Change your thoughts » Business

Free eBook – How to Reach 10,000 Blog Subscribers

Steven Aitchison — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:57:06 +0000

Over the last few weeks I have been trying to find out what readers of the blog would like more information on. So I emailed my subscriber list and asked them. 4 titles topped the polls and one of them was ‘How to get more subscribers to your blog’.

This kind of surprised me, but I asked the list what they really wanted to know about this topic and in true ‘let the readers decide’ I have produced a first draft of an ebook entitled: How to Reach 10,000 Blog Subscribers.

I am giving this away for free to all CYT readers.

DOWNLOAD THE EBOOK HERE

Who is it for?

Anybody who has a blog and is looking to increase their exposure in the blogging field. You can be in any niche and benefit from this ebook.

What you will learn

Why your subscriber count is important.
The four aspects of your blog you must focus on to capture readers attention
7 ways to dramatically increase your subscriber count

Do you like it? was it helpful? If so, I have two simple requests

1) Let me know. Share your feedback in the comments section or write to me directly.

2) Help spread the word. Pass this along to the everyone you know, maybe no everyone, I don’t think your Gran would like a copy, but you know what I mean. Would be great to Tweet this as well.

I hope you enjoy ‘How to reach 10,000 Blog Subscribers’ it and look forward to hearing your thoughts about it.

50 Fantastic Free eBooks to Enhance Your Online Business

Steven Aitchison — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:11:42 +0000

When I first started reading ebooks way back at the end of the 1990’s I didn’t ever think there would be a time when there would be free, valuable, information on the net. It’s only when Rich Schefren and Eben Pagan started moving ‘The Free Line’ that things really started moving. Then of course, more recently, Frank Kern started releasing his free videos packed full of information for marketers and entrepreneurs to help start and drive your business forward.

I have scoured the net for more recent bloggers and businesses who have released ebooks and manifestos to help others drive their businesses forward.

It’s an approach I am now taking and will be releasing 2 free ebooks before the end of the year which will be packed full of great info. For now I will share some of the best ebooks I have read which you can grab for free (you might have to sign up for some of them but believe me they are worth your email address), Also I have not set the links to open a new tab (not got my faithful Dreamweaver here in Turkey) so right click each link and click on ‘open in new tab’:

50 Fantastic Free eBooks to Enhance Your Online Business

The Biggest Mistake that Self-Employed People Make

Hulbert Lee — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:00:36 +0000

Often times, I spend my time in forums where many self-employed people interact with each other. One thing that always strikes my curiosity is the self-defeating threads that people start –

“I’m broke, in debt, and depressed,” “I hate my life,” “I have no girlfriend, no job, starting to feel very depressed,” “Starting to lose hope,” “I still haven’t made a dime,” “Fastest way to make $2000 – $3000 in one month?”

Surprisingly, these are the threads that usually get the most replies. There’s usually a lot of hype in them, even a little bit of excitement, but one can definitely feel the energy of the atmosphere as everyone is telling their own personal story to get it on the action. After many responses, the original poster receives wonderful tips to help improve their life. The scary thing is days later, weeks later, and even months later, you will find the original poster there, in the same thread, asking people for the same advice. This has made me realize that there are really two types of self-employed people in the world.

The Ones Who Take Value for Themselves

Some people need to have the perfect plan before they start taking any action. They think they have to read all the books, watch all the videos, listen to all the audio tapes, attend all the seminars, or get all the best advice from people on the forums before they start doing anything. The biggest mistake is that self-employed people make is thinking that by reading a book, watching a video, listening to an audiotape, or attending a seminar, it is the same as producing value to other people. It’s not. Rather, they’re taking value from other people who are giving it to them.

Even if the book they are reading has the answers to every single problem imagined to achieve success, if they have done nothing, they still end up just taking value. If this person doesn’t take action, nothing really changed besides them becoming more knowledgeable. They may feel more powerful or energized, but soon even this feeling will fade away into the distance when they realized that they haven’t given any value back.

So in order to regain that power, energy, inspiration, motivation, or feeling again, they will find it in another book, another video, another audio tape, seminar, or thread reply, until one day they’ve realized how much time has passed by and how much they are in debt. The credits are maxed out and the ink from crossing out all the days of the calendar run dry. Like how a powerful king who falls from the throne when he becomes too greedy, a self-employed person will fall out of greed to know everything, eventually putting them in a helpless, powerless state to do anything.

