Many independent service professionals nonchalantly enter
the Internet marketing game by throwing together a
half-baked website without any plan and mistakenly believe
that visitors will find them. I should know -- I was one of
those nonchalant business owners once upon a time..:)
Initially, my online business grew from word-of-mouth
referrals from other clients rather than from any true
Internet marketing. My website simply served as an online
brochure detailing my services and my rates for several
years.
What changed my mind? Over time, I became tired of trading
time for money. This exchange is the bane of existence for
most independent service professionals. Upon gaining some
time and experience in business, the independent service
professional has a rude awakening that there are only so
many hours in the day and consequently that limits the
number of clients that can be served. The business owner
can decide to expand and take on more staff or independent
contractors, but that, too, can be problematic. When a
business owner decides to pursue this strategy, s/he then
becomes a manager of staff/associates, which can be even
more time-consuming and sometimes problematic than keeping
the business small with the owner as the sole employee.
Despite all the useful information I'd absorbed over the
years about expanding my business reach through the
development of products that I could sell on my website, I
just didn't want to devote the time necessary to create
multiple streams of income for my business. However, as I
began to see friends and colleagues do this successfully in
their businesses, the light bulb finally went off, and I
realized that this was my next step, as well. So, I bit the
bullet and began to try some of the strategies and began to
get quick results from what I had implemented. Now, I look
back and wonder why I was so hard-headed and refused to do
this years ago. Hind-sight is always 20-20..;)
In my own professional development as an Internet marketer,
as well as from work with clients over the years, I've come
to realize that there are 5 Internet Marketing Mindsets that
must be in place for someone to be successful online:
1. Create content that can be re-purposed. The
goals here is to create your content once and find multiple
ways to use it or multiple ways of delivery. So, for
example, if you have an Inspiration Line phone service in
which you record an inspiring thought each day for your
clients, you can record these calls and have them serve as a
publicity tool by distributing them as a podcast. This will
help drive traffic to your site and bring people into your
marketing funnel. When you've accumulated enough recordings,
you then sell a subscription membership so that the buyer
receives a new inspiring thought each day via email or a
direct-to-desktop service. Over time, you can categorize
recordings by topic and then combine the recordings into
multiple motivational CDs or .mp3 downloads and make them
available for sale online. When you've been doing this for a
year, perhaps you then parlay the recordings into a book or
an inspirational card deck.
Sometimes it helps to start with the end in mind. As
someone who loves to write, it's fairly easy for me to churn
out a new article each week. For marketing purposes, I put
it on my website as well as distribute it to article banks,
where it's picked up and placed on other websites, blogs,
and ezines. I then record the article and distribute it as
a free podcast online. Ultimately the podcasts will be
grouped together as a CD or .mp3 file that may be sold
independently or as an addition to the special reports or
ebooks. I'm now taking groups of articles that relate to
the same topic and putting them together for a series of
special reports. The series of special reports is bundled
together for ebooks, and one of the ebooks is destined to
become a print book. The print book will spawn 2 training
programs and a subscription membership website, as well as
an in-depth home study course. For me, I always knew that
weekly article writing would be my catalyst to product
creation.
2. Record everything that you do. Whether you're
doing live events, radio or TV interviews, teleclasses,
webinars, etc., it pays to record and have a permanent
record of everything that you do. Having a digital video
recording of yourself in a one-day live event can be
packaged into a "home study" course. Teleclasses with
transcripts can be resold individually or packaged together
for a bigger product. Radio or TV interviews can be placed
on your website to enhance your credibility and convince a
meeting planner to pay you big bucks to come and provide a
keynote speech. Open your mind to the possibilities for
re-purposing your recordings.
3. Get yourself and your customers into a sales
mentality. Many of my clients simply like to have their
products sit obscurely for sale on their websites and do
nothing to make their list members or website visitors aware
of what they have for sale for fear of offending their
visitors or subscribers. If someone is going to be offended
because you're trying to sell to them, then just let them
go. You don't need a list of tire-kickers who want to
sponge all the free info that they can from you and never
buy anything -- you'll never be able to stay in business
that way.
I have to chuckle when I do a promotion and get an email
from someone on the list who chastises me for "daring" to
sell to them and notes that they much prefer to "decide"
when they want to buy something from me and then they
threaten to leave the list. I just respond that I'm sorry
that they feel that way, but unfortunately I'm not a
trust-fund baby, and that my hard-earned information has the
same value as any info that they might get from their car
mechanic, doctor, attorney, or accountant, and I've never
seen any of those professionals give away what they know.
