The Story about The Instant Cash Button
I was playing Need For Speed on my Nokia n95. Cool game. And I was getting really good, I can go for a race and win every time. In NFS, you need to qualify yourself from small racing events to the next bigger ones. Of course, the bigger ones offer bigger prize money. And finally, I’m qualified for the biggest racing event. This event offers $5000 cash prize. With the cash prize, you can upgrade your car, or even get a totally new one. And there come a time when all that I needed to do to get bigger, more powerful cars was just to go for a few races. I know that I will win every single race I go. It felt like I can press a button and boom - $5000!
That made me thinking… Wouldn’t it be nice if in business, I can just press a button and make $5000 every time? Sounds like a fantasy. But this really happens in the real world. OK, maybe not a "button" so to speak. But some businesses have put together a system where they can do 1-2-3 and here comes the cash.
The freelancer’s cash button
I remember talking to one of my friend, who is an accomplished web programmer. He started as a freelancer and later launched a software development company, doing well over $200k every year now. When he was starting out, he taught programming through training companies. Companies and government agencies would send their staff for a one week training to learn PHP, and my friend is the trainier. To him, doing the training is a sure-fire way to generate cash to cover his overhead. He can go out and do a 1-week course (which he’s done dozens of times) and come back with $1000 in hand. The rest of the months, he spends building his actual business, which is developing custom software. And later, students who came for the training recommended him when their company needed any custom software development. It turns out, their company were preparing staffs for new web projects. They need their staff to be able to manage the project later. Not develop, just manage. So they turn to the first guy they know who can develop a custom software for them.
Another example - the funded proposal system
Business is all about systems. If you’ve been struggling in business, then you ought to stop and look at what you are doing now. [+] What are you doing to get customers to you? [+] What are you doing for long-term success? [+] Do you have your own instant cash button? One time ago I learned about the Funded Proposal System. From my point of view, a funded proposal system is a lead-generation-cum-instant-cash. How does it work? You create a report and sell it. When you sell your report, you make some money up front. That should cover for your operations. But what you are really after is customers to buy bigger things from you. If you are in web design, maybe you can write a book about how to effectively manage a company’s website. But your aim is to generate leads, and later design clients. Your long-term is of course the hosting, maintenance fee and repeat sales. This is similar to the freelance programmer story. The only thing is that he’s doing training rather than writing a book but both serve the same purpose.
Positioning yourself as the expert
If you really think about this, both stories that I told you about, they are positioning themselves as the expert. When people see you as the expert, they will come to you instead you go looking for them. The easiest way to make money (online of offline) is to get people look like an expert. If you are not an expert, then become one. It’s not that hard to do. OK, maybe it’s better to start with something that you are familiar with.
Finding your own cash button
Some people are really good with the online. They can put together a book and use PPC to drive traffic. But don’t stop there. Your ebook should lead you to bigger sales. Because it’s a lot fast to make more with bigger sales. I mean, it’s better to have two clients paying you $5000 than having 10 clients paying you $1000. Yes, the two clients you have will be demanding because they paid you a very high price. And you should deliver something worth the money they paid for. But that is nothing like the headache of handling 10 clients paying you only $1000 each. Well, you should consider this and price yourself wisely. But the point about this whole post is to get you to think. What you should do is start thinking about your cash button and after that, conver those into bigger sales. That is how you grow a business.
