“Every prospective client, whether it’s reality or not, perceives their problems to be unique to them.”

Only by establishing yourself as an expert will you build the necessary credibility to your brand and reinforce your niche positioning. If all these elements are not totally congruent, your offer will never be compelling to your prospects.

Your marketing message will seem confusing as your prospects will not understand how you can offer solutions to their niche problems - problems they may have been experiencing for some time and not been able to solve themselves - without being higher qualified or having specialised skills and experience (being an expert).

What are the benefits of establishing yourself as an expert in your niche? Being an expert or specialist in your niche affords you many benefits and competitive advantages including:

As an expert you can market with dignity! You won’t have to ‘chase’ clients. Clients will come looking for you because of your ’specialist’ tag. Remember, clients are searching for someone who is perceived to be as knowledgeable and skilled as they are in their niche.

There are substantially fewer barriers to conversion because your prospective clients are pre-sold by perceived knowledge and specialisation.

Limiting the number of competitors you have because you are perceived as one of the few (perhaps only) coaches that can meet the clients unique needs.

Building your reputation and reinforcing your positioning as a superior (if not ‘the’ superior) coach in the niche. 

Being given the opportunity to speak, comment and or write about important issues, challenges or opportunities within the Niche. By default it gets you involved in industry events and networking opportunities.

In turn this opens the door to have your ideas and insights published and talents recognised by important industry commentators, which in turn assists in developing your image as an expert! Your reputation as an ‘expert’ will endorse your business and vice versa.

It allows you to be more selective with the clients you work with and you can deliver products and services you are most passionate about.

You can take advantage of powerful and highly leveraged marketing strategies such as publishing, public speaking, networking opportunities, JVs, referrals and endorsements.

You get a much higher return on your marketing dollar, reducing your Client Cost of Acquisition, improving your bottom line net income (and breaking even earlier as a business start-up).

You are able to build greater client loyalty which significantly increases your new client referrals, which in turn dramatically reduces your cost of client acquisition. You also get a higher conversion rate to your services. Prospective clients are far more likely to trust and appreciate the wisdom and knowledge of a coaching specialist.

The ability to solve a broader range of client problems. Once you’re an established and trusted advisor for the client you will be able to expand the range and scope of services provided. The chance to better educate clients to the value you provide and charge fees based on the cost of the niche problems rather than on an hourly rate.

You can expand your services from 1 to 1 coaching to include highly leveraged product based and 1 to many services and are able to work with more astute and strategically beneficial affiliate partners who will provide higher value to your clients and ultimately better financial return to you.

Due to your strong client rapport and expertise, your clients will have a greater propensity to take up your endorsed affiliate services. As an expert in your niche, your service becomes the only logical choice for your prospects.

In this article we look at two inexpensive, highly effective and leveraged ways to reach thousands of prospects via the Internet: affiliate programs and link exchanges.

Affiliate programs (also referred to as “reseller” or “associate” programs) are a great way to get other people called “affiliates” to promote your product or service for you. For every paying customer your affiliates refer to your web site, you pay them a commission. And since you only pay when you make money - it’s extremely low risk.

Your affiliates send visitors to your web site using banner ads, text links, letters of referral, and so on, while you track these referrals using special software. It’s an extremely powerful way to grow your business because it automates your traffic generation.

To get started with your own affiliate program, you need to:

1. Set your commissions. (To keep your affiliates motivated, you should pay them 40% to 50% of your profits per sale.)
2. Get software to track the traffic and sales of your affiliates so you know what to pay them.
3. Provide your affiliates with tools they can use to promote your products (like e-mails, banners, etc.).
4. Recruit your affiliates. (Look for sites that target your market, and invite them to become affiliates.)

Affiliate programs are an ideal way to automate your traffic generation because other people market your web site for you - and you don’t lift a finger. Your sales increase on a daily basis - but they do all the selling for you, and it doesn’t cost you a dime until they send you paying customers.

Link requests require minimal effort from you, but they can explode your traffic numbers overnight. How? If your site is a featured link on a major site in your industry, one that receives a ton of attention, your site immediately benefits from all the exposure their site receives.

Getting started with this strategy is simple, but you should follow a structured process every time you request a link. Let’s break it down into a few easy steps:

1. Do a Google search for your standard keywords - the ones that people generally use to find your site.
2. Make detailed notes about the sites that appear regularly in the top ten listings for your major keywords.
3. Use the Alexa Toolbar, LinkPopularity, or Technorati to find out who these sites are linking to, who is linking to them, and how much traffic they are receiving, then look up their contact information.

