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.

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 functions, optional templates, greater scalability, the ability to support multiple sessions, lower latency, a more resource-friendly version are all items that premium customers might consider.

Why sell a “plain vanilla” (excuse the pun) fudge sundae, when customers might want a triple-chocolate, molten cocoa heart-stopper sundae with cookie dough, cotton candy and strawberry mix-ins?

• Offer an end-to-end, turnkey solution

Find out if your customer wants help with installation, customization, long-term customer support. See what else they might want as part of a complete solution.

Often, budding entrepreneurs are too happy to sell 1 unit of their product, and scoot back to their research lab.

Why not take the opportunity to provide a complete service and use the opportunity to gather more product feedback.

• Subscription and continuity income

Your utility company, your cell phone operator, internet service provider, cable TV operator all do this. They continue to provide service each month and collect a steady stream of income.

Why not do the same too?

It not only generates cashflow, it also opens up opportunities to further develop your customer service resources.

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While there’s no surefire way to grow your product income, these methods will go a long way to finding out what your customer wants, and enhance customer stickiness.

In the long run, it just might bring your product income to the next level.

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? I think not.

It may be because the bulk of internet marketers are solopreneurs (working through a sole proprietorship structure) that leads to this form of opportunistic thinking.

Granted revenue and more importantly, profits are going to be the lifeblood when you’re starting out as a solo operation. Growing beyond this stage requires visionary thinking and a long term gameplan.

This may mean forgoing some opportunistic quick cash opportunities (like setting up and launching a keyword campaign based around “Michael Phelps”, “Michael Phelps olympics”) because even though this might make you some quick cash, it will take you away from building your core business.

Having a business plan, outlining your goals, area of focus and defining your business activities will give you greater leverage and maximize your chances of achieving the goals you’ve set.

This ties in to a conversation I had earlier this week with Israel-based marketer Andrea Yager about the goals of marketing and how you can best focus your efforts to get what you want out of this business.

Stay tuned for this week’s edition of the Friday Podcast.

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?

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 businesses and new internet marketers:

• An online presence: If you don’t show up on the search engine results, you’re as good as invisible which isn’t a good thing. If you can’t or are not able to set up a WordPress blog or a website, it’s going to be difficult to maintain an online presence.
• Lead generation: A business without customers is dead in the water. Whether it’s bringing inbound traffic via a content site or a blog, or heading out to bring traffic in via PPC (pay per click), articles, classified ads, or ezine advertising or social bookmarking, you will need some form of traffic generation in place, which can then be converted into prospects who will then be converted into customers.
• Customer engagement/customer relationship management: Internet marketing as an industry needs to move beyond the single sale, into building customer relationships like in the real world. Savvy merchants are already picking up on this, and smart affiliates will move beyond just a single sale to building up email databases (ie: customer databases) to build relationships with customers.
• The sales funnel: The concept of cross selling and upselling are key here. Are customers able to get a variety of products, premium products, personalized service if they want it? Can they get it from you? Else they’ll go to someone else to have their needs met.

Technology is just one piece of the puzzle in putting the system together. Without the processes and customer service to back up the tech element, your online business could remain stagnant and struggle to reach the next level of growth.

Lifechanging technology only makes sense when accompanied by well thought out business processes. Else the whiz-bang effect will last for a very short duration.

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.

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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 spending your time digging up all the coolest and newest Facebook applications or WordPress plugins at the expense of your business growth.

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If you are serious about bringing your business to the next level, you might instead be looking at:

• Synergistic partnerships to expand the breadth and reach of your products and services.
• Opening new channels and distribution, opening new markets for your existing products.
• Trend forecasting and research and development, to expand the capabilties of your current, to evolve it into a version 2.0 or version 3.0 so you can meet the future head on.

And only once you’ve laid out the blueprints to meet those challenges listed above, yeah, sure, you can fire up the Battleships application on Facebook and start fragging those tactical-thinking marketers into kingdom come…

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 your visitors fault if a campaign flops – It is solely your fault” because you did not meet their needs.

What’re some ways to gain an advantage in this “information war”?

• Develop Critical Asset Mass

A successful PPC campaign is an asset. An ebook or program which helps your audience meet their goal is an asset. Having the right network of contacts to be able to broker deals is an asset.

You probably don’t realize all the assets you have at hand, and auditing and keeping track of what you know and what you can do goes a big way in reaching your goals.

How do you define a “critical asset mass”, you know you’ve achieved “critical mass” when your assets have taken on a momentum of their own and enable you to achieve your goals easily.

Need to put a deal together? If all it takes is a single phone call to accomplish it, you’ve got networking mass.

If you need to create a customized package for a client and it’s a matter of bundling your existing IP assets together, you’ve achieved product mass.

Which brings me to my next point.

• Developing Relevant Asset Mass

If you’re taking an adhoc approach to developing assets, you’ll naturally end up with a hodge podge of assets and it can be a struggle to bring your assets together.

You’ve probably realized that a number of the posts in this blog are geared towards developing a focus.

