Take 10 Minutes to Build Your Backend Profits Strategy
You work hard to get prospects through your doors, or their contact information onto your email list – but are you getting all the value that’s available to you? In a moment, I’m going to use the opt-in email list as an example here because it’s an incredible asset all small business owners should be building, whether their business is online, offline, or a mix of both. However, the same principles apply to all the contacts you have with customers. Here’s the big idea: The real profits are in your backend sales. You spend time and money to get a prospect to buy something, or do another “action,” such as signing up for your email list. We can essentially assign your customer/prospect acquisition costs to that first action. Any money you make via follow-on actions is pure gravy. Backend sales propel auto dealer profits Let’s use a car dealership as an example. Savvy car dealers often make very little off the sale of a new car. That’s the front-end profit. However, when the dealer signs up a customer with financing, sells an extended warranty, and gets the buyer to pony up for undercoating, those are all backend profits. On average, they far exceed the front-end profits. One great thing about having a good email list is that it gives you a means to enjoy more backend profits. If you know the buying history of your customers or the specific interests of your prospects, you can design all kinds of backend offers to send to the names on your email list. Further, the growth of your email list can be viewed as the growth of your backend profit potential – and it’s the kind of growth that is totally in your control. In one of my recent newsletters, I was discussing passive income, and an affiliate marketing strategy I mentioned in that newsletter is ideal for generating additional backend profits: cost per action (CPA) opportunities. CPA programs as backend sales Maybe you have extended warranties, clearance items, or other related products or services you can offer after you’ve made a sale, or signed a new prospect on your email list. Some of these backend sales items require you to carry inventory. That’s fine in many cases, but when you can make money without having to carry inventory – especially if each additional sale is fairly substantial – it’s even better. Many CPA programs award affiliates with generous payouts. You’ll find many CPA opportunities at the following websites: CPA leads Clickbooth Max Bounty PeerFly W4 CPAWay If you enroll as an affiliate in one or more CPA programs that relate to your niche, you can present these opportunities via your mailing list in a variety of ways. You can: Present one or more offers at the end of the opt-in process, Present one or more offers via an email receipt when a customer makes a purchase, Present one or more offers in a targeted email to a list that has been segmented, and Present one or more offers in an auto-responder program to prospects who have shown interest in your small business. These are some of the basic approaches. If your small business model is more closely aligned with sales made in your location, you need to develop a menu of...
read more19 Tips to Get and Stay Motivated
It can be lonely at the top! And in the long run, that can be a major de-motivator for the small business owner. Of course, the stress and the long hours can also make it difficult to maintain your enthusiasm or commitment to your small business. So if you’re wondering how to get motivation back, here are 19 different tips for you to try out. They range from concrete tactics that require actions on your part for them to work for you, to attitudes you need to adopt to keep motivated at work…and life. None of them are difficult, but for many of us, they take a conscious effort to adopt and to stay with over the long term. Feed your brain each day – read. Motivation starts upstairs. New ideas and new ways of looking at things will keep you fresh. Regularly revisit and write down realistic goals, both short term and long term. You need to know where this race is taking you and be on board with the destination(s). Work on your main, big goal each day. Don’t let the big obstacles become too daunting for you. Master them, little by little. Focus individually – No multi-tasking! – on smaller goals and knock them out. Despite what people think, we are lousy multitaskers and it ends up costing us dearly in our efficiency. Take breaks during the workday, à la Pomodoro technique. Short breaks to refresh your brain and even stretch your legs a bit will keep your mind and body in tone. Keep personal contact with customers. This keeps you grounded. What you’re doing matters to people. That should always help you at keeping motivated. Network with encouraging peers. There is strength in numbers. As a kid, you probably had the courage to do things with your friends that you wouldn’t dare try alone. Meet regularly with a coach or mentor. Sometimes you’ll need direction and feel like you’re in over your head. A good mentor or coach will have the guidance and perspective that you need to forge on successfully. Recognize and work to increase the value you’re creating for customers/clients. You are creating something real that makes people’s lives better and helps them accomplish their goals. This is positive reinforcement. Stay or get organized. You don’t have time to be looking for “those papers” over and over again. Make life easier on yourself. Start your day strong. Knock off tasks in the morning. When you make this a habit and start to enjoy the results, you’ll have a strong motivation to get out of bed and get at it. Pull the trigger. Be action oriented. Don’t just sit there; do something! You can correct mistakes. You can’t correct actions never taken. Be just as serious about your time away from work. You know what they say about “all work and no play.” Set aside time for yourself and your loved ones to travel, relax, and enjoy new experiences. Maintain your health, body, and mind. Meditate. Grow stronger physically, spiritually and mentally. Get new perspectives. Change your routines. Habits that create efficiency are good things. Habits that become ruts are bad things. Switch things up every so often. Move your office or desk. Take public transit instead of driving to work. Be an expert...
