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Turn Your Ideas Into Products That Make You Money

PAM HENDRICKSON & MIKE KOENIGS 2nd Edition

Turn Your Ideas Into Products That Make You Money

PAM HENDRICKSON & MIKE KOENIGS 2nd Edition

www.MakeMarketLaunch.com

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs © 2013-2015 Product Solutions Group, LLC. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-9888663-0-0 (paperback) ISBN: 978-0-9888663-1-7 (epub) Published by: Product Solutions Group, LLC. 3830 Valley Centre Drive, #705-314 San Diego, CA 92130 866-654-6534 or 858-720-8720 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher. Disclaimer: No portion of this material is intended to offer legal, medical, personal or financial advice. We’ve taken every effort to ensure we accurately represent these strategies and their potential to help you grow your business. However, we do not purport this as a “get rich scheme” and there is no guarantee that you will earn any money using the content, strategies or techniques displayed here. Nothing in this presentation is a promise or guarantee of earnings. The content, case studies and examples shared in this book do not in any way represent the “average” or “typical” member experience. In fact, as with any product or service, we know that some members purchase our systems and never use them, and therefore get no results from their membership whatsoever. Therefore, the member case studies we are sharing can neither represent nor guarantee the current or future experience of other past, current or future members. Rather, these member case studies represent what is possible with our system. Each of these unique case studies, and any and all results reported in these case studies by individual members, are the culmination of numerous variable, many of which we cannot control, including pricing, target market conditions, product/service quality, offer, customer service, personal initiative, and countless other tangible and intangible factors. Your level of success in attaining similar results is dependent upon a number of factors including your skill, knowledge, ability, connections, dedication, business savvy, business focus, business goals, and financial situation. Because these factors differ according to individuals, we cannot guarantee your success, income level, or ability to earn revenue. You alone are responsible for your actions and results in life and business, and by your use of these materials, you agree not to attempt to hold us liable for any of your decisions, actions or results, at any time, under any circumstance. The information contained herein cannot replace or substitute for the services of trained professionals in any field, including, but not limited to, financial or legal matters. Under no circumstances, including but not limited to negligence, will Pam Hendrickson, Mike Koenigs, Product Solutions Group, LLC. or any of its representatives or contractors be liable for any special or consequential damages that result from the use of, or the inability to use, the materials, information, or success strategies communicated through these materials, or any services following these materials, even if advised of the possibility of such damages.

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Dedication To anyone who has ever had a dream to make the world a better place through your unique knowledge, wisdom and experience. May this book provide the pathway for you to turn your passion into reality and in the process create the income, impact and legacy you desire.

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs

“The best use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.” —William James

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Table of Contents A Note from the Authors................................................................. 7 Introduction................................................................................. 13 Step 1: Mindset—Shift IT............................................................. 29 1. Access Your Super Powers............................................................31 2. The 3 Core Elements to Turn Your Ideas Into Products...............35 3. Your Product Funnel: The Power of Escalation............................39 4. Product Formats: Packaging Your Products for Success................43 5. Instant Product Titles..................................................................49 Step 2: Target—Attract IT............................................................. 55 1. The 3 Pillars of Product Creation: Market, Message, Media.........58 2. The Power of Avatars: The Key to Customer Empathy.................62 3. Your Brand Message & Story.......................................................65 4. Market Discovery Tools...............................................................67 Step 3: Offer—Present IT............................................................. 75 1. Create an Irresistible Offer..........................................................76 2. Design the 7 Elements of Your Irresisitible Product or Service.....78 3. The Psychology & Structure of a Perfect Offer............................84 4. Presenting Your Offer to Your Customers....................................88 Step 4: Leverage—Outsource IT................................................... 95 1. 5-Step Guide to Outsourcing....................................................100 2. Project Planning Essentials........................................................106 3. Productivity Tips: How to Get More Done in Less Time...........110 Step 5: Create—Build IT............................................................ 117 1. Product Creation 101: What You Need to Know......................118 2. Production: Getting Your Product to Market............................128 3. Structure & Story: The Two Pillars of Premium Content...........133 4. Setting Your Final Foundation...................................................140 Step 6: Monetize—Sell IT........................................................... 145 1. 9 Ways to Make Money With Your Product or Service..............146 2. Copywriting Secrets..................................................................162 3. Traffic Strategies to Build Your Email Marketing List................166 4. Three Components of Long-Term Sales Success........................171 5

