I started this blog last November and to date i have published most of my small business offline marketing info.

You can get started with that by clicking here.

I will begin to publish my Online Marketing an SEO posts shortly. Watch this space!

I have recently gotten quite a bit of queries from individuals asking if and how it is possible to build a business online that would allow them to effectively quit their jobs and work from home.

Many people would love to work from home, either to spend time with children, family, saving on fuel etc.

I’ve decided to put together a free course that will cover how to go about building an online business for yourself that should effectively bring enough cash in on a monthly basis to allow you to work from home, after about 6 months from the day you begin.

Forget all that business opportunity crap that you have heard about before. I’m not going to be discussing multilevel marketing rubbish or any of these common programs that you see advertised locally quite often.

My course will be showing you how to leverage your own skills and knowledge to publish information on the web on a topic of your choice. You will be shown how to build an online business around an area that interests you and/or an area you have specific expertise in.

This means while at the same time as building your business, you will be enjoying it, and I will be easy for you to do so due to your existing knowledge on the topic.

This system works very well due to the above two key points.

1. You need to enjoy what you are doing, this keeps you motivated.
2. If you already have per-existing knowledge on a topic, it is easier for you to create content and articles around this theme.

So how will this make you money, allow you to work from home, and exactly what will you be doing?

You will begin by creating a website on your own domain using a content management system called Wordpress. Originally created for bloggers, this platform allows anybody with zero knowledge to easily create a good looking and easily managed website on the internet. (Don’t worry, I’ll show you exactly how to do this when the time comes).

You will then be creating articles and content on your website around the topic you have chosen.

The purpose of this is to eventually get ranked in Google for search terms on your topic which will result in visitors to your website. The South African internet landscape is still very new and many topics are still easy pickings in terms of competitiveness in google rankings. This means there are many markets that can still be easily dominated by persons knowledgeable on the topic who can create great content and follow basic SEO principles.

Once you begin ranking in google and generating visitors, you will then begin to monetize your website so as to generate revenue from your website visitors. This traffic will be free and as long as you create good content and follow my teachings around search engine optimsation, you should be able to keep generating traffic and cash for free from your websites, almost indefinitely.

This is a great long term business plan, and many have found success with it and have been able to live the work from home dream.

In summary, in the coming days, I will be teaching you the following steps

1. How to research you topic and niche, and find out exactly how many people search Google on the topics you are interesting in building a website around. This will allow you to make 100% sure you have enough potential visitors to generate your target amount of cash.
2. How to easily register your domain, get hosting and “create” and upload your website in as little as a day.
3. How to plan your content and determine what you need to write about to maximize your chances of getting ranked in Google. You will find that writing articles is not as hard as you would have thought. Please don’t let the prospect of writing scare you out of giving this a go! It’s easier then you think!
4. How to promote your website, do search engine optimization and generate links to your website that will allow you to rank at number 1 in Google fast! I have already done all the research for you around SEO and link generation so you will be shown exactly how to dominate almost any topic you desire!

Once again this course will be 100% free to you. I will show you how to get started for as little as R150 per month (for the cost of hosting) so don’t think this is some expensive venture requiring cash commitment. It is not! 90% of what is needed here is your time.

If you want to keep up to date with each new section I release, go ahead and add you name and email below, and I’ll keep you up updated! (Note I hate spam and your email is safe with me!)

CLICK HERE TO SEND ME AN EMAIL TO BE ADDED TO THE LIST!

The work from home dream can become your reality! God bless.

Referrals work very well by leveraging this aspect in existing (happy) customers & partner relationships and getting this “idea” passed on to other potential prospects your customers / partners have existing relationships with.

Referrals are great ways to generate new prospects that are of very high quality due to the fact that your leads have already received you as a recommendation from a source they trust in, who in turn knows, likes and trusts you.

Many businesses already receive much of their business from referrals however in most cases these are accidental referrals and not referrals due to a referral system you have actively setup and targeted.

Now, to maximize all the benefits of referrals, want to setup a referral system to take full advantage of this strategy

Let’s look at some points that make up a quality referral system.

