Posts tagged business

I feel like complete honesty is necessary – after all, if you can’t trust me to be honest then how can you trust me?

When I’m writing a sales letter, this would be the “damaging admission” section. The moment when you let down your guard and reveal yourself as human. You tell your lead, “Hey, I’m not perfect.” This psychological tactic lets your reader connect with you on a deeper level, and can win you a lot of business! But that’s not the lesson for today. You can learn more about damaging admissions later…

Today I’m here to admit my own weakness in this whole Internet business. When you get into Internet marketing, the first thing you realize is: wow, there’s a lot of ways to make money online. This realization either becomes your trap or your gateway to making real profits.

• If you see all those opportunities and start flailing your arms, swatting at them, trying to grab up as many money-making methods as possible – you will fail! You will spread yourself too thin trying to learn it all. And in the end, you won’t be good at any of the methods. Chances are you’ll end up that guy that knows a lot about marketing, but doesn’t have any results to show for it.
• If you see the variety of methods and settle on one (maybe two), you stand an excellent chance of becoming the master in that area. You can learn everything about your business model, dominate it, and apply it over and over again to different niches.

I found my method, and I’ve been dominating for a couple years now. But it’s time to expand. It’s time to look outside the box, and find ways to boost my existing income streams. Sure, I could always just create more products in more niches. But that gets old after a while. I know my strength is in ONE LITTLE TINY NICHE. And I make a killing there. So now I want to increase my market share in that niche.

My biggest weakness is content sites!

So what, you say? Who needs content sites when you can just put up a sales letter and forget it? Well, if you want to own your market, you need to provide value-add to your clients or customers. You gotta give them more than they ask for. And sometimes, providing that value to potential customers can win you new business.

Well I suck at creating and maintaining this kind of content. And that’s gotta change. For 2009, my plan is to put together a small network of content sites around my niche. These sites will act as a resource for existing customers, a place to gather opt-ins and build my list, and a portal for expanding the scope of my entire business.

There’s my early New Year’s resolution, and my damaging admission for the day. If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave them in my comments. Any encouragement is welcome, too.

And maybe you can learn something from this post – what’s your biggest weakness? What’s stopping you from maximizing your profits? Identify and eliminate it. If you put down a road map, you will have an easier time getting from Point A to Point B.

Good luck, and happy early Thanksgiving!