A 3-Step Program to Get Yourself Un-Stuck
- WEALTHY: How one small change can make a huge difference in your business (MaryEllen Tribby)
- HEALTHY: Helpful hints for dieters (Jon Herring)
- WISE: Christine Lavin on being in a rut
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- Climbing out of that hole you dug (Michael Masterson)
- Feedback Friday: The debate rages on… and on
- It’s Good to Know… if you like city living
- Add "peremptory" to your vocabulary
What is having the Secrets to a Lifetime of Automatic Income Worth to You?
Think about taking just one simple step today… and finding that in a few weeks, you have a chance for $3,000, $6,000, $12,000 or more (maybe MUCH more) to be dropped into your bank account each and every month… with almost zero effort on your part… and practically no costs. Read on…
- Patrick Coffey
Business-Building Case Study: Change Your Offer, Double Your Profits
By MaryEllen Tribby, ETR’s Publisher
Interested in growing your customer base over 1,000 percent, just by making one simple change? Today, I’m going to show you how one company did it … and increased their sales by more than $7 million as a result.
About five years ago, one of Michael Masterson’s clients came to him for help. "I’m not sure what to do," the CEO said. "I’ve got a three-year-old business that does a million in sales each year, but I can’t make it profitable. It pays me a low six-figure salary, but that’s about it. I’m thinking it would be easier for me to shut it down and go to work for someone else."
"That may be the right move," Michael said, "but before you make it, let’s take a look at what’s going on in your business."
Michael and the CEO spent a full day reviewing every aspect of her business - from the product itself, to the personnel, to the advertising copy, to media placement, to customer service - everything. It all looked good - except one thing…
"Look at this," Michael said, pointing to a page of financials. "The prospective customers you’re targeting are used to paying $50 for the products they’ve previously bought through direct mail… but your offer is $500. That’s something to look into."
"But we’ve talked about that before. Our product cost is high because our quality is so high. We don’t want to compromise that," she said.
"Maybe you don’t have to," Michael said.
Working with a top-notch creative team, Michael and his client fashioned a brand-new offer that gave customers the option of buying the product through a series of monthly payments, instead of having to come up with the $500 up front. And when they tested it - as expected - it increased her customer base by 1,200 percent!
Plus, they were able to double the net sale from each customer by supporting the payment-plan offer with a carefully designed program of extra benefits, product reinforcements, and good customer service.
The result? Sales doubled on the front end. And now, six years later, the business has revenues of $8 million with profits of over $1 million a year.
The moral of this true story is this: You can have 90 percent of your business exactly right and only one thing wrong. Fix that, and you can turn a stalled business into a dynamic growth enterprise producing millions of dollars in profits.
[Ed. Note: This April, Michael Masterson will lead a small group of ambitious businesspeople through a 5-day program that can help dramatically increase the profitability of their businesses. If you join this elite group, every aspect of your business will come under scrutiny. Under Michael’s critical eye, we’ll discover all the changes you need to make.
When all is said and done, you could very well see a big jump in your bottom line… just from reinventing your offer alone. Who knows, maybe even an $8 million difference.
"There’s a very fine line between a groove and a rut."
Christine Lavin
A 3-Step Program to Get Yourself Un-Stuck
By Michael Masterson
When Geena called to ask for an appointment, I had a good idea what the subject of our discussion would be: Did I think she should keep trying to make it as a freelance copywriter?
She had an auspicious beginning, working for almost two years as an in-house reporter and writing assistant for a business I consulted with. In that position, she was in direct contact with some of the best copywriters in the world, and her own writing was steadily improving. But then, she floundered. The quality of her writing leveled off.
I wasn’t close enough to her to know why, but I do know that uninspired writing is the result of uninspired thinking. For whatever reason, Geena had lost the zeal to become a great writer and had settled into the ordinary. And that wasn’t good enough for her employer.
Having seen this happen before, I counseled her to take a chance and go freelance, even though she wasn’t technically strong enough to be out on her own. I had coached other, similarly uninspired writers to jump in the deep water, and it had worked.
Geena took the leap. I helped her by putting her in touch with a client - but they couldn’t agree on price. Geena wanted the going rate for her services, but the client didn’t want to pay top dollar for an unproven novice.
After that unsuccessful coupling, I wasn’t surprised when, nine months later, Geena was still struggling.
"Maybe freelancing just isn’t for me," she told me.
I asked her how she felt about the freelance lifestyle - whether the benefits (control over your own schedule, working from home, upside income potential, etc.) still appealed to her. "Definitely," she said.
What was discouraging Geena was that she wasn’t making the money she wanted - and the reason she wasn’t making the money she wanted was because she was losing, rather than gaining, clients.
