By now, you should have gone through some or all of the videos in the Better Business Basics course. If you haven t, go back and start watching them because as great as everything that I m going to be talking about in this ebook is, you are more likely to fail in the long run because the business principles are not there. Think of what I m going to share with you as just tools and techniques while the meat of the Better Business Basics course was the strategy. Why? Think about it, even if you create an awesome product or service and start to sell it who are you selling it to? What happens after they buy? How do you entice them to even hear your offer in the first place? Make sure that you have the basics down first before you do anything else. Now that that is out of the way, let s have some fun. I am going to divide this ebook into 3 sections like so: 1. Amazon/Physical Product Selling 2. Service Creation 3. Product Creation The Amazon selling is actually going to be the shortest section because I am going to give you access to a product that my cousin and I sell that teaches how to start selling on Amazon. It takes you through the whole concept and also invites you to our Facebook Mastermind of over 1800+ other entrepreneurs doing the same thing. The service and product creation sections excite me the most because you aren t dependent on a platform and you have a ton of flexibility. We ll talk about them soon. Amazon selling Amazon FBA is a great way to start selling something, even something that is not your own created product, and see some quick results. Over the last few years my business partner and I have helped more than 30+ people start a side income and/or full time Amazon business. These were the people that took action and didn t make excuses as to why it wasn t going to work for them. Rather than go into detail in this ebook as to how to sell on amazon, here is a course that my business partner and I created that has helped a ton of people make money online for their families.
If you are at all interested in selling on amazon, this is a great place to start. Check out our Amazon FBA course by going to this link (please do not share this with others who are not in the Better Business Basics course: http://www.theonlineempireacademy.com/make 1000 with amazon fba/ Make sure that you join the mastermind group. It s super important and an amazing resource. Creating a Service Here s where the fun begins. But before we get into it, I want to ask you a question What service can a nutritionist with cancer create? Weird question, huh? Well, let me share a story with you. A friend of my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer that moved into her lungs. Her family (husband, and 2 kids) were distraught and they battled the cancer for years. Yes, years (don t worry as of writing this she is still alive). One day while I was picking my kids up from catechism class she and I got into a conversation and she was sharing her business idea with me. She was really into juicing (not steroid use, making juices from fruits and vegetables) and she wanted to teach others how to do it. I thought it was a great idea, but I warned her that it was a saturated market and that she would have to implement a lot of the things I teach in the Better Business Basics course. Well she did and man o man did she kick butt. A couple of things happened. First, she did free trainings for people at their house and made sure to get their names on an email list. After that she emailed each one of them and let them know when and where her next trainings were. Things began snowballing from there. Now, one really cool thing was that, because of her cancer, she was able to position herself as a super nutritionist since she was able to survive so long with her cancer. Well, guess who became some of her best customers? That s right, cancer survivors. So a couple of things, to keep in mind from this story. 1. Take action. Nothing she did would have happened if she didn t get started. 2. Don t be afraid.
