Aaron Hoos

Your website can potentially reach a massive global audience. But if you’re an accountant, you’re not so concerned about website visitor from the other side of the world. Rather, you’d prefer website visitors from the other side of the street! Your website needs to reach a local audience.

In this video, I show accountants how to make one simple tweak on their website to help them get more local traffic to their website.

A few days ago, I posted 2 blog posts about moving your business toward a passive model — one in which you maximize your return while you minimize your effort. In those posts, I outlined the key business functions which CAN demand a lot of time and attention, but which entrepreneurs should try to make passive. Those business functions are Administration, Marketing, and Deliverables. You can read the 2 blog posts here: How to be a lazy entrepreneur (part 1) and How to be a lazy entrepreneur (part 2).

If you are building a sales funnel for a new business or optimizing a sales funnel for an existing business, you are probably thinking about ways that you can generate income by converting prospects into customers. Your choices are active deliverables and passive ones.

• Active deliverables require you to put in some time to fulfill the order — an active product might require that you manufacture it, package it, and ship it; an active service might require that you do research, perform the service, and send it to the customer.
• Passive deliverables are ideal because they allow you to earn an income without doing a lot of active work for each sale. Passive deliverables can be more profitable because it allows you to spend more time filling your sales funnel and nurturing contacts through your sales funnel, and less time on the deliverable component.

If you are thinking about the ways to earn passive income, there are three that you can mix and match for your business: Ads, Affiliates, and Assets.

Ads: This is where you create content and embed ads into your content. This earns you income (usually per-click, although there other payment models). Google AdSense is an easy way to get started.

Affiliates: This is where you create content and link to products or services via an affiliate link. When someone clicks through your link and then buys that product or service, you will earn money (often a flat fee or percentage). Amazon is a nice starting point but there are many options here.

Assets: This is where you create content and then sell that content for money through various methods, such as ebooks, podcasts, subscriptions, books, magazines, etc. Clickbank or Lulu are great ways to get started selling assets.

The key to success in all three is creating highly-targeted, compelling content that correctly identifies the problems, needs, and interests of your target market and then positions the deliverable (the ad, affiliate, or asset) as the solution the problem.

The ubiquitous About Us page is frequently an afterthought, often filling in the missing pieces that aren’t necessary in a website’s other (more frequently visited) pages.

Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch describes a new take on the About Us page and how to turn it from an afterthought into a valuable tool for your business’ website:

The New About Us Page Is a Social Beast :: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing.

Last night I received a call from a friend of mine who is contemplating a move. He is an independent consultant affiliated with a national organization and he’s been offered an interesting opportunity with another organization. His current position offers a higher potential cash flow (although a big payday hasn’t happened yet) and the new position offers a lower overall income potential but the cash flow is more immediate and the marketing investment is substantially less.

Then today I met with another friend of mine who has a job but is thinking about developing his own business on the side and building it up slowly.

I think both of these people are in a similar situation and have a huge opportunity that they can take advantage of. And I thought I’d write it here because I know of several other small business owners who may find themselves in the same situation at one point or another in the life of their business.

THE PLATEAU
The situation is this: Both of my friends have reached a plateau in their professional lives. I don’t mean that in a bad way (the way some people use the word “plateau”). In fact, I mean it quite positively: They both have the opportunity to take on higher risk/higher paying ventures but they are momentarily accepting the lower risk/lower paying “safer bets”. Consider it an intentional or strategic plateau; a place to run on autopilot for a season.

There are a variety of reasons for choosing to run on the plateau for a while, but the bottom line is that both friends now have a relatively easy and consistent road ahead of them for the short term. It’s beneficial in some ways because it helps to reduce risk and increase time and cash flow, which are occasionally necessary in the life of the entrepreneur.

This is an exciting opportunity that I think can lead to even greater things. A plateau is a place where you can run on cruise control for a while, which gives you the opportunity to invest time and money and effort into…

THE SPRINGBOARD
When business owners/consultants/freelancers/etc. find a nice, easy gig that will sustain them for a while, it sometimes feels like the Nirvana of entrepreneurship: You get the own-your-own-business income without the sweat of marketing aggressively. That’s the plateau.

The mistake would be to just coast. To just take in the scenery. To just sit back and enjoy the ride. But I think there’s an opportunity to turn the plateau into a springboard. I think there’s an opportunity to enjoy the fact that one aspect of your professional life can run on autopilot with less risk and less time (and yes, slightly less income) while you pour your efforts strategically into another place: The future you.

Your plateau can be your springboard — the opportunity for you to market yourself very aggressively. And, because you aren’t marketing yourself aggressively to win business today, you can market yourself far more strategically… positioning yourself for where you want to be when you’ll reach the end of your plateau.

Here are a few ideas:

• Select keywords and start producing content for those keywords. Yes, you won’t reach the top of Google tomorrow but that’s okay because you don’t need to achieve that result tomorrow. You have time.
• Start building assets, content, products and services for where you want to be in 2-3 years (or whenever your plateau is going to end).
• Start networking. But remember: Network with the people that will help the future you, not the present you!
• Refine your brand so that it’s no longer expressing who you are today, but rather who you will be when you have to go back into the marketplace to get more clients.
• Revise your business plan to reflect “tomorrow’s” business.
• Build a following/subscription list/fanbase. Do it now when your business isn’t depending on it.

Chances are, you may be at the same point now or in the future, too. It usually comes with long term contracts or with employment. If taking on more work isn’t right for you, then using some of your downtime to create the “you” of tomorrow is an investment in your long-term success.

Your blog content is good and you hope that people go back and read the archives in the future… but they rarely do.

There’s no need to let that content disappear! Break out the defibrillator and get a blog post’s heartbeat going again. Get people reading old blogs by doing some of the following:

• Once a month collect older blogs on a specific topic. For example, I might write a review blog highlighting the top ten previous posts on content strategy.
• Create an ebook with your “best-of” content (on a specific topic or just in general), and offer it for download.
• When you write your newsletter, link to older content in your blog as a PS or a sidebar.
• Get rid of your “most popular posts” sidebar widget (because that is often a self-fulfilling prophecy, since people click on the popular post and make it more popular) and instead put in a “featured post” widget that you yourself select posts for.
• Create a Squidoo lens about a particular post or subject.
• My favorite: Find a blog topic from 3-12 months ago and write an article about it then post that article online (at an article distribution site, for example). Link to your general blog but link more prominently to a specific blog post on the topic.