The 7 Unchanging Steps For Making Money Online

Great!

These are the real things!

Thanks...

Thanks lakshaybehl, glad you like it.

Here's Step 2...

Rule 2/Step 2: Start Making Friends & Influencing People

The greatest power a business owner can wield is the power of influence.

Too many small and home based business owners do not understand this simple fact.

Every Fortune 500 company knows this and operates based primarily on this.

If they can not positively influence those who can help their businesses grow (whether it's their prospects, customers, associates, employees, shareholders, bankers, publicity contacts, suppliers, consultants and so on), into going ahead and doing always and only that which is in THEIR companies' best interests, they know they can easily kiss their profits "see ya"! And that's why they take all the pains and spend all the big bucks to hire full time PR consultants who can get them into the public's good books and get them out of a jam whenever that is required.

Politicians the world over thrive on the above as well. The Power Of Influence -- It Is Probably THE GREATEST POWER A HUMAN CAN HAVE.

The latter in part explains why Dale Carnegie's classic "How To Win Friends & Influence People" has so far sold over 500 million copies and is still going strong after several decades in book stores all over the globe.

The problem is this however... millions of people (probably yourself included) think that possessing the power to positively influence people who can help their businesses grow is an art form that can not be easily learned. And the truth is, they (and you) are just downright mistaken. Fatally so in fact.

To prove it, take a look at some of the most successful people the world has ever known... so many of them had nothing more than their skills, talents, or wits to offer for recognition. They became household names not because they splashed thousands of dollars around advertising themselves (that would definitely help anyone, even them), but what many of the well known "Greatest contributors to humanity" all have in common isn't their advertising budget, but the fact that they developed the ability to influence those closest to them in such ways that those people were able to influence those closest to them (and so on), into taking the steps required to help our heroes grow into household names.

It may sound complex, but it really isn't. Human beings were built to naturally pass on information to one another. It's the main reason we can speak while other creatures have only sounds and gestures etc, to guide them in understanding each other. The power of speech however allows you or anyone to pass on valuable information about anything on the face of the planet within seconds and with the advent of powerful technologies like the telephone and the Internet and TV and radio, other people all the way across the world can get their hands on the exact same information within a matter of minutes or even seconds.

USING THE POWER OF INFLUENCE TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS

Now, imagine that you can wield that same power within your own market. All you have to do really is say something to someone or a group of people that they would instinctively want to pass on to someone else... If you can convince them to do so, they will. If you can convince them to get others they can influence to influence those they know to do what is in your business' best interest, and they do, you would have easily hit the mother lode and it may never cost you more than your normal working hours and/or a few thousand dollars to achieve this status.

What you really need is to provide people with something they WANT to talk about with someone else and that someone else will want to talk about with someone else and so on... It's not that hard when you sit down and think about it...

For instance, when was the last time you were able to convince someone to say something nice about you?

All you have to do to achieve that status is be nice to the people around you... become the one person they can't do but say nice things about... Influence them with your good nature and people will rush to share the good news with their own friends.

A very important point you should NOT forget to attach to this step is to try to stay in contact with as many of your new found friends, prospects and customers as possible...

Remember, in order to be able to positively influence people, you have to be able to CONTACT them. If you don't have my cell phone number or email address for example, you can't possibly expect to say anything directly to me half way across the world and have me hear you. Same goes for your marketing...

Collect the names, email addresses, phone numbers etc of your new friends, acquaintances and customers every time you have a chance to (just don't force people into being on your contacts' list, that will always backfire, trust me, no one likes being forced to do things they don't want to do).

Once you have their permission to contact them, use that opportunity to be nice to them, and do it from the bottom of your heart, because the human psyche can smell B.S. ten miles away. So just be real about it all.

People will appreciate your good deeds, kind heart, fairness, great content, great information, great products and great service so much that even if they don't tell anyone else about you, they will stick with you just to keep enjoying the good stuff... And those who will talk will only have glowing things to say... Build your business from the start in this way. Build the audience for a product from the start in this way.

I promise you, you can never go wrong when you plan to positively influence those who can help grow your business and if you're smart, you'll always ask them for a way to stay in touch so that you can continue to build on that relationship. It's a no brainer, but then again, how many times have no brainers ever been the most obvious line of action?

Don't let this one pass you by... You won't only regret not having this circle of influence, you'll PAY FOR IT UP FRONT. Guaranteed.

Look out for Step 3 - "Prepare To Deliver 1st Rate Products/Services" -- Coming soon

Kunie, you sound like the voice of experience

Hi Kunle,

These are some excellent posts. Thank you for all the thought you have put into them.

Hi Angela,

Thanks! It's really great to know you appreciate it ;-)

Here's step 4.... It's right up there with the top 10
most dreaded and misunderstood tasks in IM!