1. You must have a target for your system, in terms of who you want to be your referrals sources.
2. Next you need a step that educates your potential referral sources.
3. Next, you need an offer or a motivation for your targeted referral source, to act as such. Give them a reason to want to refer others to you.
4. You must have a process where you execute your referral marketing. There must be a defined process to implement this strategy.
5. Lastly you need to follow up on results.

So let’s look at this in more detail.

Who do we target as our referral sources?

Obviously your first target would be your customer base. However in many cases certain types of customers are simply not able to or in the position to generate referrals for you. This can be due to certain industry issues, privacy or many other reasons.

Most of the time you will receive referrals from only a certain quantity of your customer base, consistently, and other customers won’t send referrals at all.

What you must do in these situations is approach that customers you are receiving referrals from and find out how they referred you, why they did and what aspects of your service they focused on as the reason for their referral.

You see, you may think the best way to generate referrals would be focusing on a certain aspect of your offering; however you may not realize how you are perceived by your customers. There may in fact be a far more effective value point that is resulting in referrals from this specific customer that you can now make use of when educating other customers on how to refer you.

Customers are great referrals sources but I want this article to focus on a much more effective referrals source so you can get the most value from implementing this strategy.

Your most valuable referral source are the strategy partners in your industry. Almost anybody who servers your target market can be an excellent referral source. Your service could be a complementary offering to the service they offer, or they may simply offer your target marketing another unrelated service.

Either way, if they are constantly communicating with your target market through their existing business, they are potentially a very valuable referral source for you.

A very common example is realtors referring mortgage leads to originators. There are most certainly opportunities for strategic relationships like this in almost any industry.

Your challenge is to get a bit creative and review every possible business that serves your target market in some way and consider how you can approach them to become a referral source for you.

Another benefit of this is that strategic partners may potentially have hundreds of new customers they can refer to you right off the bat, or over time, often much more than your customers may have.

This makes strategic partners a more valuable referral source to focus on initially for maximum return.

An excellent way to approach a referral source if you have no relationship with is to send them a communication stating that you have customers that may be interested in their services and you are requesting a “perfect introduction” template from them that would detail how you would go about “introducing” their business to your customers.

You then include the same “perfect introduction” summary document for your own business, as an example of what you need from them.

This strategy is very effective as you are address the “what’s in it for them” aspect right off the bat, and can expect a high response rate since you are potentially offering them new business.

At the same time you have give them the info and tools to refer you without looking presumptuous, as well as having now opened up the lines of communication between yourselves to build a relationship moving forward.

The secret of course in building any relationship with a potential strategic partner is always addressing the “what’s in it for them” right away. Once the lines of communication are open negotiations can begin in comfort.

The idea of this article is not to go into detail on referral systems and advanced tactics but to rather get you thinking about potential referral sources in your industry. Start getting creative and get thinking on how you can approach, and what you can offer potential strategic partners to secure them as a valuable referral source for your business.

In this section we are will be looking at generating more leads for our business.

As you have seen up to now, we have concentrated solely on optimizing our existing business to squeeze as much revenue out of it as possible, usually with the only cost being some of our time.

In most businesses that have not been optimized in the ways we have discussed up to this point, its very easy to increase profits up to 50% by implementing the previous steps.

Now that our back end and conversions are up to scratch, we can concentrate on generating more leads with the knowledge that we will be converting the greatest amount of those leads as possible, while at the same time generating as much revenue down the line as we can from those exact same leads.

You can’t buy that kind of piece of mind.

So without further delay, lets look at our first lead generation source, referrals.

If you don’t know already, ad writers and copywriters get paid very large sums of money to do what they do. An ad can make a break a business and quality advertising copywriters who write good ads demand a premium for their work.

In small business we tend to write our ads ourselves, most of the times simply because we don’t have the funds to get this done by professionals.

If this has worked for you, and you are currently running a business with existing advertising that works, generates good leads and sales, and was written in house, then this is great.

What this also means however is that you have an opportunity generate many more leads then you currently are from the same leads source, simply by getting the ad written by a professional.

The fact is that if you write this ad yourselves, or had it done in house, and the person who wrote the ad is not a professional copywriter who does copywriting full time, I can guarantee you that your results can be improved, sometimes drastically.

Copywriting is a vast and complex topic that fills many think books. It’s one of the highest paid jobs in the advertising and marketing industry simply because a good copywriter will be directly responsible for millions of dollars of sales due to well written 1 or 2 page ads or sales letters.

