Greg Cassar.com

This is an amazing story, the folks at Havamag (digital magazine for business owners) reached 350,000 readers in only a year or two, which is massive growth. They just published me in their latest issue on some Facebook stuff. http://havamag.biz/biz/biz-issue7/index.html

We started with the barter system, then moved onto precious metals, then coins and notes, followed closely by credit cards.  The next evolution is using your smart phone as your wallet (credit card).

Google has recently launched ‘Google Wallet’ – an app that makes your phone your wallet—with Citi, MasterCard, Sprint and First Data. With Google Wallet, you can tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC).

If you don’t have a Citi MasterCard and you want to use Google Wallet you can use the Google Prepaid Card. The Google Prepaid Card is a virtual card that you can fund with any of your existing credit cards.

The business implications of this technology are far reaching too:

Gift cards: Google Wallet can store gift cards for participating merchants. When you tap to pay at a merchant, Google Wallet transmits your gift card information to the terminal. This is very clever.

Offers & Loyalty: Google Offers are deals on products and services at local or online businesses. Whenever you buy or save a Google Offer, it automatically syncs to your Google Wallet so your offers are always with you. Google Wallet can also store loyalty cards for participating merchants.  The world of the coffee loyalty card will never be the same again.

Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple, was a unique visionary and his influence, as a technology innovator will be sorely missed.

World leaders, tech giants, and countless ordinary people have paid tribute to Steve Jobs after his death, marvelling at how the Apple visionary made modern life more user-friendly.

US President Barack Obama said Jobs, who died from cancer on the 5th of October, had “transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Founder and CEO posted on Facebook “Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.”

After founding Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, he was eventually ousted by the very CEO he had hired to run the company. Without him, Apple struggled and flirted with bankruptcy. With him, Apple flourished and will always be recognised as the greatest turnaround in corporate history, as Apple has become the largest company in the world by market cap.

Apple’s Mac Computer range have unparalleled industrial design while proving that computers can be irresistible as their users ultimately become raving fans.

Apple re-defined the MP3 player market with the iPod and the iTunes Music store set the standard for digital distribution of music and content.

The iPhone not only raised, but really smashed the Smartphone bar and changed the mobile device world forever with the now-ubiquitous touch screen and shot down the idea that technical specifications were all consumers cared about. Rather, ease of use and an integrated user experience trumped everything else.

The newest market that is still unfolding under Apple’s influence is the tablet market, whose standards have been set incredibly high by the iPad and now the iPad 2.

During his absence from Apple, jobs also acquired and created Pixar. Starting with the original Toy Story they redefined the standard of computer generated movies for years to come.

Jobs list of accomplishments are many and far reaching. So what business and marketing lessons can we take from them:

11 Business and Marketing Lessons from Steve Jobs

1. Design trumps function
All the devices Apple made had one crucial thing in common: people fell in love with them. They felt passionately about them, in a way the world had never seen before.

Design, as he explained in 2000, wasn’t about how it looked. It was about how it worked. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

Apple products are just plain cool. They’re sleek, attractive, enticing and they work well. While other products may work just as well, people want something that looks good too. Steve Jobs was well aware of the importance of good-looking designs

2. Turn Your Customers into Raving Fans
Apple has become a popular culture icon and adored by its customers on a level that most other brands can only dream of.

They have done this with their sleek cool design and by creating insanely great brand experiences. They have turned their customers into Raving Fans.

Most people are either Windows People of Mac People. From my experience once someone has changed from the dark side over to the light side and embraced the Mac there is no going back . They even become evangelists to try and get others to try it too.

3. Be a visionary leader, not a follower of the Pack
Visionaries are always called crazy in the beginning. Be confident. You might be right, even though nobody listens to you. Jobs showed the world that thinking differently is acceptable. Do not be afraid to implement your ideas.

4. Improve on what is Currently Offered in the Market Place
Apple is known as a highly innovative company that has completely transformed the way we think about entertainment and communication.

But in reality, the business has built its success on improving what went before. It made the MP3 player better with the iPod. The mobile phone was improved with the iPhone.

The story goes that the iPhone came about after Apple execs complained to each other about what irritated them about their mobiles. Jobs focused on what wasn’t working in current trends and overhauled it.

5. Keep a Strict Focus
Jobs once said: “Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we’ve got less than 30 major products. I don’t know if that’s ever been done before… it means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

6. Demand the Best
Jobs may have a favourable image in the media, but those who have worked under him describe a hard man obsessed with perfection. As well as thinking big, Jobs liked to be across the detail too.

“My job is not to be easy on people,” he once stated. “My job is to make them better.”

7. Work Hard
Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day. He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures.

8. Turn a problem into an opportunity.
Jobs got fired from the company he built, but came back to build the most valuable technology company in the world. “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” Do not give up when facing obstacles. It might just be another hurdle you need to clear before arriving at your destination.

