I have some more great news for our affiliates: I just added two new links to your affiliate media section of your affiliate account that you can use to promote the newest recordings and course that we have scheduled for home inspection business owners.
If you login to your affiliate control panel (which you can find the link to that on the Learn To Be Rich Affiliate Program page) you will be able to click on the “Links & Tools” link. Using links from there will automatically include your affiliate code in the links so that you get credit for sales and can get paid.
Here’s a little more information about the two links we’ve added and how I’d personally use them and how you might use them as well.
New “How To Market Your Home Inspector” Link
First, we have a new link for the “How To Market Your Home Inspector” business webinar that we are holding live tonight. I expect this recording to be somewhere between and hour and two hours packed full of amazingly valuable information for home inspection business owners. After the live version tonight, we will post up the recorded version on the website and the downloadable recorded version is primarily what you will be promoting as an affiliate.
Here’s how I would market it… I’d use some traditional websites that would allow me to post an ad and market it as a free download. Realize that you won’t be paid a commission for the free download, but you will receive commissions on sales made if they download the free recording and then do decide to upgrade to the full paid course (the link I will talk about next). The nice thing about promoting the free download is that you will tend to get a better response offering the free download and the great information we share in the free download is a pretty compelling reason for many people to upgrade to the full 10 hour paid course.
New Link For “The World’s Greatest Home Inspector Marketing Course”
The second link that I’ve added to your affiliate control panel is the direct link to the sales page for “The World’s Greatest Home Inspector Marketing Course”. This is the link to use if you are planning to sell the full paid course directly (which I encourage you to do that as well).
For any direct sales of this course that you make you will earn a 40% commission. So, if the price remains at the currently set price of $197 you would earn a commission of $78.80.
Marketing Tips For Our Affiliates
First, while I would market both the free download and the paid course simultaneously, I would probably lean more toward the marketing of the free course because response tends to be better if you show them value first with the free download and then let our automatic follow up and the free presentation itself encourage the home inspector to upgrade to the full paid course.
Second, don’t forget that this is just ONE of many courses that we have. Add this to your daily marketing plan to cast a wider net of possible sales you can make.
Third, if you realize the true power of doing marketing yourself AND working with other affiliates to help them make sales of their own you’ll do far better financial than just focusing on sales yourself. Just like I can only promote the free download and paid course in my own local city on websites like CraigsList because they limit the number of ads one person can post, you can only post a very small handful of ads yourself on websites.
However, we do pay a commission on direct sales and also on sales that affiliates you directly refer to us make. So, if you make a direct sale of a course you earn a 40% commission on that sale. If you refer an affiliate using your referral link that you can get in the affiliate control panel and they make a sale they earn 40%, but you also earn 15% of the sale as well.
If you can with a committed effort to your marketing reasonably expect to make a single sale a week and earn $78.80 that’s great. But what if you decided to find 20 other affiliates to work with and help them make 1 sale per week each. They’d each earn $78.80 and you’d earn an additional $591 per week (15% of $197 times 20 sales). With 300 major US cities to market to, 20 people is just a fraction of how big you could grow your affiliate team.
I hope that helps, but if you need more help, please let me know.
Sincerely,
James
In anticipation of the first ever live recording of “The World’s Greatest Home Inspector Marketing Course” that I will be recording from Monday, March 29th, 2010 through Friday, April 2nd, 2010 (from 8 AM to 10 AM in the morning for each of those days), I created The World’s Greatest Home Inspector Marketing Course Fan
Page on FaceBook to share resources, tips and socialize with home inspectors interested in the course.
And, in addition to just creating the fan page, I also added a link to it to the webinar that we are doing tonight.
I hope to be putting up some additional resources to the fan page as we continue to promote and market the course and the number of owners of the course increases.
Sincerely,
James
Are you ready to take your home inspection business to the next level? Tonight, we are holding a free webinar called “How To Market Your Home Inspector Business”.