All I can say is, don’t presume to be able to write an ad like they can.

Getting an good 50 word ad written can cost as little R3000 and can double the response you receive from your current ad that was not written by a copywriter.

Most times, this can be done risk free, by simply requesting that new ad beat your current control (current ad).

Most copywriters understand that business will not pay for an ad that does not perform as well as their current ad and will agree to write and rewrite the ad until it results in better response.

So for a very reasonable investment you can generate considerably more leads then you currently are, so this really is a no brainer.

I still thought it wise to touch on this point just to make sure you give this some thought and make sure you have taken advantage of this opportunity as much as possible in your business.

In almost any business, you should always attempt to offer incentives to any employee that has any sort of contact with a customer.

It’s obviously standard practice to offer incentives or commissions to sales persons who are responsible for generating sales in your business, but it doesn’t stop there.

You need to understand that every customer contact point is always an opportunity to generate more business and you need to take advantage of every customer contact point you have.

Its certainly not only sales people that have regular contact with customers. You could have financial people, receptionists, technicians, service providers and many other types of employees who have regular contact with customers.

Taking advantage of as many of these as possible can have incredible impact on your business, and not only from a sales point of view.

A customer contact point can be used for all of the following:

1. Provide details on additional products or services that may offer additional value to your customers.
2. Request feedback on your quality of service, eg. Get a testimonial, complete a customer survey.
3. Request feedback on additional services your customer would like to see you provide, or changes to your service that would provide them increased value.

All of these can be of value to your business, from generating additional sales, to getting valuable feedback on your quality of service or additional services you can offer.

By offering all employee types incentives for performing certain actions when in contact with the customer, you gain the benefit of the customer responding to the action (accepts offer, provides feedback etc) and the employee gains whatever incentives you have defined.

Some examples:

1. A receptionist mentions a special offer you may have running at that point in time and tells visitors or callers if they want to take advantage of this they should email, call etc Mr Salesman and use coupon code XXXX. A unique coupon number per employee allows you track who generated the lead or action.
2. A fitness trainer staff member can make recommendations for specific health products that will further benefit the customer, and all they need to do is visit XXX website address or call XXX number and quote that unique coupon code to take advantage.
3. An accounts receivable employee can be given the power to offer customers increased payment terms on outstanding invoices if they take advantage of XXX offer right now. Or if they take advantage of offer XXX, they will receive a 10% discount on a previous outstanding invoice.

Every employee is a potential salesperson. Empower them to make offers, recommendations or receive feedback from customers, for a little incentive and you have a powerful additional sales force that can really have a big impact on your future sales.

This strategy also makes for very happy and productive employees who will go above and beyond in their job because now they have the incentive to do so. You get the business benefit, and at the same time, a very happy employee base, who will think twice about moving over to your competitors who don’t offer any types of incentives in their business.

I’m almost 90% sure that you don’t already offer a 100% money back guarantee on your services or product. What this also means is that competitors most likely don’t do this either.

This means you have a huge opportunity to gain incredible advantage over your competition by offering a very compelling guarantee that far outshines anything your competitors may be offering.

The fact is most businesses are terrified of offering any type of guarantee at the risk of losing profits due to a high amount of returns.

I can however guarantee YOU that if you have a good quality product or service, this will not be the case.

If you don’t, well, you should stop trying to market any further and go back to work on developing a better product. No amount of good marketing can make up for a low quality product or service.

I’m sure however that you have a great product, and thus can benefit incredibly from offering a great guarantee. The fact is that the additional sales your will receive will far outweigh any false returns from dishonest individuals taking advantage of your guarantee. This has been tried and tested in almost all types of businesses.

A great guarantee works so well as it addresses all the perceived risks the customer may have with regards to doing business with you, and builds incredible trust in the fact that you are offering a quality product that will live up to your marketing.

You really can’t beat the benefits and increased sales you can get from offering a great guarantee.

Obviously all business are different and you need to take a good look at your business and work out exactly what type of guarantee is viable for you to offer.

This also comes back to one of the most important aspects of marketing and that is to TEST EVERYTHING.

Let’s look a the fitness business for example.