The Ones Who Give Value to Others

There is hope though. Although in today’s highly competitive world, a normal person – with or without all the rich knowledge of the information age – can still succeed and see themselves rise up to being a king, but not only a king that serves himself (or herself for women reading this – Queen), but a leader who serves the people. And this is done through giving value to others.

There’s a catch to this however. The word “value” is often times misused or misunderstood. The reason for this is because when a word is used too much, the meaning of it becomes inflated. Other examples are words like “best,” “top,” and “most.” But when you look at the word “value,” what does it really mean to you?

Most people might replace the word “value” with the word “something”. So the phrase of this paragraph’s title would read, “The Ones Who Give Something to Others”. This “something” usually comes out to be a form of rehashed or regurgitated material from a common source. What is value then?

In chess, value is not the pawn, knight, or bishop. It’s the queen. Value is something of quality. Value is something important. Value is something unique. It is not something.

So I guess the biggest question is how can you give value to other people? Although human beings may seem different in a hundred billion ways, we have an innate characteristic that enables us to detect on a deep, personal level whether or not the value we are receiving is actually making a genuine positive different in our lives.

This could be something that makes us laugh, makes us think, makes us wonder, or even better, all of the above. But it’s not something that makes us disappointed, frustrated, or even just walk away as if nothing had happened except for time passing by.

You can stand out from the rest; you can rise to the top; you can be the king. But the one thing you must always ask yourself is this question. Are you truly making someone else’s life better?

Statistics For 2009 And Looking Forward To 2010

Steven Aitchison — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 15:08:57 +0000

As it’s coming toward the end of the year I thought I would give a quick update on stats and what’s in store for 2010.

First of all I would like to thank every single one of you for being great readers and great members of the CYT community. I really do appreciate your feedback, your support, your comments, your suggestions and mostly for being you and being honest.

Highlights

The highlight has to be the change of design and cutting out of adwords and annoying adverts. The new design has made a huge difference and there are more reders, more authors, more comments, more interactivity, more all round. My determination and productivity levels rose dramatically in August as well after attending Leo Babauta’s A-list Bootcamp Course. I met some fantastic people on that course and some great new writers in the personal development field.

Statistics for 2009

2009 has been a great year for CYT in terms of change and growth. Here are some figures:

Subscribers grew from 2500, at the start of the year to 6300 (most of this growth occured from August when I made my mind up to get 10,000 subscribers by the end of this year, it jumped from 3,200 in August to 6,300 to date, I didn’t reach my target but I tried my best )

Page Views: 663,978 up from 590,000 last year (12% growth)
Unique Visits: 442,496 up from 397,000 last year (11% growth)
Clicks out: 109,184 up from 78,000 last year (40% growth)

Online Earnings For 2009

Advertising on the site:
TextLinkAds – $826.15
Linkworth – $1,913

Affiliate marketing:
My own product at www.binaural-mind.com – $5,326
Promoting affiliate products from clickbank – $8,283

Freelance writing:
from August – date: $2,350
EBooks – $650

Total online earnings = $19,348
Total direct costs (adwords etc) – $8,800

Earnings – cost = $10,548

Average extra monthly income – $879

The online earnings model I have been using is to promote affiliate products using adwords, and I am getting a good rate of return however it’s not enough to realise my goal of being a pro blogger. A better business model looks to be from writing, not necessarily for others but from creating my own products such as ebooks, books etc. So that is the way I am going to go next year and see where that leads me.

New authors on CYT

2009 saw a lot of new authors and I would like to thank all of them here:

Armen Shirvanian – See All Armen’s CYT Posts Here

Ayo Olaniyan – See All Ayo’s CYT Posts Here

Brian Walsh – See All Brian’s CYT Posts Here

Celetine Chua – See All Celestine’s CYT Posts Here

Douglas Cartwright – See all Douglas’ CYT Posts Here

Dragos Roua – See All Dragos’ CYT Posts Here

Francesca Kotomski – Read All Francesca’s posts Here

John Anyasor – Read All John’s Posts Here

Jonathan Beebe – Read All Jonathan’s Posts Here

Jonathan Wells – Read All Jonathan’s Posts Here

Mary Jaksch – Read All Mary’s Posts Here

Mr Self Development – Read All Mr Self Development’s Posts Here

Nik Karlil – Read All Nik’s Posts Here

Noah St john – Read All Noah’s Posts Here

Patrick Stoeckmann – Read All Patrick’s Posts Here

Tara Miller – Read All Tara’s Posts Here

Zeenat Syal – Read All Zeenat’s Posts Here

I loved having the guest authors on CYT as it broadens the readership and the message I am trying to create here. There are so many fantastic writers out there and I am glad some of them spent time to write for CYT.