And, good news is, I may have the solution to turn your
feeling of dread into that of ecstasy. Read on for more...

Step 4/Rule 4 - Price To Profit Right From The Start...

It's like I said, perhaps THE most difficult task for many online
marketers (especially those selling intangible goods like digital
products, design services, content creation services of any kind
e.g. copywriting and so on and so forth, even consultation services),
is the art of determining the price at which their customers will rush
to buy and also one that generates the maximum (or at the very
least generous) profits for the work they've put in.

Hands up if this isn't one of those things that bugs the heck out
of you. I consider myself pretty comfortable with pricing for the web
and yet, I still come up against some head scratching moments myself,
so I'd be surprised if others were not having a nightmare of a time
with product/service pricing especially for an Internet
Marketing/Home Based business.

But fear not, help is here, albeit not in totality, but it should
get you feeling much more in control (at the very least).

Before we get to that, you need to know a little about my
pedigree with regard to pricing for the web. I have been online
since 1998, I've taken short and lengthy breaks from IM every
now and again, either to work offline or for college studies etc,
but every time I come back online after one of those breaks, I
find the age old problem of pricing for the web still bothers even
the best of us. The arguments range from pricing extremely low
to pricing extremely high to sticking to something in between
(and the latter varies for every business and product out there).

But arguments are a very dangerous concept in and of themselves.

They tend to be one-sided and biased and usually based on
personal experience or no experience at all (e.g. on the 3rd party
experience of others). I have been caught up in such arguments
myself in the past though I have always tried to remain impartial,
I have to admit I have favored pricing higher to pricing lower for
personal among other business-related reasons. It got so bad,
I decided it was time to set the record straight from my point of
view, that I sat down and in 2 weeks finished a 90+ page report
on Pricing For Profits online that was released in 2001.

I am proud to say that report or book achieved critical acclaim,
however even though it was probably downloaded over a half
a million times all over the globe--no, I don't have the actual stats
to prove that, but have made some deductions based on some
research I did at various times over the past several years--the
contents of the book itself have not appeared to help too many
people.

It's sad really, because if people would just try to get out of their
own way sometimes, they might find the road blocks (that they
thought were stopping them from achieving success) are actually
non-existent or at best not as bad as they'd initially thought they
were. The reason I say all this is simple...

I wrote that report titled Proven Pricing Secrets and put a price
tag of $125 on it when it was first released. It sold well considering
it was 2001 and a PDF report and I was not even a high priced "guru"
coach at the time (at least not that I knew of, then I probably
bungled it all in my haste to get the book in the hands of thousands,
by selling MRR to it for $249.

I thought I was helping people by letting go of the rights like that,
it wasn't about me making a name or making money. I thought
since I can't reach these millions of folks on my own, I'd give the
rights to those who could. They would sell the book for $125 each
and could pass on the rights for "just" $249 and the chain would
keep growing and helping people. How wrong was I? Within months,
the product found its way to sites like ebay and was being sold for
the less than the price of a song, and people were adding it to
ebook packages selling for $29 with some pretty crappy ebooks...

I even saw some selling it on their personal sites for $0.06 cents!!!

I mean, really.

The entire premise of the book was to teach people to price well
and price higher if it could be justified. And here was the very
audience I set out to teach this stuff to, selling a book I had
estimated at $125 (a price which many had happily paid), for less
than a cup of coffee! You can imagine this outraged me no end.

But, I could blame noone but myself for letting go of my
rights to such a gem of pricing wisdom and allowing so many
clueless, selfish people the right to make a mockery of me and
others trying hard to make a living and/or make a difference.

All this led me to further take the time to study the web as
a market especially in the IM circles I moved in.

What I have seen has both saddened and disappointed me.

It's either people are encouraging each other to sell very valuable
content for less than 10 bucks just so thousands don't have to
THINK before they buy, and "the sellers" can make a good income
that way (which I bet is usually if not always short-lived, nothing
like McDonald's who are still going strong (by MY standards) even
with their low pricing--but more on this another time).

Or, I would see marketers pricing way out of reach of their very audience.

Both sides as far as I am concerned (and this is just my personal opinion), are wrong.

And you're about to find out exactly WHY (based wholly on scientific provable facts)...

***WHY PROFITABLE, HOT SELLING PRICING ON OR OFF THE WEB CAN BE SIMPLE AS DUST.***

My gripe above isn't just a gripe. It's the MAIN reason why pricing is giving YOU
so much of a headache and someone has got to address this if any progress is
to be made. So, now that I'm off my pricing madness soap box, I can tell you
how to avoid the pitfalls mentioned above...