You may just now understand that a number of things you do every day generates an asset: from the emails you send, the private messages, forum posts, blog posts – all these generate assets.

But are these assets focused in a specific area?

Or do they run across a chaotic spectrum?

If the IP you are creating each day is tightly-themed, you can be sure that brought together, their value will multiply and may just help you move that next mountain you come across.

PS: In response to questions about IP assets, I created my Apple iPhone-themed Rabid Niche Cash Machine to help you gain a headstart in your Internet business building.

Amit and I are in obvious agreement that niche sites can be very profitable. As Amit notes:

Yes, $1k-$2k/month is fairly typical for the amount of revenue that I generate from my content sites just free traffic. Small compared to what I make from PPC from these site, but it’s a great source of long term revenues & profits, especially if you continue to add content and get backlinks to your site.

That $1k-$2k/month can grow to $1k/day, I know one affiliate who have done this in 6 months by ranking high in Yahoo and MSN.

Certainly, niche sites can provide nice long tail income, especially if you’ve built a critical mass of niche sites.

Amit’s experience of talking to one super affiliate: I had a chance to speak with some other very successful super affiliates. I talked to one guy who was running 500 affiliate offers at one time, making $20-$50/day from each one. WOW!

Is fairly typical of a number of Super Affiliates I’ve worked together with.

But the one limiting factor, especially if you’re not already doing this regularly is:

How do you generate original and more importantly “sticky” content.

Tim notes in the comments to Amit’s post:

Thanks for addressing the issue of content creation. I’m curious to know where you are finding writers who work for $5 a page. Most of the eLance article writers I have seen who actually have a good command of English and write well charge a lot more than $5 a page. Maybe I’m not negotiating enough.

It would be great if you could share your “insider strategies” on quality content control and selecting the right people to outsource to. I’ve found some great people on eLance, but they’re not insanely cheap not do I want to insult them by nickel-and-diming them down to nothing. I think what Amit has said is that if you find someone good, expect to pay them well because they’re in pretty high demand.

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The reality is that you will get what you pay for. Proven quality costs.

A workaround is to find new guys on sites like elance, workaholics or rent a coder, who’ve yet to establish themselves and might be willing to do quality work on the cheap in order to build some positive feedback.

If you’re going along this approach, you might like to farm out a batch of 3 articles, and solicit 10-20 freelancers to work on your project. You could then do a ‘survivor’ style elimination and work with your favorite 2-3 writers.

The important thing to note is that you need to spend time scanning and headhunting quality. You might be really lucky and have a talented freelancer fall into your lap, but it’s not likely to happen.

In terms of negotiating a good rate, as a business consultant I look at three dimensions when working with a new prospect:

• What’s the level of trust/engagement?
• What’re the long term prospects?
• Am I merely a contractor or could I potentially be a “partner in profits”?

Addressing the trust/engagement issue, you need to establish rapport with your writer, make them feel comfortable. It’s just like any real-world, face-to-face relationship. If you feel secure with the person, the relationship will flow very smoothly.

You could demonstrate your commitment and explore the long term prospects by:

• Making an upfront payment for the job
• Making a long term commitment (contracting 500 pages of content over a 6 month period)
• Banking on your credibility (You’ve established yourself as an authority and as a credible person within your industry, haven’t you?)

Although it’s an online work relationship, many of the dynamics of physical relationships come into play.

You might’ve heard of several successful Internet Marketing partnerships where 2 guys met on a forum, decided to work on a project together, and ended up as partners. You might also have heard of an Internet Marketer who advertised for a programmer on Monster/Craigslist/LinkedIn/a forum, got someone to work on a couple of projects, found a good fit and eventually ended up as partners.

A number of the joint ventures I’m working on have also originated from forums. Whatever you might think, Internet Marketing is still a people/relationship business and at the end of the day, it’s not merely what you know, and who you know, it’s also a matter of how well you know them.

A cynic once told me, it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you.

There’s an element of truth in that, and keeping that phrase in mind, will help you go far in this business.

The “Stuck Newbie Internet Marketer” syndrome is more common than you might think and I go into some solutions and workthroughs if you find yourself in similar circumstances.

The podcast notes follow (click the “more” prompt)

How do things go wrong when you do everything right? Even if you do know how to do article marketing, set up a blog, familiar with mechanics of PPC.
Yet you’re not able to succeed online.

Why is that?

There’s 2 business elements to every marketing campaign.

• Tangible — people do ok with this.
• Intangible — people mess this part up.

What’s missing is the Internet Marketing masterplan.

Solution? Go beyond the small picture (beyond asking what is RSS? What is Paypal)

Move to the macro level issues.
You need to put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together.

You can only do it when your hands are dirty, and that means getting involved in IM, even if you don’t know how all the pieces fit together yet.

A well developed master plan is:

• Integrated
• Complimentary
• System-oriented, process-driven

What you must do now:

• Take action.
• More importantly, learn from what you did right and wrong.
• Take notes, keep a record.
• Learn from what happened, decide on necessary changes.
• Make amendments to your master plan.