James owes the amazing life he has now to three things.
In this quick tip, he shares what they are and how he wishes he'd known them sooner.
So the top few things I wish I knew when I started out, would be to look for leverage. And one of the best leverage I’ve found, in my time online, is recurring subscriptions. That was a huge shift for me. When I took the work that I’d done for my regular website customers, and when I took the information product focus that I had selling one-time products and software as an affiliate, and turned that into looking for recurring programs, that is when my business took off.
I went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year to $100,000 a month, because all the effort that I was putting into getting a customer was compounded when that customer stayed on board. Even now, the lifetime value of my customers is in the thousands.So that’s thousands of dollars per customer. You don’t need many customers if they’re worth several thousand dollars each. And you get to focus on the cool stuff, which is actually helping them out and getting a result. And you get to nurture and grow great long-term relationships. So if I could have gone back in time, I would have gone to recurring subscriptions earlier. That’s point one.
Point two is I was too slow to buy information. You can speed up your results by adding intellectual property to your brain so that you can get faster results. I took ages to buy an e-book that was I think, $38 or so, and bought a couple way back then, this is 2007 or so. I started buying a couple of e-books and I really got some good ideas and information from it.
Then I started going to a couple of events. And some of the events back then had actual content and they were good. So I went to one event, the first internet marketing event in Australia that I went to, and realized that I actually knew a lot of this stuff from my own research and from buying information. The caveat, of course, is you’ve got to use the information. Fifty percent of Kindles have never been opened once, apparently.I just found that statistic somewhere. There’s a lot of books on people’s libraries in the background when you’re doing a Zoom with them, that maybe they haven’t actually read them, but they’re there to look impressive. Bang for dollar, books are probably by far the most impressive investment you can ever make in your education.
So I should have done what I did in my offline world. I bought lots and lots of books and read them. I went through plenty of courses, we did lots of training with the companies I worked for. Big time training. When I started doing that again online, when I started buying e-books, started listening to audio cassettes and getting courses and going to some events, that’s when I really accelerated. And I will say some of them were $1,000 or $2,000, but they’re worth it.
And I’ve done all the classic courses. I’ve done the Product Launch Formula, I’ve done Traffic Secrets, the original John Reese version. I’ve done all sorts of blueprints and master classes and I still now buy programs that help with things like videos, social media, traffic, and so forth. I give them to my team a lot of the time now, but invest in intellectual property. The very fact that I have members in my programs means they are invested in their intellectual property to get a leverage faster.
So far recap – we’ve got recurring income, we’ve got intellectual property. The third thing, where I was a little bit slow off the mark, was team. And the first hire that I did was a support person to help me fulfill tickets. And I’m pretty careful with how I spend money. So for me, spending that money on a monthly wage was a little bit of a stretch. But then I did a little calculation and I worked out how many tickets could they answer that I didn’t have to log in and do and at the time, my business model was quiet heavy on bonuses so people would buy from me and then claim a bonus. And then they would go to the support desk, they’d claim the bonus, show the receipt.
I used to have to login but it used to be emails. I used to check my emails, check their receipt, then send them their bonus, make sure they got it okay, without complaining etc. And then when I hired this person, they were doing this every day, three times a day, five times a day. And when I didn’t have to do it anymore, it’s like, wow, I can use this time to do other things like write articles. And then I went through this process of training up a receptionist that we had at the Mercedes-Benz dealership that I worked as an article writer, and she took over writing my articles. And again, I did the same calculation. If I paid $10 per article, how many softwares would it sell? Because at the time, I was earning $49.25 per software that I sold, and then that affiliate commission went up to $98.50, something like that.
So it ended up being that if I could just sell one software per 10 articles, then I was breaking even. And so I ordered hundreds of articles. And that was such a big relief because I’m actually not a good article writer. I hate writing. I don’t even type. English wasn’t really my strongest subject at school. In fact, I failed at school. So I’m just the wrong person to be writing articles.
So as soon as I got some leverage there, things took off. And later on when I hired team, I had them start to do everything, like sending out the emails, doing my bookkeeping, building the websites, design, transcriptions. The only reason I have the amazing life I have now is because I chose subscription business, I’ve invested in my education, and I’ve built an amazing team.
So if you have that good business model, and you keep innovating and staying sharp and on top of it, and then you get other people to help you implement all the things you’re learning, you’ll have a fantastic business. So I hope that helps you out.
See our products here
Creating a membership doesn’t have to be overwhelming… Check out our course on having a profitable membership here
Leave a Reply