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.