The webinar is one in a series of marketing webinars that we have held for a variety of business industries based on the marketing strategies that I have used to generate leads in over 1,200 different industries over the last decade.
This home inspection business marketing webinar will include:
- Two Major Marketing Focuses For Marketing Your Home Inspection Business
- Using Niches To Market Your Home Inspection Business More Effectively
- 4 Ways To Build Your Home Inspection Business Offline With Business Networking
- 7 Ways To Build Your Home Inspection Business Online Without Spending A Fortune
- 3 Ways To Get Paid Doing Lead Generation For Your Home Inspection Business
- Marketing Your Home Inspection Business Using Special Reports
- 5 Ways To Outsource Marketing Your Home Inspection Business
- Joint Venture Opportunities For Growing Your Home Inspection Business
- 4 Ways To Cultivate New and Repeat Business From Your Client and Prospect List For Home Inspectors
- Using Meetup To Market and Grow Your Home Inspection Business
- Plus a whole lot more marketing info…
If you can make the live webinar tonight I strongly recommend it. If you can’t I hope to be able to record it make it available afterwards (technology willing). To register for the live event or, after the live event, to download a copy of the webinar in easy to listen to MP3 format go to the Home Inspector Downloads page. From the downloads page for home inspectors you will be able to select “How To Market Your Home Inspector Business” and download it. Right now, we are still offering it for free, but I may start charging for it at a later date and it will likely be sold for about $25.
Packed with tons of practical marketing information from the guy that made a nice living from lead generation, you will find it a valuable investment of your time.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Also, you are not going to want to miss “The World’s Greatest Home Inspector Marketing Course”.
Next Tuesday night we will be presenting the “How To Market Your Landscaper Business” webinar as a free webinar.
If you are a landscaper then this webinar is a great resource for you especially if you are looking for real world, implementable marketing and business strategies for getting more business.
I estimate the webinar to go between an hour and two hours depending on how many tangents we get on (which has been known to happen on other webinars of this type that we’ve done).
The landscaper webinar will include:
- Two Major Marketing Focuses For Marketing Your Landscaper Business
- Using Niches To Market Your Landscaper Business More Effectively
- 4 Ways To Build Your Landscaper Business Offline With Business Networking
- 7 Ways To Build Your Landscaper Business Online Without Spending A Fortune
- 3 Ways To Get Paid Doing Lead Generation For Your Landscaper Business
- Marketing Your Landscaper Business Using Special Reports
- 5 Ways To Outsource Marketing Your Landscaper Business
- Joint Venture Opportunities For Growing Your Landscaper Business
- 4 Ways To Cultivate New and Repeat Business From Your Client and Prospect List For Landscapers
- Using Meetup To Market and Grow Your Landscaper Business
- Plus much more…
I strongly recommend that you try to attend the live version of this webinar or, if you miss the live event, download and listen to this powerful marketing webinar. To register for the live event or, after the live event, to download a copy of the webinar in easy to listen to MP3 format go to the Landscaper Downloads page. From there you will be able to select “How To Market Your Landscaper Business” and download it (currently for free). I think you will find it to be of amazing value to you as you learn to more effectively market your landscaping business.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Coming up in next week we also have, for the first time, the live presentation of “The World’s Greatest Landscaper Marketing Course”. To take your landscaping business to the next level, I strongly encourage you to either attend that live and/or get the recorded version of that.
If you’ve done any type of professional sales you probably are intimately familiar with some of the pros and cons of the relationship between the commission amount per sale and the number of sales you might expect to make. If you are considering sales, this could be a very important concept for you to understand and could significantly affect your criteria in selecting your next sales position.
First, I will tell you that I am making an important assumption. The assumption that I am making is that the lower the commission is per sale, the more sales you are likely to make. Another way to put it is that the larger the commission the more time you will, on average, need to invest in making the sale.