Looking Ahead To 2010

Two Books

I have just finished one book and am working on another one, in fact I am working on a few.

The first one is called 100 Ways to Develop Your Mind and is an extension of the post 100 Ways To Develop Your mind I wrote a few months ago. Instead of this being available in eBook format I have put it into print using a service called Createspace and it will be available on Amazon in a few weeks time. I will be sending copies out via pdf to a few people in the next week for review.

The second book will be ready by the end of February 2010 and it’s an ebook, with videos, audios and PDF files, it’s going to be a major one for me, more about that next year.

Services

I am offering more services such as:

Freelance writing
Life coaching
Blog coaching

As a direct result of the success of CYT I have managed to land 3 regular freelance jobs writing for Lifesnips.com, Dumblittleman.com and Eclecticmagazine.com and have written for another 3 people on an ad-hoc basis. I am loving the writing just now and my productivity levels have risen so much this year, it’s hard to believe.

More Writing

I belive the quality of writing has gobe up since last year and I want to keep all the readers interested in coming back so I will be writing the same type of content for 2010 and adding more exciting bloggers to CYT.

I am still toying with the idea of video which I tired briefly, but I need it a little more professional before I attempt it again.

Thank You

There are a few people I would like to thank personally for their support and encouragement and belief in me:

Robin Easton - Has always been supportive of my work and she really is an inspiration to a lot of people including myself. thank you Robin, you’re the ‘Angel of the internet’

Jonathan Wells – Another good friend and someone who has listened to my half cocked ideas and still had my back, thank you Jonathan.

Dragos Roua - Dragos has been great this year with his writing and is some I admire and someone who has been behind me in everything I have done.

Ayo Olaniyan – He took on the role of coach in the ‘Ask The Coach series and is a great professional

Leo Babauta – Without his course A-List Blogging Club course I wouldn’t have rediscovered my passion for writing.

David Peralty – For hiring me and beliving in my writing enough to give me a writers spot at LifeSnips.com

Jay White – For giving me a little leeway with my writing subjects on DumbLittleMan

The readers of CYT have all been great this year and they have made all the authors feel welcome and encouraged them to speak their minds. Thank you, thanks you, thank you everyone I hope next year will be just as good.

Your Thoughts

I am always interested in your thoughts for 2010 and would ask what you would like to see on the blog or what would you take away. Anything at all would be helpful to keep driving the blog forward.

The Passion Paradox – A Response

Steven Aitchison — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:11:26 +0000

I am writing this article, in response to great article written by Lisis over at Quest For Balance

To give my summary of the article by Lisis: she was saying that too many people are advocating that we should follow our passion and the money will follow. Lisis’ analogy of the people who write about giving up the day job to pursue our passion is: ‘Snake oil salesmen.’

She made some great points about how making money from our passion is hard work and that we still need business acumen to make it a business and make money from it. Lisis goes on to explain that being deeply passionate about something doesn’t equate to it being a viable income source and that these ‘snake oil salesmen’ can be dangerous leading us to believe that it’s not okay to have a traditional job and we should go out and leave our jobs and work the 4 hour week.

This is a great article and I can totally see Lisis’ point of view. I have my own thoughts on what the ‘snake oil salesman’ is really saying:

‘If you’re unhappy with your job there is another way to make money’.

They are speaking to one type of person.

Two types of people

(S)He is speaking to a few people, not everyone, just a comparative few who think ‘I don’t like following the rest of the crowd. I want to make it on my own, I want to set my own hours, I want to make my work contribution count, I want to say ‘I made a difference in the world.’ Yes you can make a difference in the world working a 9-5 job, but the people who don’t want the 9-5 job feel they are not making a difference which is part of the reason they want to follow their passion and their dream of going it alone.

