Whether you are building an actual business or if you are an affiliate marketer, having a sustainable structure is key to survival. Many affiliates tend to hop from one opportunity to the next as the companies that they are an affiliate of collapse. Yet somehow they think this is what it means to be successful. Many business owners don’t create a sustainable or scaleable business model, they have a good year, and then the next they are back at their office cubicle making calls for the boss. Building a sustainable business online will allow you to have a solid foundation; well planted into the ground. Let me help alleviate some of the uncessary bullshit most online business owners put themselves through.
Let Your Business Work For You, Don’t Work For It
I used to wake up, check my emails, make my Facebook posts, follow up with the people who said “maybe next week I will buy,” and wait for the sales to come in. While I still have many of the same habits (especially and ALWAYS when it comes to follow up) I realized that being in a constant state of grinding and manual labor was not sustainable. So what, I just made $60,000 in a month but I worked 350 hours that month to do it. It’s not sustainable; in order to do the things in life that I wanted to do I couldn’t work 350 hours per month ALL the time. I think all of us who actually understand that REAL success takes excessive amounts of hard work know that there are always going to be those times where we go back into the office and don’t come out for air until the work is done…even if that means 7 weeks in a row. But that aside; doing this long term is simply not sustainable.
I learned to take a different approach and let my business work for me instead of me slaving for it. There are some very simple things you can do to change your business and transform it into a long-term, bigger picture, revenue-producing machine. Things like setting up great sales funnels, re-structuring your products, understanding the science of the sales process and the way your customer think, and automating your traffic generation are all critical elements to letting your business work for you.
Be The Captain And The Sailor:
Recently I trusted a company to help blow my websites up to page one of Google and start bringing in some massive amounts of traffic. I had trusted them because I had seen work they had done for others, including one of my own clients. Yet when it came to my dealings with them they fell short of their word in every single instance: The boss, a supposedly successful business man (whom I had known in conversation several months before my business dealings with him) promised me returns as long as I was committed for 90 days. I invested $5,000 per month for 6 months straight maintaining faith in his promises despite the fact that no sales had come in. The guy couldn’t keep his word to save his own kid’s life; we would schedule calls and he wouldn’t show up, he would promise reports and never would deliver them; it was always “here’s what we are running into Ben;” never any solutions; just a grown ass man telling me why he couldn’t fulfill his empty promises that had cost me upwards of $25,000 to this point.
I had trusted this company to take my SEO to the next level. I have some decent knowledge of SEO and have ranked my own sites before, but what I was looking to do was beyond my skill level and needed some serious experts. Most people would think I made a $30,000 mistake, but here is the lesson I learned; a lesson that will save your business at least a few times: KNOW EVERY SINGLE ELEMENT OF YOUR BUSINESS BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE.
…Especially before handing it off to someone or some company. The reality is, most people aren’t good for their word and most people will not do what they say they are going to do, I’d argue to say that 97% of people are unreliable. So the problem occurs when you trust and pay someone else to do a better job at doing something for YOUR business than you could do yourself. When they screw up or don’t do a good job you have no idea that they are screwing up because you don’t understand enough about the job yourself to identify the problem. Therefore, if you are going to pay to have something done it is absolutely necessary that your first possess that skill yourself. This way if there is an issue you can identify and fix it, or at the very least monitor it until the people you paid to do it fix the issue.
There is a time and place for outsourcing because at some point you will need to free up the time you used to spend doing something so you can create more time in your life or utilize the time to move towards a bigger goal. But first, be the captain and the sailor.
Building A Sustainable Business Online
One of the simplest things I could say, and this is going to be like a slap in the face because it’s so stupid simple, is re-structuring the products you are offering. Here’s an example of what I mean by this:
You sell a course on how to make $5K per month in 90 days or less on Shopify. This is your only product and you market it for 3 months. During those 3 months everything you walk, talk, eat, breathe, and sleep is Shopify; you are known as THE Shopify expert.
Your course is $297 and you sell 1 course per day for 3 months. Congratulations, you might be feeling really good because you just made $26,730. You are now 90 days in and you notice that your sales are starting to drop and you aren’t getting as many leads. You have exhausted your traffic source, everyone has seen your offer, and you have noting else to offer your clients.
The other issue is that you are in constant survival mode because your product is a one time gig; you sell it for $297, then you have to go find another buyer and start all over.
I just identified multiple issues; you have nothing else to offer your clients AND your’re in constant survival mode because your product is a one time gig. The most your clients can ever be worth to you in their ENTIRE life as well as your ENTIRE life is $297.
Solution: Re-structure your product: Supplement that $297 with a back end, subscription-based product. You acheive three things by doing this; you have something new to offer your current clients (as well as everyone else), you have increased the potential LTV of your customers (life time value), and you are no longer in survival mode.
So say someone buys your $297 product and your $29.99/mo subscription. They stay a member of your Subscription for 6 months before unsubscribing; the LTV of that customer has increased from $297 to $477 and by the time they unsubscribe you already have signed up 100 more clients on the subscription product. See, what you are doing is supplementing your income, making your business model work for you, increasing the LTV of your clients, having a new product to offer any and all of your previous/present customers, and increasing the amount of ads dollars you can spend trying to obtain a buyer.
A simple re-structure opens the doors for so many new opportunties. If you have the right structure you increase the LTV and you are able to spend more money on ads because your profits are greater and they have longevity. This is a great opportunity to optimize your sales funnels and really take the time to understand the psychology of buying a product; this is what sales funnels are for. Yet again, making the choice to let your business work for you instead of you working for it. If you understand the science of making a sale then you will use this re-structure to optimize your sales funnels for cold traffic and you will be able to efficiently convert ads dollars spent on obtaining sales.
Be the captain and the sailor.
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Please feel free to drop comments below and I will be happy to answer!
