Not Growing Fast Enough? 7 Shortcuts To Double Your Information Business In Record Time

 

Infopreneurs care about their audience and share generously of their knowledge, expertise and experience. But that doesn’t mean they’re in it for charitable purposes alone, never caring about their own well-being, profitability or growth.

In fact, the really smart and successful information marketers know and believe that their own self-interest is tied in intimately with the welfare of their audience, and link them together in a synergistic and happy union that helps them grow in proportion to how helpful they are.

It’s what makes being an infopreneur so distinct and different from what is conventionally referred to as “Internet marketing”.

Though Internet marketing started out being similar to infopreneuring in ethos, somewhere along the line it changed significantly into a “money-sucking, cash-grabbing” style of hucksterism that repelled those who were more oriented towards delivering value and seeking fair compensation in return.

Yes, information marketing happens over the Internet, and in that sense may be considered a sub-set of Internet marketing.

But there’s a sufficient difference to be distinguished and recognized as something separate and unique – the biggest of those factors being the driving motive behind information marketing.

Given a choice between fleecing a hapless victim of more dollars, and making a difference to his or her life through the information they share, most infopreneurs will do the latter. That’s because they are rooted in these twin philosophies or belief systems:

1. Sooner or later, everyone will buy from you

2. The best time to start delivering value is right now. There’s no reason to wait until money changes hands.

Now, the first time someone hears me saying this, they incorrectly assume that I’m one of those “move the free line” evangelists who advocate giving away the barn for free.

No, I’m not.

I’ve never recommended giving away everything you create by way of infoproducts or resources. That’s in fact the surest way to devalue your material, because the market wrongly misinterprets this to mean your stuff isn’t worth paying money for, because you’re giving it away!

Instead, the approach most infopreneurs benefit from is giving away enough of your material to:

a. showcase the depth and nature of your skills, talents and expertise
b. deliver some value to a prospect, with the promise of more

This way, the samples you give away are designed to showcase specific elements of yourself and your experience. They are also structured in a way that presents you and your information business as the problem-solver of the biggest issues that keep your prospects awake at night.

And this leads us nicely into the first winning growth strategy for infopreneurs.

Education Marketing

It seems strange to link the two words, education and marketing, in this manner. After all, education is something you get from going to school or college, or in the University of Hard Knocks (a.k.a. ‘Life’).

But I’ll use the phrase here to mean something very specific. Education marketing is the process of educating prospects in your niche market about the value you can deliver to their lives.

Now, let’s say you’re an experienced search engine optimization specialist. Your typical clients are those seeking to get their business website ranked high on Google and Bing, so that their best prospects will find them listed, and visit their website, to do business with them.

In this scenario, your clients are going to be researching competitors to find the best SEO specialist to handle their needs. They may search for you on Google, or ask a few friends and colleagues who have the same problem, or even stumble across your service from an advertisement. But how will they choose you over any other SEO expert?

Let me take you one step back. How will they know on what basis they should even make that choice?

You see, while you are the expert on SEO, your typical client doesn’t have a clue about what it’s all about. They run a business that may have nothing to do with the Internet at all. They may be a lawyer, a dentist, an exporter of manufactured goods, an owner of a spa, or bar, or restaurant. All they know is that they’d love to see their website come up on the top of Google when their customers run a search!

That’s where you have a golden opportunity to sneak ahead of any competition, and position yourself in front of your prospect as…

The Answer To A Dream

How do you become the answer to a prospective client’s dream?

By presenting them with a solution to their most pressing problem, or a way to take them closer to their most desired outcomes!

And doing it through ‘education marketing’ which not only enlightens them about what they need to know, but subtly along the way, positions yourself and your business or service as the ideal way to implement that knowledge.

You could craft a report titled “The 5 Biggest Mistakes That Could Get Your Website Banned From Google – AND Bing!”

Do you think that title would attract the business owner looking to rank on search engines? Would it startle, shock or scare them into wanting to read it?

Of course.