Generally speaking (and assuming they aren’t involved in an industry-wide depression), there are two reasons why a service provider would be losing clients:
- The service they are providing isn’t good enough.
- The clients don’t enjoy working with them.
Geena admitted she was having a tough time "kissing her clients’ backsides" and that the copy she was providing wasn’t breaking any records. Neither of these revelations surprised me.
I was glad that Geena recognized what she was doing wrong, but, as I suspected, she was doing nothing whatsoever to fix what was broken. She was working on the copy that was assigned to her and reluctantly dealing with her clients. And she was devoting zero hours a week to getting new clients. "I was kind of hoping for word-of-mouth referrals," she said.
"Why would you want that," I asked her, "when the word of mouth would be that your copy is mediocre and you are a pain to deal with?"
Here, in a nutshell, is the 3-step program I recommended for her. If you are a freelance professional stuck in a rut, some of this advice may work for you:
Step 1. Become better at what you do.
I gave Geena about a half-dozen suggestions for how to become a better copywriter, all of which are in AWAI’s advanced program for copywriting:
- Learn from the work of others, particularly those who have mastered your skill. (Geena could learn so much just by looking at a single good or bad promotion every day and asking herself what caused it to succeed or fail.)
- Form a little collective with other fledgling professionals to exchange ideas, techniques, and encouragement. (Through AWAI, Geena has access to many other people who are in her stage of the copywriting game.)
- Continue to formally study your craft by reading books and taking correspondence classes. (Geena has plenty of choice here.)
Step 2. Become better at communicating with your clients.
Geena’s second challenge, communicating more effectively with her clients, must start with revamping the way she thinks about them. Instead of assuming that she knows more than they do, she’d do much better to realize that they have a longer and broader view of their market. Instead of arguing with them about their proposed changes, she would be wise to try to give their ideas the greatest possible respect. Instead of giving them a litany of reasons their suggestions don’t make sense, she should thank them, compliment them on their insights, and then do her best to incorporate them into her work.
"Now is not the time to stand on principles," I told her. "When you are more experienced and greatly in demand, you will be in a position to do that."
But the truth is that the very best copywriters in the business seldom fight with their clients. They realize that time is money and that arguing about copy points is generally a waste of time. (A reasonable amount of back-and-forth is good for everyone, but the marketer should make the key decisions, not the copywriter, because the marketer has more intimate knowledge about his customers and he is taking the financial risk.)
"Realize that there are two Geenas," I told her. "The social you and the professional you. The social you can be as opinionated and as argumentative as you like. But the professional you has to master the art of communicating effectively with your clients so they will want to work with you.
Step 3. Go out into the marketplace and find new clients.
Geena’s final challenge - getting new clients - is something all fledgling freelance professionals must spend most of their spare time doing. Relying on word-of-mouth advertising is just another form of doing nothing. Like every start-up entrepreneur, freelance professionals should spend 80 percent of their time and resources building their business … and they should stop doing that only when their business has grown beyond their comfort zone.
I told Geena not to worry about how much other people are being paid. "Take every decent job," I told her, "at whatever price the client is willing to pay. View those low-paying jobs as chances to practice and improve your skills."
Geena agreed that she would spend 50 hours a week working at her job, and that if she wasn’t writing copy she’d be selling her services or practicing her skills. She agreed to look at every customer contact as an opportunity to develop her professional personality, and promised to try to achieve a 100 percent change in her reputation, from being difficult to being extremely pleasant.
"If you do everything I’ve asked you to do, what do you think your chances are of succeeding?" I asked her at the end of our counseling session.
"About 99 percent," she said with a confident smile.
Getting stuck in a rut is a very common problem when you are trying to make any kind of a change in your life. After an initial burst of growth, you settle into a routine that is okay… but nothing great. If you continue at that level for long, you will almost surely wake up one day and wonder why you bothered to make the change in the first place.
The interesting thing about getting stuck is that the solution is almost always to do the basic things that got you moving in the first place: to work more hours on those tasks that will create the biggest and fastest improvements for you. You probably already know what those tasks are… so if you are feeling stuck right now, get to work on them!
[Ed. Note: If you need a weekly dose of motivation to help you achieve all your goals - personal and professional - sign up for ETR’s Total Success Achievement program.]
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6 Healthy Weight-Control Habits
By Jon Herring
If your goal is to eat healthfully and lose weight, but you can’t seem to make the good habits stick, here are a few ideas to keep you on the right track.
- Brush your teeth several times per day. When your mouth feels clean and fresh, you are much less likely to eat between meals.
- Eat five or six small meals instead of two or three big ones. Doing this helps balance your blood sugar. It also reduces the temptation to snack on junk food or grossly overeat when you do sit down to a meal.