I make this assumption because the commission a business owner is willing to pay is often based on the amount of time and work that the business owner estimates it will take to make the sale. Paying a $1,000 commission (like we do) for making a sale that you might expect to make 10 times a day is usually not required to retain sales professionals in the job. Demand for that job would exceed the supply of spaces for the job and the business owner would reduce the commission to have a more balanced number of applicants to job positions.
On the other hand, if the job pays $10 per sale, but would require the average sales person to talk to a large number of people investing a good number of hours presenting and building value, few sales professionals would be willing to work for a commission of that size in relation to the amount of work.
There is some room for variation here. Some sales opportunities will allow you to make sales that have very high commissions with a reasonably short amount of time invested in the sales process. The sales opportunities you need to be careful with are the ones that offer you a relatively low commission with a very high amount of time required for the sales process.
Which brings us to the commission per sale versus number of sales discussion. If you are paid a small commission because you are expected to make several sales in a relatively small period of time, there are some definite advantages to that. For example, you get the benefit of quick feedback. If you are expected to make several sales a day, for example, you can see what works in your sales presentation and what doesn’t much more quickly than if you are only expected to make a sale once every few days.
Not only do you get the benefit of feedback on your presentation, but do not underestimate the importance of mini-victories in morale and motivation. Anyone in sales knows that it is easier to stay on a role once you’re on a role and making sales tends to start those positive roles. Prospects can sense the winning attitude in your voice and presentation and often respond positively to that.
So, there seems to be a decided benefit to seeking sales positions that might allow you to make smaller commissions and to make a larger number of sales, but that’s not the whole story. There are also advantages to sales professional seeking sales jobs that allow them earn very large commissions on single sales.
For example, if you were making sales that had commissions that could be an entire week’s wage you can see massive results from improving your sales skills. For example, let’s say you are calling on 10 prospects per day and are used to closing 1 out of 50 in any given week. If you can improve your sales presentation and skills so that instead of closing 2% of your prospects you now close 2 out of 50, you’ve doubled your income. Some math folks will be quick to point out that if you doubled your sales on the smaller commissions you’d double your income too. Granted that is true. However going from 1 sale a week to 2 sales a week is different than going from 20 sales a week to 40 sales a week in my opinion from a practical stand point.
With larger commission but fewer transaction sales jobs, you do miss some of the mini-victories that can really keep you motivation up, but creating mini-victories for yourself might be an acceptable alternative especially if you are able to make a much larger amount of money overall by focusing on larger transaction sales.
Until my next post,
James
As far as Backpage goes, Backpage is the third-biggest classified ad website you might consider using to market your handyman business. They tend be more integrated in with local classified ads and newspapers as well. So when you post on that on Backpage, they’ll also ask you “Would you like to place a similar or the same ad in your local newspaper for this particular site?” And you could go ahead and pay some nominal rate in order to have your ad listed in the newspaper. They also allow you to pay a certain fee in order to have your posts automatically repeat and repost on there. You can check out that, if it’s worthwhile for you to have that done, and I would consider doing it. I did not find it worthwhile for me, but everyone’s got their own numbers and what they’re willing to pay in or have that stuff done. I had tended to outsource some of this stuff, and I would have other people do it for us.
And what to post, same types of things that we were talking about on Kajiji, and also Craigslist. And as far as posting frequency goes, again read their rules to make sure that you’re not in violation by re-posting too many times. But posting frequently is important in all three of these sites. Being on top of that list is going to make a significant difference in how many people are looking at things, so don’t be surprised if you post an ad on Craigslist or Backpage, and you may get one inquiry within the first hour or two after you put it up, and then your response just goes away. If you went back on there and posted two days or three days or a week later, whatever the frequency they allow you to do, you might generate another response. So it could definitely be a situation where being timely and reposting is a highly effective strategy for you, as long as you’re following the guidelines of these sites. Make sure to read their terms of use policies.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information on how to use free and low cost online classified ad websites to more effectively market your handyman business.
