By: Craig Garber

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Wouldn’t it be awesome if it was easy to make money? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if making money didn’t take concentrated time or effort? Unfortunately that’s just not the case. It takes serious planning and lots of thinking.

Often, the good advice we receive from others includes sharing our ideas with someone with an experience of success. And that’s what we hope to help you with in this week’s summary as we call on the know-how of Craig Garber. In his book, “How to Make Maximum Money with Minimum Customers”, Garber tells us how he can make $7,500 a day in consultancy fees from his home in Tampa. Sounds like success to me!

Lesson 1: There is no easy way

The first lesson that Garber tells us to take note of is the fact there is no easy way to make money. In generating his success, easy didn’t fit anywhere into the mix. Often we are told to go for the low hanging fruit when we enter a new market or launch a new enterprise. But where is the low hanging fruit in today’s economy? It’s just not there anymore.

If you are afraid of hard work or – forgive us for being blunt – you’re a bit lazy, your quest for success will be disappointing and forever dreaming of what “could have been”. Garber’s tip: get out now. Find another way of spending your day but realise that being a millionaire is not for you.

Garber asks us to be brutally honest. We need to ask ourselves whether or not our work ethic is as good as it could be. He tells us we need to “get real”.

On a more positive note, if our work ethic is good then we have a good foundation to build from. Nevertheless if we have a good work ethic but no great success Garber suggests we may have a mindset issue – we can’t frame success.

In that case we may simply need a defined goal. Garber suggests any time we set a deadline to do something, or anytime we start measuring whatever it is we’re doing, our results will be incrementally improved. He says we should also consider finding a role model: observe him or her to find out what makes them tick.

The bottom line is this: if you’re not working hard, then realise that where you are right now, is very likely to be where you’re going to end up!

Lesson 2: Be Specific

At the root of Garber’s success is his specialty. And he tells us if we want to attract a specific audience, we’re going to have to attract them for a reason. We’re going to need to cultivate some sort of specialty. And then, within that specialty, we need to identify something different or unique about ourselves in our marketing.

Being a generalist is not a particularly compelling reason for someone to work with us. It is difficult to separate yourself from your competition if everyone does the same thing. It’s equally difficult to answer the question “Why should I choose you over someone else?”

Incidentally, being a generalist also doesn’t allow you to charge a lot of money, which defeats the purpose of your efforts.

Being a specialist doesn’t mean we need to restrict our market – we can actually target many different kinds of customers and we can be proficient in multiple skill-sets.

But Garber gives us specific advice in relation to multiples: we need to separate our marketing for each of these different customers or skill-sets.

Most people are preoccupied with trying to cast as wide a net as possible, so they can attract everyone. What we want to do instead, is create multiple marketing campaigns, or multiple websites, and perhaps even multiple “identities” that address one or two specific and related needs.

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?
• Is there a certain demographic or line of business that’s highly profitable?
• Are there others in your field that have a unique specialisation you’d like to have?

Garber tells us to focus our marketing on addressing how to eliminate our target market’s biggest problems, fears, concerns, or worries. We should then work out how to satisfy their strongest hopes, dreams and desires, and use all of these items as benefits that make up the core of our marketing.

Lesson 3: Relational Success

This is going to be as clear as the nose on your face but it still needs to be said: many businesses fail because of poor relationships with their customers. It is also a key contributing factor to why they are making far less money than they could be.

Garber clearly points out that the strength of any relationship is based on two things: the frequency and intensity of interaction. He gives us this easy analogy: we are all much closer to our spouse today, than we were after knowing them for just a week. Business relationships are no different. No one cares how much you know… until they know how much you care.

Garber advises that if we want to show our list of prospects how much we care, we need to contact them as much as possible. E-mail them or send them offline information—in other words, speak with them as frequently as we possibly can. Our contact has to be meaningful and valuable, if we want to have a meaningful and valuable relationship.

Lesson 4: Lost Prospects

We all spend a great effort in developing a good prospect database, but do we ever think of why we don’t get the best out of it? The main reason is lost prospects. Garber gives us some ideas of why people unsubscribe from our prospect lists.

1. They aren’t interested in what we’re talking about and they made a mistake by signing up in the first place.
2. What we promised them when we invited them into our site isn’t being delivered to them.
3. Our list 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.
4. We don’t have any kind of personality or identity of our own. People have relationships with people, not with “e-mails.”
5. There are so many different people writing our e-mails, that our list doesn’t know who they’re forming a relationship with, or what’s going on.
6. We are sending them e-mails from someone that wasn’t identified when our prospects signed up.
7. We are committing the cardinal sin of wasting our prospect’s time by being boring.
8. We stay on topic too much. Our job is to entertain, educate and inform. And we can’t do all three of these things if all we’re ever doing is talking about the one topic our website or business revolves around.

Other than the first reason – which is not our fault – we can address each of these by setting up a structured and focused communication strategy. We want to build relationships, and the best way to do this is to share and to become a trusted authority in our marketplace. Fundamentally, we should be giving out as much information as we can possibly offer about our speciality.

Now many will say that this is giving free consultancy. But in Garber’s eyes, anyone who’s confident enough to have all this knowledge and share it, is an expert and expertise is worth paying for.

Lesson 5: Selling Balance

Garber states that nothing gets bought unless you sell it first. No offer means no sale. And no sale means no money. Sales are fundamental.

He believes that when companies have a sales problem it’s one of three things: they don’t sell enough, they sell too much, or they don’t sell at all.

Problem 1: Not selling enough.
When we feel awkward about selling, we wind up communicating with our prospects only once in a blue moon—and then, whenever we do communicate—the only thing we’re doing is trying to sell them something.

Talking to someone once a month, and just trying to sell them something, isn’t a relationship. This generally winds up frustrating many of the people on our list, and many will unsubscribe. So unless we go out of our way to get someone to remember us and go out of our way to be different and create a relationship, we are merely an annoying blip on the radar screen.

Problem 2: Selling too much
As a prospect, if all we get are hard-hitting sales pitches, we are unlikely to engage with the sender.

To get round this, we need to vary and entertain as well as sell. We must consistently give our list members quality content. We need to contact them often and give them multiple opportunities to build a relationship - over and over again. Sales pitches alone just won’t cut it.

Problem 3: Not selling at all
Garber tells us that if we feel awkward about selling, and prefer to make a living by waiting for customers to find us, we need one thing: luck. But “luck” isn’t a very good business strategy, is it?

Not selling will not make you money. As with Lesson 1, if you’re not cut out to sell, then you need to get out of the game. Communicating with our list but avoiding the sales “elephant in the room” will get us nothing but friends.

Not selling enough? We need to figure out how to pitch our list more often, without compromising the content we deliver.

Selling too much? We need to figure out how to focus on our relationship first, and selling, second.

Lesson 6: Don’t Give up

Garber’s success didn’t occur overnight. There was a lot of blood, sweat and tears before he got to where he is. Trial and error is key. Garber gives us some support: what we must understand is that just because something doesn’t work, it’s not a failure. Everything we do must go through some form of testing. He tells us all we need to do is get 2 or 3 projects right out of every 10 we take on, and we’ll be making a small fortune and living life on our own terms.

What works for one person may not work for us, and there may be more going on than meets the eye. And 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.

Garber advises us that next time we think about throwing in the towel, we should consider Theodore Roosevelt’s words:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming”