Is passive income in your success plan? If not, it should be.....
Seven Steps to Leverage Your Expertise into a Highly Profitable Business
Is passive income in your success plan? If not, it should be.
Smart professional women develop multiple streams of income in their business. They know that financial freedom begins with passive income. They sell their ideas, not just their time.
You can turn your passion and what you love into profitable income streams. Coaching, consulting, speaking and delivering workshops are examples of active sources of income. Selling products, assessments, licensing your programs, and affiliate marketing are examples of passive sources of income. To be really profitable and free up more of your time, you want to shift the mix so that most of your income comes from passive sources.
You can redesign your business around your ideal lifestyle and free yourself from feeling trapped in your business. You can design your business so you work less, make more and live life on your own terms.
To build a very successful business in the new Web 2.0 marketplace you must learn how to create information products. You can leverage your expertise into a very profitable business by turning what you know into products and programs.
You can use the internet to create instant passive income. You can automate some of your income so that you can sleep on it and let the money roll in. Automate your marketing and sales to make it a no-brainer that happens independently of your time. What you need are technology, automation, systems and support.
I have learned a very good strategy to build a highly profitable business: position yourself as an expert in a profitable micro-niche and create information products. Teach people what you know, and solve their problems with your information and how-to expertise.
There are seven specific steps you can take to redesign your business around your strengths and turn your expertise into lucrative profit centers.
1. The first step is to establish your reputation
Create a national or international reputation and a brand in your segment of a profitable niche. Why is it important to have a strong personal brand in your area of expertise? Because the more people who know of you the more who will buy passive revenue products from you.
You can still earn active revenue from delivering your services and offering workshops and seminars, but if you're like me, the passive sources are a lot more appealing because you can maintain your ideal lifestyle without working so many hours one-on-one or traveling all the time.
2. Map out your passive income marketing funnel
The marketing funnel is a basic marketing concept that can have a huge impact on your profitability. First, you get lots of prospects in your funnel, then you guide them through the funnel. You need a plan for bringing people from your free talks or your free newsletter to your lowest priced offerings and then on to your highest paid services. The mistake many professionals make is to try to sell people directly into their high end services. That rarely works.
Instead, your information products will allow potential clients to get to know you with less work on your part and little risk or cost to them before they try your higher priced services. Your clients move down through your funnel so when they are ready to work one-on-one with you, you have already developed trust with them and you don't have to sell them.
3. Learn passive income skills and info-preneur strategies
You can multiply your profits by turning what you know into info-products and using the internet to create instant passive income. Learn the many ways to package your information and sell it online. Learn about content development to leverage the content you already have from your talks, articles and workshops. Learn general information about article marketing, web 2.0 marketing, affiliate marketing, blogging and pay per click advertising to determine which tactics are right for your business. Then, delegate those tasks to the specialists who can support you in growing your business.
4. Nurture your creativity
If you're so busy all the time that you don't have the energy to come up with new ideas or to spend writing or creating programs, you may not be able to earn passive income. Creativity and innovation are key to coming up with new ideas. You need to carve out blocks of time out in your week for creative right-brain, intuitive thinking.
I encourage my clients to take time for what I call 'creative silence'. It's in these moments of silence – when we are in the flow and a 'non-doing' state of mind – that inspiration comes to us. Get into the habit of capturing your ideas and writing regularly to develop information products to position yourself as a credible expert.
5. Create systems
Systems are the key to leveraging your time and expertise. You can create a system for every function in your business so that you do something one time, and then it is either delegated or automated to be done in future. You don't want to be doing all the work yourself and reinventing the wheel each time. You can have systems for getting client referrals, for contact management, for delivering your newsletter, for your recordkeeping, and for product development.
In fact, everything you do in your business can be made into a system. Leverage the power of technology and the internet to reduce the mundane tasks that take your time and energy.
6. Delegate and automate
It's impossible to build a highly profitable business by doing it all yourself. Learn to delegate. Build your team to help you create your 'information empire'. You can start small with delegating the tasks you don't like to do to one person a few hours a week, then build from there. To know what to delegate, make a list of all the things you don't like to do or are putting off doing. I call this my 'not to-do' list. These become the first tasks that you delegate.
Automation is also important to free up your time. You can automate your follow-up messages using autoresponders, such as AWeber and Get Response. Automate your sales using a shopping cart system, such as the 1 Shopping Cart system through Practice Pay Solutions. Automate your article marketing using a paid service like Article Marketer. Have your teleseminars recorded automatically using one of the many free services, such as Free Audio Conferencing
7. Play a bigger game
Do you have a big vision for what you see as possible for people and for the world? What's your contribution going to be? To play bigger and make more money, you need to enroll other people in your vision and create accountability and support for yourself by joining a coaching program or mastermind team. You need to take a leadership role in your industry to make a bigger impact. You can leverage your expertise through joint ventures and collaboration with others. If you have a purpose and passion for your work, you can develop a base of lifetime followers that will sustain your success for years to come.