Raising Entrepreneurs

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I was thinking about a particular business issue yesterday, one I have seen in many of my offline clients’ businesses, and one which is also a problem for internet marketers.

The issue is that old chestnut that it’s five times easier (and cheaper) to sell something to someone who has already bought from you than to find a new customer from scratch.

In a retail store, that means coming up with creative ways to collect contact information from your customers, and then posting them physical letters (although these days more and more traditional retailers are collecting email addresses).

Internet marketers have so many advantages over traditional business when it comes to creating their customer database. They usually collect an email address when they make a sale, and, what’s more, people expect to be asked for their email address when they shop online. They don’t resist it in the way that they do when their local pizza delivery guys asks for contact information.

And yet, I know that many people online are only selling a single product. How can you follow up and make the five-times-easier second sale if you don’t have anything else to sell?

I was trying to think of a way to make this idea concrete, for younger kids especially, who struggle to visualise what we mean when we say “customer database”.

And it came to me.

Did you ever see that game Trac Ball, with a ball and two scoop-shaped racquets? Like plastic tennis racquets which have had the edges curled forward, so no matter where the ball hits, it is directed to the bottom centre, near the handle, into a pocket. When you make a throwing motion, the centrifugal force lifts the ball up out of the pocket, and the curve of the racquet sends it curving beautifully through the air to your partner, who just has to get theirs into the ball’s general vicinity and the shape of the racquet does the rest.

By comparison, a standard tennis racquet is really good ball-repellent. I mean, those balls just BOUNCE off that racquet, so hard that if you’re not really careful with the angle of the head the ball shoots out of the park, and you spend the rest of the afternoon hunting in the woods for it.

These two types of racquets are a great analogy for the two styles of doing business.

In the sub-optimal business, customers come along, interact once, buy or don’t buy in that instant, and then “bounce off”, never to be seen again. You can get crazy busy hitting ball after ball, but you can’t stop because when you stop there are no balls around at all - no sales in your business.

What you really want to build is a Trac-Ball business - a business which “scoops” up prospects from the general vicinity and channels them to where you want them. You can hold them as long as you like, and send them “over the net” to your product offers when you are good and ready.

Your opt-in list is the key to your Trac Ball business.

Wow!

I just got off the phone with Justin Brooke! (I know what that sounds like - don’t you see something like that at the top of every salesy email that ends up with an affiliate link to yet another “pay money to make money” offer?)

This isn’t one of those.

Justin is one of the big players in the internet marketing game, he’s in with some of the big super-affiliates, and he’s in the middle of a major launch of his own new product (and if you don’t know what all that means, I’ll simply say he’s got better things to do with his time than be on the phone to me right now!)

Justin teaches people how to sell their web sites for big money, just like 15-year-old Josh Buckley did.

Anyway, I tried to tune in to a webinar Justin ran yesterday, and couldn’t get the sound working - very annoying - You Tube works fine. Even my tech guru was baffled. I sent an email to Justin, and despite my email having a somewhat peevish tone, Justin graciously invited me to call him so he could answer any questions I had in person.

I was stunned. This simply does not happen in the internet marketing world.

What’s more, when I got on the phone, Justin was incredibly patient, and helpful, and interested in what we are doing with getting kids started in businesses of their own.

As you can imagine, I was incredibly grateful - but it didn’t stop there!

Justin offered to write a guest post for this blog about how to help your kids set up a saleable web site, and to sell it for good money. Then he said he was interested in any case studies of kids actually accomplishing a sale, even if all they made was $500.

And, to cap it all off, he then said that if you and your child use his information to sell your kid’s website for $500 or more, and write up a case study about it, he will give you 12 months free membership to his new SiteFlipAcademy.com website - not hundreds of people, of course, but the first person, and one person each month after that (to make it fair for people who might not yet have a site up and running).

Can you believe it? I still can’t believe it. That membership is worth hundreds of actual dollars, and Justin has priced the membership very generously anyway, so the real value of the offer is probably thousands.

Of course, it’s good for him to be able to say “hey, this is so simple, even kids can do it, here’s my proof”, but it’s still a very generous offer to make, when all you and your child have to do is write up a case study on how you sold the website.

I have a case study template document here, which I will give to Carolyn, so if you are serious about this, use the contact form on the Raising Entrepreneurs site to ask her for a copy of the template. It’s always easier to write something if you have a framework, and I promised Justin the case studies would all be really good quality write-ups.

