Making money takes serious time and effort. Luckily, Craig Garber has some lessons on the subject from when we made $7,500 a day in consultancy fees from his home in Tampa.
Lesson 1: There is no easy way.
The first lesson is that there is no easy way. If you’re lazy, then you are going to end up disappointed. Garber asks us to be honest with ourselves on whether or not our work ethic is enough for us to make it.
Lesson 2: Be Specific.
Garber tells us to attract a specific audience. We need to cultivate some sort of speciality. And then, within that specialty, we need to identify something different or unique about ourselves in our marketing. Here are some questions to ask to find out where our specialties may lie.
- What kinds of customers do you currently work with?
- What kinds of customers or clients do you like working with, or would you like to work with more often?
- Are there services you’re not providing that you should be offering because customers have asked for them?
Lesson 3: Relational Success
Many businesses fail because of poor relationships with their customers. This is also a key reason why they are making far less money than they could be. Garber advises that if we want to build relationships with our prospects, we need to contact them as much as possible. Our contact has to be meaningful and valuable if we want to have a meaningful and valuable relationship.
Lesson 4: Lost Prospects
Garber provides us with some reasons for why we lose prospects.
- They aren’t interested in what we’re talking about and they made a mistake by signing up in the first place.
- What we promised them when we invited them into our site isn’t being delivered to them.
- Our prospect isn’t hearing from us often enough, and then when they do hear from us, all we’re trying to do is sell them something.
- We don’t have any kind of personality or identity of our own.
- There are so many different people writing our emails, that our prospects don't know who they’re forming a relationship with, or what’s going on.
- We are sending them emails from someone that wasn’t identified when our prospects signed up.
- We are wasting our prospect’s time by being boring.
Each of these reasons can be addressed by setting up a structured and focused communication strategy.
Lesson 5: Don’t Give up
Success doesn’t come overnight. There's a lot of work and a lot of trial and error. Garber advises us to put everything we do through some sort of testing. What worked for someone else might not work for us. This is why the lessons we learn from the mistakes we make are so important. And if you fail: never take it personally—it’s just business.