Starting A Business Too Much Of A Gamble?

Grand Victoria Elgin, William Hopkins via Flickr

Grand Victoria Elgin, William Hopkins via Flickr


1. Play the right game







3. Use a methodology




4. You will eventually win




So what do you think, is it worth the gamble?

Originally published 6/13/2011 on

Small Changes With Big Results






It’s All About The Product



cr / ci = ri









Marketing Blah, Blah, Blah







Isn’t Marketing And Sales The Same Thing?






What Can You Do With Marketing?





What Do You Know?

My son went off to help in the hot dessert of Iraq
He packed up his bags and never looked back
I was so proud of him at the end of the show
I wish he’d never gone but what do you know?

My other son’s been going to college out west
Wants to be an actor, he’s trying his best
All it takes is a break to spin things out of control
He’s got a good head but what do you know?

My daughter is a Senior in high school next year
She got through it all, I really had no fear
Next year she’s going to Belmont, out on music row
She’s a country music writer, hey what do you know?

I’ve worked now for a distribution company going on three years
The layoffs started earlier, created a lot of fear
Now I’m a short timer with a week left to go
They’re closing down the place, well what do you know?

I started marketing my business a couple years back
Didn’t get much business but I made some good contacts
Now things are turning round, I’m reaping what I sowed
It’s going to support me, now what do you know?

Marketing 101 For Small Businesses

Marketing is not simply the act of selling the product to a customer but is the definition and backbone of the total effort of the company.  Marketing defines the attributes of the customer and how the customer will be reached so that time and money are not wasted.  Marketing looks for the value added of the company that can be sold to the customer.  Marketing outlines the business flow of customers through various areas of the business.  Marketing can help determine the vision and direction of the company.

Good marketing is the difference between being miserable and disheartened, and being energized with a lot of activity.  You are selling to the right people who want to hear your message.  People are making their way through the marketing process, hearing the sales presentation, buying product or signing up as distributors.  Poor marketing practice is like cold-calling the phone book.  It’s beating your head against a brick wall and never getting anywhere.  If you are a new multi-level marketer, you have probably felt this way many times.

So how do you market well?  You need to find the right types of people for your product or opportunity.  Are you selling widgets?  Who uses widgets?  Do men or women usually buy widgets?  Are widgets purchased by everyone or just certain income levels?  Are people more likely to buy widgets in a certain part of the country or world?  Are office workers more likely to buy widgets than blue collar workers?  These are the kinds of questions you need to ask about your product in order to build a profile of your customer.

For a business opportunity that sells widgets, you probably want your customer for widgets plus a few other elements.  For instance, are store owners likely to want to sell widgets?  Are widgets best sold by personal sales people?  Does being a distributor for widgets offer a discount for purchases?  These questions can define which of your customers you may want to offer the opportunity to, or the kind of people you want to find for your opportunity.

The attributes of your potential customer or distributor is their demographic profile.  Demographics are subsets of the general population.  A given person usually fits within a group or several groups.  Perhaps your demographic profile describes only 10% of the population so 90% of the population typically would not be interested in what you are offering.  If you make your offer to the correct 10% of the population, not all will buy but they are considerably more likely to be interested.  This makes business fun, to be presenting to people who want to be presented to.

Marketing also defines your advertising methods, sales messages, and what values your business offers to your customers.  Marketing as a whole may be a process of trial and error, but once you find what works for you, you just do it over and over and bigger and bigger.  Larger companies try to get more precise with their marketing activities by doing a ton of research before ever delivering a product to market, but since we don’t have a major amount of resources or time, doing things small in a trial and error fashion works fine.

How To Create More Demand

You have a winning product and you have a great sales presentation, why are orders only trickling in? It could be many different factors, and you will have to consider each one and possibly experiment a bit before you come up with the right answer:

1. Your expectations are out of whack

Perhaps you have good sales and you are just looking to get rich overnight. Let’s say you spend $100 on advertising and get $20 in orders. That’s not bad. Hopefully the orders you’ve received are from customers who will buy from you again.

2. People like the product but they like another vendor

Maybe your sales presentation needs a little bit more about why people should buy from you. Why should they buy from you and not somebody else? Just because you gave the sales presentation doesn’t mean you’ll get the sale.

