Last night at dinner, I was telling my wife about one of my mentoring students, “Tom”, who  received an angry email from a prospect he had contacted.  Apparently, the prospect was offended because Tom asked if he would be interested in a new web design for his local business.  He had designed the site himself, and took offense to the idea that it could possibly be improved.

Tom responded with a polite email, apologized for causing offense, and mentioned a few things that he thought could be improved, and explaining that those were the basis for his contacting the business owner.  Soon after, the business owner called him on the phone, wanting to know more about Tom’s ideas for his site.  After a 30-minute conversation, the business owner had requested some renovation work to be done on his site, and a possible contract for a new design for his wife’s business.

When my wife heard this story, she said “Hasn’t that happened to you before too”, and she’s absolutely right.  I’ve turned angry customers into buyers on several occasions, and all it took was a polite and genuine response to an angry email.

When people are being sold to, especially online, they put up a lot of barriers.  I know I’m a nice guy who would always work as hard as I can to please my clients, but potential prospects have no way of knowing that at first.  Simply showing a genuine interest in them and their business is enough to break down much of the skepticism they have towards me and my business.

I was talking to one of my students from my offline mentoring program today, and he was expressing frustration that he had been in touch with several prospective clients who were on the verge of committing to buy from him, and yet he couldn’t seem to nail down the final sale.  He’s shown them everything he could do for them, given them pricing and a timeline, and they are ready to commit – only they haven’t yet.

Understandably, he doesn’t want to bother them by contacting them repeatedly, but he doesn’t want to lose out on what seems like a sure sale because they’ve forgotten about him for whatever reason.

As someone who sells websites and web services for a living, as well as a full-time small business owner, I can see this from both sides.  Business owners have a million things on their plate at once, and there are always fires to put out.  Though we all know that changing a business’ website can have fantastic effects to their bottom line, it’s not exactly an “emergency” to the business owner, so they allow everything else to take precedence over it – and it’s hard to blame them.

What we can do on our end is follow up consistently, politely, and not so frequently that we start to annoy our prospect.  Calling someone once per day (until we are able to get in touch with them) if they have already made it clear that they are interested in working with us isn’t too much, in my opinion.

As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m not a good salesman, and I’m actually terrible at following up.  If I couldn’t get in touch with someone for a few days, I’m the type that would stop calling, and then forget about the prospect altogether.  Of course, this is a terrible way to make sales, but I’m working on getting better.

My initial sales strategy needs more follow-up too.  I contacted prospects via email, and if they didn’t get back to me, that was the end.  Following up with a simple reminder a week later can convert dozens of additional clients, yet I just didn’t make the effort.

Once I changed my strategy, and followed up with clients, in a non-aggressive way, it really made a huge difference to my bottom line.

By the way, if you’re interested in building a local business of your own, with very little risk, check out my mentoring program.  I’ll come to your city, build your website, and find you clients, until you turn a profit!  Guaranteed!

Happy New Year!

One of my new year’s resolutions this year was to finally make this blog something that people are interested in reading.  I’ve had this site for about seven years, and it’s been in it’s current form for about two years and I’ve done almost nothing with it.  2011 is the year when that changes, along with many other things.

For the past several years, I’ve had a tradition on New Year’s Eve.  After everyone goes to bed, I sit down with a pen and a legal pad, and I brain dump onto the paper.  I think about the past year, and my goals for the coming year, and I get it all out.

Then, I make a list of what I want to accomplish in the next 90-120 days.  It would make sense to set goals for the year, but I think those are too easy to break.  Any goal that I don’t want to start working on immediately isn’t something I even want to bother writing down.  I’ll keep it tucked away until I am ready to work on it.

Anyway, at the end, I’m left with a list of 10+ things I want to accomplish on in the coming months.  These aren’t goals like “make $15,000 a month by March”, but rather goals like “Sell the viral script I’ve been working on” or “Create and sell a line of WordPress themes”.  Sort of like goal/projects.