If I ask you why you don’t offer a guarantee, you may explain that in your business it was up to your clients to achieve results. For example, you or your team can’t guarantee your customers put the necessary effort in and follow the recommended diet which will result in their success.

All your competitors probably feel the same. I’m sure none of them offer a guarantee.

Fine, but perhaps you are looking at it the wrong way.

If your clients give you honest and accurate information, follow your advice, and put in enough effort, (and other factors remain the same) can you guarantee they will increase their chances of achieving better results?

The key point here is that you can guarantee your ‘process’ works to help clients achieve results. Of course you can’t guarantee clients will always reach their goals. In your case perhaps, that is up to every client to work on.

Here is an example of wording for a guarantee in this specific case:

“If you follow our guidance, put in the work required, and be honest with us about your commitment, we guarantee you will have better prospects of reaching your goals. We’ll do everything we can to help you realize your potential. If you not completely satisfied that following our process achieved the results promised, you will receive 100% money back”

The guarantee provides specific details on what the client needs to do for the guarantee to be applicable.

The main point of this is that you demonstrate faith in your product or service. As I’ve said before, the objective is to minimize the perceived risk in purchasing from you.

If you have faith in your product or service, you should not have any problem offering a guarantee such as the one above.

The basic premise is that you should always have “reason why” you perform any specific marketing or sales promotions. Secondly your marketing should always provide a “reason why” customers need to listen to you, buy your product, take an action etc.

The concept can be difficult to explain properly so ill just give some bullet points to clarify:

1. Any specific promotion or “sale” or discount or other type of special offer you have going at a specific point in time should always have a reason why it’s being done. And this reason needs to be shown in your marketing.

For example, you should never just have a “sale”. You should have a “sale” because its Easter, or it’s the business’s birthday or any other type of reason you can come up with

This is because customers will always expect you to have low prices you’ll usually have on a specific sale, and why  shouldn’t they? If you can afford to drop your prices for no reason for a “sale”, why can’t you just use those prices all the time? Are your usual prices actually overpriced?

I’m sure you seen many “sales” in your time, and wondered to yourself if they really even dropped prices, or if they simply put the posters in the shop just for some sort of marketing stunt.

Giving reason for each promotion stops prospects from always expecting you to have a sale on or always expecting discounts, and wondering on the trustworthiness of your supposed promotion.

1. Always have reason why customers should buy from you. This ties closely with your USP, and if your USP is well done, it will already include the reason why you should be chosen over your competition.
2. Always have reason why they should trust you. What compelling reasons are there that you claim to be the best (as per point 2 above) and why you can be trusted.
3. Always provide a reason why they should act on your offer right now. Why should they seize the opportunity today and not some time in the future.

A testimonial is incredibly powerful as it provides something called social proof.

Social proof is the ability to show your customers in some way that your product or service has benefited others that have purchased from you, and that your marketing and advertising is not false or misleading in any way.

An example of social proof is the fact that you are far more likely to purchase something recommended to you by a trusted source, perhaps a family member or friend. The idea is that proof of benefits is provided from a non bias source that will result in building credibility for your business.

They come in many formats such as endorsements, written testimonials, photographs of happy customers, case studies etc.

Testimonials are seriously underrated and under used in offline marketing since it’s not always obvious how to go about getting them in front of your customers.

On the internet testimonials are always used by marketers or business that understand good marketing, since it’s very easy to show written testimonials on a website or sales letter.

But how to do this in a brick and mortar business?

I challenge you to begin immediately brainstorming how to get testimonials and other forms of social proof in front of your customers. This will always depend entirely on your business, and how you interact with your customers, and what marketing materials you use.

A good example is the car salesman that fills his sales booth with photographs of happy customers, in many cases, the same customer in many photos show additional vehicle purchases. This shows “proof” that the salesman is selling good deals and is trustworthy, otherwise why did they buy from him multiple times?

For the fitness trainer, displaying before and after photo’s of training customers in your office or training area is incredibly powerful and will result in many more sales due to direct proof of the effectiveness of your service right in front of their eyes.

With regards to advertising, you could display a written testimonial underneath or in between your advertising message, whether it be print advertising, brochures or storefront displays.

This is extremely powerful yet many physical businesses never make use of the testimonial.