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Step 7: Grow—Sustain IT........................................................... 177 1. How to Build Your Business Strategically for Sale......................177 2. Success Systems: How to Ensure Your Business Doesn’t Take Over Your Life.................................................................181 3. The Power of Partnerships.........................................................191 4. The Long-Term Entrepreneur....................................................194 Closing: One Final Gift to Change Your Life.............................. 201 Appendix: Tools & Tech Guide................................................... 203

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A Note from the Authors I grew up back East in a small town in western New York: Corning, NY. My dad was a process engineer for Corning, Inc.—a Fortune 500 company—for 40 years. My mom was a church organist and piano teacher who wrote 25 books (her seminal book on teaching Suzuki piano is still THE go-to book for teachers) and traveled around the world speaking to teachers and parents about empowering their kids. Both my mom and my dad worked hard to support me, build my confidence and give me an amazing education. They sent me to Brown University, where I graduated magna cum laude with a degree in psychology. My plan was to use my degree and my background to help others in the same way as my mom had. I’m big on planning—in fact, it’s one of the things that had helped me get into Brown and do well in school. But you know what they say about making God laugh by telling him your plans for your life…. Instead of becoming a teacher or psychologist or going to grad school, shortly after graduation I ended up in California, where I got a job as a receptionist at the Anthony Robbins’ organization. In only a few years I worked my way up to become the VP of Content & Product Development, working directly with Tony himself. Those almost 18 years gave me an incredible opportunity to be in on the ground floor for the creation of literally hundreds of training products, coaching programs, live events, supplement lines, software—you name it. I’m still proud of how well those products have done, both in terms of revenue and impact. I loved my work, but things changed in 2009, when my mom passed away. If you’ve lost someone you care about deeply, you know how that experience can make you re-evaluate your outlook and priorities. I realized that because of the intense schedule my job required, I was missing out on precious time with my husband and our two little boys. I also felt drawn to continue my mom’s legacy in a more personal and meaningful way. 7

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs So I started to wonder: What would happen if I could take everything I had learned from my mom, my education and my time at the Robbins organization, and used it to help others create products and services that made a real difference in the world? In the mid-2000’s I had met Mike, who had built several successful Internet businesses, and I asked him to come in and consult with Tony about online marketing. I had been impressed by Mike’s unique ideas about using video and technology to reach new customers and automate distribution of products in a compelling way. I also admired him for the way his success was based on the tangible results he was able to produce for himself and others. Mike’s example—and the examples of many of the other top Internet marketers that I met around that time—made me think that yes, starting my own business was possible. After all, I had a ton of product creation experience under my belt, I worked on infomercials, I knew top people in many different industries…. It should be great, right? So I opened my own consulting and product creation company. I thought that the TONS of positioning, status, know-how, contacts and relationships I possessed would translate into immediate results. Well, I quickly learned that great positioning can help get you off the ground, but it’s not going to deliver the goods by itself. And it doesn’t automatically translate into money, business or lifestyle success. My first year in business I ended up LOSING $1,542. How could that happen? Simple. My business had exactly one product, a single training program that sold for $297, and I marketed it exactly once over the course of the entire year. What was missing was a product strategy—one that connected my positioning with products and services that could actually sustain me and grow my business. With Mike’s coaching and support, as well as some great input from other colleagues, I revamped my business and started to build a suite of integrated products and services at various price points. I drilled down on market research to determine exactly who were my ideal customers were, 8