9. Simplicity
One of the largest and most widespread early arguments for switching to Macs was that they’re easy to use. People raved about how simple Mac computers were and felt no sympathy for whiny PC users who couldn’t find the files they stored or the ‘print’ command in Word. Bringing things down to a consumer level can be hard to do, but Jobs made the computer accessible for everyone.

The same can be said for Apple’s other devices as we have a 3-year-old son who can work the iPhone and iPad to play Angry Birds. The same could not be said for many if any other mobile device brands.

10. Make it Easy to Buy
iTunes is the most perfect ecommerce store online. It has an incredibly smart design where they capture your credit card details once and then store it and all your details with your unique ‘Apple ID’ so that next time you are ready to buy you can buy with just one click. Having 200 to 300 million customers setup to buy with 1 click buy has no doubt largely helped the profitability of Apple in recent years.

11. Do What You Love
Steve Jobs said: “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

Do what you love. Seek out a business that gives you a sense of meaning, direction and satisfaction in life. Having a sense of purpose and striving towards goals gives life meaning, direction and satisfaction. It not only contributes to health and longevity, but also makes you feel better in hard times.

Lets finish with Jobs’s parting advice to the Stanford graduates of 2005 in his Commencement Speech – “Stay hungry,” he said. “Stay foolish.”

If you’re not Upselling your customers, you’re missing out on an easy Internet marketing strategy that could increase your sales by 39%–or more!

Adding complementary “Upsell” offers to your thank-you pages or pages prior to checkout is by no means a new strategy, but it’s just as effective now as it was years ago.

According to Marketing Sherpa, 39% of their newsletter subscribers take advantage of one of the opt-in offers they put on their “thank you for subscribing” page.

Upselling your customers at the point of purchase is a KEY Internet marketing strategy for growing your business.

Why is Upselling so effective?

Well, by the time a customer sees your thank-you page, they’ve already made the decision to trust you enough to buy something from you… so encouraging them to make a second purchase that you have positioned as a ‘no-brainer’ offer is a relatively easy sell.

This type of Upsell has become more popular in the last year with 1shoppingcart and other shopping cart providers building in ‘1 click Upsell’ type functionality that remembers the credit card details and can do an Upsell without requiring the card details to be entered again – very effective.

The other main place to do an upsell is between the ‘Order’ page and the ‘Checkout’ process.  I’ve used this one very effectively in the past.

When I was in the positive cash flow property niche (my first online business) we had 1 product that out-sold everything else on the site.  We sold about $2,500 a month of this particular $97 printed manual.  Then we added an Upsell in the middle between the order and the checkout of a second complementary $97 manual for just $45 more.

Over about a year it averaged out that 33% of people took the Upsell.  This equated to an extra roughly $800 a month in additional sales just for adding in this one Upsell step. Because our cost of acquisition was still the same (our traffic costs), most of this ended up as pure profit.

Up to date knowledge of what you can Upsell is critical. Upselling the wrong or irrelevant products or services will just alienate your clients. Upselling and cross-selling the right stuff at the right time can make a massive difference on your profitability.

I find a high value low price Upsell behind an email opt-in works well. I often use this to fund my cost of traffic and break even on the front end.

Perhaps the biggest block to upselling is that most marketers don’t do it. Maybe they feel scared. Perhaps they feel cheeky. Maybe they think that they don’t have the right. Perhaps they “already know” that the client will say, “No”.

Whatever! The biggest problem with upselling is that most marketers quite simply just do not ask for the order.

Call it the McDonalds affect if you like… you have to ask! They Upsell on everything and they get a lot of “Nos” but they also get a lot of “Yeses”! You need to make just asking part of your sales process too. You could significantly increase your sales results over night.

With McDonalds they ask you ‘would you like fries with that’ or “would you like to upsize for an extra xx amount?” It’s easy because the decision to buy has already been made.

When you provide recommendations based on their needs, then you are increasing the value to the customer. It’s important to be specific, don’t ask the customer ‘is there anything else you need’ because at this point they don’t know what they need.

Make suggestions based on the most likely item that the customer will want or need and why you think they will need it. Only recommend what the customer genuinely needs, not just what you want to sell them.

So just think, is there anywhere in your business that you can add an upsell for extra profit?

99 out of 100 entrepreneurs online are focused on ‘Selling’ as their primary objective and main focus. This is understandable as selling for profit is the reason that we do marketing online.

While this is a valid model, it’s certainly not the best model to position your business
for lasting success in 2011 and beyond. Traffic is getting more and more expensive and so the cost of acquiring a customer to make a one off sale often costs the same as or more than the profits you will make from one sale alone.

So for this reason…

Your Number One Most Important Job as an Internet Marketer is to build a list (database) of prospects and clients who that you can create a relationship with to then market other products and services strategically to them over time.