This master list (which ended up with 13 items – my lucky number) now sits on my desk, and every morning when I plan out my day, I look at the list, and for each item, I ask myself “What can I do today to get myself closer to reaching that goal?”.  It’s a surprisingly effective strategy.  I’ve already made huge progress towards two projects I’ve been sitting on for months!

Writing this post is the first step towards one of the goals, which is to communicate more through this blog, and post valuable information that you can use to help your own business.  If you haven’t sat down recently and assessed everything you are doing online, I suggest you do so soon.  The New Year is a great time to do it, but there is never a bad time.

All the best to you and yours in 2011!  You’ll be hearing from me again soon!

This doesn’t have much to do with earning money online, but with business in general, and how companies can keep their customers happy by empowering their employees.

So I was out the other day, and on my way home, I decided to stop by Starbucks to pick up a delicious drink for my wife.  As it often is, Starbucks was packed.  It took a few minutes to order, and then I waited for my drink.  And waited.  And waited.  Growing up, my family owned a store, and I dealt with my share of rude customers.  As such, I always hesitate to complain about slow service.  When several people in line behind me got their orders, and it didn’t look like anyone was preparing mine, I finally asked the barrista if my order would be coming up soon.

As it turned out, the order taker never relayed my order to the barista, so she was completely unaware of my order.  She quickly made the drink, and handed it to me along with what looked like a small brochure.  She said she was sorry for the wait, and to come back soon.

As I left, I realized that what she had handed me was an apology for the poor service, which doubled as a coupon for a free beverage.

I assume this is Starbucks’ policy, to automatically give these to any customer who has been inconvenienced, even if only slightly.  If so, it’s certainly a good way to keep people coming back.

What I like most about it was that it wasn’t a manager who gave me the coupon, nor was it given to me after I complained (I didn’t complain at all).  It was immediately given to me by the employee I was speaking to.  Presumably, all Starbucks employees have the autonomy to hand these out as they see fit.  By empowering their employees, Starbucks has ensured that their customers will walk away happy, even if they were inconvenienced.

A similar principle is outlined in my favorite business book, The 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferris.  Bogged down by questions from his call center employees who needed Tim’s approval for everything, he tested a plan in which his employees had the authority to fix any problem on their own, without asking him, as long as it cost less than $100 to fix.  Instantly, his workload dropped dramatically, along with customer complaints.

So anyway, I just wanted to share that.  It’s a great principle to keep in mind as we run our businesses.

I mentioned a few months ago that I had a new project I was working on called Free PLR Articles.  It started out as a side project, and has (relatively) quickly morphed into quite a profitable venture, despite the fact that I give away everything for free.

Simple Clickbank links and AdSense ads pull in a few hundred dollars a week, and I’ve grown an extremely responsive list of over 5000 people in a short time.

The real beauty of this is that with my list, I can do so many things that I wasn’t able to do before.  I have so many projects that are about to be released, and getting it in front of thousands of eyes is as simple as sending an email.

Marketing Gurus are always talking about how the money is in the list, and though I certainly believed them, I never had the drive to establish a good list for myself.  Now I see the opportunities that are open to me.  I encourage everyone to start a list as soon as possible, and cultivate it in your spare time.  It can pay off in dividends down the road.

…and if you need any free PLR articles, look no further than my site.

Cheers,

Robert

For months, I’ve been planning how best to tackle the local market, and I’ve finally made some good progress with recruiting local clients. I’ve realized for years that local markets are virtually untapped, and not nearly as competitive as the online world. The biggest hurdle for me is that I’m the world’s worst salesman.

For me, working online means communicating by email, receiving payments online, and never having to sit in traffic.  It also means little or no rejection.  I do all my marketing online for a low cost, and customers come to me from all over the world.  The local market involves actually meeting face to face with potential clients, talking on the phone, and sitting in traffic occasionally.  It also involves a much higher chance of rejection.