Make, Market, Launch IT how I could best help them solve their problems, and what information would I need to include to make my products highly effective for my customers. In 2011 Mike and I launched a product specifically designed for entrepreneurs who had great ideas but needed a strategy and system to turn those ideas into a sustainable business. That was the first version of Make Market Launch IT. And I’m proud to report that hundreds of entrepreneurs used that product to build great businesses and to maximize their impact in the world. But one of the biggest lessons I learned from Tony Robbins was the concept of CANI—Constant and Never-ending Improvement. And Mike’s just as committed to ongoing reinvention based upon the results our customers want. So in the years since the launch of Make Market Launch IT, we have changed, revised, edited, and made the entire system better and easier to follow. You hold in your hands, the newest edition of Make Market Launch IT—as the old Six-Million-Dollar Man TV slogan said, “Bwtter, stronger, faster than before.” One thing hasn’t changed, however, and that’s my mission: To help people create the freedom, the lifestyle, the impact, the income and the joy they’re really looking for not only in their businesses, but in their lives. And I believe that making, marketing and launching products of your own is the fastest way to do must that. If you apply the principles contained in this book, you too can achieve economic freedom while you create something meaningful that allows you to share your unique knowledge and experience with the world. I can’t wait to hear the story of your success! —Pam

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs When I was five years old, my dad gave me a real jigsaw and full access to the “shop in the basement” that had lots of tools in it. My dad could fix just about anything and had a knack for figuring out how things work. He passed that gift on to me—and as long as I can remember, I’ve been taking things apart, figuring out how they work and if time permitted, putting them back together! I grew up in a lower middle-class environment—dad was (and still is!) a barber and with four kids, there weren’t a lot of “extras” to go around. We grew up eating out of the garden and I made a lot of my own toys out of rubber bands, paper clips, string and blocks of wood. I learned how to program computers when I was 14 and became a serial entrepreneur by 18—mostly consulting, teaching people how to use and set up their computers and writing software for small business owners. As long as I can remember, I’ve loved the idea of “personal development” and the “personal growth” business. As a kid, I devoured biographies about people who overcame incredible odds to achieve great things. I was introduced to the world of personal development after going through a painful divorce. I was broke, overweight, felt like a horrible failure and spiritually empty. That’s when I discovered and started reading Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer and Tony Robbins books and listening to their audio cassettes. During that painful time, my business was failing, I was nearly $250,000 in debt, paying my credit card bills with credit card checks and buying food on gas cards. With all my knowledge, know-how, creativity and entrepreneurial skills, why couldn’t I succeed? I was saved by a conversation with a good friend who suggested I go to a Tony Robbins event. My ticket was secured by a brand-new credit card a foolish company sent to me. Days later, I was on the phone with a Tony 10

Make, Market, Launch IT Robbins sales representative named Chris Hendrickson who signed me up for “Life Mastery”. Armed with a dream, a lot of pain and a desire to get my life in order, I found myself in a room filled with adults jumping up and down, screaming and hugging each other. To say I felt weird and out of place was an understatement. In Eagle Lake, Minnesota where I’m from, guys didn’t hug guys! But after a couple of days of watching, I decided to start smiling, jumping up and down and hugging guys because I had a “breakthrough.” Ninety days after leaving that live event, I turned most of my life around and less than a year later, my previously failing company was being purchased by a billion-dollar advertising agency. Over the course of the next couple years, I studied online “direct response marketing” and started creating products, audio programs, video training and web sites for authors, experts, speakers, coaches and consultants. And in 2004, I “became the star” and launched my own products online and started several online companies that earned millions of dollars over the next few years. During this time, I had moved to San Diego (home of Tony Robbins), connected with my Tony Robbins sales rep, Chris Hendrickson, met his beautiful, kind and brilliant wife, Pam and we became fast friends (along with my wife, Vivian). For years, Pam was Tony’s “Product Development Specialist”—which meant if a product came out of that organization, Pam had her hand in helping make it. Pam eventually introduced me to Tony and I helped him and his company with a variety of online, video marketing, product creation and have even had the fortune of speaking at his live events. I felt Tony’s work saved my life. Now it was my turn to help him.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs A few years ago, I suggested that Pam, Chris and I start a business, combine our skills and products devoted to teaching small business owners, entrepreneurs, authors, experts, speakers, consultants and coaches how to make their own product and start self-sustaining, successful businesses of their own. That was the start of Make, Market, Launch IT—and using the same skills we’ve spent over 40 years combined honing, we launched a business that earned over a million dollars in our first year. This book and the product represent our experience and knowledge— and an opportunity to do the same for yourself, no matter what your knowledge, background or expertise is. No matter where in the world you live. You can turn your knowledge into products that will change and improve lives and businesses and make you wealthy in the process. If you have an idea or think you could have an idea that can be turned into a product, you’ve found the right book, the right resources and the right people to help you on your journey. Welcome to Make, Market, Launch IT! Mike