Since Justin’s being so generous, I’ll match his offer. As well as a 12-month membership to Site Flip Academy, you will also get 12 months free membership to Cash-Smart Kids. Weekly lessons on money and business concepts, including teaching stories, activities, and real world money-making ideas, including setting up your own niche website. Take this short-term excitement for your child, and make it into a lifetime of wealth creation!

Now, if you want to get started immediately, you can go and do some research on Justin’s blogs at www.siteflipking.com and www.websitenegotiator.com. There are also free videos on the sales page for Site Flip Academy, just bear in mind it is a sales page. I’m not sending you there as a trick to get you to buy something - Justin is really genuine and a great guy, and you can watch the videos without paying a cent.

So, there you have it! Get your web site up and running, build a subscriber list, and add some revenue sources - you stand to gain two valuable memberships which will give you the information you and your kids need to be set up for life.

Don’t have a web site yet? Not sure how to get started? Register for our free Get Started! email course and we’ll give you an eBook and email you step-by-step instructions.

Last weekend I went on a road trip with one of my daughters. It wasn’t that far, just a couple of hours up into the mountains near where we live. She’s writing an eBook, or, rather, she has contracted a writer who is an expert in her topic to write an eBook to her specifications, and the writer had bogged down a little.

So, she and I headed off to visit the writer with a nifty new Ipod microphone to do some interviewing to help get the project moving again.

On the way up there, she was telling me about the Zone athletics meet, where she represented her school at shot put.

“I sucked,” she said. “I only got to go to Zone because the best two in each sport went to Zone, and there were only two of us who put our names down for shot put, so we both got to go.”

“Well,” I said, “It’s easy to come first when not many people are competing with you.”

“Hey!” she said. “That would be a great example for the internet business!”

And so it would.

What we are doing, with all the researching we teach our members to do, is looking for the niches like shot put in athletics - the places where not many people think of competing. The places that aren’t sexy and flashy and celebrity-generating.

And the beauty of an internet business of course, unlike sports, is that they don’t gather people together from further and further apart until you meet some real competition. The internet is a global market, but it’s composed of millions of little pockets, and you only need to come first in your own little pocket to make a decent income.

All we are doing when we look for a profitable niche is finding our own little pocket where we can come first.

Just like my 11-year-old shot put “star”!

As I regularly point out to the parents in our Cash Smart Kids program (www.cash-smart-kids.com), opportunities for business education are everywhere.

I was out with one of my girls, aged 11 at the time, waiting for our pizza to cook in a small, family-owned pizza store by the beach.

She looked around, thought for a bit, and then asked “Does a shop like this lose money, or make lots of money, or just sort of balance out?”

“Well,” I said “They have to spend a certain amount of money on things like rent and wages, whether they sell anything or not. And they have to buy the ingredients, and if they don’t sell enough pizzas, they have to throw ingredients out.”

“Because they go mouldy?”

“They got too old to use, one way or another” (Discussion of Health Department requirements can be saved for another day!)

“But if they have too many customers they run out of ingredients.”

“Yes, they need to balance the ingredients so they don’t run out and they don’t have to throw too much away.”

“And if they sell lots they make lots of money?”

“That’s right.”

“So they have to get lots of people to come in and buy things?”

“Yes.”

“But we’ve been here for ages and only two other people have come in.”

“That’s true. But it’s still early – I’m sure lots of people will come in later tonight because it’s Saturday.”

“Still,” she said thoughtfully, “it’s hard. You can’t go out and get people to come in.”

“I’m sure they advertise, and put coupons in the newspaper,” I said.

She frowned.

“I think I’d rather stick with having an internet business,” she said. “It doesn’t cost rent to have a website.”

She finds that thought process just as interesting as the other thing she learned that same day, which was that the beach we were on was part of a sand spit joining an island to the coast. At one point you can stand on one beach, facing inland, and look down the street to see the other beach at the other end. She was fascinated.

All I did was to answer her questions (about both topics) in words that she could understand.

She still doesn’t have the vocabulary of an accountant – she couldn’t tell you the definition of fixed and variable costs, ROI, or expected return - or isthmus (the sand spit), or bombo (the island).

But she has the concepts, based on her own experience. Business concepts are so simple that a child can understand them, as readily as they understand islands and sand spits.

Now, it doesn’t happen by accident. Our mainstream culture doesn’t explain business ideas to kids in the normal course of events. However, once children have grasped the basic idea of how business works, learning more advanced business concepts is fun and interesting for them, so it’s worth getting the conversations going early in their lives.