So lets quickly summarize why testimonials are so effective:

• Testimonials build trust. They tell prospects that other customers had a positive experience with your product or service.
• Testimonials aren’t “salesy” or part of your sales message. They are written by someone else in another “voice” and can lend great credibility to any existing sales message.
• Testimonials overcome skepticism and can convince even your most hard sell customers who may never had made a purchase from you otherwise.

Let’s now discuss how to go about getting testimonials:

Firstly, simply start asking for testimonials. I’m sure you must know who your happy customers are, and what success they have had with using your product or service.

Simply call them up and ask for a verbal (you can record this with your phone) or a written testimonial and ask them if they would allow you to use their testimonials in your marketing. Most happy customers won’t have a problem with this at all.

Start taking photo’s of happy customers with your products. Not possible in every business type, but see if this can work for you.

In a service business, develop case studies describing how you managed to solve the customer’s problem. Make sure to use customer quotes in the case study and obtain their signature if possible.

Get a website (check here how to do this easily and cheaply) and add your testimonials there. Almost everybody has a website these days and customers or prospects find it easy to visit a website to investigate a potential business they want to purchase from.

In the health business it’s always very effective to run competitions to see who will get the most results from your product or service, or who makes use of it the most etc. Obviously the terms of the competition is making use of perhaps the top 5 winner’s results in your marketing.

Make sure you get and use the right kind of testimonials:

Here’s an example of a glowing, but ultimately ineffective testimonial:

“I love this product! I can’t get enough! I’m so glad I bought your stuff and I’ll definitely be back to get more!”

What could be wrong with that? It sounds like you have a happy customer on your hands!

But what does this testimonial really tell your visitors? Does it prove the product works, or explain exactly how your customer benefited from using it? While the feedback is definitely positive, the testimonial doesn’t provide enough detail to have any real impact on your prospects.

Here’s an example of the kind of effective, benefits-driven testimonial that’ll turn a prospect into a customer:

“I used the methods you told me to use, and in 3 weeks I’ve lost over 5lbs! The methods are easy to use and don’t even take up much time at all!”

This testimonial shows benefits from the product and speaks to the kind of results the prospect may want to see for them. I testimonial must always include as many benefits as possible.

Make sure the testimonial backs up the claims made in your marketing, as closely as possible. Inconsistencies will raise warning flags.

Next, make sure the testimonial comes from somebody or some business they can relate to. If your selling products for aging, try to include the age of the person who provides the testimonial or the type of industry you are targeting in your marketing (if the testimonial is from another business).

Make sure the testimonials are credible and that you include as much personal details as you can (with permission of course), names, location, age contact details, whatever else is appropriate.

So, why not get started right away and gather as many testimonials as you can. It’s usually 100% free and will have incredible impact on your business!

If you already have an existing business that is not entirely internet based, then this is almost always the case.

The incoming call is your first contact point with a new prospective customer and is extremely critical in obtaining the desired result.

In most cases, a sale is not made over the phone, but every business has a desired action they would like the customer to make, as a result of the conversation. Eg. Go to the physical store, got to the web address, fax an order form here, request a brochure etc).

This means your conversation needs to be scripted to maximize the number of customers that take your desired action.

A call conversation is just as critical as your advertising, or any other marketing materials you may have. There is no point in getting leads if you can get them to take your action once they have made the call.

If you are not already aware, copywriters who write advertising, as well as advertising firms get paid a lot. This is because ad writing is a skill, a unique talent that not everybody has.

Good advertising makes business big money, and that’s why business pay them big money in return.

The reason why I stress this is because you need to think of your incoming call as an opportunity to leverage a well written conversation script that gets the caller to take your action.

You need to think of it as a very valuable marketing contact point, and you should invest in it as such, exactly like you would with any advertising or marketing materials.

Its very common for a 2 page incoming call script to be sold to companies for up to R50k, simply because the ROI is worth it.

Now of course you may not be in a position to buy a custom script, or have one professionally written, but it was important for me to stress the importance of your call script, and the massive impact it can have on your sales.

Now, I’m not a copywriter myself or a professional salesman, so I won’t presume to tell you how to put together a good sales script. For now I will simply provide some resources where you can get once written specifically for your business.