Resource Management Summary

● Greetings, and welcome to treating your customers right part two, where we’ll be looking at the final three resource types, and how to cross them over in the most profitable way, multiplying their profitability by five and potentially, massively multiplying your profits at the same time.

● Let’s jump in immediately, and having already talked about the list and your short term customers, let’s discuss your long term customers and the relationship they have with your other four resources.

● The first thing I want to talk about is trying to turn your long term customers into heavy hitting affiliates. The best thing to do here is avoid trying to do that.

● For the reasoning behind this, we first need to refer back to the role that long term customers play in your business. Couple your long term customers and place them in the same category as your standard customers. They’re special, your money-makers, people who are purchasing your products.

● For this reason we need to treat them as such. Trying to get the most affiliates as quickly as possible may seem like a good idea in the beginning, but when we take a closer look, we know that such actions can go towards removing the role of your customers especially, and when we do things that count towards unsubscriptions especially when looking at your profit pullers, this is not a good move.

● If anything, leave them be, use them to promote your products and place the commission levels on a big red button on your site, as we discussed previously avoiding any unnecessary unsubscriptions through wrongly crossing your resources.

● You can also see through a little math how much more devastating it is to annoy anyone on this or cause them to leave for any reason. Granted, you may argue there’s plenty more out there, but this is where most of your advertising funds are going. Getting people to buy your products that are going to be bringing you in a mighty profit in the first place isn’t a short or easy task. Be very careful what you do with this list. This is going to be the long running theme in this section about your long term customers.

● So how about turning long term customers into your list? Well, treating long term customers is very similar to the way in which you’re treating your first time customers, because they’re so closely related and generally have the same role; to make you profit through the products they buy now and into the future, the reaction here is the same.

● Don’t worry about trying to separate them, instead use the fact that most will be on your standard list through your other subscription methods to your advantage to build trust and prove your special previous-customers-only offers really do mean previous-customers-only. Straight forward enough, but there is a difference here, and something that I’d like to talk about is what do you do with them after they’ve bought their second product.

● Do you start them at an intro product and work them up again? Or do you sell them straight onto the follow-up profit making products? In effect, do you turn your long term customers back into customers through less expensive products, or turn your long term customers back into long term customers straight up?

● Well, the answer is mixed. It’s both to be exact. The general consensus on the matter is they should indeed receive immediate notification on the launch of your follow-up products. After all, they already have the trust factor three, so there’s no reason that they shouldn’t buy these high priced products from you. There’s no need to demote them to standard customers again.

● There is only one situation in which it’s best to start them all over again, and that’s if you haven’t contacted them for a long time. This should be taken care of in your list maintenance however, as you should be in touch with your list, customers and long term customers at the very least once every two weeks to prevent the evaporation of this trust that you’ve worked hard to build.

● There is another way to build trust further with your long term customers, that’s to give them something free. Now I’m not talking the standard freebie with a made up price on it, but in fact your intro product that you’re selling for sixty dollars or so to your standard customers. This is especially helpful as a booster after the initial ad for a high ticket item, because it allows you to convert extra sales through the intro product. You have nothing to gain any longer by actually selling these products to your long term customers, but everything to gain when you consider giving them your intro product further inspires trust when they see it come down for the other list members at a cost, and secondly, by converting those extra sales when your intro product is tailored to selling onto the higher priced product. Sales coming from every angle, just what we like to see.

● Next, lets move on and talk about turning your long term customers into one of the most powerful resources you can have at your disposal, joint venture prospects. Many would disagree with me when I say long term customers are a good source of joint venture prospects, but through my personal experience, I have to disagree.

● Now there isn’t much that you actively have to do here aside from passively watching out for the signs. It isn’t unlikely that you may have contact with some of your long term customers, more so than any of the resources we’ve discussed so far.

● Even though this isn’t the quickest or most effective way of pulling JVs from your resources, it’s still quite possible. There’s nothing much that I can say aside from you’d be surprised what happens when you begin talking to people, especially your long term customers, some of which I’ve now been in personal contact with since my first site back in ‘99/2000.

● So, don’t go out there looking, but look out for signs such as mentions of having large amounts of promotion resources themselves, or mentions of their previous experiences, or even if you just happen to get talking, which has happened to me on a number of occasions, more often than you might expect.

