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Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

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How to raise your prices by 300% (almost) overnight

Posted: 27 Feb 2013 06:18 AM PST

One of the worst pieces of advice you can ever listen to is: raise your prices if you want to be more profitable. Why? Because it’s grossly incomplete.

In this blog post, I want to share specific actionable things you can do to raise your prices by 300% or more (also referred to as being a premium provider). Besides the obvious benefit of being more profitable, charging premium prices also enables you to grow faster and, counter intuitively, attract better clients. From a lifestyle perspective, you can also hit six figures or higher with only a handful of clients and with very little staff and infrastructure (goodbye complex sales funnels).

I have applied this approach for myself and my clients in multiple markets including markets that are notoriously price sensitive. It works best if you’re in a position to be able to set your own prices / fees.

Becoming a premium provider requires you to implement 2 key things:

  1. Identifying one or more affluent markets that can pay you premium dollars (as the old saying goes: "You call sell Mercedes to broke people but good luck.")
  2. Focusing on communicating accelerated results. What do I mean by this? Affluent buyers are not interested in education since they tend to be fairly educated already, and they are extremely busy. This means they don't want to hear about many DVDs or manuals are in your home study course or how many years of experience you have. Since the #1 thing they value is their time, you have to be able to communicate how you can help them quickly get the results they want with your help.

Here are some real-world examples that will show these principles in action.

Marty is a fit 50-year old who was a spokesperson for a weight loss company (he lost 75 pounds under some very challenging circumstances). He was approached constantly after each public appearance on how he did it. Finding that he wanted a more active role, he decided to launch his own business. Because he had no track record, he felt he needed to start at the bottom and coach people for free. As you can imagine, his results was abysmal because these folks never committed to what he was coaching them on. After he became my client, I recommended that he narrowed his target market to male business owners and executives between 45 and 55.

Why this target market? Marty is a male business owner so there's affinity and people in that age range tend to be more affluent vs. people in the 20s or 30s (a much, much more crowded market and much more commoditized).

To summarize: in less than 45 days of working together, Marty has sold his 1st client at $800 and his highest sale has been $4,000 so far (my goal is to get him up to $10,000 per client). He’s even landed a world-famous heart surgeon in Italy (!) as a client (Marty lives in Chicago). His big promise is he can help his clients quickly get in the best shape on their life mentally and physically, not how to get six-pack abs (that appeals more to a younger audience).

As a second example, Angela helps folks release destructive habits that lead to overstress (this refers to when you’re so stressed that your physical and mental facilities start breaking down). Until now, she has referred to herself as a stress management expert, which immediately caps her financial results. Instead, I have repositioned her as a peak performance specialist.

With that in mind, she is initially targeting female business owners and executives, and she's also raised her fees by over 1,000% (with her target market, having stress is sometimes worn as a badge of honor hence the repositioning to a peak performance specialist).

Finally, she has connections to very high net worth families. In this case, she has to raise her fees just to be credible to this target market (as I advised her, if they’re paying you the same as their maids, it’s unlikely they will take you seriously).

Prior to working together, she was spending months trying to figure out how to sell a $47 product and implementing a maze to upsell the buyers into a $297 product. Instead, we have set all that aside and focus on attracting premium clients that can pay her thousands of dollars per sale (with the high net worth families, the goal is to charge 5 figures or more per sale).

So here’s the game plan for you to raise your prices / fees by 300% or more almost overnight:

  1. Identify one or more affluent markets that can afford to pay premium dollars (in most cases, this is usually a subset of your existing list – In other cases, you may have to go to an adjacent market).
  2. Communicate your benefits in terms of accelerated results vs. how much “stuff” is in your solution.

By applying these 2 simple principles, you can pass on marginal buyers and focus on premium buyers instead. You can also save weeks and months of your life from having to come up with a gigantic upsell maze that usually cost a fortune to implement.

Trying to increase your Google rank that is like no other?

“ProBlogger Census: We Need You!” plus 1 more

“ProBlogger Census: We Need You!” plus 1 more

Link to @ProBlogger

ProBlogger Census: We Need You!

Posted: 26 Feb 2013 11:08 AM PST

It’s that time of year!

We’ve set our plans, shifted our focus … and now we’re running our ProBlogger Census.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the change of approach on ProBlogger, but I’m also really keen to hear what topics you’d like us to explore in the coming months.

The 2013 ProBlogger Census is a short survey to capture your thoughts, ideas, and wishes so that we can help to serve you better in our blogging.

I’d love it if you could take a few moments to fill it out.

I look forward to reading your thoughts!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
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ProBlogger Census: We Need You!

Four New Ways to Monetize a Blog

Posted: 26 Feb 2013 05:00 AM PST

The ad industry is dead.

Target will only buy remnant inventory. Federated Media, the darling of the online ad world, is just about vaporized. And media behemoth IAC is building a state-of-the-art ad sales system that will work like a trading floor where you don’t even know what content you’re buying—you only see the profiles of the people who are viewing the content right this second.

So how are people going to make money blogging? Here are four ways.

whiteboard

Image by Jeff Kubina, licensed under Creative Commons

1. Build a paywall

This was once seen as impossible. But after growing up online, generation Y reads and writes more than any other generation in history and is therefore more willing to than others to pay for online content.

This attitude has opened up lots of fee-based content models. Today The New York Times is successful in its paywall strategy, and it’s paved the way for bloggers to start looking at this as a viable option. Andrew Sullivan, for example, launched a paywall and raised $100K in a few days.

The problem is that a paywall is limiting rather than expanding in terms of the ways you can connect to the world as revenue options grow and change.

2. Turn your brand into a company and take in investors

As a serial entrepreneur, I saw this option coming early in the blogging game. So I named my blog something that was not attached to the domain name. Then I built up the brand name, sold the brand to investors, and spun off a company.

I don’t know why more people don’t do this. It's a great way to leverage your community-building abilities, if you have them.

In this scenario, you hold onto your blog and your personal brand and you own stock in the spin-off brand. (And look: I recently gave up the CEO position and went back to blogging. But I held onto the founder's stock. It's like a big lottery ticket.)

3. Use your blog as an incubator

The best way to test new companies is to launch them. You could throw up a product offering on a web site, then announce it on the incubator blog. If it takes off, fine, if it doesn’t, then announce the next product.

In this scenario, the blogger is like a full-time marketing team for a range of startups within the incubator. Keep writing good content and you can send your audience to any beta site you need to. In this scenario, you’d get stock in each of the companies that you help launch.

4. Go after a talent acquisition

It’s common these days for companies to buy a startup to get the employees who would otherwise not be in the job market. You could create this same scenario with your blog.

Typically, a talent acquisition is for developers. But I can see it happening for someone who is amazing at PR, for example, and is essentially offering up her social media sauce and her high-powered media network in the talent acquisition of her blog.

Another way I can see this going is that someone uses the blog as a way to display thought leadership in the industry, so the acquisition’s purpose is to have the property attached to the larger brand, but also, to get the talented thought leader behind the blog.

What will you do?

Each of these four ideas takes planning, but with ad sales no longer being a viable option for blog revenue, we need to think more creatively.

Blogs are clearly becoming more and more prominent in the social and intellectual fabric of our lives. Those of us who can adjust in the most creative, big-thinking ways will benefit the most from our blogging talents.

Contributing author Penelope Trunk is a serial entrepreneur, and the author of the bestselling book Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success. She has written for a wide range of publications including Time, Business Week, and the Wall St. Journal, but she likes writing for her blog best: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
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Four New Ways to Monetize a Blog