3. People want what you have to offer. The more you offer it the better your target market will be focused. Developing your service Your service doesn t need to be fancy. Don t wait for some grand idea to come to you in which you will know 100% that it will work. No, go do something. What are you good at? Juicing? Landscaping? Baking? Cooking? Tech stuff? Writing? Speaking? Sports? Woodworking? Tools and home building? Smoking cigars? wine tasting? Dog sitting? Cat grooming? Pet training? Cleaning? Surfing? Wakeboarding? Excercising? The list goes on I m not trying to be coy either, each one of those topics are waiting for a service to be made from them. For example, Just using the speaking topic above, a friend of mine that is the COO for a highly respected business recently hired a public speaking coach so that he could refine his presentations. There are people that don t know anything about cigars but want to learn. They not only want to know how to smoke them, but how to tell a good one from a bad one, how to keep them fresh, and where to find the best deals on them. So the first thing you need to do is stop making excuses and start
Got it? Getting your customers First things first, I want you to do one of two things in order to get your first customers. 1. Offer it for free to your friends and their friends in exchange for their email addresses. 2. If you don t want to do that, go to your local community center and sign up to teach a class. They are always looking for teachers for classes. Once again, when you are there you will get email addresses. Make sure that you are offering something of value to get their email addresses. So for example, if you are teaching people how to carve wood offer them a free quick start guide to carving your first wood figurine. Yes, you are required to offer something of value even if they are only giving you their email address. After you get their addresses, email them right away with their gift. You can also automate this side of things mentioned in the Sales Funnel section of Better Business Basics. (highly recommended you automate this). A few days later start building your affiliate list. Send out an email and let folks know that you offer private woodworking classes and the host gets 50% of all sales of the class or products sold within the class. this way you are building up your automated marketing machine. Then you keep rinsing and repeating. Some services don t lend to the free classes I know. But even with those you need to have something that is free. It can be free for the first month, first time, or free if the customer is not satisfied. Yes, you are going to take a loss up front, but you are removing risk for the customer and if they like what they see they will keep coming back for more. If you don t think this is a good model to use, the next time you watch television or listen to the radio keep track of how many commercials offer something for free. There are a lot, and it s not because they are giving out of the kindness of their heart. It s not that hard, but it takes guts to start. As our Lord says, Be not afraid. Creating a product I put creating a product last on purpose. The reason is that in order to really develop a great product I believe that you need to understand the pains found in having a service.
Before I developed Magic Action Box, I was constantly feeling the pain of my customers asking for email optins for their websites. I needed an easier way to make them and connect them to their email auto responders and the only way to do that was to make something that was independent of the service I was offering. The beauty of products is that they are very easy to systematize and automate. I spend about 1 5 hours a month directly involved with Magic Action Box and make anywhere between $3,000 $5,000 a month. But like I said, it was a pain in the but to get there. One more thing about creating a product from the pain of your service is that you are far more likely to be able to find customers for your product because you know that there are other people out there that have that same pain. With things that you think of out of the blue you don t have that same assurance. Let s create our product Okay, we are going to base our product off of something that we have been offering as a service. Don t think that this works? Well, think again With my business partner, we went from him personally teaching people how to sell on Amazon (service), to us creating a membership site (product), to creating a service that does it all for them (service), to teaching customers how to create their own private label products (info product), to teaching how to market those products with paid ads (service), to creating a product from that training (product). When you actually start and do things the right way they all run into each other and opportunities are always available. So using our woodworking example: 1. The free classes should either be recorded and/or documented so that a video or ebook or physical workbook can be made. Doing it this way kills two birds with one stone. 2. You can easily make professionally bounded books using Createspace and you can also sell them directly from Amazon by using them. You can do this with DVDs too, also you can just use a label maker and Roxio for this. 3. You don t need them to be professional though. You can just three hold punch or have the workbooks spiral bound at a local office store and sell them that way. 4. Offer the workbooks and DVDs at your free AND paid trainings and position them as an easy way for customers to work privately and comfortably in their own home. Now, if you are looking to make an online product it s different. You need to leverage a few things and it depends on if it s a physical product or an information product or even software.
Since we ve already talked about physical products with amazon, lets talk about information products and software. In both case, just like with a service, you need to have something free to get folks in the door. With software it s a fully functional but limited free version that allows them to see why your premium product is worth buying. I do this with Magic Action Box and it works very well. The next thing that you need to leverage is a marketplace. With Magic Action Box I leverage affiliates from JVZoo and also the free Wordpress Plugin Repository. Both allow me to virtually zero marketing but still see increases in sales every month. With information products you may want to use a well known forum in your niche. You may not be able to sell their directly, but you can have a link to your product or website in your signature. For Productive Catholic I haunt the Catholic Answers forum and have a link back to my blog so that I get visitors and potential buyers into my Free 4 video series.d Lastly, you need an affiliate program. I talk about this in the Better Business Basics course. Conclusion I apologize if it sounds harsh, but coming up with a service or product is not hard. What s hard is starting, mainly because we are chicken, and constantly pivoting and changing in order to meet the needs of customers. If you are willing to take the risk and start, you will learn more than hours and hours of business courses (including mine). So get started there s nothing else to do. Leave a comment somewhere in the BBB course and let me know the service you are starting or the product you are creating.