● Lets move on to the next resource type and one of the most interesting and pliable of the lot, your affiliates.

● This is where things begin to get interesting and flexible too. The reason being when looking out for affiliates and converting affiliates into different resources you have a lot more to work with as far as the numbers are concerned and it’s much easier to pick out and approach them yourself safe in the knowledge you’re approaching the best performers. It’s clear cut. They signed up with you to promote your products and make a bundle of cash, making you a bundle of cash at the same time.

● Beginning with the least effective, and that’s turning your affiliates into your list. As far as affiliates go, they’re the least likely to be on your list as well as on your affiliates list compared to the other resources, because a majority of them are there for the promotion opportunity instead of the products themselves unlike your customers, long term customers and standard list. The only time that this may not be true is when you’re in online marketing to teach online marketing. Many of your students and purchasers may become your affiliates too.

● What we’re not going to be doing in this particular case, is sending random adverts to your affiliates, not even for your products, because, as we learned earlier, they’re more important than even your immediate profit, in fact, they’re going to be the ones bringing in the majority of your new resources together with joint ventures.

● Remembering that each of these resources is a list of their own anyway, you will be sending out communications, jump starts and offers to get and keep affiliates promoting.

● Before getting to the good parts, let’s take a look at turning your affiliates into customers and long term customers.

● If you’ve been following us so far and your affiliate commissions are nice and high to get lots of people promoting, you’ll find that you won’t be making much profit even if you did get them all to sign up. In any case, it’s more likely you’ll put them off promoting and lose some quick blasts to some of these peoples big lists if you go about this any other way. Steer clear of it, and remember the role of your cheap introductory and purely resource building products, and the resource itself, your affiliates.

● Looking at affiliates in the light of converting them to long-term customers, however, is a different story altogether simply because that’s what your high-priced product is there to do. Make you a profit, and if any of them sign up and buy this whilst promoting, while it’ll be very unlikely it’ll be the main source of customers for your business, it can be a nice little bonus. How you do this is only limited by the system you have set up and your imagination, adaptation and implementation. There really is no right or wrong way, and to list every single method would be a whole encyclopedia in itself.

● An example of this would be a discount or even a free product after making a number of sales. Remember not to substitute this for their commissions or any other special offers at any point, because it’s extremely unlikely that this will be a large source of income anyway, and you have to be careful not to take away the number one reason they’re your affiliates, and that’s to make money for their pocket.

● A good method to adopt is instead of pushing affiliates hard, is to have the ticket only request one sale of your product before it becomes valid. It’s very unlikely an affiliate with a good list is going to make exactly one sale when they blast an ad out. Easy they think, out goes the ad, ten sales come in instead of the one that they needed, they get a discount, you persuaded someone to get out there and promote, not only bringing in more sales, but a bundle more resources that are going to do the same again and again.
● Finally, in the affiliates section, let’s look at turning your affiliates into joint ventures. A very powerful technique indeed, looking back to what we approached earlier in this section when talking about the ease of this method due to your knowledge of their performance simply through their sales.

● A really simple way to comb your affiliates for good JV prospects is, after a number of weeks of promotion, check your affiliate stats, select the top ten, and approach them. Tell them that they’re in the top ten, and that your next product has just been released, and you want them to promote. Because of their past performance you have already raised the commissions on their account by ten or fifteen percent compared to the regular promotions.

● This is also a very viable tactic after a few weeks of promotion for the same product, but remember to take your affiliates with you no matter what you launch, because wherever they go is where your ads will reach the most people, and also where your ads will pull in the most resources for future promotion further building your arsenal without pulling money out of your pocket for paid ads. See how easy this is once you’ve got started, and how important it is to understand already? Where others are spending all their time and money getting started again and again, you’re here letting your resources build themselves. You may be giving away higher commissions but you’re getting equals back in return through the gain in promotion power.

● Remember also that just because your affiliates are not turning into other resources directly, they are indirectly building your resources through their promotions. This is the main importance of affiliates aside from making direct sales, and what makes them so powerful in building your resources for you compared to the standard list or your customers and long term customers.

