Issue 4 - October 22, 2010
Hey Genc,
Did our last issue of One Step Ahead help you get on track with creating your ideal life? Well you'll find today's article an essential follow-up to making that happen.
In fact, if you ignore what I'm about to share with you, you may never create your ideal life.
This time, it's all about leveraging a business to create your ideal life. See, your business IS the vehicle that will deliver your ideal life... while you own it... and after you sell it.
To make your business work for you like this, it's all about focusing on your customers. Giving them what THEY want is the key to getting what YOU want.
So in Part 1 of this 2-parter, you'll see how to really get to know your customers. And why falling in love with them is the best thing you could ever do for your own success.
And if you're not sure what kind of business will enable you to create your ideal life, you'll get some solid direction in our Reader Q&A Session below.
You'll hear a common question that you may have yourself. One that stands in the way of "getting started" for many. Until they get clarity, that is. And that's what you'll get today.
To higher profits,
Rich
 Using Your Business to Create Your Ideal Life
Part 1: Give Your Customers What THEY Want
A few days ago, I showed you how to plot out your ideal life. Now that you know what your ideal life looks like, it's time to learn how you can use your business to turn that vision into reality.
The key to unlocking real business success - and the ideal life you want - lies within your ideal customer. Your ideal customer is the most important person in your business universe.
In this two-part essay, I'm going to help you get to know your ideal customers better than your competitors do. In fact, you should know them better than anyone else you know. Remember, they're the ones who are going to give you the money you need to have the business of your dreams... a business that delivers your ideal life on a silver platter.
In order to achieve that ideal life, you have to design a business that gives you what YOU want while giving your ideal customers what THEY want. To know what they want, you must first know your ideal customers inside and out.
Knowing your ideal customers will:
- Dramatically decrease the cost of acquiring new customers, allowing your business to grow faster and be more profitable at the same time...
- Make everything you do on a marketing level more effective, more certain to succeed, and more profitable immediately...
- Allow you to create products that are sure to succeed because they address the needs and subconscious desires of your ideal customers...
- Make bonding with your ideal customers a cinch, getting them to buy sooner, buy more often, and spend more money with whatever you offer them...
- And so much more...
You see, creating a business has nothing to do with throwing up a website... making a bunch of unsupportable promises... grabbing as much money as you can... and then jumping to the next website to do it all over again.
Creating a business is all about fashioning a win-win situation for you and your customer. A situation where you give your customer something he wants or needs... And, in exchange, he becomes your greatest advocate and a repeat buyer. This will allow you to work less while earning more.
The Bait Your Prospects Crave
It's far easier to get your ideal customers to buy from you - and keep buying! - if you're focused on what value, benefit, advantage, solution, or increased results your business can give them. Do this, and they won't be able to do anything but buy from you - and buy constantly.
But let's be clear about something important right up front: Making the sale has nothing to do with what YOU want to sell. It has everything to do with what your ideal customer wants to buy.
This should be obvious... But I've seen many entrepreneurs take the wrong approach. They try to build a business that sells something because THEY want to sell it, not because their ideal customers want to buy it.
It's easy for me to spot entrepreneurs who have made this mistake. They go on a wild goose chase trying to figure out what they can say or do to manipulate prospective customers into buying. And trust me, they always come up short.
Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, once said that he loves strawberry shortcake but he hates the thought of eating worms. Yet, when he goes fishing, he doesn't put strawberry shortcake on the end of his line. If he did, the fish wouldn't bite! They prefer worms.
That's a great analogy for how you should determine what you sell. You should always build your business around what your ideal customers want to buy... Not around what you like or what you'd like your business to do.
Once again, most entrepreneurs mess up here. Many entrepreneurs mistakenly attempt to build a business without figuring out what their ideal customers crave. Big mistake! It never ends well - unless massive luck is involved.
Now, before you can fully understand what your ideal customers WANT, you need to learn everything you can about who they are. This will give you invaluable insights into their inner-most needs and desires.
Let's take a look at how you get to know your ideal customers ...
Knowing Your Ideal Customers
Most entrepreneurs miss this point entirely, so pay careful attention here and really think through what I am getting at.
The most important knowledge you can ever have is a real understanding of your ideal customers. Seriously, there's nothing more important than this.
Knowing your ideal customers is vastly more important than knowing any marketing tactic or sales technique. In fact, the more you understand your ideal customers, the less you'll need to depend on marketing tactics and sales strategies. Everything you do will be much more effective because you are aiming at the right target and using the right bait.
And don't just take my word for it. Direct-marketing legend Dan Kennedy says, "I do not believe in 'generic' persuasion. In fact, my contention is that truly understanding the targeted prospect/customer is more important than any other element in a marketing success." Well said, Dan.
But understand this: Knowing your ideal customers will not only make your marketing more effective... it will also make your products better and more sellable. It'll help you exceed your customers' expectations... which will fuel word of mouth and even create a viral effect. And it will improve the performance and results of almost every area of your business.
That's why it's vital to have this information before you ever sit down and design your business.
Yes, Research Is Required
You will want to know your ideal customers inside and out... This is how you will discover their frustrations, fears, dreams, desires, and problems.