The simple fact of the matter is that people don't even understand
the basic dictionary meaning of PRICE in the first place. That's why
they can't figure out how to solve the problem of "PRICING" especially
in a market like ours where very little expenditure is made and very
huge profits can potentially be generated.

How do you marry the 2 outrageous sides of the same coin (i.e. Low costs
and High profits)? In the real world where you have to pay for virtually
every aspect of running a business it is easy to price, you simply add
up all your expenses for producing an item and you determine based
on market research how much you need to sell at various price points
to make back your expenditure and add a nice profit on top.

That's pretty basic and very easy to do really... Just tell your accountant
every single expense you make in order to produce one unit of the product
you're going to be selling.

Let's put the figure at $10,000 a month. Now, research tells you that
your target market (lets say you sell ice cream for a living), can pay
up to $5 for a JUMBO cone of well made, frosty, delicious ice cream
(which is what you're going to be selling). Research then tells you
where best to position your ice cream store and how best to get
people to know about the product.

If your costs after all of the latter are still $10,000 as initially stated,
then your accountant can easily predict that if you sold only 50 Jumbo
cones in a month, you would be making a huge loss of $9,750 each month!

So, you would obviously be crazy to continue doing so without trying
to fix the problem or just plain getting out of that line of work.

So then, your accountant tells you, if you could at least sell 2,000
Jumbo cones of ice cream, you would just break even, which means
you make back exactly what you spent, which means you don't make
a cent of profit but at least you won't have to pack up anytime soon,
unless you just keep on not making a dime over break even point.

Your accountant then makes it clear that if you could just strategize
well enough to make 2001 sales of your $5 Jumbo cones each month,
you would at last be in profit!

Yeah, your profit is minuscule at just 5 bucks but hey profit is profit
friend, and far better than loss or breaking even. But then, you didn't
get into the business to break even or just to make a $5 profit, maybe
you plan to expand your business or add more recipes, employ more
people or want to have the doe to enjoy some nice things and your profit is
what determines just how far you can go with those "extra-curricular" plans

So, you talk to your bean counter and he tells you, if you can at least
double your minimum number of sales of 2,000 to as high as 4,000 sales all
still on the same budget of $10,000 you would be one of the happiest business
owning ice cream merchants in the whole world...

He would tell you that would mean you earn $20,000, and after
deducting your previous month's expenses of $10,000 (so that
you are no longer IN DEBT), you will still be left with $10,000 you
can then re-invest or spend any other way that is smart to.

Wow... wouldn't that be an enormous achievement for a lowly ice
cream man or woman? Imagine if somehow, you could earn that
extra $10,000 each month, that would mean within a year your
business would be generating REVENUES of $2.4 Million and turning
a PROFIT of $1.2 Million! Wowee! That'd be nice!

But all that can ONLY occur if you have a great product people
want and are able and ready to buy. And you have to work it all
out so that you make as many as 4,000 sales per month to
achieve your dream position in business. And, you have to do
it all within a budget of $10,000 and not a cent more each month.

Again, wow.

Any mere man would be daunted by the above task. That is only
natural. And it would only be natural to make some bad calls
or omit something or other or overspend or underspend or hire
the wrong staff or make one of a plethora of other mistakes.

But you see, this mere man's problems are child's play in direct
comparison to what YOU might be facing right now... What?
How? Well... HE has been able with the help of a set of
professionals to determine without an iota of doubt that $5 is
a perfect price for the market he's trying to reach.

And, the professional help of his bean counter also made it
obvious that all he has is $10,000 a month which he must never
overshoot if he intends to stay alive and happy for very long.

So, this mere man KNOWS perhaps the 2 most important facts that
will either sink or elevate any business in the world.

He KNOWS them. Now, all he has to do is find a way to make both
facts work in sync, smoothly, perhaps even perfectly so that he
becomes a true success in business.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

This guy KNOWS how much he has to spend each month.

And he KNOWS how much he must not overshoot. He also KNOWS
how much customers will be happy to pay.

Finally he KNOWS how much is the minimum he must generate each
month to at least stay in business WITHOUT a profit. He is VERY
KNOWLEDGEABLE.

And KNOWLEDGE my friend, is POWER. With Power you can do
and undo practically anything. My question to you therefore
is... how POWERFUL a business owner are YOU right now?

How much about your business do you REALLY know?

FACT 1. Do you KNOW how much you need to spend each month to
get your products/services ready and out there? Write this down if you do.

FACT 2. Do you KNOW how much you must NEVER overshoot to stay safe?

Write this down if you do.

FACT 3. Do you KNOW how much your customers would be willing to spend (ouch!)?

Write this down too if you do.

FACT 4. Finally, do you KNOW how much is the MINIMUM no of sales you MUST
make to at least stay in business WITHOUT a profit (again, ouch!)?

Write THIS down, too.

