3: MONETISATION

Monetising your message

How to generate six to seven figures by hacking the agent of influence’s bank account

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

New York City, 2 am. Seven hours and counting.

It was the morning of the launch of the National Publicity Summit. The lights from Times Square reflected down a corridor of skyscrapers and bathed me in light in my thirty-sixth-floor hotel room on 37th Street, just around the corner from Hell's Kitchen. I couldn't sleep. Jet lag had kicked in and I was angry and frustrated — because tomorrow, well, it was showtime.

In a few hours I was due to meet TV producers, journalists and editors from the likes of The View, Good Morning America, Today, Time magazine, Fast Company and 70 other influential media reps.

Only problem was, I was on track to attending the function comatose. This wasn't how I'd pictured my trip going at all. Hell's Kitchen was living up to its name.

Being the adventurous type, I had booked through Airbnb, where you rent out a room in someone else's apartment. I wanted to live with real New Yorkers, to experience the city in a way only a New Yorker could.

Big mistake!

Not only did my accommodation cancel on my first night in the city, but this was the best I could find at short notice, before I was locked away in a conference for four full days. There was no time to shop around. My room had floor-to-ceiling windows, no blinds, a bed with slats that would randomly fall off during the night, and no quilt — I used the blanket from the plane!

At 2 in the morning, sitting in the only chair in the room, I decided to work until I fell asleep. I started by writing a promotional email to my database, launching an online product I'd recently created in my spare time. I wasn't sure how it would go. I'd spent only an hour a day over the course of a month on it. I hit Send, rubbed my tired eyes and went back to bed.

Hacking the agent's bank account

The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso and Newton risked failure.And if we want to be great, we've got to risk it too.

— Steve Jobs

I'd finally done it. I'd hacked the agent's bank account! The product I'd launched at 2 in the morning in New York brought in more than $20 000 in sales that month alone. Finally I was making a serious return on investment with minimal effort, while being in another country!

My business no longer required my 24-hour input. In fact, I'd been unintentionally hindering my own progress by acting on the flawed premise that ‘the harder you work, the more you're worth'. But it wasn't about working harder; it was about working smarter and applying the Pareto Principle. Named after economist Vilfredo Pareto, this principle argues that there is an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs, such that 20 per cent of our efforts are responsible for 80 per cent of our results. Now I knew that working out the 20 per cent of my efforts was what I needed to focus on to continue to hack the agent's bank account.

And it all began with ascending.

Ascend your way to profits

As you read through these pages your vision for your ultimate lifestyle business will keep evolving. Increasingly you will gain insights into your own potential to impact the world in a more meaningful way through your knowledge and expertise. And your business's potential to generate repeat business that will drive profit margins higher and higher with each evolution.

Ascending your way to profits begins by persuading your customers of their higher needs.

Because my goal is to help you shape the world we live in, in relation to any industry and any product or service, I want you to focus on ongoing customer transformations, and on contributing to them in numerous ways. Think about how you can help them, not once or twice but three times or more, through a suite of products.

What I call the ‘ascension marketing model' is about producing and crafting complementary products or services that continue to help your clients progress to higher levels of experience.

Think of it like the school system. We start off in prep school, move on to primary school, high school and then university. Each level of education provides a higher degree of detail and complexity than the one that preceded it. If we were to attend all levels at once, our minds would collapse under the weight of the information. The graduated system creates a seamless experience, presenting information in chunk-size pieces and building knowledge at each level, thereby minimising the chances of becoming overwhelmed and failing.

Business is no different. Ideally every successful business has a defined product and/or service offering that includes lower priced, entry-level products, as well as successively more expensive, sophisticated offerings of greater and more intensive experiences.

Picture Apple Computers. One of many ways Apple has drawn millions of new customers to its products over the years is via the music download program iTunes, available for PC and Mac, which allows users to buy and download music and to manage their collection with a few keystrokes. Apple literally put their shopfront in their customers' hands. But of course it didn't end there. Suddenly iPods was being sold in their millions, soon to be followed by the iPhone and iPad tablets, and users were syncing their music between multiple Apple devices.

This meant that instead of a customer purchasing just one device, they ended up spending thousands on a suite of synced products that needed to be constantly updated, which significantly increased the average dollar spend per customer, not to mention Apple's profits.