- Always eat breakfast. This gets your metabolism kicked into gear, which is essential for weight loss. It also helps you resist the temptation to snack on high-calorie foods before lunch.
- Write down EVERYTHING you eat … and be honest. Instead of wondering why you are gaining or not losing weight, it will become quite clear. And if you want a little more incentive to watch what you put in your mouth, get a friend or family member to agree to check your "food journal" once a week.
- Before you sit down to dinner, put the amount of food you would like to eat on your plate and put the rest in the refrigerator. This will discourage you from going back for seconds.
- Observe the 10-minute rule. If you really want a second portion of calorie-rich food, wait 10 minutes. In most cases, the craving will pass.
And remember… staying healthy and maintaining your ideal weight is not about sacrifice and denial. You can find plenty of great-tasting foods that will help you make steady progress toward this objective.
Feedback Friday: ETR’s Words to the Wise, Part 3
We continue to get interesting comments from ETR readers about our daily Word to the Wise column - one of our most popular features. We’ve already printed some of them in ETR #1943 and ETR #1961. Here’s more …
"I love ETR’s Word to the Wise column. I have found that the inclusion of this feature reinforces and expands my knowledge of ‘big’ words. While their everyday usage in normal conversation would, indeed, be pretentious, knowing when, where, and how to use a word correctly is important. The ‘dumbing down’ of our language and its usage does a disservice to everyone, as evidenced in our younger generation who cannot read, write, or spell correctly and are hindered in their ability to achieve better opportunities based on their language skills."
- Gwendolyn C. Blackman
Washington, D.C.
"Personally, I welcome the vocabulary piece, if only because there are some words we need to be reminded about. That said, having read a number of the feedback notes, my sense is there are a couple of things going on. For those who think using these words risks making them sound like Lord Gotrocks or Professor Egghead, I’d suggest that you can use them sparingly and to great effect. In fact, a listener or reader who encounters an unusual word but implicitly understands its meaning from the context even feels rewarded. The point, I think, is to use your vocabulary and use it well.
"Here’s an old salesman’s trick: People will tell you how they’re oriented. Those with a math bent will want ‘add it all up’ or ‘bottom-line it. A visual person may want to ‘run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.’ A person whose strength is interpersonal skills may want to see how another party feels about something.
"Listen for the cues and you’ll always know which words to use. You might even choose to save the 50-cent words for when you meet Roget at the lexicographer’s convention."
- Tim McCreight
Douglaston, NY
"I enjoy and appreciate your Word to the Wise feature. I also believe that a larger vocabulary goes with larger incomes. But sometimes you choose such arcane words that I refuse to clutter my mind with them. Keep up the good work - but choose your words with more care."
- Ed Fritz
Bethesda, MD
"I especially enjoy the Word to the Wise feature of ETR. Many times, a word that one might consider the use of as pompous is, in reality, simply the best way to express something. In other words, it takes the place of many words.
"I don’t plan on using every word that I receive each day, but I love getting them. It never hurts to expand one’s mind. Bravo and keep them coming."
- Fred B.
Oakhurst, TX
It’s Good to Know: If You Like City Living
If you are a nonsmoker living in Pittsburgh or Riverside, CA, your chances of dying from heart disease are the same as if you were an active smoker living in the country. That’s the finding of a new, seven-year study of 58,600 postmenopausal women reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Start Making Money Today
Interested in getting a nice little side-business going on the Internet? Or maybe even from your living-room table?
But you don’t have too much money, you don’t have too much time, and you’re not exactly Bill Gates when it comes to technology. Sound familiar?
A lot of people are in the same boat. The good news is that ETR has heard you. And now we’ve done something about it…
We’ve asked our colleague Marc Charles to be on the lookout for profit opportunities that can be run from a kitchen table, your desktop or out on the road.
Criteria? They’ve got to be inexpensive, easy to start, and still have great income potential, but without a lot of red tape.
They say when you’re first getting your feet wet with a side-business, the most important dollar to make is the first one. Well, Marc is an expert at taking beginning entrepreneurs and showing you how to make that first buck. He knows, because he’s done it dozens of times for himself, his family and his friends.
If you’ve been dreaming about starting your own business … now you can get started for about the price of 2 lattes.
And get this - you could be making money literally just hours from now. Imagine the feeling of finally getting a side business launched - TODAY!
- Patrick Coffey
Word to the Wise: Peremptory
Something that’s "peremptory" (puh-REMP-tuh-ree) - from the Latin for "destructive" - puts an end to all debate or action.
Example (as used by R.M. Berry in Leonardo’s Horse): "He would dismiss the whole business … with a peremptory snort."
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker … build your self-confidence and intellect … increase your attractiveness to others … just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR’s new Words to the Wise CD Library.]
Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007