Remember, you're designing a business that'll make your ideal life a reality. Everything you've dreamed of can be real. But - to achieve this dream lifestyle - you must build your business around what your ideal customers really want. The only way to know what your customers really want is to know them well. And that knowledge comes solely from doing the research and thinking necessary. Yes, that means you need to do some work!
This is one of the biggest business secrets I know: The best way to create a business that requires little to no work on your part is to do quite a bit of work up front, before doing anything else.
Many entrepreneurs are lazy and don't want to do the work necessary to crawl inside the minds of their ideal customers. Instead they prefer to "wing it" and rely more heavily on selling strategies. But selling strategies can never make up for this lack of understanding... and lack of understanding is a chief reason that so many entrepreneurs fail.
But that's not the only reason many business fall short...
Most Entrepreneurs Fall in Love With the Wrong Thing
"Most entrepreneurs fall in love with the wrong thing," says master marketer Jay Abraham. "They fall in love with their own company, or their products or services, instead of falling in love with their clients and prospects."
And that's a recipe for disaster!
Think about what Jay said. What would your business be like if you fell in love with your ideal customers instead of your company and its products?
Remember the last time you fell in love with someone... how fascinated you were with what made her tick? You could talk to her for hours and it never felt boring at all.
Well, that's exactly how you need to be with your ideal customers: FASCINATED.
You want to find out everything you can possibly know about your ideal customers. To get started, you can use a technique developed by business-building expert and multimillionaire entrepreneur Michael Masterson. He calls it "The Core Complex."
Your ideal customers' Core Complex is made up of the emotions, attitudes, and aspirations that drive their buying behavior.
You can use the Core Complex to reach your customers on three levels: intellectual, emotional, and personal. In order to construct your ideal customers' Core Complex, you first must discover and deduce their beliefs, feelings, and desires.
- Beliefs: What does your ideal customer believe? What is his attitude toward your product and the problems or issues it addresses?
- Feelings: How do your ideal customers feel? Are they confident and brash? Nervous and fearful? What do they feel about the major issues in their lives, businesses, or industries?
- Desires: What do they want? What are their goals? What life changes are they looking for your product to help them achieve?
When you know these three things, you'll be on your way to building a business that will help you make your ideal life a reality.
And to be clear - it needs to be you doing the work. You can't outsource or delegate this work and still reap all the benefits. When you create your ideal customers' Core Complex yourself, you'll sift through a lot of information that will give you a deeper understanding of them and what makes them tick.
There are many ways to get all the information you need to create your ideal customers' Core Complex. In Part 2 of this essay, I'm going to reveal a few of the most useful tools I use to get to know my ideal customers better.
Resources To Grow Your Online Business...
Today's Question and Answer with Rich
"I am an absolute newbie. What is the best way, in your opinion, for an absolute newbie with limited time and resources to get started
in an online business?"
Rich's Answer:
The way you build a successful business, is by fixating on where you're capable of providing the most value and where does that intersect with the market. So that's step one and that's why it's so important to really think that part all the way through.
That especially when starting out, you don't want to be in an area where you have a sharp learning curve to provide value, and a sharp learning curve on how to market that value. Because now, you've got two whole areas to master and that becomes problematic. So it's always better that you come to the table with only one thing to learn, because you've already got the value side worked out.
After that, before you dive in to the nuts and bolts of internet marketing, it's really about thinking about... What is this business that I'm creating? How is it going to work? What type of customers do I want and what kind of prospects will I need to get those customers and what will that process look like? What will I need to get those prospects.
I'm not talking about from the technical side at this point, just from a conceptual side. What would they be interested in that I could provide them so I can get their attention. And then how could that attention be capitalized on so they'd eventually want to be clients. And then how would clients buy from me and what would they be buying. jAnd what would make them want to continue to buy from me and stay with me for long periods of time.
If you don't figure those elements out, it becomes incredibly difficult to succeed online because everything then seems appealing, and not everything should be appealing. Richard Koch who is a business writer, he once wrote a book on strategy which I always loved, he said, "A strategy not only tells you what you're going to do, it tells you what you're not going to do. Who you're not going to sell to. What products you're not going to have. What prospects you're not going to market to." And until you can say that, you don't have a strategy.
So you need to have those elements in place. The reason that this is so important is so you can really distinguish between what's essential and what's non-essential. In other words, until you're absolutely clear on how the business should operate, you can't be clear on what's essential to make your business operate on the tactical side. And that becomes incredibly problematic because online there is an infinite number of tactics.
And just understand the important thing... because so many people make this mistake - I've made this mistake and I'd hate for you to make the mistake. Is that based on your experience, if you have a general understanding of how business works... None of that has changed online. It's just how it gets employed is different. So you don't want to forget all the things you already know about business.
"Friend us up" and always be in the loop with the latest business
building strategies while you're on the go:
Boca Raton Headquarters
1200 North Federal Highway
Boca Raton, Florida 33432
| Please click the link below to unsubscribe from future emails from Strategic Profits. unsubscribe Strategic Profits 1200 North Federal Highway Boca Raton, Florida 33432 United States |
|