It’s working pretty well so far though.  I’m already pulling in several hundred dollars a month from local businesses, and since I bill monthly, every new client I recruit adds to that total.  I have some marketing ideas that I’ll put into place next week, and I hope to triple my client base in the next several weeks.  With some luck, I’ll have a large enough client base by next Spring that I can hold off on recruiting new clients, and simply maintain my business in a few hours a day while I travel around Europe again with my family.  Now that would be great! 

I’ve read a lot on the Warrior Forum and other places about local marketing, but I haven’t come across any good information about exactly what I’m doing.  I’m sort of winging it so far, but through trial and error, I’m learning a lot, and I’m growing the local part of my business.

I have a lot of other projects going on right now as well.  I’ll post more about them soon.

–Robert

p.s. – For a preview, check this out – Free PLR Articles – It’s a concept I’ve been testing with pretty good success so far.

Over the years, I’ve created lots and lots of websites.  Some, I haven’t touched in years, and some, I update nearly every day.

One site I created mostly for myself is ComicStripArchive.com

I am a huge fan of comic strips.  I’m not a super-hero kind of person, so I’m not really into comic books, but I love the daily strips – even the soap opera strips, which can often be hilarious without even trying!  Most comic strips have archives online, but most only link to the past month of strips, even if the archive goes back several years.

I created  a simple PHP script which links to the archives for each comic strip, making it easy to find years worth of strips.  Mostly, I did this so I could access old strips easily, but I figured I wasn’t the only one who liked old comic strips, so maybe other people would enjoy it.

Did they ever!

Within a few months, I was getting tens of thousands of visitors a month, and now I get over 5,000 unique visitors a day on a slow day!  The site usually gets over 25,000 visitors a month directly from highly-targeted Google searches.  It’s a marketer’s dream!

The problem is monetizing that traffic.  With that kind of targeted traffic, one would think some decent income would be easy, but I’ve really struggled to make any sort of worthwhile income from the site.  I added a blog, to ensure fresh content, added Project Wonderful ads, and recently added Amazon boxes that have books related to whatever comic strip page the visitor is viewing.  Still, almost no revenue.

I have some ideas to attract even more traffic that I’ll probably implement in the next few weeks.  Still, if 5,000 visitors a day isn’t making much, 10,000 visitors a day won’t make much more unless I’m able to step up the monetization.

I’ve thought about trying to build a list, but I’m unsure of exactly what type of content I would offer, and what type of incentive people would have to join the list.  This will probably be my first step.  Even with a list, though, comic strip readers aren’t the most rabid buyers around.

This would make a good case study, especially if I’m able to increase my profits in a big way.  I’ll be discussing this site more over the coming months, I’m sure.  Be sure to check back.  If you have any profitable ideas, I would love to hear them!

Robert

I’m heading to bed, but I wanted to share something quickly.

I’ve had a membership site, the Online Marketing Toolbox, for several months now.  I promoted it through various advertising, and to my customers who bought websites from me, and though I had occasional signups, membership was very low.  With the economy in trouble, and revenue dropping, I made a commitment to make the Online Marketing Toolbox a site that every serious online marketer would want to be a member of!

One of the main changes I made was to the layout.  I had hastily designed a quick layout when I started the site, and though it looked pretty nice, it didn’t make customers say “Wow, I want to get more sites from this guy!”.  At least, I would imagine it didn’t.

Anyway, after discarding over a dozen potential designs, I finally came out with one I was exceedingly happy with.  Of all the website designs I’ve ever created, it’s by far my favorite.

What I found over the next month, is that potential customers like the new design too – enough to increase my conversion rate by over 400%!

It was hard for me to believe at first too.  Not only did my signups increase, but the biggest increase was from my website customers.  These customers saw my work firsthand, and yet only a handful were interested in joining before.  Now, five times as many were eager to signup.  It was truly amazing!

As a web designer, I’ve always felt like a good design can really change the perception of a potential customer, and now I have living proof!

Goodnight, and God Bless!

Robert

I wouldn’t consider myself to be great at writing sales letters.  I guess I’m okay at it, but when I write some copy and then read it back, I’m rarely impressed.