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Make, Market, Launch IT

Introduction

“Knowledge is great. Competence is great. But the combination of both encourages people to trust you and increases your powers of enchantment. And in this world, the combination is a breath of fresh air.” —Guy Kawasaki, Enchantment

We believe you’re reading this book because you have a burning desire to contribute, make a difference, have massive impact and help people. You’re an entrepreneur, small business owner, maybe a service professional like a doctor, attorney, consultant, author, expert, speaker, coach or creative type… Maybe you’re in transition: recently retired, left your job or in the process of reinventing yourself. Whoever you are, you’re great at something. You’re an expert. You’ve probably spent 10+ years in your field, honing your knowledge and skills. You’ve assembled an incredible wealth of knowledge from varied sources, including your education, your research and your experience in the field, all hard-earned. Or maybe you’ve spent fewer years but still you have knowledge that you believe will have value to others. 13

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Regardless of your background, you know that you have something to share: a unique perspective, a “take” on how the world works. But you aren’t having the impact or earning what you would like from your ideas or knowledge. You figure that by creating a product and selling it online you can help a lot of people and make a profit at the same time. But you don’t have a clue as to what product creation is all about or how to get started. You’re in luck — because there has never been a better time to sell your ideas or products. The rise of the Internet has created a singularly unique opportunity for anyone with a laptop or smartphone to have a voice, one with the potential to be heard around the world. With the click of a button you can reach over 2.8 billion people in every country and continent. Those people are hungry for information and knowledge—perhaps your information and knowledge. And they are willing to pay to access it online. Sales of information via the Internet are expanding dramatically. In the last five years alone, the digital information product market has more than doubled. Every day almost $2.5 billion in products are being sold over the Internet. Here are just a few examples of how much is being spent in different categories of online products: • $33 billion in corporate training and e-learning industry • $27.94 billion in the ebook and book publishing industry • $10.5 billion in the personal growth market • $17 billion in the mobile app market • $1.2 billion in the coaching market To give you a little different perspective on the size and dynamism of the online world, during the time it took you to read just one page of this book… • $7,206,000 was spent on online training, products, apps, and downloads worldwide 14

Make, Market, Launch IT • 144,000 apps were downloaded and $46,053 was spent to purchase apps through Apple’s App Store • $13,698 was spent on personal coaching • Amazon earned over $250,000 • Over $170,000 of book and eBook were sold in the US alone • YouTube users uploaded 216,000 hours of video The people you want to reach are online, waiting for your information. The opportunity is there for you to monetize your knowledge and expertise by creating and marketing a product. In fact…

It’s now faster, easier, and more profitable to make, market and launch your product than ever before.

Why create products? As a businessperson, having your own products is the fastest way to get seen heard, read, found on any device anywhere anytime and build your brand while you sleep. With your own products, you can… • Scale your revenue and impact—earn more money and make a difference to more people. • Leverage your time and stop trading your time for money. • Create passive, ongoing income—make money while you sleep. • Generate income and a business that is not dependent on you. • Connect to new people in new ways. • Maintain a competitive advantage in your industry. • Work together with others in your industry to move the industry forward. • Create and support your desired lifestyle. • Contribute and make a difference in the lives of others.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs It’s time for you to make the most of this opportunity by creating a product out of your expertise and building a real business around it, one that provides you a consistent, healthy source of revenue. It’s about combining all the things that make you special and unique—your special sauce—and packaging them into products and services that truly represent the core value you’re here to give. In this book you will discover… • How to take ideas that are in your head and turn them into digital or physical products. • How to discover the audience and calculate the demand for your products. • How to sell those products or services online and turn your ideas into on-demand-revenue immediately. • How to create a suite of products and services that will delight your customers and keep them coming back for more. • How to build a successful business that leverages your time and expertise to provide a great income and lifestyle. Before we go into the details of how you can create and market your own products, there are four key factors you’ll need for success.

