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Should I cut back my marketing to save money?

By Christian

There’s been a lot of talk lately in the small business community about “cutting costs”. This always happens toward the end of the year. It’s especially understandable these days, when a lot of business owners are struggling with changes in their market.

Cut waste. Cut unnecessary expenses. Cut systems you’re not using.

DON’T cut investment in your business.

Not all expenses are the same! But many of you think they are. To you, an expense is an expense is an expense. And when it comes to expenses, fewer is better. It’s not overly complicated, but there’s more to it than that.

Unfortunately a lot of biz owners look at money poorly. As in…they look at money like poor pe0ple do. That’s a shame, because you’re creative, motivated, gutsy and talented. You have everything it takes to be successful, so take the next step and learn a bit about the differences between investing and spending.

Spending = expenses that do not yield a return on investment

Investing = expenses that DO yield a return on investment.

I’ve seen you guys (real world stuff…this ain’t made up, hypothetical stuff) flippantly shut down websites you’ve owned for years, that have tons of exposure and incoming links, so you can save $100 a month.

I’ve seen you guys cut marketing campaigns that bring in leads, so you can save some money. Think about that for a second. I talked with a guy last week in a LinkedIn forum about this. He was BRAGGING about how much money he was saving. Unbelievable. How are you going to grow if you don’t invest in your business? Find new ways and creative ways to invest in your business, but don’t stop investing. I know this is a tough market for a lot of you. Sales were down in 2010, maybe they were down in 2009 also.

SOOOO, it’s the time to invest MORE. Not less. If you need to cut expenses, move that in-house server into the cloud. My real estate team just did this, and it gives us the EXACT same performance for several hundred less per month. Cut your mocha lattes if you need to. I wouldn’t recommend it unless it’s truly necessary, but sometimes we need to take extreme measures.

If given the choice between cutting the cleaning service or cutting marketing, a LOT of you choose marketing. For God’s sake, please don’t do that. Take out your own trash. Look at your payroll; are you paying an employee $30k a year to do stuff that doesn’t bring in a return on investment? I’m not going to tell you to drop the empl0yee. I’m going to tell you that it’s YOUR job to get them doing stuff that DOES bring in a return.

Don’t cut marketing when business is slow. Do MORE marketing. If it’s slow for you, it’s slow for others. It’s not time to run in fear. It’s time to grow.

What if I don’t make it?

By Christian

Oh my. I’m not sure what’s caused it to be honest, but many of you have found this site lately through using keywords like “what to do if my business fails” and “how do I know if my business will succeed?”, etc. True to form, I’m writing a post that targets NONE of these long tail keywords 🙂 Why? It’s 20% laziness and 80% driven by the fact that I’m evidently already pretty well-optimized for those terms, so why optimize for them yet again?

Yet the fact remains that I haven’t directly addressed these questions, so that gave me the idea for this post…

Ask the RIGHT questions!

I’m a huge advocate about being careful when it comes to researching ideas to grow your business. If you want good, helpful answers, make sure to ask good questions. I also talked about this in my last post about How to Make Money Fast. If you ask negative or fearful questions, you get answers which cater to that mentality. I don’t cater to negativity, and neither should you. So basically…I’m not going to answer your quetions 🙂

I have something even better for you though. I’ll answer your REAL question, which is “what steps can I take to make sure my business does well and meets my goals?” See how that question is positive and focused on success instead of failure? This isn’t just some dumb mind game or a word trick. It matters. It’s crucial actually.

So to answer your concerns, let’s start with dumping fear and focusing on how to get the results you’re looking for. Cool? How do you make sure your business is successful in 2011 and moving forward? Some of you are ready for what I have to share with you. Candidly, some of you aren’t ready for the answer yet, and that’s cool. All I can do is give it to you straight.

There are several fantastic ways you can grow your business faster than ever, get on track, stay on track and make sure you’re reaching your goals. I have a new article published on Blog for Profit today. What? Two articles in one day? I know, I’m a machine 😉

I have a few of the most high impact principles outlined there. I recommend you swing out and read the article. Leave a comment, and let’s talk about it! One of the principles I talk about is Once, Twice, Thrice, which is my witty name for an old school principle that WILL double or even triple the growth of your online presence. I also discuss how education, speed and bonuses will get you what you want. Fun things that cost nothing and work…every single time. Let me know what you think!

How I make money fast ($522.60 in less than one second)

By Christian

I’m about to trick you. Pull the wool over your eyes, if you will. It will be fun. The fact is I DO make $522.60 in less than one second. I do it all the time. You can too. It’s just not some stupid “get rich quick”, “make money online” garbage. It’s the actual truth. Sorry about that.