Think about it now in your own business – “If building my list is the most important task I have online, how much time, effort and resources do I put to that task each week or month?”

How was your answer?  Chances are, not good, but that’s OK provided you learn from that and move on. If you were able to answer honestly to yourself that you are devoting massive time and resources to building your list and your relationship with them then congratulations as you are well and truly on your way to building a good long term strategic internet business.

Most new Internet Marketers I meet are in the ‘Opportunity Seeking’ business, meaning that they are chasing one online opportunity to make some cash after another.  I know this for a fact well as I did it for several years myself. You know what, this is fine initially when you first start marketing online because you really need to get some experience with driving some traffic and making offers and trying out different niches until you find the area that you are going to specialize in.

All the consulting clients that we work with at InternetMarketingDoneForYou.com that are doing big numbers online have changed from being opportunity seekers to strategic marketers at some point in their development. They now make money out of building a big list and creating relationship with them and making offers over time. There is no exception to this.

Think about it, how often does Amazon email you?  And they started off as just an online bookstore making one-off book sales and evolved and morphed over time into one of the best marketing machines on the planet. The great thing about their business is that they are emailing a list of ‘clients’ rather than ‘prospects’, which is a very powerful position to be in as they know their list already are buyers.

So how do you build your list?

The answer is to build a  website  (or  a  squeeze  page  section  of  your  website  where  you  drive  traffic)  where  its  primary  focus  is  to  provide  something  of  value for free in exchange for your new prospects’ contact details.  You then follow up with them again in an automated way with the use of autoresponder software.

Your free offer is about quality… not quantity.  What you offer is only limited by your imagination, but good examples  of  what  you  could  use  include  free  reports, videos, audios and newsletters  etc.

To create a good free offer you really need to get into the mind of your prospect and ask yourself “What is it that they really want?” and give them that, as that will significantly increase your chance of getting a great conversion rate on your landing page.

An important point with your opt‐in offer is to also communicate you are going to follow up with them again, otherwise what people see and hear in their mind is that “I’m just going to get this free product or service the one time”.  You want to set up the right relationship from day one so that they look forward to future communication from you.

You can achieve this by having an eCourse component to your offer or advising them that they will also receive your newsletter or follow up training components on an ongoing basis.

Once you have your free offer in place you need to drive targeted traffic to it over time to capture your leads and deliver your free offer to them.

A recent study by our friend and colleague Armand Morin showed up something so powerful you can’t ignore it.  His research showed that of the top

100 websites on the Internet 89 of them use the new ‘free’ model.

What we’re referring to is, if you look at the major online companies today, like  Google, My Space, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, all of them utilise the 100%  FREE model… it costs you nothing to use!   Then they make money out of you over time with enhanced services, or they make money out of advertisers because they have they have the target market on their list.

The way we look at it is that we can debate this all day long but the facts are facts. The free model is here and it’s here to stay.  It’s a great model and it is obviously the right model because the marketplace as a general rule doesn’t want to be ‘sold to’ and this is more the case now more than ever before.

What do you do now that you have them on your list?

You need to follow up with them in an automated system called a ‘marketing funnel’ that provides both value as well as offers over time. (I’ll cover detailed ‘marketing funnel design’ for you in a future edition of the magazine).

By opting-in the prospect has put their hand up to say that they are interested in your area of expertise, your training, your products and/or services.

You get the opportunity to nurture and educate them and build trust so that when you do make offers there is a high probability of their success because you are not marketing to strangers – they feel like they already ‘know you’. This way you become a welcome guest rather than an unwanted pest.

Having a large list with which you have a good relationship enables you to make good value offers and generate income on a predictable basis. Marketing to your existing leads and clients is always more cost effective than the costly process of continually trying to get new clients.

All successful Internet Marketers (without exception) know that the money is in the lifetime value of the client, not in one‐off sales. If you are not following up with your prospects and clients you are potentially leaving a huge amount of money on the table.

Ask yourself now “how many automated follow up emails do I have in my marketing funnel sequence that create value and relationship as well as offers over time?”

If you answer was ‘not many’ then this is a great place to start on your action list of what you need to do next to become a more successful marketer in your niche.

2010 has now come and gone. It was what it was. For you it may have been a massively profitable year with your internet businesses, or you may be at more of a beginner or intermediate stage and still be finding your feet and testing and measuring new things to see what works and what doesn’t.

Either way, no matter what your results last year it’s always possible to, and it should be a goal to make this year bigger than the last.

Let’s get stuck straight into our 5 steps to make your Internet marketing businesses more profitable in 2011…

1. Speed of implementation

This is a concept I can honestly say I really only ‘got’ in the last few months. How it came about for me was that I was doing pretty well online in that I was already a full-time Internet marketer, but my consulting business was demanding more of my time than my other ‘Real Passive Internet businesses’.