Make sure you know the correct URL for the site, the URL of the sub-page on which you want your link to appear, the name of the site owner or webmaster, the date you last visited their site, and a brief description of the contents of the site.

When you’re ready to contact these web site owners and request a link, write a personal e-mail - don’t use form letters. Be sure to include some positive comments about their site, information about you and your site (along with your URL), an explanation of why a link to you would benefit them, and instructions for contacting you to get started.

You want your request to be thorough and professional. If you can present a persuasive argument for why the link request benefits both of you, you stand a better chance of forging a connection.

If you are really eager to get your link on their site, be prepared to up the ante by offering them a commission or a link on your site in return. The investment could be well worth the extra exposure your marketing message receives.

But be stingy when other businesses request links on your site - just as links on others’ sites serve as a personal recommendation of your site, links on your site are recommendations for their businesses. Only recommend the best.

Related Articles from IQ:

1. Testimony Power
2. Gro.www. Your Business
3. Simple Viral Strategies
4. Bring BUZZ to Your BIZ

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You have an invisible business! What you sell is not tangible. You can’t drive it home, wear it, sleep on it or consume it. As a coach you are in the Service Industry. The service industry has many unique attributes that differentiate it from the product industry.

There are both positive and negative differentiators to a service industry. How you optimise the positives and mitigate the negatives impacts on the effectiveness and success of your business. And it impacts dramatically.

This article will provide you with some strategies to optimise your services in order to stand out from your competitors. The strategies will include: information products; establishing your credibility; Post Purchase Reassurance and; low delivery costs.

Information Products

Information products are a very powerful tool. They can be used in many leveraged ways. In the context of this module, information products are one of your best means to build trust, rapport and credibility.

They are one of the best mechanisms to overcome low credibility and high perceived risk in the early stages of your client relationship. They can be used as a very low barrier to entry device to allow clients to ‘test drive’ your service.

In the initial stages of your relationship with your prospect there is a significant Credibility Gap. This the gap that exists between the level of credibility you need to sell your prospects into your higher priced service, and the actual credibility you have with them. Information Products allow you to demonstrate to prospects the value you can provide them.

For example, let’s say your core product is a 6 month, $500 per month ($3,000) 1-to-1 coaching program. This may initially pose a significant barrier to your prospects.

To bridge the Credibility Gap and promote your service, you speak at an Association meeting for your niche (Information Product 1). Due to time constraints, you’re allocated 30-minutes.

Whilst your content may be compelling, it’s most likely the 30-minutes of content will not be enough to bridge the Credibility Gap. But you came prepared.

At the seminar you used a Green Sheet technique (Information Product 2). At a critical point in your speech you channel people’s attention to a green A4 page containing incredibly important information.

You say something like: “If you’d like more information on this, I have a free resource guide that I can send you.” Hold up the green sheet and continue: “If you want a free copy, just write “GS” for “green sheet” on your business card and hand it to me after the presentation.”

When you do this, you’ll be swarmed by prospects eager for more information. In return you capture their names, addresses and emails. By giving more information you bridge the Credibility Gap a little more. And now you have their contacts, you can continue to nurture them (Information Product 3, 4, 5) until your credibility reaches the point they are willing to invest in your higher priced services.

This example is just one of an infinite combination you could use.

Establish Your Credibility

As a service professional it’s crucial you establish your credibility. Most product businesses establish their credibility through their brand. For instance, Nike has immediate credibility. As does Porsche. You know what you’ll get for your money.

These brands have so much credibility it becomes a shortcut to decision making. Their brands have so much credibility that prospects do not need to consciously consider or validate the value of the proposition.

But as a service professional, do you have the same? Anthony Robbins does. Jay Abraham does. As do many others. What are you doing to establish your credibility?

Post Purchase Reassurance

You must have a system in place to reinforce your clients buying decision. Once your client has overcome the mental hurdle to commit to buying your service they are immediately seeking validation of their choice.

In a service business your client has no tangible product to look to as validation. You must therefore nurture them, particularly in the honeymoon stage. This will improve your client relationships, make your client feel positive about their choice, and also improve referral.

Low Delivery Costs

A significant benefit for service businesses is their shorter development timelines, lower development and delivery costs and higher profit margins. If you use these attributes to your advantage you can gain considerable upside advantage.

These features allow you to create multiple services to utilise in your sales process and sales funnel. You can create services with very low perceived risk as incentives into the top of your funnel, then incrementally more valuable services to sell as you demonstrate and increase your credibility. You can offer services as value-adds to your sales proposition in place of discounting.

As you have much greater net margin, your risk of loss on returns is significantly lesser. As such an extremely powerful psychological tool to use as a conversion inducement is a risk-reversal or guarantee.