How to make $522.60 in less than one second

My average client pays me $522.60. You know…it’s the average. Some pay less. Some pay more. Almost no one actually pays me exactly $522.60. It’s just the average. When someone clicks the “submit payment” button, over the course of that one second I make on average $522.60.

It still amazes me that this works. It still blows my mind that I can literally sit here at my kitchen table (or wherever I’m working at the time), click “publish” and then money shows up in my Paypal account. It’s addictive, really.

How to make money fast

Just for those of you who feel ripped off by this post so far, I want you to know…there IS a point, and there IS a reason I’m sharing this with you today! It’s deep stuff, actually.

The reason I’m writing this post is that “make money fast” is a keyword that gets almost 250,000 searches PER MONTH. Can you believe that? There are a LOT of you trying to figure out how to “make money fast”. It’s simple really…EVERYONE makes money fast.

You didn’t know that, did you?

The fact is that making money fast is kind of automatic. It doesn’t take long. Money changes hands. It only takes a second, really. So what’s the problem? What are you struggling with?

You’re asking the wrong question! Making money is a piece of cake. All the work leading up to it…that’s what you need to focus on!

For all of you searching “how to make money fast” this month, I humbly submit that you’re asking the wrong question! Don’t ask how to make money fast. It’s a waste of time. Instead, ask stuff that’s actually going to connect you with better customers and clients. Why aren’t more people searching for this stuff? Ask these things instead:

How to create value (5400 searches last month).
Ask how to connect with your customers (210 searches last month).
How to survey your website visitors (ZERO searches this past month…really?).
How to do market research (2,100 searches last month).

Why are so many of us struggling to make money with our websites? We’re asking the wrong dang questions!

One final point

Check it out…not only do the RIGHT questions yield you MUCH more helpful answers (you know…stuff that’s actually going to HELP you grow your business), there is also another extremely high value benefit you might be overlooking. Look at how much COMPETITION there is for these much more powerful questions. There are way less competitive.

Do you know who IS making money fast? People searching the keywords above, not the ones searching “how to make money fast”. It’s ironic, isn’t it?

As soon as you make the decision that you’re going to use the keywords above (and many others like them), instead of useless searches like “how to make money fast”, everything gets so much simpler…and so much more effective.

Are you looking for answers? Make sure you ask the right questions!

How to turn the most problematic page on your site into a cash cow

By Christian

It’s all about taking something ordinary and making it better. That’s how to keep your business alive, on the edge and profitable. So when I find a little tweak here and there and get all excited about it, most people just think I’m a freak. But little things add up to big results over time! This one little tweak will make me several thousand dollars this year.

The most problematic page on your website

What’s the most problematic page on your website? It’s your 404 page. For those of you who don’t know what a 404 is, it’s the page that shows up if someone visits a page that’s no longer there. Or perhaps they typed in the url incorrectly, etc. In any case, your visitor is trying to visit a page that doesn’t exist. When that happens, they land automatically on your 404 error page.

Most of you haven’t even visited your 404 page to see what’s up. I encourage you to do so; it’s probably pretty ugly. It probably says something like “The page your trying to visit doesn’t exist. I am a cold, computer-generated page built for the purpose of alienating you, making you feel like a dope and causing you to leave my website quickly, never to return.” Something like that. That’s NOT how you want to roll, trust me.

Visit your 404 page today, and see how stupid it is. Make it better.

How to make your 404 page rock

If you’re an enlightened webmaster (there are lots of you out there), you have probably already customized your 404 page. Instead of the stock 404 page, you’ve made your page more inviting. You explain the page they’re trying to visit is not available, and instead why don’t you try visiting one of these other articles…and you provide some links to other articles on your site. You might even offer them a search field, so they can find the article they intended on visiting in the first place.

Not bad. You can do better though!

Whether you have a customized 404 page or not, I recommend turning your 404 page into a squeeze page. I did this last week, and it’s been bringing in new subscribers to my site every day. It’s not a lot, but it’s steady. I’ve had maybe 20 new opt-ins in the past week. Not bad if you ask me 🙂

Doesn’t it make SENSE to take the ugliest page on your website and turn it into an asset which consistently brings new subscribers into the fold? Before I did it, I questioned whether there is some unspoken rule against this or something. I simply do not know why no one does this. It works great for me; I recommend giving it a shot on your own site.

The details

All I did was take my 404 page and put an optin on it. The verbiage I used was:

Get Everything
EVERYTHING is available to subscribers! Make sure to opt in here to get access to EVERYTHING on the site. Subscribing is:
1. Free
2. Awesome
3. High value

Then I created a plain opt-in box, and that’s it.