And in your report, you take care to explain the risks and dangers of experimenting with search engine optimization on their own, or hiring incompetent service providers who may endanger their business through shady or black-hat tactics. You would showcase some incidents where Google cracked down hard on specific techniques that ethical and expert SEO specialists would never dream of suggestion – yet the cheaper, shadier outfits use every day to rank their clients’ websites higher… temporarily.

As your prospects read your report (which you may distribute for free, or offer as a welcome packet along with your marketing calls, or outbound marketing material), they become more knowledgeable about the skills and methods needed to rank a website higher.

More to the point as far as you are concerned, they now know what questions they must ask of the service provider they are thinking about hiring – and how much they can expect to pay for quality service.

And if you’ve done a great job of education MARKETING, they’ll automatically gravitate towards you as the provider of the best quality service, based on what you’ve subtly slipped into that free report about the way you care for your clients.

That is information marketing at its highest and best.

You’re delivering value. You’re giving away the material which does so. And you’re attracting the best clients, who are well informed about your specialty and expertise, ready and willing to pay your asking fee, and do so happily because they already know what value they’re getting in exchange for it.

But even on a lower level, education marketing can work.

Lead Generation Through Free Reports

I have written over 65 short reports – and given them away to people without any payment. I’ve asked for nothing but their name and email address, and that is to share some more updates and follow up with them about the material shared in the free report.

With some tweaks and additions to this basic process, I have reached over 100,000 prospects for my information marketing business – without paying a cent in advertising expenses.

The tweaks I mentioned have helped the material spread far and wide, through word of mouth… and the reason for that is because the free reports provided valuable education to readers.

Some of them explained the nuances of a recent policy change. Others explained a detailed tactic to achieve a certain outcome. A few were overviews of a subject that’s in the news and impacts information marketers in many ways. Some were just reviews and compilations of the best resources on the Web.

All of them delivered value to the reader. And all of them were designed to appeal only to a reader who may become my ideal client.

Which means, if a person received a free copy of my digital brochure, newsletter or report and enjoyed the content, the chances were very high that they would spend money with my business (or make a donation to my non-profit work) in the fullness of time.

I do not have to wait until they pay me in order to start delivering value to them. I start out doing it – and the money will follow naturally.

Infopreneurs Thrive on Repeat Sales

Another growth strategy for information marketers is to focus on delighting their paying clients, so that they come back to buy more from them later.

It is accepted marketing wisdom that the first sale costs more. It takes time to build trust with prospects to a point they’ll feel comfortable buying from you. It takes money to advertise and market your business and reach your market with a message about your offer. It takes effort to test and tweak your selling process and refine it to become better.

The lion’s share of your first sale will therefore be spent on acquiring a new client.

But here’s the good news. It doesn’t cost much to sell other stuff to the same buyer again.

And if you’re doing this right, you’ve attracted your ideal prospect who has a craving or urge, desire or desperate need, for what you have to sell them.

You may sell the business owner seeking a high Google ranking your SEO services. But after that, you may sell them many more things that are designed to enhance their business too. After getting a #1 rank on search engines, think about other things that client might be interested in learning.

• how to improve sales conversions of visitors to their website
• how to build a relationship with prospects through email marketing
• how to get more referrals from website visitors
• how to write Web copy that closes the sale

There are dozens of other things, including services like email auto-responders, shopping carts, Web hosting and more that you can offer these business owners – and all of them will be designed to grow their business further and deliver higher value.

No matter what niche you are active in, there will always be related products or services that extend and enhance the value you provided your clients with the first sale.

And those future sales are what turn you from being a one-shot promotion into a profit generating business.

Backend Sales Can Multiply Profits

Many infopreneurs soon see this vast potential from selling more to their existing buyers that they quickly move to create an entire line of related products – and that becomes their backend product catalog.

As long as you have done your market research and understand what your audience is looking for, wants and needs, you will be able to tailor your offers to match. And if information products or resources can solve those problems or meet those needs, you can create them and sell them to your existing customers, growing the profitability of your business.

Now this can be misunderstood to be a suggestion to keep mindlessly creating new products just because you have an audience of potential buyers.

No, that would be a violation of one of the primary tenets of infopreneurs, which is to consistently add value to your client’s lives and business in some way.