When I thought about it my real goal was to be in the ‘lifestyle creation business’ meaning that I really needed to get my passive income streams cranking more, rather than adding additional active income streams.

I got some advice to go see a man by the name of Richard Bandler, the co-creator of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and get my head right. So I got on a plane to London and did exactly that. As luck would have it on the 2nd day of my Licensed Practitioner of NLP course I got hypnotized on stage by Richard and he made it plainly obvious to me that if I wanted my passive income streams to grow then I needed to focus on those businesses with the same amount or more energy as I was doing for my active income streams.

The other big learning was the speed with which I needed to implement to achieve the results that I was after.

Following that trip I am now implementing in my businesses at roughly 12 times the rate that I was previously.

Now think about this for your businesses. Are you treating your Internet business like a hobby or like a real business with urgency? Give yourself tight deadlines, hit those deadlines and make things happen quickly.

Effectively you will test and measure more techniques, niches and product offers more quickly. This will dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to achieve the results you are after.

2. Build your list faster

When you know what niche(s) you are going to specialize in online you really need to build a list (database) of prospects and clients that you can market to over and over again.

The most common way of building your list is to give away something of high perceived value to your target market in exchange for their contact details so that you can follow up with them again via your auto responder software.

There is an art to this so that you create a good relationship with your prospects and customers by providing them great information and value, while also implementing enough offers to them so that you make a profit while actively building your list.

This point is also closely related to the first one we covered – are you implementing quickly with building your list? Do you have a sense of urgency with it?

Ultimately the bigger you build your list and the better your relationship and offers with it the more money you will make in your business. So what can you do in 2011 to actively and rapidly build your list?

3. Work on your mindset

Have you ever noticed that people who win the lottery are after broke again after 5 to 10 years? It’s amazing isn’t it? I often thought about how could this be, and then I heard Pat Mesiti say “you can’t stay a millionaire if you have a two dollar mindset”.

This is pretty clever. What it means is that as your wealth creation mindset expands so will your opportunities and your prosperity. It also means that you can do all the clever Internet marketing traffic and conversion strategies etc but if your mindset is not right you will never get wealthy – sad but true.

There is no easy way of getting your mindset right, and in many ways it is a journey rather than a destination. For me learning NLP has made a massive difference because I now understand how the unconscious part of my brain works and can control it better rather than letting it run it’s own programs. For you it may be different, but ultimately this mindset area is a field of study that should get as much of your attention as the Internet marketing area in 2011 and beyond.

4. Test and measure like a pro

With our Internet marketing strategy and consulting business we get to see the inner workings of hundreds of businesses that do marketing on the Internet. The great thing about this is that we no longer guess about what is going to work online, we can gather data and observations across a number of industries and identify trends and traits of successful businesses online.

One thing that we notice about all successful Internet marketing businesses is that they test and measure consistently. There is a saying that “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” and this seems true with Internet marketing 100%.

We measure our stats like clicks, opt-ins, sales, conversion rate, cost per lead, cost per sale etc on a weekly and also monthly basis. We have monthly goals that then roll up into annual goals. This works beautifully because at all times there is visibility of what is working and what isn’t and it allows for quick adjustments along the way.

The other part of test and measure like a pro is to be constantly working on improving your conversion rates. Google website optimizer is a fantastic free tool to help with this as in its simplest form it allows you to run two versions of the same web page against each other and see which converts the best.

You then declare the page that converts the best as the winner and try and create a new page that will convert better again. What this means is that for the exact same advertising spend over time you start to get better and better return on your investment (ROI). Professional marketers do this constantly and you should too.

Now think about your business, do you have a spreadsheet with your weekly, fortnightly or monthly stats on it? If not how quickly can you get one implemented? Do you have Google Website Optimizer implemented for the main landing pages of your website? If not how quickly can you get it implemented?

5. Cut the dead wood

Over time as you test and measure new products, niches, sites etc you incur both monetary costs and also tasks that require your time.

On the financials in your business, if you take it back to the fundamentals to make more profit you either need to make more sales revenue or reduce your expenses. With this cut the dead wood theme, review your business credit card statement – is there any software tools or other expenses that you don’t need anymore? If so then cancel those services and reduce your expenses where ever possible. In our businesses we review all our expenses quarterly and anything that is not actively being used gets culled. This one technique will save you thousands of dollars over the course of the year.

The other part of cut the dead wood is look at all the different aspects of your business such as the websites and product offerings you have. Are there any there that are taking up a lot of your time but not significantly increasing your profits? If so look at them with a critical eye to see if you can cull them to free up your time and make space for new opportunities to enter your business life.

We like to think of it as “run your winners long and cut your losers short”…

Treat your business with priority, efficiency and urgency. Implement the 5 strategies above in 2011 and watch your results improve.