You remove the risk to your prospect of losing their money but giving them a fully refundable guarantee. In this way, the risk is reversed from your client to yourself.

Host-parasite relationships are a powerful way for you to grow your business. You may recall the term ‘host-parasite’ from your high school science or biology classes. It refers to a mutually beneficial (symbiotic) relationship between 2 entities. For instance, a protozoa living in a termite that enables it to digest the wood it consumes, or mistletoe growing on a host tree.

Host-parasite relationships also exist in business. In business, a host-parasite relationship occurs when two or more businesses willingly enter a joint venture to their mutual gain. In most instances, one business will contribute to the wellbeing of the host; and the host will provide a reward in return to the parasite. The resultant benefits are greater than one business could capitalise on alone.

The key to an effective host-benefit relationship is exploiting an exhausted or passive asset in your, or the other parties, business.

An effective host-parasite relationship provides the parasite with a highly targeted prospect group, leveraging off the established rapport with the host; and provides the host with a means to re-sell to a passive asset base.

Put yourself in this scenario… you have a current prospect or customer list that you have fully exploited for all it’s worth. You’ve established excellent rapport and trust, yet have nothing further to sell or offer them. What’s your next step?

OR

Consider this scenario… you’ve spent months developing a niche leading product. You’ve commercialised it as well as you can amongst your clients and prospects. What’s your next step?

In most instances, the host in a host-parasite relationship is the entity that owns or controls the distribution channel that the parasite wishes to exploit.

You’ve no doubt received a statement or bill in the mail from an airline, credit card company, accommodation group, or bank with inserts offering another business’ products or services. This is an excellent example of a host-parasite relationship.

The Power of Host-Parasite Relationships

Host-parasite relationships are a highly leveraged way to grow your business. They are your best means to commercialise a dormant asset; and open up a whole new qualified prospect channel.

Commercialising your dormant assets

Despite how well you optimise your sales processes and sales funnel, you are going to have clients that won’t buy more of your products; and prospects that despite your best efforts will not purchase off you (at this point in time, with your specific offer).

In both instances, these groups have ALREADY cost you a significant investment. If you don’t commercialise that investment it’ll remain a lost expense to you.

Just say you have 300 dormant prospects and inactive clients on your list. Each of them have not purchased at all, or have not purchased for months. They each have valuable, qualified attributes – geographic proximity, niche interests, socio-economic profile, etc. These attributes make them a valuable commodity. And significantly, because of the trust and rapport you’ve build over months of added-value education-based communication, you are in a position of authority and influence.

Let’s say you become aware of a high ticket product of interest to your list (for instance, a Bootcamp) offered by someone else. You may approach this person (the host) with an offer to promote their product to your list in exchange for a commission (you may also want other things such as re-distribution rights of DVD/ CD’s etc).

The host, knowing his cost of acquisition for clients is $500 per person, is willing to pay you this as a commission. If you convert just 10% of your list into this product, you make $15,000.00 in commission.

Leveraging other people’s assets

Imagine you’ve developed an excellent product in your niche. You have a client and prospect list of 300. You commercialise your product to your list as best you can, converting 25% over 6-months, resulting in 75 clients.

But you now realise that getting new clients is difficult and expensive.

If you utilise the host-parasite relationship concept, you can approach different groups already dealing with your profile of client. It may be another type of business or membership association.

Let’s say your product is in the health and fitness niche. You can approach all the gyms, physiotherapists, health centres, sporting associations in your area with a host-parasite offer. In this way you may access thousands of pre-qualified prospects.

For instance, a gym group may agree to promote your product to its 10,000 members, resulting in 200 sales.

Have you put any thoughts into how you can develop host-parasite relationships to benefit your business?

One of the most intriguing things about business (and life) is how two people can have substantially the same opportunities - training, know-how, capital and experience - yet produce dramatically different results. This paradox exists everywhere.

Having the right mindset for business success goes well beyond establishing goals and being positive. In part one, we considered the importance of being aware of your reality and understanding your expectations to develop a successful mindset. In this second-part, we consider the following:

3- Responsibility. To have a success mindset you MUST acknowledge your responsibility. Highly successful people acknowledge their responsibility. Only by acknowledging your responsibility can you take control and invoke the necessary steps to be successful. Blaming others, validating failures and making excuses are simply ways of avoiding YOUR responsibility. To become more responsible:

• Acknowledge that if you want your desired outcomes to be realised, YOU solely are responsible.
• Others DO NOT share your passion for your vision. They may say they do, but ultimately only you are truly passionate about achieving your vision.
• Accept that others will not complete things to your entire satisfaction.
• Take full responsibly for outcomes. Avoid blaming others. Even when you delegate a task or use an outside business, if something is not done to satisfaction, YOU are ultimately responsible. Often when people delegate a TASK, they also try to delegate RESPONSIBILITY. This is not appropriate to successful people. YOU:
• May not have given clear enough direction;
• May not have effectively managed the process;
• May have withheld important information;
• May have varied your expectations of the outcome without informing the other party;
• May not have managed the resource well enough;
• Chose the employee/supplier in the first instance.
• Have the choice to use another person/supplier.

