What do you think?

Notes follow after the “more” tab

Internet Business Building From The Ground Up

separate tools vs strategy.

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Tools:
software, widget, ebook, dvd

help you get where you want.

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Strategy: plan, roadmap.

• defines what you plan to do
• what your financial targets are.(budget, profit)
• contingency/worst case scenario “Plan B” and”Plan C”

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The Trend: overemphasis on tools

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Can get to your goal with strategy, but no tools (automate process, speed up a task)

Cannot get to your goal with tools and no strategy, no game plan.

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Lot of forums – discussing the best software, actually focusing on best game plan gives you more mileage.

Even if you have the fastest, long-range high tech plane, you’ll never get to your destination if you fly in the wrong direction…
In this situation, a $5 road map which you can purchase in any gas station will get you there.

Bottomline: Stop with focus on tools, focus on your game plan.

Instead of going along the lines of “what product to create”, an asset-based approach and solving a need will help you conceptualize a product with a hungry market behind it.

Click the “more” tab to access the notes:

In the business world, creating and marketing your own product ranks at the top of the value chain.

It creates unmatched opportunities to:
1) Brand yourself
2) Control product or service pricing and distribution
3) Gives you free rein to develop related products, form joint ventures.

Bottomline is that you’re in control.

Misbelief is that you need to put together something exotic like belly dancing or how to make a blackforest cake to have it sell online.

Not true.

—when i first started blogging, i had the belief that i needed to blog about something that no one was talking or writing about. needed to invent new techniques… not true.

Instead, you need to find something you’re good at, and you’re capable of teaching, to put it online, and more importantly market it effectively to the people who will find it relevant.

Assets – easy to think of ebook or a CD or DVD as an asset, but it’s more than that.
A particularly insightful forum posting or email reply, or a comprehensive answer on your customer support board forms the foundation of your knowledge base.

Some criticism about “crappy ebooks”. A lot of it has to deal with the fact that there’s no “knowledge base” in place.

So want to go beyond thinking of selling a physical or electronic book, or a CD, DVD or teleseminar for a moment and focus only on assets.

Assets are your knowledge. Something you know, something useful to somebody else that will bring them value, help them solve a problem and that they’re be willing to pay a fee for, to solve a problem or challenge they’re facing.

Looking at the root of things, let’s look at tapping the assets you already possess.

what you already know and seems common will provide value to someone out there.

• know how to cook chicken fried rice – lots of americans and europeans coming over to singapore, find that the local food here is delicious. wouldn’t you logically be able to market it to ready market over ebay or your own product site?
• curry national dish in the UK – what passes for curry isn’t very pleasant, why not put together your receipes and start marketing them.
• stay at home mom in pennsylvania or ohio and you have a great biscuits and gravy receipe – get in touch with me. it’s one of my favorite foods. would be popular in asia.
• busy professionals, how do you keep your house in decent condition in 1 hours quick cleaning a week?

know lots of programmers who’d benefit from it.

So the issue with creating a product or generating a profit with it has nothing to do with how to create a CD or write a book.
The issue is more basic than that.
So skip the idea of thinking you have to be an accomplished belly dancer. You don’t even have to be a rocket scientist to do well on the Internet.

You only need to be able to think out of the box, and bring value to your customers.

Click the “more” tab below to access the notes:

Business Overdelivery and Profit Building

Value: Pay $5, get $5.

A lousy movie, is something you paid $10 for and gave you $9 of entertainment, or cardinal sin is ZERO entertainment = ie waste of time.

Overdelivery is when what you get, vastly exceeds what you paid…

Another real world example. Go for dinner at a nice restaurant, have a nice dinner, waiter gives you a slice of their signature triple fudge cake, or maybe a slice of freshly made key lime pie.

What’s happened here?

You spent $50 on dinner, waiter gave you two slices of cake, which costs $5 each and probably cost $2.50 to make(desserts have at least a 100% margin). What’s he done?

Taken $5 for the 2 slices of cake, and bought your satisfaction and potentially your loyalty.

Customer retention stats: at least 5-10 times more effort to get a new customer, than it takes to retain an existing customer.

Make sense to hold on to all your customers, doesn’t it?

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World of Internet Marketing:
These days, about 40% of products out there give you value parity.
Pay $50, get $50 value.

Another 50% of products give you value destruction.
Pay $50, get $10 value.

So it doesn’t help to have a spectacular product launch, a number of big ones out there, my inside sources tell me some launches have >50% product refund rate.

So that $1 million product launch has $500k in product refunds. How cool is that?

Not really.

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Choose to be in the long term business game.

Market your product at $50, be sure to give $100 in value.

Word of mouth marketing goes hand-in-hand with your brand and reputation.

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Reality check:
the big name JV launch partners and crazy giveaways (buy $500 product, get $10,000 in bonuses), a lot of times result in one time sale.
$10,000 in bonuses fail to deliver. Is it really worth $10,000?
Not many people are capable of giving away $10,000 worth of value.

Wouldn’t you prefer to build lifelong customers?
Someone who would choose to buy your product, buy something with your name on it every time it comes to a buying decision?

Trying to play outside the overdeliverability frame sends a clear signal that you’re only here to earn the quick buck.

Strive instead to build a business empire built on a solid foundation of credibility, reliability and innovation.