Now, there are very few people in the world like this, most people are happy with their jobs and that’s great. The world needs the two types of people: the person who likes making a difference in the world and getting paid by an employer at the end of each month, and also the person who says ‘No! I don’t want to be part of the machine, I want to build my own machine.’ The likes of: Bill Gates, Seth Godin, Richard Branson, Eben Pagan, Michael Dell, Leo Babauta, Darren Rowse etc

It’s not being unrealistic to have a goal like this, however, what is being unrealistic is to think that it can happen overnight and that it’s easy. The ones who give up their day jobs in pursuit of the dream without having tested their theories are the ones who will fail miserably and they are also the ones who were laughed at when they bought the snake oil to cure their baldness or make them more attractive to women.

The ones who have a day job and transition over to making their passion their main income are the ones who know there is a market for their work, they have a bit of money to fall back onto should it not work out, they have more income from their passion than they do their day job, they have a business plan, they have the business sense to make it work. They will also, more than likely, have someone behind them, their partner, who is bringing in money to support the transition.

The School Funneling System

Quitting the rat race is a phrase I hear a lot and it’s about empowering oneself, saying to everybody I don’t have to have a traditional job to make a contribution to the world, and I don’t want to be a sheep.

The reason traditional jobs, in the western society, are so popular is because we are funneled into them and slotted into jobs like a jigsaw piece, according to our grades at school and how much money our parents had. The schooling system breeds little cogs that will fit nicely into society and that can do jobs according to abilities and grades at school.

The problem with this is that the school system teaches us to be cogs, they don’t teach us to be free thinkers and think about the alternatives in life, it’s all about ‘Get good grades, you’ll get a good job’. They don’t teach us entrepreneurship, business skills, writing a business plan and all the other skills we need to make a business of our own. They also emphasis left brain thinking and leave right brain thinking to a few token classes like art, philosophy, drama studies, and even these classes are left brain structured.

Now I can hear you say that a lot of schools are teaching business skills and how to run a business and all the skills needed, yes you are right but how many of these schools are privately funded?

Conclusion

To end this little rant, I would like to say that making money from your passion, and the people who advocate this way of living, is an alternative. It’s an attractive alternative to a lot of people but you definitely need more than having a passion to make it, you need marketing skills, business skills, accounting skills, networking skills etc. Is it a viable alternative? without a doubt yes. Is it okay to have a traditional job and be happy? without a doubt yes.

When you are in the mindset that you want to work for yourself and follow your dream I don’t think it is feasible to say ‘Love what you do’, there needs to come a point when you have everything you need behind you, all the skills, the money pot etc and just go for it, if it fails, at least you can say I went for it.

I would like to thank Lisis and Alison for the inspiration for this rant check out their blog Quest For Balance for more thought provoking articles.

One Key To Success In Life And Business

Steven Aitchison — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:13:25 +0000

I have been into personal development for over 15 years and sometimes there are moments that just hit you square in the face and scream ‘Pay attention to me’. No doubt you have gone through life and you get these moments, they’re called ‘A-ha moments’, when you just get it, whatever you’ve been trying to figure out.

There have been quite a few of these moments in my life but none more profound than than the one I’m about to share with you now.

The Key To Success Is Making

Others A Success

Now, you’d think that would be well known and everybody would say ‘Duh, I knew that already!’ but so few people know of this key or really grasp it’s importance.

In any field you happen to be in, if you go out of your way to help people better themselves you will become known as the person to go to.

Be the person to go to

At work I am known as the ‘Computer Man’, no matter what the problem is; Word documents, excel spreadsheets, trying to find a lost image file, undoing things etc. That’s because I love the computers and even though I don’t know most of the things on the computer I use the little tab that says ‘help’ and figure it out within a few minutes. Why do most people ignore this little ‘help’ button; probably because in every workplace there is always someone like me.

If you make yourself the person to go to at work you can make yourself the person to go to outside work and start a business or a part time venture whereby you become the person to go to in a small niche. You do this by giving away free information, give great advice and generally being a nice person. When you become quite well known for the person to go to, then that’s when your business really starts.

My friend, Dragos Roua, has become the guy to go to about blogging, within his circle of friends. And due to this he is now starting to do blogging seminars, why? because he’s helped people for free in the past, built up his knowledge while showing others what to do and generally being a nice guy. Now he has another income stream, all because he become the person to go to.

Helping others

When you help others become a success you undoubtedly will become a success yourself, however, you still need the business savvy and the business guts to put yourself out there.