I hope you’ll test it for yourself and let me know what you think. If you need any help implementing it, I’m here to help you with that also. Isn’t web marketing fun? Rock on 😉

Fantastic video on leadership

By Christian

This is a fantastic, insightful video on leadership. It’s a little over half an hour long, so if you don’t have time for it right now, just bookmark this page or do whatever you need to in order to make sure you can watch it at a convenient time. I found it profoundly thought provoking with regards to what it takes to be a great entrepreneur and leader. It’s worth your time.

If you’re viewing this in a feed that does not support video, please click here to view the video.

Do you know what your biggest asset is?

By Christian

What is your biggest asset? It is your existing customer and client base. Even further than that, it is a very specific SEGMENT of your existing base, something I call your E300. We’ll talk about that very soon, but for today don’t forget the people who ALREADY love you. I know from talking with you that many of you have been in business for quite a while. Not all of you, but some. But you still focus a great deal of your attention on getting NEW customers. Why?

If I could show you how to spend 1/10th as much on marketing while getting 1000% higher response rate, would you be interested? This is something I often go over with clients in great detail, because it’s REALLY powerful. It all BEGINS with focusing your attention where it will have the biggest impact.

Focus on your biggest asset

For those of you new to running your own business, you may not think this applies to you, but it does. Even if you’re new and don’t already have a list of 1,000+ past customers, this still applies to you. You have a base also. You have what many people call a “sphere of influence”. These are people who know you. They trust you. Your friends, fellow business owners, old bosses, etc. These are people you can have a real conversation with. This is bigger than you might realize.

There is a time and a place for spending thousands of dollars marketing to people who don’t know you from Adam, but why would you ever do this without FIRST engaging the people who matter most to you?

This is not a pitch to start selling your wares to your friends and family. That is old school crap. I’m talking about focusing on marketing to people whose attention you already have. Why yell when you can whisper? It takes way less energy, and it’s way more effective. What happens when you whisper? People listen more closely.

Can you whisper?

To whom can you whisper…and still be heard? This is where your focus should be placed. Please understand that building businesses is not dependent upon huge marketing budgets and how loud you can yell your message from the rooftops. That ain’t what gets it done. What does get it done? What does get people to buy from you? Engagement. I’m not referring to “grabbing people’s attention”. I’m referring to real, honest engagement. An honest-to-goodness exchange of ideas between people who actually LISTEN to each other.

What’s crazy to me is that marketing this way is not only accessible to EVERYONE, but it’s also dramatically more effective, less expensive by far, and most people DON’T do it. It blows my mind. Yes, there is technique, and there are tactics to learn, but it’s not more complicated than any other form of marketing. It just WORKS better is all.

Do you have the guts to admit the core of your business is really a lot smaller than you realize? It’s good news actually. It means you don’t have to spend your life yelling and doing other stupid things. You can whisper. You can communicate quietly and effectively, and you will be heard. And if you do it right, you can reach far MORE people than you can imagine, by actually ENGAGING just a few people.

How to engage fewer people and sell MORE at the same time

By engaging your most powerful assets (your existing base), you greatly increase your effectiveness. Do the math…it just makes sense, right? Your sphere of influence and existing client base is where the gold is. They’ve already bought with you. They already trust you. You already have momentum going, so you don’t have to push nearly as hard.

There is a key question you need to get good at asking. The question is not “Will you buy this thingie I’m selling?” The question is “How can I help?” And if you really WANT to help, the people who know you will let you. They’ll WANT your help. That’s how you build a sustainable, profitable business after all…by helping people. It’s not about selling thingies. It’s about helping people.

You MIGHT have a huge gold mine you’re sitting on that you don’t see right now. OR, your people may be best served by buying your thingies. I don’t know. What I DO know is that you learn, uncover new opportunities and grow your business by listening, not by talking and always trying to sell more thingies.

For those of you who’ve been in business a while…start focusing on your past clients. We’ll cover specific marketing tactics in future articles, and we can always hit this up in details during our consults as well. But for today, start looking at your biggest asset. There is gold. Lots of it. More than you think. So much gold in fact, that it will change your paradigm. I promise.

For those of you new in business…you may think your old boss or the friends you grab drinks with on the weekends are not good potential clients of yours. That is probably true. But you have their ATTENTION. You don’t have to make an ass out of yourself in order to have a legitimate, engaged conversation with them. This is more valuable than you realize. Given the choice between engaging these people first or spending your entire net worth on mass media, I think you know which I’m going to recommend.

And remember, the question isn’t “Want to buy my thingie?” The question is “How can I help?” Your friends know people, and those people know other people. With tact and some tenacity, building a million dollar client list is not more than a few months away if you really go to work on it.

Or, you can continue yelling. Louder…and louder…and LOUDER. Your choice 🙂