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Old November 26, 2020, 02:41 PM
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GordonJ GordonJ is offline
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Default GJA business primer, coming throughout the day. Part one.

Since my Thanksgiving is tomorrow, I'll take some time today to mouth off here. About business, and/or making money. You don't need the first to make the latter, as CHATTELING shows. That, in case you are unaware, is the buying and selling of personal and corporate, or gov't property.

Buy a bike here, sell it over there for a profit. Simple as it gets.

Business? Not as simple, but not as complicated as many make it out to be.

I ask people WHY they do what they do in business, and I'm always astounded at how clueless many are, they just don't know, other than to make money, and all too often, they fall into their business.

I wish it were true that many businesses are PLANNED and well thought out, especially these Internet Businesses, but, alas, it just isn't that way.

In the real world, the fast dying, rapidly fading business of RETAIL, there usually is a plan, some thought put into it at least at the beginning. Too bad all the best plans have gotten derailed by Covid Crisis.

Anyhoo, old timey stuff here, nothing new, albeit a good reminder of it all...

The TRANSACTION is the foundation of all business, it is an exchange of VALUE, an ageement between parties to make the exchange.

Simple one, pay 20 bux to a guy at a garage sale for his used bike.

Complicated one: buy 1,000 bikes and place them around a city and rent them out.

Simple one- ice cream truck with a freezer in it.
Complicated one- an orchard where they make their own ice cream or a dairy farm, with a lot of moving parts.

Simple one online, The AUTOMATIC PRODUCT VENDING site, put money in, get product out.

Complicated online-Affiliate Funnel, with a dime sale, intro, upsell, cross sell, last chance, update, upgrade, new algorithm etc. etc.

In retail, there is a lot of overhead; rent/mortage, utilities, upkeep and maybe fixed costs too.

eCom does eliminate that slop and mess, and maybe that is the reason for its astounding growth, with more to come.

So if the TRANSACTION is the foundation and the EXCHANGE OF VALUE is it's core...it implies TWO entities. A buyer and a seller.

Many people start with a PRODUCT or SERVICE and then try to find the buyer, and this is OK, many if not most businesses do this.

The easier and faster way is to find a BUYER first, then offer something in the family of products/services they just bought.

There is no right or wrong, but there are differences and it depends on what suits you as to the choice you make.

Probably the biggest consideration for the vast majority of online or would be marketers is the cost of entry, and that means, MOST of them don't have the money to invest in an existing business or to build it from scratch.

They then turn to the low cost of entry types, AFFLIATE marketing and MLM or Network marketing, or the middle-man approach of eCom, to stand between the buyer and seller and be like a traffic cop directing the buyers toward the best bargains, or to what they are searching for.

Other low cost entrances are; the Joint Venture, mostly if you own or control a product and someone has a list of buyers who would be interested in it. You can arrange to do a one off joint venture to the list.

The takeover. You can buy a business using the profits of the business and do this over a given period of time. These are often done by those older businesses, people who want to or are looking at retirement, and don't want or need a big cash asset problem, but will take on payments over a period of time.

There are speculative businesses, as in stock investments, or Forex trading or any of the trading, the buying and selling of assets, or of perceived value and these often have low cost to get into...with very HIGH RISKS, which make them lucrative to those who know how to get in and get out at the right time.

There are TIME constraint businesses, as in FREELANCERS and consultants. They trade their time for dollars. They are limited by the hours in a day, unless they leverage their knowledge, skills or assets and "clone" themselves via partners, distributors or affiliates.

Then we have the businesses which require employees, as do most retail businesses, and they bring with them their own challenges and headaches, or cost of doing the business.

Any choice made has built in considerations. Freelancers must find their next client. That is really a business about LEAD GENERATION as much as it is about fulfilling on the service. There are tens of thousands of new copywriters now, and so many of them don't know how to find a client, the first one or the next one.

LEAD GENERATION is a big business itself, and there are many ways of gaining the leads too.

So, there are a lot of choices. And preferences. The how and what, but at the beginning, it should be the WHY?

What do you want? And Why do you want it? The answers form the building blocks of your business or money making activity.

How about MY model? What I have chosen to do and I'll stick with the online and SowPub related stuff, I've never really gotten into my off line activities (other than chatteling) and don't have a need today to do it either. I will say Harvey Brody, about 15 years ago, turned my head around on gaining control and building toll gates on my highway of life.

But for online, I chose to sell INFORMATION products. Some of this due to coming on board the www already having created some. I was selling Golf tapes, and one of my first online money makers was a product I created (at the behest of SCI) and wrote a promotion for...THE PROFESSIONAL REMOTE DIRECT MARKETERS COURSE. I wrote the ad, they fufilled, I got a commission. Nice big fat check for that.

In the early days, 93-99 I was still doing a lot of OFF LINE ads and selling.

By 2004, I found too much time was being spent on the few who didn't buy much and asked a lot of questions, in other words, the support of selling information was becoming a headache, even though there were several thousand buyers on my lists.

I made a conscious decision NOT to follow the guru lead, at the time, it was the PRODUCT LAUNCH way, and chose, instead, to go a small cost product, with limited sales per year, although, very high % of repeat buyers.

By whittling my buyers down, and catering to low cost REPEAT buyers, I found that a 4 time a year offer (quarterly) at below 25 bux as an auto buy for vast, vast majority on the list and once or twice a year, usually at holidays to offer a higher priced item.

This was the general plan, with the once in awhile specials of high cost consulting or one of our private membership things worked out for me.

So, the measly ten dollar product, sold four times a year, with almost ALL on my list buying...and at least half buying the bigger 25 to 49 HOLIDAY offers, seemed to deliver what I wanted.

As an example, if I had 1000 on my list of buyers, and most of them bought all my offers, roughly about 40 + 50 a year, or 90 bux a year...and they did so year after year (as some of you reading this have done{thank you very much})...then it added up. It was a much less stressful way to hit my money goals for online activity, not working that hard, and provided nice sums to work with offline.

Just a different way of thinking. Gurus in the syndicate and groups chose to offer pricey offers, oft $2,000.00 with a 1k split with their buddies, and to then offer private membership groups or inner circles for hundreds of dollars...and their formula worked for them too. It is the de facto IM method taught, bought and sold for IM riches.

That didn't suit me because it ate up too much of my TIME. I wanted to, and remained a very part time Internet Marketer while making a full time wage, if I were to trade my time for dollars as an employee or consultant.

I'm sure many remember the couple of years I spent traveling around the country, having adventures while maintaining my creative schedule.

In my case, I traded the bigger money for more time TODAY, or now, as opposed to those who liked to grind it out, make a lot more money, so they could take time off later (although most really don't, cause they like working). Again, no right or wrong, but whatever works for YOU is cool beans, eh?

Let me call this part one of my Thanksgiving 2020 rant and rave on business or making money, shall we?

Gordon

PS Feel free to ask questions.

Last edited by GordonJ : November 26, 2020 at 03:27 PM.
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