Never call yourself an expert, let others call you the expert, but put it out there that you know what you’re talking about and help others achieve what they want to achieve.

I realised this a while ago but am only now beginning to put into motion the second stage of this and that is having the business guts to get out there.

What’s your story?

Have you realised this key already, if so what’s your story and how did it help yourself and others?

A letter to BT PLC

Steven Aitchison — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:26:07 +0000

Due to a monumental screw up by BT Plc I have not had internet access for 10 days, So I am back again and just setting a schedule for posting.

I was supposed to get my telephone number changed with BT as I wanted on old number back and instead of changing the number they decided to cut my line off instead which cut BT broadband off and Cut off the BT Vision off as well. So I called customer service, quite angry, and after being passed around 5 different departments was advised that the line had been cut off, duh!.

When I asked what they were going to do about it, they advised they would get me back on in 7 days time. By this time I was fuming so I asked to speak to a manager and got a Miss R Nelson who apologised and all that and promised me my line would be on within a day but the broadband was going to be 1 week. Again I complained. Miss Nelson advised she would call me within a few hours. 5 hours later and I received a call from a customer service advisor saying miss Nelson was away for the day and advised me she could not put the order through that day as there was some kind of problem. I was then promised a call back in the morning which did not come until the afternoon and was told the Broadband would be going on for the 17th June.

I waited another day for the line to go on and nothing. So I called and spoke to someone from India who advised me the line would be activated on the 17th, I advised I was told that the line would be activated on the 10th June and wished to make another complaint to the telecoms body and wanted the telephone number I was then given a telephone number of 0800 800152 which I know to be the business department and certainly not complaints, when I queried this the girl from India assured me that this was the number for complaints and then promptly hung up on me.

BT, if you monitor the net to find out what people are saying about you then I have this to say:

“Your treatment of your customers is an absolute disgrace and I am appalled at the customer service I have been given over the last 10 days. Instead of laying off 10,000 employees I suggest you get back to basics and make customer service a priority where people actually own the call and we do not get the ‘BT Shuffle’.

You have a fantastic product in BT vision, your Broadband is a mess with your capping of download rates, your phone lines are always reliable, but please invest in your own people and give customers what they want and need from you or your share price and your place in the market will disappear fast.”

5 Ways to triple your business profits Part 2 – Email marketing

Steven Aitchison — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:32:10 +0000

This series will look at 5 ways to increase your business profits, quite dramatically. This is the second in the series and looks at email marketing.

In the first part of this series we looked at Increasing your prices to increase your profits which is a great way to start increasing profits, even if you increase your prices by a small amount. The next part we are going to look at is leveraging the prospective customers who walk through your door or visit your website and making them a lifetime customer.

Most offline businesses don’t even think about capturing the names, email addresses, physical addresses and phone numbers of the customers who walk through their door.

Why capturing a customers details is important

Imagine you have a brick and mortar business and you get 100 potential customers per day walking through your door. So, per week, you are getting 600 potential customers to your shop per week, assuming you are closed on Sunday. Say you have a conversion rate of 10 – 15%, which is typical for someone walking into your shop. So you are getting 60 – 90 sales per week of your products, after all someone walking into your shop will know what they want and are more likely to buy if they know what they are looking for.

It’s great that you have 60 – 90 sales per week but what about the 510 – 540 potential customers that walked through your door or visited your website? Chances are you might never see them again. However imagine capturing their details by offering them an incentive. Typically if you offer someone a good incentive in exchange for their details you will get great conversion rates, anywhere from 50 – 70%.

So what!

Well, imagine you get 50% of the potential customers to sign up to an email list, it could be a physical mailing list as well or a mobile number for texting. That means you would get 300 potential customers details every week which is 15,600 per year.

Now let’s say you want to get customers to your shop so you offer all 15,600 potential customers a 10% discount if they buy within 48 hours of you sending them the offer and you do this once a month. You give them a code to quote when they want to buy from you, which means you can track how well your direct response campaigns are working. Suppose you get 0.5% of the people you have sent a mailing to coming in to buy something from you at an average sale of £25 ($40) you will have an extra £1950 ($3120) per month, take away the 10% discount you were offering and you still have £1755 ($5055) extra per month just for capturing your potential customers details.

How to get your customers details

Simple answer – just ask!