4- Appropriate use of Force. Highly successful people apply their time in the most leveraged areas to escalate the success of their business.

Business is diverse. As a business owner you’re required to perform an extremely diverse range of activities on a daily basis. Each individual has their strengths and weaknesses. And each has their specific area of interest. People generally do what they perceive they’re best at, or feels most comfortable. NOT what’s best for the business.

First and foremost you have to realise that YOU ARE A BUSINESS OWNER. You are not a Life Coach, an administrator, or a bookkeeper. You must put the interests of the business first. Only then will you think and act in a context that will assist you build a flourishing business. Only then will you apply force in the right areas to create maximum forward momentum toward your objective.

The most powerful question you can ask yourself (and should ask yourself SEVERAL TIMES per day) is “What is the most effective use of my time RIGHT NOW?”

Other questions you should ask yourself include:

• What tasks do you most like doing?
• What tasks do you least like doing?
• Where do you spend the majority of your time and effort?
• What tasks, if done well, would make the most significant positive impact on the success of your business?

5- Your subconscious holds a powerful key. Your subconscious has extraordinary power. Your subconscious is your hard working servant to your conscious thoughts. In fact, your subconscious mind never stops working. That’s good and bad.

Your subconscious works day and night 24/7 making your conscious thoughts become reality. What you think, you are. Unfortunately, most people consciously think limiting, negative thoughts. These negative conscious thoughts put the subconscious to work, and hence they become a reality. And then people say “See, I told you that would happen”.

Reflecting back on our comments about self concept, people that have a poor self concept in a specific area ALWAYS have poor conscious thoughts relating to that area. For instance, if you think (your self concept) you are not good at public speaking; you will find that you reinforce it through your conscious thoughts. When someone mentions public speaking you’ll think to yourself “I hate public speaking. I just can’t do it. I get really nervous and usually make a fool of myself”.

Your subconscious can not discern between positive and negative. It simply acts to bring your thoughts into reality. So when you consciously think about being bad at public speaking, guess what happens? You become bad at public speaking!

The beauty of the subconscious is that you are never aware of the diligent work it does. So it doesn’t actually feel as though you have expended any effort. So in order to invoke positive outcomes you must concentrate on having positive, effective conscious thoughts. You’ll then immediately put your subconscious to work in a positive context:

• Think in positives and always expect the best.
• Reframe all your negative conscious thoughts into positives.
• Think of your subconscious as a child that requires careful training and direction.
• Become more aware of your negative conscious self talk.
• Spend 20-minutes each night in bed before sleep thinking about positives and affirming your positive expectations.

6- The power of perseverance. Perseverance is a sum of positive attitude and persistence. Perseverance goes hand in hand with expectation. If you fully expect a certain outcome, there is no obstacle that can’t be overcome.

To the expectant, persevering mind, a challenge is an opportunity for a solution. It’s simply something that has to be worked through on the road to success. When confronted with a challenge, the expectant, persevering mind will think “That’s part of life and business, what’s the best solution?”

To the non-persevering mind a challenge is a barrier. The non-persevering mind doubts that a challenge can be overcome. They look for the worst in every situation and hence the worst often occurs. When confronted with a challenge, the non-persevering mind will think “Oh no, it’s happening again. Why does all this bad stuff have to happen to me? It always seems to happen to me and not anyone else.”

Worry is simply a negative thought caught up in procrastination. To develop a success mindset, you must develop perseverance. Because challenges confront everyone, they are not discriminatory!

7- There is someone that can do better than you. This is probably not the type of realisation that someone aiming to establish a success mindset would ordinarily have! But it’s simply reality. Once you accept that there is someone out there that could walk into your business tomorrow and do significantly better with the exact same resources, you’ll acknowledge that YOU can do more, better.

You’ll quickly realise that you have the capacity to make an extraordinary difference in your business. The thoughts you have; where you focus your attention; the assistance you seek from others; how you apply your capital; the skills you seek out to attain; all dramatically influence your success - and hence your lifestyle.