Greg Cassar.com

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?

I’m pretty lucky in that because my Internet Marketing skills have got to a very high level now I get to work behind the scenes in some amazing millionaires businesses to find out how the tick and also crank them up a notch.

Many of you know I’ve been the brains behind Australia’s Millionaire Maker Mal Emery’s Internet Marketing for nearly 3 years now. When working with Mal and also speaking on stage I met a lot of amazing people. Out of all those, the Internet Marketer who impressed me the most was Armand Morin.

I’m now friends with Armand and as a result I got the opportunity for him to review all my strategies and tactic from the way I drive traffic, to conversions and marketing funnels etc, and I can say he sure does know his stuff.

Armand has sold over $70m online and has a massive team that keeps him up to date on all the latest trends etc. Armand’s AM2 training is what I use to keep myself sharp and keep learning on a month by month basis.

What I like about it most is his marketing tutorial videos. His magazine is also a very good read, and you can learn an amazing amount just from the Website Critiques he does. When you see these think about how you can apply them to your site(s).

Suss out AM2, its free to see what he has to say, and see what you think.

PS. Remember when you are there make sure you take a copy of each of his pages for your marketing swipe file, as his clean look and feel converts very well.

So what can you learn that’s relevant to internet marketing from McDonalds – well quite a bit actually,  but one of the most important things is the power of the up-sell.

Ever bought a Big Mac from McDonalds?  What is the next thing they say to you? -  “You want Fries with That?”

We don’t think anything of it, it’s just business as usual isn’t because we now expect that question.  The percentage of people that get offended by that up-sell would be very small, but the effect on their bottom line from people saying “sure, why not” is incredible.

But then do they stop there?  No, generally not.   Next they are likely to go into another upsell about “do you want to upsize that?” or ask you about an apple pie or other special offer that they have on the go.

So if McDonalds can do this on a daily basis to millions of customers why do so many internet marketers shy away from doing it on their sites?  Is it because they don’t want to be seen as being too pushy?  or because they don’t know how to implement it?

Other companies that do this well is computer hardware companies like Dell who ask you how would you like to “Customize Your Order”.  This is quite clever isn’t it in that we feel as the customer that they are helping us by allowing us to customize our order with the right size hard drive and RAM etc.

Amazon is another amazing up-seller.  Head over to Amazon and make a purchase there and watch there and watch what happens.  Before you check out you will be prompted with “People who bought X were also interested in Y” and it gives you a whole bunch of relevant product options that could enhance your knowledge or experience in your chosen subject matter.  You then make a decision whether to add anything else to your order or check out.  I know I am personally guily of adding another $14 book to my order at that stage.

So, think about your own internet business. Is there anywhere that you can add in an additional “Customize Your Order” type up-sell before your customers check out?  Often adding a high valuable but generously discounted offer as a ‘Step 2 of 3′ will result in roughly a 33% of additional sales without having to get any new customers.  Just make sure that your up-sell product is closely related to and complements the original purchase.

I have had internet businesses that were at break even and then have added in this step and gone into the green. I’m a big fan of the upsell when done right, and you should be too.

Have you had some success in this area you could share?