#1. You must become an entrepreneur, not just an expert. Experts are a dime a dozen—and unless they work at monetizing their expertise, that’s likely about all they’re going to be paid for what they know. So instead of being an expert who creates products, your goal is to be an entrepreneur who creates products. An entrepreneur is someone who organizes and operates a business or businesses. By design, you’re setting up a system to sell products and services that don’t require you to be there 100% of the time. Entrepreneurship comes with greater than normal financial risks, but it’s the only way to create something that truly belongs to you, that has value beyond your salary or the business’s assets. When you’re an entrepreneur, you are building freedom for yourself and your family. 16

Make, Market, Launch IT Entrepreneurs…. • are willing to take risks and embrace uncertainty. • are business-focused — they make bottom-line decisions based upon the potential of an idea to make a profit. • have the passion to do whatever it takes and be willing to let things be messy in the process to get a result. • constantly develop new ideas and improve processes. • are willing to ask for the sale: they constantly promote their business and how it benefits the customer. • are willing to fail, persevere and move on. Most important, they don’t take failure personally. • constantly seek out and learn from other people that have skills they don’t. • create a strong network of people in their field who can help in a synergistic relationship. • are invested in the success of their customers, so much so that they highlight and promote their customers’ success. The good news is that these are all learnable skills that anyone can attain. You just need a blueprint. Once you have that, you can make the rest happen. And this book will provide you with the blueprint to become a successful product creation entrepreneur.

#2. You must treat this as a business. One of the first lessons you must learn as a product creator is that your business isn’t you—it’s the product or service that you’re selling. It’s not about getting a product done. Rather, it’s about putting a process in place to create better and better products and services over time. That process is your business. It doesn’t matter what size business you have or aspire to have, there are four things every business must have to be successful: (1) a repeatable and consistent system for (2) bringing in revenue and (3) serving customers (4) without you having to be there. 17

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Most business owners have one or two of these four things. They might have a repeatable system but doesn’t bring in revenue. Or might have revenue but isn’t repeatable and consistent. Or they can get the consistent revenue but it requires them to be there all the time. When you get all four things right—when you automate your marketing and delivery systems to create constant and consistent streams of revenue to sustain a thriving business with minimal day-to-day involvement on your part— then your business has a good chance of long-term success. Each entrepreneur brings his or her own reason for being in business. Your reason likely will fall into one of four categories: 1. Are you building your business to support your personal outcomes and lifestyle? 2. Are you building to scale and create a valuable brand or recognized name? 3. Are you building to sell—i.e., your focus is on creating a saleable asset? 4. Are you building to contribute or support a cause (i.e. a nonprofit)? Your reason is the primary driver that will determine many of the decisions you make about the types of products and services you create, as well as how you market and deliver them. Decide what’s most important to you and what type of business you want to build up front.

#3. You must not be a one-trick (or one product) wonder. A one-product business is a recipe for failure. To have a successful product creation business, you must create a full suite of products, at different price points, to meet your customers’ changing needs. Those products are arranged in a sequence that will lead customers from an introductory product at lower price points to a primary, higher-priced product that contains the “meat” of your idea, service, or system. If you have provided enough value and results through your primary product, some customers will wish to continue studying or working with you at greater depth. They will be the purchasers of your advanced product offered at a premium price point. 18

Make, Market, Launch IT Here’s what it looks like in your business:

As you can see, to make this system work you need at least three products, at various price points and levels of involvement, to offer your customers. But this system also produces two of the biggest benefits for a product creation entrepreneur—and in particular, an information product creation entrepreneur. First, if your customers like your products, their next question is usually, “What else do you have?” So there is a built-in demand from your current customers for more products. And selling to existing customers is much easier than finding new ones. The second benefit is that if you listen to your customers, they will tell you what your next product should be. Their questions, their comments (“It would be great if you had this feature…”), and their feedback will not only help you improve your currentofferings, but also show you where you can fill a different unmet need with a new product. Later in this book we’ll talk about targeting and talking with your ideal customers so you can build entire series of products that they will eagerly and happily buy.

