Business Leverage With Media, An Octopus,Trojan Horses And Saying NO

James Schramko sharing some powerful business leverage concepts:

Podcast: Download (Duration: 9:07 — 11.8MB)

Highlights this week:

Like never before you can create and distribute your own media
SuperFastBusiness is now oniTunes
Leverage your brand by entering competitions
Eliminate, purge, cut and shred away wasted resources
Treat your target goal like the head of an octopus and grow targeted tentacles
Locate competitors and send them parts of your product as trojan horses
When you get placed in the lower position, turn the tables
Saying NO gives you more power for the yes
Sometimes you will be challenged. That’s business
Test your emails with Split tests
Focus on delivering the most value from your system
Ask yourself the big questions to get worthwhile answers

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Transcription:

James Schramko here with our business news update.

I’ve read a really good book called Blogging In Your Underpants, and the whole point of the book is that we’re in this new age of the internet. It’s cheap, easy media. Anyone can publish media and put it out to the world at a very low cost. It’s not going to change. We are now in the position where we should be creating. We should be putting it out and publishing our own stuff. We don’t have to be bound by the big publishers. We’re not under the control of the old ways so get out there and create. And you really can combine what it is that you enjoy about your business and translate that to the community.

SuperFastBusiness is now live

This week’s a very exciting week for SuperFastBusiness because SuperFastBusiness.com went live and it’s now a podcast which has been approved by iTunes. You can now tune in to these episodes on your portable device, and I’ve been saying for a while, you really need to get in front of your audience wherever they are even if they are not in front of the computer. You can do that with MP3s and people can be on a bus or walking the dog and still tune in. I’m putting out videos and audio content on pretty much a daily basis and that’s the strategy behind it.

Leveraging press release

One of our members in SilverCircle won an award and it’s just a good reminder that if there are awards or if there are competitions that you have a good chance of entering and winning, you can really leverage the press off that. The press release news aspect of it is very appealing. You can also really engage with all of the other participants and the community that come together for this sort of thing, and rally up a lot of buzz with your social media network, your email or customer list, and also credentialize your website with good sort of prize-winning little badges of authority.

The octopus head and tentacles

One of my favorite concepts this week was the head of the octopus and the tentacles. The head of the octopus is like the website and then it has tentacles going out in different directions, so if you’re running an event, if you have a authority blog, you can have a tentacle or pages for different topics. On SuperFastBusiness.com, I have different tentacles for websites, search engine traffic, design, affiliate marketing, reviews and of course, business and internet tips. They are different channels or different tentacles, but the head of the octopus is the SuperFastBusiness.com website. So have a think about how you could approach that for your business.

The trojan horse technique

A really cool way to get extra traffic and targeted traffic to your offer is to take a small piece of your product and give it to someone else in your marketplace. This is complementing. You go out and complement the marketplace. Find someone who you might have thought was a competitor and give them the first few modules of your cause and let them load it up to their membership area. And then what they can do is then introduce their customers to your material with a nice little affiliate link pointing back to your full product. So this is a Trojan horse technique. It’s very valuable. I’ve been doing this for years, putting little pieces of my content in other people’s paid memberships and having them come back to my membership to buy.

Is it time for a powercut?

Alright, if you’re getting a little bit bogged down with paperwork or your wardrobe is out of control, maybe it’s time for a power cut. And by power cut I mean just cull. Dump, get rid off, reduce, eliminate, shred, gift, whatever! Just get things out of your life that you’re never going to need again.If your business is in a shambles, it’s very hard for you to leverage and to grow faster so go and attack that piece of paperwork that’s sitting there and staring at you. Just attack it. Get rid of it, and see if you can do that by the next update and perhaps leave a comment about how you’ve been able to eliminate or delete something. I’d love to hear your progress on that.

Change the game

You know those scenarios where you go into a deal with someone in business, and they want to put you in that little power control thing where they’ve got all the big chairs and they put you in the little one? Well, change the game! Suggest that they try different chairs and move the chair to a different part of the table. You can actually carry your chair around to their side and face back at them. Have some fun with it. Break the scene. I’ve heard it called frame busters, I’ve heard it called disruption. I’ve known about this technique for at least 15 years from selling. Don’t put yourself in the situation where you’re subordinated to the weaker person if you don’t want to be. You can do something a little bit different. Make a comment. Look out the window and say, ”Hey, what a nice view!” Just distract the person and get it back on side. You don’t have to be put into that little pressure spot. It’s your choice.They’re lucky to be dealing with you and when you get that sort of framing, I think you’ll find that business becomes more enjoyable.

The power of NO

Sometimes in business you have to say no. And when you say no, that actually frees up more power for the yes. Now, I learned this technique from Raymond Aaron. But the point is, if you just say yes yes yes all the time, suddenly you’re busy. You’re flat out, and when someone else wants something you’re going to have to turn them down and say no. What I suggest you do is filter out the good business. Just deal with the people who you want to deal with, so say yes to them. And the ones who you don’t want to deal with and you know them pretty early, say no thanks, and then you’re free. When someone says, would you like to help me with this or collaborate or work on this project, now you’re free because you’ve made your time available. You’ve put the emphasis on only doing the things you want to do, so use the power of no.

Business is hard work

Just a word on business, yes it’s challenging. That’s what business is. It’s there to create a customer and by that very definition, creating a customer is hard work. It’s hard to get a customer sometimes. It’s hard to keep the customer. You might need staff or team or tools or software or paperwork, and all the things that make business challenging. That’s why you get the big bucks! You make more money when you figure out how to manage all this and not get too bogged down the stress of it all. There will be continual challenges. Life is dynamic. Get with the program, accept it and play out through it because other people don’t. They give up too early and that’s why they’re still working in a job and that’s why you have a business.

Leverage your business with media

Deliver more value

Here’s something I think a lot of people really obsess and focus on. They are so worried about making the next sale that they forget about increasing their capacity to deliver value. What do I mean by that? I mean, work on your systems and your structure and your ability to deliver more value. The perfect example is a sole operator. If you’re just selling your time, you’ve only got you and once your time is gone, your 160 hours a month, that’s it! It’s gone! If you had a team, if you hired three or four people, now your capacity might be 400 or 500 hours a month. You’ve increased your ability to deliver value and you can actually serve the same customer with more quantity or you could serve more customers in the same amount of time, therefore making more profit. That’s what I want you to focus on. Focus on creating a better system for delivering more value and the customer side will take care of itself when you’re actually able to really look after people and look after them more.

Split testing technique

Here’s a split testing technique. This is very simple. We probably all have heard of split tests, right? AB split test. You put up one offer, you put up a second offer and one of them will win and be the winner. What you can do is just test a very small portion of your customer base on a split test. You might split your list into 25 percent, 25 percent and 50 percent. You run the first test with 25 percent, 25 percent – that’s your AB. One of those is the winner and then roll that out to the other 50 percent of your customer base and therefore you’ve really maximize your result. This works particularly well with email broadcasts, and most really good email broadcast systems will have the ability for you to send out a portion of your list at any one time.

Asking better questions

My final tip for today in the business update is ask better questions. When you ask better questions, you get better answers. Ask yourself, how can I improve my delivery value system? How can I set up split testing today? How can I go and do a power cut? How can I increase my octopus and tentacle business model? I’m sure when you answer these questions, your business will absolutely be rocking!

So those are my business tips for the week. I look forward to catching up with you next week.

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