The main way to get customers to give you their emails is to simple offer them something in return. You could give them something simply for getting their details. The customer is happy as they get something for nothing, you are happy as you have potentially made contact with another new future customer. This is called the power of reciprocation which Robert Cialdini speaks about in his book ‘Influence’.

I remember buying a book from Borders and the salesman casually asked me if I would like to give my email address so I could be sent discount vouchers in the future, I go to Borders all the time so I happily gave my email address and use their vouchers all the time, I love it. How many people do you think say no to being offered discount vouchers just for their email address? Not many!

How often should you send out emails?

This very much depends on the customer base and what you have to offer. Your success rate and sales from email marketing will be different if you are selling cars compared with someone selling golfing products. If you have a rabid market like golfing you could make a lot of money through email marketing if you have good copywriting skills, if not you can always outsource it.

There are companies sending out emails every day to their customer list, which I think is a huge mistake as it quickly becomes boring to know you have yet another email from a company. I would personally send out once per week however with a much larger customer list I maybe send out an email once every 3 days with free stuff and discounted products mixed and useful content or sales letter in the form of a story.

What you need to get started building a list

First of all you’re going to need an autoresponder which is a company that can handle your email campaigns online. There are two major ones out there www.aweber.com and www.GetResponse.com

Once you’ve signed up for one of these or any of the other autoresponders out there check out their videos and get to know the software, this is vital. Take a few hours and get to know it well, it will be well worth it in the future.

Check out some of the case studies these sites have which will give you an idea of where you want to go with your campaigns.

Decide on why you want to collect email addresses in the first place. Is it to get to know your customers better or is it purely for sales, this is of enormous importance. Imagine you are getting 50 signups per day and all you want is sales, you can blast your customers with offer after offer in the hope some will bite, but be prepared to lose a lot of subscribers. If you build a relationship and take time to build trust this will help you in the long run and help keep more of your custoemrs on your list.

Need help?

Post a question here and I will help out as much as I can. Email marketing is a huge topic and there is a lot to learn but it is well worth it for any business whether online or offline.

Meantime here are a few articles to help you with more info.

Why should you use email marketing – Aweber.com

Email promos exposed – Michael Rasmussen

Takeaways from the email evolution – The retail email blog

Money in the email –InternetRetailer.com

Email marketing subject line length whitepaper – Epsilon

Open this email – Terry Dean

5 Ways to triple your business profits-Part 1

Steven Aitchison — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:05:41 +0000

Most people will have heard of the ‘4 Hour Work Week’ by Timothy Ferris, about how we can work less and get paid more by working smarter. I have applied such thinking to my own online business and listened to other great internet marketers such as Rich Schefren, Howie Schwartz, Brian McCelroy, Dennis Becker and Rachel Rofe.

I want to give you 5 ways that I have found to work which has doubled my business sales, tripled the bottom line and halved my advertising budget.

When I first started writing this article I expected it to be around 1200 words for the whole 5 ways of doubling your business sales, but when I got started I soon realised I had a lot more to say than 1200 words. So I have written about 1500 words for each part.

For regular readers you will know I own www.binaural-mind.com where I sell binaural beats to the public for better health and relaxation, I also do affiliate marketing which I won’t talk so much about as I don’t want to give away my niche.

Anyways, when I first started out I thought if I sell the downloads of the binaural beats cheap I will get loads of vistors to the site and loads of sales through word of mouth. Well the first month of going live, and it was a soft beginning, which meant I didn’t really shout at all about the opening of the site, I made 6 sales at $29 for each download. I then received a message from someone else who was selling downloadable binaural beats basically saying that I should not under price my product as there were others out there selling binaural beats for up to $1000 per set. I thought about this for a bit and obviously I knew that my competition would not want me selling cheap for obvious reasons but I thought about the psychology of it, if a product seems to cheap then it can’t be any good which means a lot of people wouldn’t buy it purely for the fact that it seemed to cheap.

I then braced myself and doubled the price of my product and waited to see what would happen. After two days, absolutely nothing, on the third day a few questions from prospective buyers, on the fourth day 2 sales at $69 each. I’d raised my prices by $40 and I was still getting sales. I kept it at the new price and I am still getting sales and with over 90 sales I have only had 1 return which is not bad going for a clickbank product.

