Differentiators For Your Business

The first thing I want to impart to you is something that is really very simple and is something that I will be implementing in my business very soon.

I was watching a video on a sales page of a diet and detox product this week. Nothing special you say, quite a few people do this now. This particular video was actually very powerful and made me really look into the product very deeply. OK, I am trying (not very successfully to lose some weight and get a bit fitter myself. So, I did have a vested interest.

However, the point is this, the video made me stay on a site I would otherwise have left...and it made me buy the product in the end.

That got me thinking! So, I did some research and this is what I found out...putting video on your sales page can increase sales...massively. Now the percentage varies depending on what you read, but it's anywhere from 30 - 250%.

So, as the promised recession starts to dig in its claws, this would appear to be an excellent way to differentiate your site and to increase sales. As I said, I will be implementing some video very soon, and I'll be making sure I keep a close eye on the results. But, I fully expect this to be a big winner.

The second differentiator is one that I do already use. Ask your customers what they want.

It's all too easy to get stuck in your own little world, particularly if you run a small / Internet business from home. The best, most successful business people are constantly asking their customers for feedback, ideas and what else they can offer. This is just a sensible, good business discipline, but out of all the sites I subscribe to, very few actually do this.

Funnily enough, this again happened to me this week. And guess what? I responded to give feedback and the person concerned came back to me and said: "Great idea, I'll do it."

Who wins?

We both do. He has a couple of ideas for new offerings to his customers and I get some cool information that I've been after for a while.

One of the common themes in questions I get asked is: "How do I find new product ideas? " Well, what better way than to ask people what they want from you. This is so powerful and is a much overlooked technique.

Another way of increasing business is to become invaluable to people. There are a couple of ways of doing this.

Firstly if you are an authority on your subject, the advice and information you give, provided it is good and profitable for your customers, will make you invaluable. This is especially so if it is new, detailed or cutting edge information. Your customers will refer you to other potential customers and word of mouth will become a powerful weapon for you.

The other way to make yourself invaluable is once you have customers paying you for a product or service, is to offer them something else (maybe free), that locks them into your main product line.

You will need to have a repeat or residual income model for this to work. If you do, then if you offer something of real value (for free) that is taken away if the customer subsequently decides to stop receiving your main product, you have a very powerful method of making yourself invaluable. Inertia itself is working in your favour if you have people on a recurring subscription anyway, but why not lock them in that extra bit tighter?

So, for example, if you have a paid for monthly newsletter, you might offer free access to your online archive for as long as they subscribe. This is another very powerful and easy to implement method to keep you ahead of the competition.

Finally, invest in yourself! This is a really interesting one. I've championed the "you should never stop learning" ticket in the past. For my money, the second you stop learning is the second you start to die...at least mentally. You should always be looking to push your boundaries, get out of your comfort zone.

If you do this, interesting things will happen...and here's an example.

This last month or so, I've been learning AdsSense. I made three really quick pages as an addendum to my diet and detox blog Anyway, very simple pages.

I took a blank Frontpage document, coloured it blue. Inserted a table (one cell) with a white background and sized it as I wanted. I found a few relevant articles on the Internet, did about 10 minutes further research and mixed and matched to come up with my own article which I wrote in about 30 minutes.

I added one 468 x 60 AdSense module and hey presto...I had my first AdSense site. It's made me $2! Don't laugh...I've made money using AdSense which is more than 95% of people do! And it wasn't difficult.

It took me about three hours to go through the Adsense tutorials, learn what I needed to learn and get a basic site up.

OK, I know, what's so good about all of this?

Here's what's good. I took my new knowledge and merged it with some old knowledge and came up with an 80 page AdSense website.

I worked in recruitment for 20 years. In 1997 I wrote a book about how to get a job. Anyway, I purchased some AdSense templates, had a look through and picked one I liked. I then dropped the book into the template on 80 separate pages, dropped in the Adsense code and I have an 80-page website.

It took me roughly three complete days to get it 100% right. Not bad for a first attempt.

Now, if each page on this site makes me $2 / month, that is $160 / month every month for...ever. For just three days work. As it happens, the hoodia page just has the one AdSense module, while the Love Ur Job pages each have four. Now I don't expect I'll get four times the income because of the extra modules, but maybe twice. So...that makes it $320 /month, now that's a bit better!

As I know many agencies I'll be mailing them all offering this as a free resource, so hundreds, maybe thousands of agencies, will be linking to the site, so, say that doubles income as well...Hey, $640 /month. Now we're talking!

So, as you can see, investing in yourself can pay good dividends. How would you like to increase your income by over $500 per month in a so-called recession? Silly question really!

I hope you agree, some very powerful techniques here to help differentiate your business, with plenty of food for thought.

I hope this is helpful in making added profit for your business.

Cheers now

Derek