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#4. You must keep evolving your business to keep up with changes in the marketplace. In 2009 only 21 percent of US wireless subscribers were using smartphones.1 We used our phones for calling, texting, and maybe (if we had a Blackberry) checking email. Things are very different now: in 2015, 80 percent of online adults own smartphones.2 And 60 percent of the time adults spent consuming digital media was via mobile devices and apps.3 (That’s the reason you absolutely must include mobile access in your products now and in the future.) But more important, the trend to accessing digital information via smartphone and mobile is an example of why product creators have to learn how their customers want information, and then adapt their content to fit those needs. In the online space, the game changes every six to twelve months, and things that were working even just a couple of years ago aren’t getting the same results today. It’s like trying to use a 2.0 operating system when your computer OS is now up to version 5.0—you are not going to be successful. Great product creators know that they must constantly reinvent themselves and their products. The market has changed quite a lot since we wrote the first version of this book in 2013, and we have revised and updated the Make Market Launch IT system to take those changes into account. The step-by-step formulas in this book are based on what’s working now—not yesterday, last month, or seven years ago. And we will continue to update this content based on what we discover are the latest trends and directions in the online marketplace.

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http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2010/smartphones-to-overtake-feature-phones-in-u-sby-2011.html 2 http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/12/80-of-all-online-adults-now-own-a-smartphone-less-than-10-usewearables/ 3 http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/majority-of-digital-media-consumption-now-takes-place-inmobile-apps/

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Let’s Get Started! If you can keep these four things in mind—be an entrepreneur, not just an expert; treat this as a business; be more than a one-product wonder and create a suite of products and/or services; and evolve your business to keep up with changes in the marketplace—then the door will be open for you to start your own Make, Market, Launch IT business. It starts with creating a product out of your expertise and an authentic, consistent business with your unique perspective, expertise and passion at its center. Then you must determine the reason that will drive your forward— something bigger than just yourself. For some of you it might be paying for your kid’s college, or finally taking that big family vacation. It may be paying off all your debts, doing that upgrade to your home that you’ve been wanting, or contributing your time and money to your church, or a charity or cause that’s really meaningful to you. Whatever your reason, you can design a business to support your goals and dreams at the highest level. All you have to do is put the stake in the ground for your vision. We’ll show you how to build a business that will provide the means to make it reality. Make Market Launch IT isn’t just a product creation system—it’s a business training system designed to help you create quality products and services that help you build a sustainable business that brings in ongoing revenue and serves your customers at the highest level. A Make, Market, Launch IT business will show you how to get the leverage you need to focus on the things that give you the most joy and get help with the rest. You’ll discover how to translate your ideas and experience into a suite of world-class products whose profits continually fuel your business. And you’ll be backed by a proven plan that produces both a pop of initial sales and a continuing stream of revenue.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs A Make, Market, Launch IT business will help you create raving fan customers devoted to you and your mission and eager to buy whatever you create. That group will bring you a constant stream of referrals as they continue along the path you’ve created for them. Like the people who carefully log and proudly share their running accomplishments in the Nike+ community, your “power tribe” will promote your brand to their friends, families and anyone who will listen, helping you to launch the successful products that form the foundation of your thriving business. It starts with a product, but the result is so much greater: a path of constant improvement for your clients and a real, revenue-generating business for you, one that empowers you to finally get paid for what you know. It’s all possible with a Make, Market, Launch IT business—and the process starts in this book. In the next seven chapters, we’ll show you how can you get your products to market quickly and inexpensively while retaining the highest quality possible, so you can make an impact in your marketplace and start building a consistent revenue stream now. Each chapter covers one of the seven essential steps of how to create a Make, Market, Launch IT business: 1. Mindset: Shift IT—make the big shift from “doer” to “marketer and business owner.” You’ll access your strengths, resolve your product title and product format, and walk away with the “big idea” that becomes the foundation of your business. 2. Target: Attract IT—identify and understand your ideal customers, or “avatars,” the specific people who want, need and will buy your product or service. You’ll learn simple and easy tools to make sure that these customers are in a market that can make you money and to ensure that your message is designed to speak directly to them.

