From: Mark S. Chatterton [mark@chattertonworld.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 06, 2009 6:19 AM
To: ;
Subject: Where is Your Money
Where is Your Money Maker?
By Melani Ward
Does this sound at all familiar? You have multiple notebooks or folders in your office with projects in various stages of completion, some nearly 80% finished but not quite there. Your calendar is filled with "opportunities", not the least of which are a few opportunities for you to complete a bonus for someone else's product where you will be one of only a select 13,000 other people who will be contributing bonuses? You have weekly writing "commitments" to your ezine, article directories, blogs, etc. which while in the process of writing naturally spark new great ideas you need to put together into some type of program.
But, you have no consistent cash flow coming in and you're beyond frustrated?
Oh, and you're totally overwhelmed to boot?
This is something I see all of the time with my clients. They have a ton of things going at once, feel too "busy" to finish any of them but can't measure a single result. So, let's just clear the air and admit that being busy doesn't mean anything. If you want consistent cash flow and you want to have more money coming in the door you have to do two things and do them very well: Measure and Prioritize.
When it comes to marketing, remember, you can't manage what you don't measure. If you want to grow your business you have to track what you're doing, see what works and then when you find it, turn it up a notch so you get even more.
What is driving your business? I ask this question every day and I also track every penny that comes into my business because if I don't, I won't know what's working and what I am spinning my wheels keeping in place.
Here are just a FEW things to consider when it comes time to measure, which is NOW by the way. (What you need to measure may be different but I just want you to get an idea.)
1. How many new opt-ins are you getting each day? How many people are opt-ing out of your communications?
2. What are the top performing traffic drivers that are resulting in the new opt-ins? From where are they coming?
3. How many new clients are you enrolling each day, each week, each month? How much is each client worth to you?
4. Where are your clients coming from? Ezine, referrals, speaking, social networking, etc. (How long had they been on your list before they became a client?)
5. How many of your clients/customers buy again? Renew?
6. How are your sales pages converting?
7. What is your open rate for emails? What headlines are converting the best? What have you received the most comments about?
Take the time you need to identify everything you are doing with your marketing to bring MORE business in the door. Write them all down and begin tracking and measuring on a regular basis. Pay attention to the money that is coming in. If you find that you are spending hours each week writing articles and you are building a list that has NEVER bought from you then you might want to consider giving up the article writing for a bit and take that time to finish a product or program you could launch and create some cash flow from. If your list is growing but they aren't buying you might consider the possibility that you aren't selling to them either.
Track what you are doing and if there is no money coming in the door, figure out what you can do differently.
When you track, test and measure on a regular basis you will avoid the trap of being "busy for no reason"...the reason why there are countless entrepreneurs who are wiped out from "working" their butts off but who make virtually no money to speak of.
The second piece of this is learning how to prioritize once you get some of those measurements in place. The best way I have found for doing this is by doing a time, cost and pay-off assessment. I usually use a graph and all the geeky organizational stuff but I'll just outline it quickly here.
Let's say you decide that what you have been doing isn't bringing in the money you want and you are at a point where you need the cash flow. You have brainstormed a bunch of ideas you have for turning your work into money and you are staring at a paper full with possibilities.
Take your idea and plot it out based on these 4 categories:
1. High effort and high payoff
2. Low effort and high payoff
3. High effort and low payoff
4. Low effort and low payoff
So, it's pretty easy to see which side of the chart it might make sense to concentrate on at first, right? Low effort and high pay off. For me, one of the things I do in my business that requires the least amount of time and effort on the front end but with the highest payoff is attracting a new private client. I have all of the content and systems in place already for working with the client and there is certainly a lot of time and effort that goes into each client while we are working together but because I often, though not always, have a waiting list for private clients, when I offer the option to people I am usually able to bring money in the door very quickly.
A program that is just an idea may fall into the high effort high payoff or high effort and low payoff. For example one thing that often falls into the high effort, low payoff category is membership sites. People will decide this is something they should do but don't realize how much work it is to manage and maintain and that by themselves, they often don't make that much money. Even my clients that make multiple millions of dollars a year know that their membership sites aren't the money makers but it's what they feed into that brings in the cash. So, it often doesn't make sense for some of my clients to do membership sites if they haven't mapped out their entire funnel yet or don't have any place for those people to go. Again, only you know your specific business and what makes sense for you based on the tracking and measuring you've done.
Brainstorm all of your ideas and then plot each one on the chart. Once you decide on a project to implement, COMPLETE it. Don't get halfway through and let yourself get caught up in a new and better idea. There will always be a new idea. Hold your feet to the fire and get it done.
The more you track, test, and measure the clearer you will be on how you should spend your time. Then figuring out what will create the highest payoff with the least amount of time and effort will help you start bringing more money in the door.
So, what's it going to be? Are you going to shake your money maker this week?
3 comments:
An interesting discussion is definitely worth comment.
I think that you need to write more on this topic, it may not be a taboo matter
but usually people don't speak about such issues. To the next! Many thanks!!
Feel free to surf to my weblog; http://tudecidesveracruz.com/overview-of-tivo-premiere-hd-dvr.htm
When I initially commented I clicked the "Notify me when new comments are added" checkbox and now each time a comment
is added I get three emails with the same comment.
Is there any way you can remove me from that
service? Thank you!
Feel free to surf to my homepage :: fast ways to loose weight; fastest way to loose weight; lose 10 pounds 2 weeks; lose 10 pounds a week; easy lose weight; how to loss weight fast
Excdellent post. I used to bbe checing continuously this weblog and I'm
inspired! Very helpful information specially the closing section :) I take care
of such information a lot. I was seeking this ccertain info for a
long time. Thank you and best of luck.
Here is my page: get a mentor, ow.ly,
Post a Comment