The other night, I was writing the sales  letter for a new promotion I’m running for the Online Marketing Toolbox.  I’m giving away a free hardcover copy of my favorite business book, the “book that changed my life” – The 4-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferris.  As I was writing the story of how I came across the book, how quickly my life changed for the better after I read it, and what my lifestyle is like now, I was actually kind of amazed.

Every bit of it was true, and if I do say so myself, it was actually a pretty compelling story.  With all of the work, and the pinching pennies, and the late nights that I’ve put it over the past year, it’s very easy to forget some of the highlights.  I set my own hours, I travel the world, I’m with my wife and daughter all day every day.  It’s really a great thing!

Anyway, I figured I should post at least some of the story here.  If you want a free copy of the 4-Hour Workweek, be sure to pick it up from here.

—–

Last year at this time, I was waking up at 5am every day to take a 2-hour commute in gridlocked traffic to a boring, low-paying job! I had a wife and infant daughter at home who I missed terribly, and I worried that I was being deprived of watching my daughter grow up.

Backpacking through the Swiss Alps

My wife and daughter on the
beach in Mendocino, CA

Finishing up work in Munich
before heading to Oktoberfest

My daughter being silly
at the Eiffel Tower

I had been tinkering with my online business for seven years, and it was still just making a few hundred bucks a month. My deliverance came in the form of a Secret Santa gift from a coworker, though he wouldn’t have known at the time what a profound impact his gift was about have on my life.

I used the $20 Borders gift card he gave me to buy a copy of the 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris. I had never heard of the book (or the author) before that day, but it looked like a good read, so I decided to buy it and take it home.

I broke out the book on New Years’ Day, and I couldn’t put it down. I read the entire book in one day, and before nightfall, I was taking notes, making plans, and telling my wife all about how our lives were about to change. I’m sure she thought I was crazy!

90 days later, on April 1st, 2008, I said goodbye to my job, and my family and I started our new lifestyle, completely free from the restraints that nearly everyone else has holding them back. I now set my own hours, and I can do my work from the office in my home in Baltimore, from a cafe in Paris, or from a beer hall during Oktoberfest (I’ve actually worked from all of these places).

After I quit my job, we immediately took three weeks to drive up the West coast, from San Francisco all the way to Vancouver. We backpacked around Europe for three weeks last September with our 18-month old in tow, and had more fun than I even thought possible! We’re taking a cruise in just a few weeks, and we’re planning several more international adventures — and I owe it all to one little book – The 4-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferris!

— Click Here To Read the Rest of the Story (and get the 4-Hour Workweek for FREE)

I’m sure I’m not the only small business owner who has been struggling a bit recently. Over the past few months, my online revenue has dropped significantly, especially from the source of income I was relying on the most.

Of course, this provides a good lesson that I’ve always known, but never got around to heeding fully – don’t put all your eggs in one basket!

Now, I pull in revenue from several different streams of online income, but since one of these streams was doing particularly well, I spent most of my time cultivating it. Now that the revenues from that stream have scaled back considerably, I’m left scrambling to bring up my income.

There is a silver lining though. I think in a year or two, I may look back to these few months as the catalyst for making my business grow to unprecedented levels. Without the revenue I was relying on, I’ve been forced to push the limits of what types of services I offer. I’ve had to leave my comfort zone, and I’m already seeing great results.

The first thing I did to try and earn more revenue was to promote my custom website design. I had built a website months ago called Porcupine Website Design, mostly to assuage friends and family who occasionally ran across people who needed a website and wanted to know where to send them. I was making enough money by pre-designing websites and selling them, that I didn’t have much time to do custom work.

Promoting that has opened me up to several new customers, generated tons of great website ideas in my head, and really expanded my view of what’s out there, and what people are looking to create.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had to take a hard look at my business model, and determine how I can not only make money online right now, and how I can build my profits to make sure my business is secure in the future.  I think I’m well on my way.