahead of the market or finding new markets to enter once one dries up, or the competition catches up.
In my case I’ve always had a solid independent income stream that’s served me well for almost ten years now.
So what is it? Read on to find out…
A Day In The Life Of An Internet Entrepreneur 2009 Edition
Back in August of 2005 I wrote an article that outlined what a typical day in my life was like. I linked to the post in my about page as I see it as a subject people are very interested in – what’s it like to live each day when you make money from the Internet?
You can read the original article here – A Day in the Life of an Internet Entrepreneur (August 2005)
I wrote that article after just over half a year of blogging and it represented what my life was like at the time. Now, four years later, things have changed and it’s time to update what a typical day in my life is like in August of 2009.
My Business Is Different
At the time I wrote the original day in the life piece, my main business and income source was BetterEdit.com, a proofreading service I started and built up over several years.
One of the major roles I performed to maintain the business was controlling the email communication system, connecting each proofreading project with an editor and providing customer support. This role was literally the main “work” in my life back then, taking several hours per day on average.
I eliminated the email management role when I hired an assistant, my good friend Angela, who to this day is still in charge of the day-to-day operations of BetterEdit and is also admin manager for my current business too. If you’ve ever sent me an email, chances are you have communicated with her.
I still have to deal with email of course, but the time pressure is no longer there and I only deal with emails that are about things only I can deal with. About 80% of my email is filtered away by Angela, meaning I never see it. She either responds with the appropriate template we have set up, or answers using her knowledge of my business and her supreme customer service skills.
If you want to know more about the systems we use to handle customer service, you can read the articles here
In 2007 I sold BetterEdit, leaving me to focus just on my blogging and information publishing enterprises. I also sold off all my non-blogging related websites, narrowing my focus to the aspects of my business I really wanted to grow.
I Don’t Do The Same Things Anymore
Is Branding Important To Small Business?
I’ve been working my way through Eben Pagan’s DVD recordings of his “Get Altitude” program, which was a $10,000 per head live in-person seminar presented as advanced entrepreneur training. It’s focused on people who already have businesses who want to grow their operation towards seven and then eight figure turnover.
One of the concepts I’ve heard Eben teach over and over again is the idea of dominating your market. This is more than just being successful, this is creating the perception that what you do is in a category all of its own. You don’t have competitors if you’re the only supplier in the mind of the customer, even if what you actually supply is provided by other companies.
The great thing about this concept is that you can dominate a market without changing anything about your product. Through a strategic marketing process, you can establish a frame of perception associated with your brand that is entirely unique. This isn’t actually something tangible, since most tangible elements can be replicated. This is a feeling that your marketing will emote from your prospects and customers when they think about what you offer.
When you establish a brand perception that is emotionally stimulating in a positive way, you have a very powerful advantage. You don’t have to compete on price, and assuming your product is at least adequate in quality, you will make more sales, even more sales than better products because you have a stronger brand.
What Is A Brand?
In my previous article from way back in December 2005 – Small Business Branding – It’s Not “We”, It’s “Me” – I defined branding, in this particular case a “personal brand” as –
Is Twitter A Time Waster Or A Powerful Business Tool?
It’s pretty clear that Twitter is the social media star of 2009, at least so far.
In case you haven’t got an account yet, make sure you go to Twitter.com and register for free. After you have your account, you can begin by following my updates –
I won’t go into the details about how Twitter works because Gideon Shalwick (@gideonshalwick) has a video coming out about that soon to teach the basics.
Twitter is essentially a micro-blogging tool where you are restricted to 140 character posts, which are meant to be updates from your life. It’s also a fantastic inter-communication tool, which I will explain more about in a moment.
Twitter can definitely be used as an effective business tool, but it can be abused as a time waster as well. You need to find a balance, so let me explain how I recommend Twitter is best used.
It’s Darren’s Fault
I’ve been a member of Twitter since Darren Rowse (@problogger) bugged me about joining. Darren has since gone on to become a super Twitter fan, starting a blog about it (Twitip.com) and becoming the number one Twitter user in Australia with some 30,000+ followers. Beware Darren when he becomes passionate about something!
I joined up after Darren’s recommendation and started exploring the service. At first you have to get your head around how the system works, how you can send direct replies @ certain people, what a direct message is and how it differs from a reply and all the other tips and tricks.
I used a desktop program called Twhirl, which sort of functions like an instant messaging client plugged into Twitter and other similar services.
Twhirl was good, but as I found out recently, Tweetdeck is better. This desktop client is, and I quote “An application that aims to evolve existing functionality of Twitter by breaking down Twitter feeds into more manageable bite sized pieces”. Simply put, you have to use Tweetdeck as it makes Twitter much easier to manage.
Chronicling My Travels
I first signed up to Twitter while on the second half of my travels overseas in 2008, so much of my early Twitter notifications were either Internet marketing related, or “I just landed in Rome” type messages. It proved an effective way to use Twitter as people told me they enjoyed my status updates about where I was in the world.
It was during this time that Twitter become more prominent in Internet marketing circles. Suddenly all the big players where emailing their lists trying to boost their Twitter followings. John Reese (@johnreese) quickly built his following passed 10,000 people after mailing his subscribers. Frank Kern (@masscontrolkern), Mike Filsaime (@mikefilsaime), Eben Pagan (@ebenpagan), Jeff Walker (@jeffwalker), Rich Schefren (@richschefren), and prominent bloggers, Brian Clark (@copyblogger), John Chow (@johnchow), are among many others who all have active accounts on Twitter from my industry.
Even celebrities are using Twitter. There’s Brent Spiner (@brentspiner), Wil Weaton (@wilw – a massive 50,000+ followers) and Levar Burton (@levarburton) from Star Trek (well I think Star Trek actors are celebrities anyway!), Kevin Rudd (@kevinruddpm) and Malcolm Turnbull (@turnbullmalcolm) from Australian politics and of course the most popular Twitter user of all time, Barack Obama (@barackobama), with over 230,000 followers at the time of writing.
This is only a small sample of the people using Twitter, with of course your normal every day Internet user being the most widely represented group on Twitter, although I believe it’s fair to say “tweeting” (to send messages on Twitter) is definitely NOT a mainstream activity.