This created what is called the ‘long tail', the economic concept explaining how the collective demand for less popular items can exceed demand for all of the most popular items added together. iTunes, for example, can carry a huge range of digital music because these digital products have no inventory limitations.

If you like to work on your laptop from a tropical island or a Manhattan coffee shop, then there is really only one way to go when it comes to selling your products, and that's digital. Forget inventory concerns. With digital you never sell out, delivery is automated and you can find cost-effective virtual staff to troubleshoot any customer queries with ease. You remain in control, yet you are ever further removed from the day-to-day chores of running a business. And what I like even more is that the results are immediate. You don't have to wait for a monthly report. You can even set up mobile-phone alerts to notify you each time you make a sale.

The ascension marketing model (AMM)

Work through a sample product offering for your ascension marketing model — to step your customers through the process, from opting into your database via a complimentary offer right through to purchasing your most expensive offering.

Each product created must pre-sell the next: step 1 will build the need for step 2, which builds the need for step 3 … and so on, just like the school system previously outlined. This technique, called seeding, is practised by every successful business. It is the process of implanting a suggestion that there is more to experience — that if you liked that, you'll love this.

It's one of the least pushy ways to sell online, and one of the most respected. You guide your customers through your sales process, instead of trying to force them through, as many do.

As with the school analogy, this creates a seamless customer experience by feeding information to the prospect or customer in increments, thereby minimising the potential for them to become overwhelmed and fail to purchase.

To put you on the fast track, you can think about this model as having three distinct levels.

In each phase you're solving a very specific piece of your customer's problem. You're meeting them at the level of experience or current education they possess on your topic, and helping them to ascend to where they want to be.

As you can see, there are three or more potential steps each prospect could take in relation to your business. Instead of them spending only a little with you by buying one product or service, some customers will have spent well over $5000 by journey's end.

By using this model, your ability to dramatically increase your revenue, reach and free time jumps immediately. Does it take time to create each product/service offering? Yes. Once the products are completed, however, you need only fill your sales funnel and let your automated marketing and sales processes do the work for you.

It's not rocket science, but it does follow a formula: the AMM template

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

— Albert Einstein

Whether you are at the very start of your journey, your products are a work-in-progress or they are ready to go, in the previous chapter you will have identified the types of outcomes your expertise and knowledge can achieve and the kinds of problems they can solve, and you will have brainstormed some possible product ideas.

To help you take it further, keeping your product ideas in mind, it's now time to put them in a specific order based on the AMM template (table 3.1, overleaf).

Don't worry about how you will create the products just yet, or even how many you will create. We'll get to that in the coming chapters. Use this as a brainstorming session to further refine a marketing model that could help you generate six to seven figures from your expertise and knowledge.

Table 3.1: the ascension marketing model template

Payday prediction and creation costs

Don't spend a cent until you've read this. Here I'll take you behind the scenes to show you a real-life example of one of my products in order to demonstrate key considerations before you spend a cent creating one of your own. This will provide you with valuable insight to help you decide whether or not your idea will fly.

My step-by-step Instant Publicity Marketing System has helped my clients secure international media coverage, from The Huffington Post, Vogue, CLEO and Marie Claire, to countless other magazines, blogs, newspapers and radio stations. Its components include:

Some readers may feel the initial development costs are high, and they may not have the finances to fund it, but it's critical to recognise what's possible when you're willing to think differently. For example, I negotiated 30-day billing terms with both the copywriter and graphic designer. This meant that I could take pre-orders for the product prior to launch to secure the funds needed to create it before I had to cover my initial start-up costs. You could even crowdfund your product to fund its release using sites such as www.kickstarter.com.

I decided to launch this product to my existing list to reduce costs. It generated $30 000 in sales within the first two months, and my online video sales page achieved a 4.4 per cent conversion rate from visitor to buyer, 2.1 per cent higher than the online industry average of just 2.3 per cent. This resulted in an initial profit of $28 400.

What this means is that if you want to make 10 sales a day to generate $970 in daily revenue for a product that retails at $97 per unit, you will need approximately 435 people to visit your site every day — fewer if your conversion rate is higher.

I call this the 2.3 per cent rule, and use it as my litmus test when working out the viability and potential profitability of new products.

We then need to factor in how much it is going to cost to acquire this traffic.