And, by the way, I don't advocate sending daily
solicitations out to your list -- I recommend that if you're
sending a "sales only" missive to your list, that you do so
no more than once/week.
Creating a sales mentality means that you need to
acknowledge that you're in business to make money through
selling and that your customers need to become accustomed to
having you sell and seeing things for sale all over your
websites. This is no different than the trait needed for
success if you were to own a brick-and-mortar retail
establishment. You can still provide free and valuable
information to your visitors, but reserve the right to take
that info, create a unique packaging and title for pieces of
info on the same topic, and put it up for sale.
4. Acknowledge that people will pay more for convenience
and instant delivery online. Many times, as I'm trying
to help a client determine the price for a product, they
object to the price I suggest because they compare it to a
physical product that can be purchased in the local
bookstore or online bookstore for less. The "buy it now and
give it to me instantly" mentality that is prevalent among
online shoppers dictates that you can charge a higher price
for an electronic product than a physical product because
the shopper can fulfill his/her need for instant
gratification and receive the electronic product in mere
seconds. Wouldn't you rather do that instead of having
to get in the car to make a trip across town to buy the
product or waiting a few days for the delivery of a physical
product from an online store?
And, people will pay for convenience. I recently spoke with
a client about selling her content that was readily
available in various locations all over the Internet. She
was concerned that no one would pay for the product since it
was currently available online at no cost if someone were to
look hard enough. I told her that many of her customers
didn't know it was available online, and even if they did,
they would have to invest a great deal of their free time to
gather all the info in one place. Few of us have that
luxury of time today. For most of us, if it's easy and
convenient and will save us some time, we'll buy it.
I gave my client an example of a publicity expert who gave
away an 89-part e-course recently on writing effective press
releases. I have every single email of the course sitting in
my email inbox, but the text of each piece of the course
links to her site, so in order to read the course in its
entirety, I have to click back and forth among pages of her
website. When she offered the entire course in an ebook
format a few weeks ago, I jumped on it, as I already knew
the info was valuable, and having it available it one place
saves me time was certainly worth the $23 I paid for this
"free" informaiton.
5. Plan your business growth around your marketing
funnel. Independent service professionals shouldn't
live on the sale of their services alone. Trust me, at some
point in your business, you won't want to do that any
longer. You need to create a marketing funnel of your
products and services that range in price from free to very
expensive and base your marketing strategy around that
funnel. Your online business success will depend upon
people being able to "sample" your expertise before deciding
to purchase your service.
Remember that it takes 7-10 "touches" before a prospect will
turn into a customer. Give them several ways to experience
your expertise, all the way from free to expensive, with any
number of price points and options in between. Keep your
marketing funnel in mind in all that you do and strategize
how every new activity, whether that's creating a new
product, writing another article, offering a new service, or
being a guest on a radio show fits into your marketing
funnel.
(If you need help in developing your marketing funnel, refer
to my article,
Create Your Marketing Funnel Online, for more info.)
By adopting these 5 Internet Marketing Mindsets into
your daily marketing mantra, you'll be well on your way to
positioning your online business for many years of success!
Resources
Audio Acrobat
Audio Acrobat makes it easy for you to record client
testimonials. All they have to do is dial a number
(will probably be a toll call) and your guest line extension
and begin speaking. That's it! Audio Acrobat will then
take and store the recording and create a player for you.
To put this on your website, just cut and paste the HTML
code generated by Audio Acrobat.
Get your 30-day free trial
here.
KudosWorks
Trust me to discover how to even automate testimonials..LOL.
When I was doing a bit of online research for this newsletter article, I
discovered KudosWorks.com,
KudosWorks is a fr*ee service (at this time -- it appears that they may start
charging a fee in the future) that lets you automate the request and collection
of testimonials from your customers and engage them to self-upload testimonials,
audiomonials and videomonials. Then, you can showcase your reputation in your
own multi-media KudosBoard and link to it from your website. And, what's
even cooler is that you can create a reward system for your testimonials through
the system.
Wanna provide a testimonial for me? Click on my KudosBoard
icon above and help me test this service!
In return for this free service, all you have to do is write a
testimonial for them, and share the site with 2 friends. Start collecting
your kudos here.