read moreHow to create a passive income stream from your blog
I recently shared five highly actionable, but mostly unrelated, tips with you in this space. Today I want to elaborate on one of those tips. I suggested that you could create a stream of passive income your blog by adding some up-sell items. The general principle is that you write an informative blog on a topic and then offer an additional resource that takes the topic even further or adds other elements that the reader will find useful. For example, I know an online marketer who is working on an article about the power of inspirational quote graphics in the social media. He has been creating and using these for some time. Each time he creates one of these graphics with his logo on it, he creates another one where he omits the logo. He plans to sell these “unbranded” graphics when he publishes his article on the topic. If readers are convinced of the usefulness of publishing inspirational quote graphics and they want some graphics where all they have to do is paste on their branding, this little set of graphics will the available for them. Another good idea is to write an article that outlines a strategy and then sell a white paper or e-book that is a “how-to” on the ways to implement the strategy. Below is a short list of content items you can create that can be used as up-sells in conjunction with one of your blog posts. They all have the potential to create a good stream of passive income from your blog or website in general. More passive income ideas Checklists. If there are specific items that must be done to accomplish something, or there are certain steps that have to be done in a given order, a checklist can be useful Worksheets. If you’re explaining a concept or perhaps a process, creating a worksheet to lead your reader through it can be beneficial. A worksheet is preferable over a checklist when steps must be “thought out” when implementing the process. Templates. You could consider my friend’s unbranded graphics as a kind of template. Others would include useful “semi-blank” documents. Scroll through the templates provided by various commercial word processing, graphics and spreadsheet software for ideas. Excel files. Maybe you’ve created a killer inventory control spreadsheet or prospect follow-up spreadsheet. Make it look pretty and sell it in conjunction with related content on your website. Calendars, planners or to-do lists. If you’re in the B2B field, for example, and your clients are retailers, you could put together a planner or calendar that helps them get prepared for the various holidays and special events that happen throughout the year. Resource lists. Think of a master list of free resources, best books on a niche topic, or where to get difficult-to-find items. The possibilities are endless. Webinar Recordings. Follow up a webinar with an article that provides a “high altitude overview,” but also allow people who missed the webinar view a recording for a small fee. Case Studies. Case studies are powerful and very engaging. As with the webinar, you can provide a useful summary in the article, but go in-depth with a white paper case study. With these ideas in mind, here’s what you should do right now to monetize your blog using...
read moreThe Secret Formula for Creating a Winning Company Culture: Attractive Employee Benefits
How long have you been in the workforce? If you’ve been out there for a while, you’ve witnessed changes in management philosophy and style. I think the most important of these has been the drive to set a positive and engaging company culture to shape employee behavior and create company loyalty. Old-style management would try to get employees “in line” by regimenting everyone to a set of company policies, rules, practices, guidelines, etc. However, smart leaders discovered that it’s a lot easier to get everyone marching in the same direction by creating a company culture that is voluntarily adopted by their workforce. A foundational principle Let me give you one overarching principle that must be in place in order to create a positive, practical and productive company culture: Your employees must know that you care for their personal and professional welfare. When you invest in that level of care for your employees, they will pay you a huge dividend by expressing that same level of care to your customers. This may seem simple enough, but let me explain how small businesses drop the ball. First, they need to attract good talent. Second, once they have the right talent on board, they need high rates of retention. If you’re settling for less than the best and then losing top talent when you are lucky enough to bring them onto your team, it’s impossible to create a sustainable high-impact company culture. Sadly, one of the reasons small businesses have these hiring and retention problems today is because owners don’t truly believe that the benefits they offer are going to impact either hiring or retention. Advantages, shortfalls As a small business owner, you have a lot to offer talented professionals. You can provide more varied challenges. Employees can discover their talents and grow their skills in areas that larger employers might consider outside of their direct areas of responsibility. Ambitious and talented individuals can grow with your small business and reach levels of leadership more quickly than in mid-sized or large companies. However, the 14th Annual MetLife U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study found that 69 percent of employees at mid-sized companies chose to hire on at their companies because of the benefits that were offered to them. Less than half – 46 percent – of those working at small companies pointed to their benefits as the reason they took their jobs. A 2014 study from the Employee Benefit Research Institute echoes this fact. That survey found that 76 percent of all employees say that the benefits offered to them are “very or extremely” important when they make their decision to accept or reject a job offer. Now, let’s look at the retention issue. The MetLife survey found that 64 percent of small business employees feel that having benefits specifically designed to meet their needs would boost their loyalty to their current company. (By the way, both dental and vision coverage were ranked at the top for these desired benefits.) ‘Small’ is no excuse The bottom line is that small business owners who think that just because they’re “small,” the benefits they offer won’t sway the decisions of candidates or current employees are kidding themselves. It’s indisputable that an uncompetitive benefits package costs small businesses owners dearly in talent and overall retention. This...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Influencer, storyteller, social media, Millennial marketing and more!
If you’re hunting for marketing advice, look no further. This week’s collection of curated content delivers email, social media, influencer, storytelling, and even Millennial marketing insights and tips. Leadership, management, and productivity It’s never a mistake to explore new ways to save money in a small business and you might be able to implement some of the five ideas here. Selling a small business is not always easy. These five steps will be helpful as you start the process or prepare for a sale. One thing is for sure: Don’t emulate some of the big telecoms if you want to boost employee engagement in order to improve your customer service. Unless you’re Joseph Campbell, you don’t want to build your business around myths, so you owe it to yourself to review these seven common customer experience myths. Marketing and sales If you’re like me, you’re working hard to understand the Millennials (we need to get beyond the clichés). This SproutSocial article helps. Check out the 30 excellent social media marketing articles in this curated content. And if you need even more advice, 215 influencers and experts reveal their worst influencer marketing mistakes. Free is good, so carefully read this article on how to build website or blog traffic for free. To be a great marketer today you have to be a good storyteller: here’s why. If you want to do a better job promoting your small business website, check out what these 39 experts have to say on the subject. (The 39 Steps?) Tony Delmercado, COO of Hawke Media, says there’s a good chance you’re doing email marketing wrong. You better find out. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation The women in Montana are a special bunch and with the two small businesses she runs, Shannon Alt-Olsson is a great example to study for inspiration. Politics, government and the economy Ready to look at politics in a new light? Tina Zwolinski says they can teach you a lot about marketing. Can something get accomplished in an election year? Let’s follow the progress of the Bring Small Businesses Back Tax Reform...
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