The method behind my metrics:the #1 secret to unlocking six to seven figures in sales

To be successful, the first thing you need to do is get your head around what needs to be measured and why these metrics are critical to your success. Don't roll your eyes. It's not hard, but you must do this. If you don't, you could go bankrupt! That sounds harsh, but it's true, and that's certainly not the Flee 9 to 5 lifestyle goal.

Here are the three key steps you will need to pay attention to as we journey through this process together:

Don't feel overwhelmed by this level of detail. It will all become clear by the end of the book, by which time you'll know exactly what's required to become successful.

Ultimately you are spending time and money on email campaigns or buying traffic with a view to bringing people to your site and converting them into clients. How much is it costing you now to perform each activity, and what is your return on your investment? It might be costing you $30 for each new visitor, but how will you know if that is too expensive? You need to measure it against your average visitor value and your profit margins. Then you'll know whether you are getting value for money.

To work out your average visitor value, follow these steps:

Using this example, your campaign is costing you $30 for an average visitor value of $1, which means you're losing $29 in advertising costs each time someone visits your website. This example isn't designed to shock you, but simply to show you how important it is to keep an eye on the numbers.

No list, no worries: how to get started without a database to market to

If you don't have a list of prospective customers, a Facebook following or a fan base ready to buy what you have to sell, don't worry. To launch a product successfully you don't need any of them, but what you do need are several highly targeted places in which you can purchase this exposure.

With a Facebook or Google AdWords campaign, for example, you can set your daily marketing budget as low as you like — $20, $50, $100-plus — depending on your objective. This will require a little, critically important, research on your part. But, compared with the $30 per new customer in the previous example, you can spend as little as 10 cents on Facebook and under $1 on Google.

Reverse engineering

So far in this book I have stepped you through how to uncover your talents and expertise. Now it's time to find a market to match it and to assess its viability. I call this process reverse engineering. Instead of trying to contort yourself into something you're not, we start with you, because we want the business to be built around your particular expertise. This is very significant when it comes to marketing yourself and your products.

To get started, you need an idea of the potential size of your customer base to see how you can compete with others in the marketplace. For example, let's take Facebook advertising. To be successful on Facebook you must be very clear about who your target market is.

The ability to determine a business's ideal prospects lies at the heart of its success, although it's never truly given the attention it deserves. This key activity is at the core of what builds your profile into a brand that is recognised by prospective customers and industry leaders. It is what you become known for. It sets the context in which prospects and the media engage with you. Your clear positioning and strong market message allow you to charge a premium for your products and services.

In essence, it's marketing made easy.

The 3X Customer Formula

This formula is designed to classify the key factors that allow you to clearly identify who you can sell your products and services to. We begin by identifying the top challenges that they experience in relation to your area of expertise. We then identify the ‘outcomes' they would like to achieve and, finally, how best to define them.

This research will allow you to reduce your advertising and marketing costs to a minimum while maximising your profit margins. Begin now by completing the questions posed in table 3.2. Be as specific and focused as you can in narrowing down who your customers are and what they need.

Table 3.2: the 3X Customer Formula template

How does this research translate into bankable products and/or services? By identifying the mindsets of your prospects when they buy, where best to advertise and who to contact for potential exposure — simply put, how to reach your ideal customer cost effectively and with minimum effort.

This research can be used not only to generate sales from online products, but to target companies and conferences to secure paid speaking engagements, which could earn you $2000 to $10 000-plus per engagement, depending on your topic and personal brand. You'll aim to identify media that could potentially feature you in a story that reaches out to hundreds of thousands of prospective customers, and to discover email lists and advertising opportunities that yield high conversion rates, not to mention hosting paid webinars, events or workshops or even getting paid as a top-level consultant.

It all depends on how you would like to create your ultimate lifestyle business and how far you would like to take it.

Sleep for sale — how to buy it by the bucketload

As I walked through Times Square on my way to the media conference, I thought to myself how nice it would be to take off and travel wherever I wanted to and not be limited by lack of funds. What I didn't realise was that I'd just set that process in motion.

Tips and resources

Use the ascension marketing model to create a seamless customer experience and a loyal fan base, thereby dramatically increasing your revenue, reach — and free time.

To conduct a successful online business, you must get your head around the metrics.

To maximise profits you need to understand the mindsets of your prospective clients; using the 3X Customer Formula will help you to define them, the challenges they experience and the outcomes they seek.

For tools, tricks and secrets to creating your very first product, visit www.benangel.com.au/flee9-5 to secure your exclusive ‘Get Started' resource guide.

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