Now, if you KNOW all this, you don't need much else except the
knowledge of how to get enough customers to achieve FACT no. 4
above. And then, how to get enough customers to achieve any level
(that you desire and can reach), that is above what FACT no. 4 tells
you -- we will be discussing how to do this in much later steps.

For now, I want you to be completely honest with yourself, how
many of those above mentioned facts do you actually have right
this minute as you read this?

If you're honest and your answer is anything less than "ALL FOUR!",
you have a problem. In fact, you have a series of very big bad problems
that WILL eat you alive and not even bother to spit you out -- and I'm
NOT trying to be funny here, I'm dead serious.

See, you NEED to KNOW all of those FACTS in order to determine just
how profitable your business will be.

You have NO choice in the matter because it is the LAW OF PROFITS.

So, look at it this way...

Why not take some time right now (this very hour) to...

1. Grab a pen and paper and write out EVERY single expense
you have each month that is directly or indirectly connected
with your success as a web business owner.

You would HAVE TO include EVERYTHING from utilities, to equipment,
to rent, to feeding, to clothing (unless you work naked, and you really
shouldn't, it's gross and unhygenic), and you probably should include every
other expense, family stuff, etc that is taken out of YOUR monthly money
pot and which affects your web business.

That list should be somewhat or very long depending on your
circumstance. If you're living at home with your mum & dad or
have a trust fund for your expenses, your list might be
considerably shorter, which is good for you, you should not
find it so hard to stick to the following step...

2. Once you know how much the stuff in no. 1 above
total at, you already know how much you should not overshoot,
and you should be responsible and disciplined and NOT overshoot
it or you will die a horrible business death and you know it.

Write this figure down and plan to have yourself beaten and
dragged down your street wearing absolutely nothing if you even
dare to overshoot by just 1 cent--make sure you tell someone who
is capable of degrading you like this about your decision or you'll
just be wasting your time 'cos nothing else will keep an irresponsible
CEO responsible except the thought of knowing he can get caught
and punished if he screws up (The story of Enron springs to mind here;-)

Once you've tied yourself down mentally and physically to
that budget, your next step is to...

3. Find out exactly how much your prospects/customers are
willing to spend on a product like yours.

Hello there. No wait, don't go. I'm talking to you, yes
you. This is the point where most people pack it in. Lazy bums.

What you need to do is simple. Research your market.

It takes time. It takes a strong work ethic. It takes expertise.

But it MUST be done if you are to answer this question as
factually as possible. If you don't have any or just one the
latter 3 'must-haves' to get this done, get help.

Find the money and hire someone who can do it for you. Or
beg them or barter with them. But get it done--Scientifically.

Here are some pointers for you, in case you need them...

A. Find your market on or off-line - Where do they hang out? Who is selling to them?

B. Ask a cross section of your market the simple question
-- "Is PRODUCT XYZ over, or under, or priced just right for you?"

An average of 100 - 1,000 answers from various cross sections of
your market will give you a very basic idea. If you want some more
depth, get some more people to answer.

C. Do some sleuthing. Find out how well the others in your industry
are doing with the very same customers at the prices you see advertised.

Sleuthing will involve any number of tactics, a good number will be
underhanded, just don't do anything illegal or overly immoral to
get answers. You can apply to join their staff and see if this
gets you in the know at least a little, if not, you can simply
ASK them... ouch... how 'unsleuthy' is that?

D. Unless you have a product ready to go, you can't do the following,
which is to TEST your own cross section of prospects by offering
different prices to the same audience either under cover of
split testing, or upfront, by TELLING them what you're doing.

E. What you DO NOT want to do is GUESS. That might work. Doing so
might fail you. But if you do it and it works, what are the chances you
can guess right, the next time? If you do it, and it fails, what are
chances your business will survive such a daring step?

The choice in the end is yours.

I'm afraid, at this stage, there is no magic pill I know of as yet,
to fixing the problem of getting the right price. No one solution fits
all, except the solution that involves what I have laid out for you
already and even then you would have to apply common sense,
some level of skill or get someone to do it all for you.

The most important factor you must keep in mind however is this...

If you can not tell your bean counter:-

A. How much you are likely to spend each month to run your business
or produce and/or deliver your product or service,

B. How much you must never go over in the course of your monthly
business endeavors if you plan to stay alive online,

C. How much your customers are happy to pay based on
confirmed results you are able to gather through research,

D. How many prospects you must convince each month to buy your
product/service in order to at least break even,

Then you have a lot of work to do.

And you really ought to get started right away...

Failure to launch usually has to do with the mindset of the individual and nothing else.

What is your current mindset after reading this?

While you decide what's next on your plate, I'll be preparing Step 5
- Build/Design Your Site To Sell, the TRUTHS of this just might shock you.