As you know I have been affiliate marketing for a few years and I have also started up an internet marketing arm of the business offering advice to offline businesses. I was speaking with one of my clients a few days ago about a making them a website and do internet marketing for a fixed fee and monthly fee thereafter. We sat down and discussed her business which was a service she offered to the public. I gave her five pieces of advice for free which will bring in an extra $10,000 – $30,000 per year. This woman’s business was run on word of mouth alone and she had a great reputation for what she did which was to make custom made curtains and pelmets for clients. She had made our curtains and pelmets for a great price. After the job was done we had a word about her business and I asked a whole load of questions about her business and her marketing and she said she didn’t do any marketing, it was all word of mouth. I asked if she would like more business and how much she could handle; the answer? Of course she would and could handle a lot more.

We sat down and went into more detail about her business and looked at her competition to find out what they were charging for their service. It turns out she was one of the cheapest on the market in her area. I gave her 5 pieces of advice which I know will increase her sales, triple her profits and half her workload.

5 Ways to double your sales and half your workload – Part 1

1. Increase your price

You might have guessed it already, the first piece of advice I would give to businesses offering a service of some kind would be to increase their price by at least 50%. I can almost hear the screams of abuse at this piece of advice; we’re in a recession for goodness sake why on earth would I raise my prices? but hear me out, (and by the way we’re only in a recession because the media say we are). If you are offering a service to people and you have taken the time to get qualifications in your area of expertise and are considered a professional then increasing your price should be a natural way to build your business but most business owners don’t think like this.

They start out in business offering a service cheaper than most to build the business and get a reputation. However, once the business has been established and the reputation gained they keep the prices the same as before, why? They don’t want to rock the boat, they are fearful that if they put the prices up the buyers will leave. This is not true. If you have a great reputation and people trust you, they will happily pay you the extra 50%. Yes, you will get customers who leave you but you will also gain new customers with smart marketing.

If you are a business owner who sells products you obviously can’t sell your products with a 50% increase? You can, depending on what you are selling. One of my clients, a computer shop owner, put a new type of motherboard in his custom built computers which greatly increased the performance of the computer.

His new motherboard was 50% more expensive to buy. After talking about it we marketed the benefits of the new motherboard and he increased the price of that computer model with the new motherboard by 50% and it is now the bestselling computer in his shop. Lets look at the numbers for the computer shop owner.

	Price	Sales per month	Cost to build	Profit	Total Profit for month
Old Computer	$800	25	$530	$270	$6750
New Computer	$1200	25	$630	$570	$15250
Increase	50%	-	19%	111%	111%

As you can see from the table above the main points are, The cost to build the computer was 19% more as the motherboard had gone up in price by 50% but the rest of the components of the computer stayed the same price. So although it was more expensive to build we still increased the overall price of the computer by 50% and gained 111% increase in profit, amazing!

Okay you might think we were being a bit greedy here. So lets just say you increase the price by 25% which is just over the amount it costs extra to build the computer.

	Price	Sales per month	Cost to build	Profit	Total Profit for month
Old Computer	$800	25	$530	$270	$6750
New Computer	$1000	25	$630	$370	$9250
Increase	25%	-	19%	37%	37%

You still increase your profit by 37%. The above tables do not take into consideration the increased amount in sales for the new computer as they were marketed as having the latest new motherboard and we marketed all the benefits of the new motherboard, not to mention the increased business through word of mouth. So by adding an extra high end component we have increased the sales and increased the total profit by 111%.

Work out your numbers on your business and see if adding an extra 20-50% would make a difference. I think you’ll be surprised at the numbers it throws out.

A lot of people who own a service-business are afraid to raise their prices for fear of losing customers. You are always going to lose a few customers along the way no matter what you do so why not increase your price, increase your customer service and lose a few old customers and gain a few new ones.

Suggest a new wordpress theme and win $50

Steven Aitchison — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:03:46 +0000

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So, I am looking for a simple, exciting design which is widget ready, WP 2.7 compatible with an easily customisable header as I will be making a new logo to brand for the blog. It should have an RSS feed in the header, be a two column design and have a wide width.

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So are you up for it can you suggest a theme for this blog and win yourself $50 in the process? Just post one link per comment and affiliate ids will be allowed as long as it fits the spec. You can post a link to a free theme or a premium theme. Any comments with speculative or with link building in mind will be deleted.

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5 Ways to triple your business profits-Part 1

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