3. People don’t understand your product

Perhaps either people don’t understand why they should buy the product or why they should buy this product when other comparable products sell for less. A little salesmanship could overcome this problem by going into more detail about the product’s features and benefits, and why the customer will be happier with this product.

4. The price really is too high

Generally as the price of your product goes down, demand should go up. You should not be selling for a loss but maybe a minor adjustment could change things. A little research is in order to figure out what people are willing to pay.

5. You aren’t selling your services

Many services add much value to a product. For instance, if you offer a long guarantee or you engrave the item. Perhaps you deliver the product to the person’s door the same day ordered. Make sure to offer free services that cost you little, or save you money.

6. You haven’t considered customer retention

Often initial orders are great but follow up orders are poor. How is the customer being treated? Are you meeting their expectations? Is the product falling short? Make sure to follow up with customers who order and ask them if there is anything you could do better.

I mentioned services that save you money. We found that many of our efforts to improve our customers’ experiences were worth spending a little more money for and saved us money compared to other distributors who did not do these things. For instance, we offered a six month money-back guarantee where other distributors offered 30 days. We found that more of our customers were successful with the product and we had significantly fewer returns.

We also had a policy of going above and beyond for our customers, and doing our best to eliminate the hassles of doing business with us. We found that people appreciated the effort so much that they would only buy from us, we had very few complaints, and almost nobody took advantage of our good nature. In fact, we only ever had 2 credit card charge backs because we would usually be able to work things out with our customers. I had mentioned that we used to bill customers who would send payment. We had so few customers not pay us that we saved money versus customers who used credit cards. I would also call customers who didn’t pay just to ask them if everything was ok. I ended up writing off 2 of the accounts but we generated a lot of word-of-mouth advertising.

Chris and I used to have meetings to discuss “the right thing to do” when we had an issue with a customer. This led to better customer service policies and more happy customers.

Hopefully you can come up with other ideas to improve customer retention and pump up your sales.

Linking To Your New Website

Your website is your sales presentation and much more, but you must advertise to get visitors, warm leads, and or prospects to your website (i.e sales presentation). The way you do this for a website is to have advertisements that link into your website. Advertisements can be long winded or a little blurb that quickly describes what your website is. Sometimes your advertisement is actually built from your website. This is the case when a search engine indexes your web pages.

Nobody will know about your website until you start getting links to your website from other sites. Typically the way this is done is by telling the other website about your site, or submitting your site. You can submit your site to directories and search engines. And there are a ton of them! I would start with Google and Bing, then do a search for search engines and directories from Google for more places to submit your site for free.

Another possibility is to exchange links with other similar websites. You would typically contact the other site by email and ask if they would like to exchange links with you. Then you put a link to them on your site and they put a link to you on theirs. Many web owners will gladly exchange links but others may not reply, but keep trying.

If you have a blog, there are a ton of RSS search engines and other ways to promote your blog. Do a search for “How do I promote my blog” for more ideas. Many websites provide this kind of information to you. Additionally, you may want to post thoughtful comments on other blogs in response to their articles. Most comment forms include your name and website name so people can see what your site looks like. You might also try this with non-blog websites, I’m sure you would get a few visitors.

There are places on the internet where you can submit classified advertisements that include a link to your website. Many are free. I am not sure how effective advertising this way is, but you might get a visitor or two. One last way to advertise your website for free is social networking sites. I have talked about these before but they do often allow you to link directly to your site. Up and coming social networking sites such as are often very effective.

There are tons of other ways to advertise links to your site, just do a search for “How do I promote my website”. Many will submit your site for cost, but you really want to try to promote your website for free. Stick to free. I say this because some of the best ways to advertise your website on the internet are free. If you can, I would measure the most effective ways to advertise for free, which website statistics often provide.

Ultimately we are more concerned with sales than visitors, so the more targeted your visitors are the better. In other words, when your advertisement is presented to your demographic and they visit, they are most likely to buy.

The way that I promote my website is to spend a little time each day on promotion activities. Set aside an hour or two, research, and post requests for links. It is not hard work and it will produce results in the long run. I often switch from method to method, for instance today I will post responses to blogs and tomorrow I will submit my site to directories.

For those of us doing multi-level marketing, you can assume that the same concepts are generally true of recruiting.

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