The offers you make should be designed to provide value to your clients in a way that you know will be meaningful and helpful to them. And the corollary to this point is if you are tempted to promote something which can earn you a nice referral bounty, but which you know is not what will benefit your members, you should be willing to turn down the opportunity point-blank.

In another section of this site, we discussed the Strategy of Pre-Eminence that my mentor Jay Abraham instilled deeply into my mind – and led to transforming my business. One of the primary tenets of that philosophy of business is to always act in the best interests of your tribe.

Backend selling should be an extension of that principle, not become an excuse to pitch more ‘stuff’ to buyers just because you can.

Use Upsells To Grow Your Business

Another way to ethically add value to your buyers while simultaneously growing your information business is to implement a powerful technique called the ‘upsell’.

You’ve surely seen it in action before, even if you haven’t read anything about it. When you walk into McDonald’s and order a burger, the smiling young girl or boy behind the counter will ask, “Can I give you some fries with that?”

That’s an upsell.

It’s an additional product or service that adds value to your initial purchase (in this case, fries and burger taste better, or so many feel!). And at the cost of just a simple offer, it adds to the ‘sizes of the sale’… which leads to an increase in bottom-line profit also.

Infopreneurs can use the same approach by making related products or services available to buyers at the point of sale, or shortly after they purchase. Or you may bundle together related infoproducts and make them available at an attractive price to prospects who were planning to buy just one ebook. That simple technique may double your profits.

The same cautionary note applies to acting in your client’s best interests. Bundling together huge chunks of worthless ebooks and the kitchen sink to sell your ebook buyers isn’t acting in their highest and best interests – and good infopreneurs don’t usually stoop to those levels to earn a quick buck.

Building Relationships As The Cornerstone To Growth

Once it becomes clear that repeat sales to an audience of delighted clients and fans is the key to long lasting infopreneur success, it automatically follows that information marketers must figure out a way to establish relationships with their best customers that grows stronger and closer over time.

There are many ways to grow such relationships, one of the best being to create ongoing communication channels like email. You can build an email list and stay in touch with your audience through regular newsletters, sharing information and making the occasional promotion for quality products relevant to their needs.

Other ways might include networking on social media, sending letters and postcards in the mail, organizing live events where you get to physically meet your clients, or teleseminars and webinars for when you can’t get them all into a room due to their being scattered across diverse geographical locations.

Many of these steps involve time and effort. And there’s a last driver of growth that you, as an information marketer, must learn to weave into your process in order to make all that you do scalable.

Automation and Creating Systems

Not everything in your information business can be automated. But quite a large portion of it can. The trick is to constantly keep looking out for areas which can be streamlined and put on auto-pilot where they run, managed by technology or outsourced teams – with your oversight to ensure things go smoothly.

Underlying this is the need for creating systems that take care of different activities in your business.

For instance, you might have a system for lead generation which begins with building a landing page to recruit new leads, creating a free gift or incentive to offer as a ‘hook’, driving traffic to the page, measuring and tracking response, modifying headlines, copy and other parts of the offer, crafting follow up messages that build relationships and take the prospect closer to a sale, and then replicating a successful process across other areas.

Once you’ve broken down the sequence into steps, you can create a work flow and assign specific tasks to members of your team (or outsourcers), and put a timetable in place that will let this system run regularly, bringing new prospects into your business regularly and without fail.

Similar systems can power every element of your information business, and by reviewing your systems periodically and constantly improving them, you can reliably sustain growth over the long term.

By following these proven methods of growing any business, an infopreneur like you can strategically grow your presence, increase your impact and boost your profits over time. And while it does take some time and effort to set things into place, once you’re done with it, you’ll be able to enjoy the results for many years to come.

So embrace constant growth as one of your infopreneur goals – and make it happen by following these winning growth strategies.

All success

p.s. If you haven't yet read my free "The Smilenaire Way" report, grab your copy here - and decide if you're ready to start smiling every day in your business. (When you are, click here)

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Tags: automation, customer service, growth, growth strategy, infopreneur, information marketing, upsell

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