● Ok, let’s move on to the final resource, your JVs, comprised of all sorts of marketers that have come from every other resource, top affiliates especially. Some of which you approached and some who approached you, their promotion power is as immense as the affiliate, but on an even higher level, the least numerous and most personal of your resources.  When you think that some of your JVs might end up being seen by lists of ten to a hundred thousand or more, it suddenly becomes clear how important this is.

● First and foremost, we don’t turn our JVs into our list full stop. Again, through their promotion they may build your list as a resource, and they may jump on it if they want to keep an eye on your progress and your business, but aside from that, we’re never bulk mailing these people, even when making deals, because each one is tailored to each individual product and you and your JV prospect. It’s simply different every time, and heck, most of these people won’t need to be on your JV list anyway because they’re going to end up working with you and communicating with you through more personal and direct means.

● Next, turning your JVs into affiliates is moot because generally they are an extended form of affiliate-promotion for specific deals instead of the standard commissions. Due to their promotion power they always get something extra, so shouldn’t be grouped in with your affiliates at any stage.

● Ok, here comes the good bit, my favorite part of the whole lot that I’ve been itching to tell you about turning your JVs into customers and long-term customers. The number one thing that I can think of that in my experience many attempt, but attempt totally one hundred percent incorrectly.

● It’s possible that some may have bought from you before, or even learned how to promote from you if your products are geared towards that way of thinking, however, your joint venture partners are way too important to go advertising to unless it’s in a ‘hey check it out, thought you might find it interesting’ manner.

● Here’s a little something that might get you thinking. Imagine you’ve been working with five people for a year or two on your businesses, JV’ing with them and such. Then one day, along comes four of them, up pops a message on your IM program. They do the standard meet and greet, and then comes the moment you’ve been waiting for. Along comes the hard sell, a corny cliché passage from a sales letter and a very obvious scripted sales process. Bear in mind these are the people you’ve worked with and talked to as if they were friends in a business sense for long periods of time and have already built a good business relationship with them.

● What would your reaction be if your wife or your husband, or even one of your friends tried to hard sell you on something with typical sales patter? It’s not very nice, I can tell you that. I should warn you at this stage, too, if you go on to take this information and be a success, some of the people you’ve been working with and have been friendly with for some time might even adopt a hard sell approach with you, when on a normal day they would have just said ‘Hey, check out my new product’ in a friendly manner. ‘Are you up for a deal, maybe an ad to your list if I whack your commissions above the norm?’ Or even, ‘hey some guy sent me an ad for this yesterday <insert link here>. I thought it looked cool. Check it out if you have time’.
● That’s all it takes. A quick, straight up, not beating around the bush nor wasting time, non hard-sell like mention or offer. The moment you try to hard sell a JV, they stop being your JV partners and contacts and you demote them to standard list members. When you begin to launch your own products and this happens to you, you’ll spot it a mile off.

● It’s immediately obvious once you’ve been around a while when someone you know is trying to sell something to you in this manner. Sure, contact me, tell me about your new stuff, and show me the new op you joined, tell me how it’s going and what the word is on the net. Ask me if I’m interested in joining you, not a problem. But, the moment you start talking to me about how much of a stunningly amazing deal I’m getting and how it’s going to EXPLODE my sales by 400% overnight, guaranteed, expect me to raise an eyebrow at you, turn around, and walk away. Moral of the story, watch what you’re saying and how you’re saying it if you want to keep your joint venture partners close, and your current marketing contacts would be wise to do the same for you to avoid negative effect. If you begin to get hard sells from your contacts, don’t fret, just relax and walk away. If they’re hard selling their close contacts it’s likely they don’t know what they’re doing anyway and it isn’t worth your time to worry about.

● Much like affiliates, as you can see the higher we get up the resource chain, the more important the resource becomes, and the less you can actually turn your affiliates and JVs into, but the more of your resources they build for you through deals and promotion anyway.

● We’ve just covered how to get your resources to build each other internally. Couple this with the external building and the influx of new customers you’re receiving through your new products, while others are struggling to start again, spending loads of cash and time trying to get started each time they launch a new product, and you’ll find yourself with an abundance of promotion power, now and far into the future.