You Need to Find These People

On Saturday morning, Matt Smith and I worked with seven fantastic Early To Rise readers to build their businesses. It was like “The Breakfast Club”, but for eager, smart, ambitious entrepreneurs – and everyone wanted to be there, too. There was the “Young Gun”, the “Kung Fu Girl”, “Daily Deal Man”, the “Legendary Copywriter”, the “Big Idea Guy”, the “Underground Coder”, and “The Ad Man with the Plan”.

We sat around solving each other’s problems, everyone adding value to each other’s business, making potentially lucrative business deals and affiliate connections, and even starting new businesses together.

You need to find these people in your life to mastermind with them. It’s people like these that we’ll be bringing together these types of people at our Early to Rise event in the spring of 2012 as well as through the Financial Independence Marketplace.

Craig Ballantyne

“Mastermind and collaborate with other smart entrepreneurs if they have futures that are even bigger than their present.” – Yanik Silver, Maverick Business Rule #29

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A New American Dream

in 2006, over 75% of the orders on my fitness website came from America. Today, that number is 60%. At first glance, you might blame the economy. However, a greater impact is the rising number of people around the world buying things online. According to the October issue of Inc. Magazine, $10.1 billion was spent in 2010 on American e-commerce sites by customers outside of the United States. In addition, today, Americans make up only 14% of the world’s total internet users.

The internet is much more global today than just a few years ago, and you’ll soon find you are getting orders from Australia, Europe, South America, the Middle East, and even China. Almost every week when I review my sales I see a new country code that I haven’t seen before. That’s the power of having an international web-based business powering your American Dream.

No matter where you live in the world you can sell to customers in every country. The world is your marketplace.

For over 10 years, Clickbank.com has served as one of the best places for online businesses to begin selling digital products. As a third party merchant account that handles payments, refunds, and affiliate payouts, Clickbank has paid out over $1.9 billion dollars to vendors and affiliates using the Clickbank system. I’ve used Clickbank for several of my major online businesses in the past 5 years and have had a great experience with them. For only a small set-up fee of $49.95, you can get started selling your digital products through their system.

You don’t need to go to the bank and get a merchant account or spend hours setting up a payment gateway on your site. Clickbank makes pursuing the American Dream a lot easier for international businesses on a tight start-up budget. In the Fast Start program that you can order as part of your Financial Independence Monthly package, I’ll show you every single step to using Clickbank to your advantage.

Discover how to achieve your American Dream and Financial Independence here.

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How to Find the Right People For Your Business
By Craig Ballantyne

Imagine a beer commercial where old folks sat around in a nursing home drinking beer in their wheelchairs. Or a beer a commercial where soccer moms sat around drinking beer at child’s birthday. Obviously we’ll never see these commercials because the ads wouldn’t address the target market.

Beer makers know who their audience is, and they advertise directly to them. In the ads we see, the beer company clearly identifies and calls out their prospect. If you’re a young man interested in having a good time and meeting girls while enjoying sports events, this ads for you.

By identifying and addressing their target market, the beer company is happy to exclude a large portion of the population. They accept that not only will older folks and non-drinkers not be interested in the commercials, but the beer company also accepts that the ad will offend the non-interested party. This is a trade-off the beer company is happy to make. They are willing to exclude to attract.

This makes obvious sense in our extreme example. However, one of the most common problems in a new or stagnant business is the lack of a specific target market. All too often the business owner or sales and marketing team try to appeal to everyone. As the old saying goes, “selling to everyone means selling to no one”.

Too many companies are worried that they will offend potential clients by being specific with their sales message, but as a result they are not specific enough for their target market and miss out on making the necessary connection for the sale.

Your business needs a WHO before you can sell a WHAT. Unfortunately, most business owners and salespeople try to force their product on the marketplace without properly identifying their best customers.

Once you figure out the right market, everything else falls into place. Clearly specifying your market will allow you to identify the best ways to reach your audience. When you know who your audience is, you’ll then know where your audience can be found. You’ll be able to advertise in the right spots, whether it’s the newspaper, online, or even on the radio or TV. Your marketing will be dictated by who your audience is.

It will also help you create the all-important irresistible offer for your market. By knowing your audience’s pain and suffering, you’ll be able to provide the exact solution to solve this problem. You want your customer to exclaim, “This is EXACTLY what I’ve been looking for.” Every sales message, product, and lead generation offer you create should be exactly for your target market.

However, it’s not just enough to know demographics about your audience. Sure, it’s important to know your best customer’s age, income, gender, family status, location, and job. But you also need to know what’s going on in their head. You need to understand their emotional wants and needs.

On the weekend, one of our coaching clients was struggling to pick the right target audience, and of main concern to him was figuring out how to reach his audience. Fortunately, thanks to ETR Publisher Matt Smith’s extensive business experience, the group was able to identify the best way to reach the prospect.

As Matt explained, knowing how to reach your customer goes beyond just demographics and he pointed out the importance of knowing customer psychographics.

According to Wikipedia, “psychographic variables are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. Psychographics can also be seen as an equivalent of the concept of “culture” as used most commonly in national segmentation.”

When you combine customer demographics and psychographics, you’ll have a powerful profile of your best customer. There’s one exercise that allows you to combine them into an important part of the business puzzle. If you’re struggling to sell to the right client, one of the most important exercises you can do in your business is to create your customer avatar.

Go back and review this article I wrote where I show you how to create your customer avatar.

List out all the statistics you know about your customer, but don’t forget to tap into the emotional aspects as well.

According to marketing expert Yaro Starak, we need to know the “underlying emotional conditions driving the actions they take. When you have a deep emotional awareness of why they are there, you can better adjust all aspects of your marketing – in fact your entire business – to appeal to your avatar’s deep rooted emotional motivations.”

Take a step back in your business and take the focus off of WHAT you can sell and revisit the avatar exercise to make sure you know the right WHO for your business.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” Peter Drucker

Similar Articles:

• Know Who Your Audience Is!
• Affiliate Marketing
• Use a Customer Avatar to Attract Customers
• The Ultimate Start-up Guide for Digital Entrepreneurs
• Word to the Wise: Small Beer