Tag Archives: business-strategy

3 Ways To Upsize Your Product Income

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When consulting with start-ups, the 1 trend I notice is that most entrepreneurs tend to underprice their products and services.

While it may seem like great value to offer a service at $50 a month, especially when your expenses are low, it doesn’t make sense in the long run. That’s because your growth will be constrained by providing products at a low price-point.

profit

To bridge the gap from bootstrapping startup to a business with sustainable growth, here are 3 strategies to incorporate into your business model:

  • Offer a premium/upsized model

Talk to your customers and find out if there’s a “bells-and-whistles” version of your product that they’d like to get their hands on.

Additional features and Continue reading →

Breaking Out Of The “One Trick Pony” Mindset

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Shawn Collins has posted the seminar track presentations from Affiliate Summit Boston at the Affiliate Summit Blog, providing a wealth of resources and information for those in affiliate marketing as well as internet marketing.

pony

Going through the various topics, it’s easy to add more tools to your marketing arsenal. At the same time, it will be prudent to avoid falling into the “one trick pony” pitfall.

What does this pitfall involve? Given that the content comes from some of the brightest lights in the internet industry?

Falling into the trap of seeing and then believing that a buzz technology, whether it’s twitter, seesmic, SEOQuake, or some other keyword, analytics or social media tool is going to transform your business.

Is one technology, or a handful of technologies or “tricks” going to transform your business? Continue reading →

Is Your Internet Business A Slave To Technology?

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I was talking to Andrea Yager earlier about the value of Twitter to marketers and whether it was “life changing”.

I think there’s certainly things that will be life changing, these include oxygen, water and food.

The litmus test of whether something is “life changing” is whether you could survive without the item before, and whether the absence of the item or service, means your business can continue surviving.

The definition is pretty loose, but I have a feeling that businesses can continue surviving without iPhones, MacBooks, Twitter or many of the new products and services out there.

So are businesses slaves to technology?

trapped

Rather than go into a philosophical discussion of whether your business will collapse without email, or if you lost the use of a cell phone permanently, here are some essentials for Continue reading →

Do You Have Adequate Risk Management Policies In Your Internet Marketing Business?

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thinkingOne of the takeaways from my friend, Tyler Project managing partner Leonard Lin’s experience of having his Facebook account suspended this past week, has been to manage your risk, especially in the area of technology risk management.

Failure to do so could mean a disruption in your business activities and in a worst case scenario, a stop in your income generation capability.

What’s Risk Management?

It’s a means to control the uncertainty and unknown elements in your business (typically referring to the negative elements). This could range from dealing with the latest Google slap, having a website get hacked into, being at the receiving end of unethical business practices by service providers or even partners.

Let’s be realistic, it’s not possible to totally eliminate risk, but you can take a leaf out of Wikipedia’s stub on Risk Management and look at the 4 options:

  • Risk Avoidance: actively avoiding all risk doesn’t do much for me, because the risk-reward maxim dictates that great reward is usually accompanied by greater risk. Go too far to avoid risk and you significantly reduce the potential returns from your business venture.
  • Risk Transfer: typically done through insurance. In the tech arena, even if insurance was available, it’s likely to be prohibitively expensive. If anything, being able to outwit, outlast and out-innovate your competition might be a stronger solution.
  • Risk Retention: Part of your market research process and due diligence should involve being ‘market aware’. Knowing your competitors and their web presence can help you better develop countermeasures and devise your business strategies accordingly. Operating in an information vacuum where you’re unaware of the business environment is a surefire recipe for disaster.
  • Risk Reduction: This is probably the best solution provided you reduce your risk in an intelligent manner. Call it having a “Plan B”. A comprehensive strategy where you’re continually being proactive in your market space is going to provide better results than being reactive (ie seeing what others do then following or improving on what they’re doing). Diversification, building up multiple streams of income works, provided you have generated critical mass in your business. (critical mass = reaching a comfortable income target). Diversification if you’re only generating a couple of hundred bucks in a niche is silly, you should instead focus on achieving critical mass.

Overall, being “market aware” is probably the best solution for dealing with risk in your business.

And yes, I have activiated “Plan B” on more than one occasion.

Monday Question: The Death of Blogging and Long Term Business Growth

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I got a short and sweet question today “Is blogging dead?
I was planning to start a blog, but I heard that I should create and optimize a Facebook profile instead.
What’s your advice?”

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That’s an interesting question and let me do my best to you an interesting answer.

If you read Stephanie Agresta (AKA Internet Geek Girl’s) post “Blogging is not dead (but I am really busy)“, you’d realize that like a lot of popular bloggers (eg. Sam Harrelson, Wayne Porter, Jim Kukral and Co), Steph has reduced the frequency of her “long form” (eg. WordPress blogging), in favor of micro-blogging (eg. Twitter and it’s companions).

So blogging is not “dying” nor will it “die” anytime soon.

The significant issue at hand is to get a grip on your long term business growth.

Are you being overly tactical – looking at the micro level of your business – whether you should set up a squidoo page, a hubpage, a facebook profile, throw up a social community site…

When really you need to be more strategic in nature!

If you need an analogy – strategic or being long term-focused means looking at the forest, and fashioning a master plan.

Being tactical means you’re looking at an individual tree and trying to optimize it. Taking care of the day-to-day. so to speak.

Don’t get me wrong, you NEED to be tactical in nature when you’re going into a new niche and building up your skills, but you shouldn’t be Continue reading →

Building Your Internet Marketing Asset Base

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Internet Marketing like biotechnology, finance and engineering ranks as one of the most intellectual property-intensive industries to be in. With that in mind, shouldn’t you be striving to develop as much IP (intellectual property) as possible?

Newer marketers may know, but fail to incorporate the concept that information is the true currency of the Internet.

It could be something as simple as knowing the URL for an open source software, or something more complex like the techniques of breaking into elite Internet Marketing inner circles. If you don’t know where and what and how to do something that will help you achieve your goal, you will be severely limited in your marketing, and by extension your income generation ability.

As a newer marketer, your core focus areas should be:

  • Absorbing as much of the relevant intellectual property assets as is needed to accomplish your goal
  • Develop IP assets to help you directly or indirectly generate income (and achieve your financial goal).

Specifically Information Marketers should focus on:

  • Understanding their target market and going beyond harvesting relevant keywords, to fully understand their thoughts and needs
  • Developing (as a product creator) or recommending (as an affiliate marketer) appropriate and relevant products and services to serve those needs

A maxim I’ve heard recently is that “it’s never Continue reading →