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Make, Market, Launch IT 3. Offer: Present IT—successful product development starts with creating a successful offer, not creating a great product (although we’ll show you how to do both). You’ll decide exactly what to include in your product, and how to structure your offer to make your product irresistible for your ideal customers. 4. Leverage: Outsource IT—do what you do best and get others to do the rest. You’ll use our templates and tools to get the right help at the right time at the right price. 5. Create: Build IT—get a quality product done and to market as efficiently and effectively as possible. You’ll uncover the 4 key elements of product development and use our precise content structure to organize, deliver and produce effective, empowering content targeted to your specific audience. 6. Monetize: Sell IT—maximize as many channels and as many forms of media as possible to reach your loyal fans, current customers and future prospects, compelling them to buy your product because it’s a direct match to what they urgently want and need. 7. Grow: Sustain IT—don’t end up in a situation where your business has you rather than you having a business. You’ll use these proven strategies, systems and tools to scale your business and make it independent of your physical presence. Make Market Launch IT shows you how to match your vision with your customer’s needs so that both of you reap the maximum rewards. It’s about creating something that will give you greater freedom, greater impact, and greater satisfaction as you create a lasting and successful business. There’s never been a better time to share your information, knowledge, perspective, and expertise through profitable products and services. There’s never been a better time to build a great business to provide those products and services to the world. And Make Market Launch IT will show you how. Are you ready to make the most of this opportunity? 23

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs

How to Use This Book As you start this journey, you may find it helpful to get a notebook to capture your ideas. It’s one of the joys of the creative process that inspiration seems to strike while you’re in line at Starbucks. Keeping a method of capturing these thoughts—whether analog or digital—will make sure that you benefit from this inspiration before it gets away. You may be reading this book on your computer, your phone, your eReader, your iPad or you may be holding it in your hands. As you experience this message, we’ll ask you at various points to complete an exercise to put a stake in the ground, generate some ideas or set some milestones for yourself. We encourage you to write the answers to these questions in your notebook or your device of choice. They’ll help you shape your ideas as you move through the book and continue the momentum to help your Make, Market, Launch IT business take flight. Congratulations for taking the first step in creating your Make, Market, Launch IT business. As we dive in, we’d like to introduce you to one of the eight people you’ll meet in this book who have used the Make, Market, Launch IT system to produce results. They’ll show you how they turned their expertise, education and passion into a product that’s changing lives— theirs and their customers’. As you read these reports from the field, we hope they inspire you to take action and seize this remarkable opportunity. We’ll start with Sue Ferreira, a woman who turned an unexpected life change into her life’s mission.

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Make, Market, Launch IT

“This isn’t work.”

Case Study from the Field: Sue Ferreira As a successful physician for over 40 years and the mother of three, Sue Ferreira thought she had the rest of her life pretty much figured out. However, when her marriage of 34 years fell apart, Sue’s “grey divorce” forced her to take another look at her life. Sue’s first realization was how little she knew about managing her own finances. She immersed herself in books, websites—anything she could get her hands on—to get a handle on her financial future. “I followed my nose and sort of did an MBA,” she says, “Partly to clarify it, but also . . . because I knew I could pass it on to other people.” One year later, when the market crashed in 2008, Sue was struck with another mobilizing realization. Millions of other people would soon be in the same place she was—forced to rebuild their lives during their later years. At that point, Sue realized she had a library of valuable knowledge on her hands. She had learned the hard way how to build herself back up from nothing, and she wanted to help others expedite the process. This shift in mindset was the beginning of a new life chapter for Sue. “I learned so much about building a new life myself. I decided I was going to build a holistic program that would allow people to work out what they were going to do, generate added income and live a successful retirement,” she says. Sue’s named her first product Boomer Bucks, but she struggled to get it off the ground. Without having much marketing experience, she didn’t know how to take the product to the next level. “I was kind of spinning my wheels,” she says. “I looked at Mike and Pam’s programs and I decided I needed their experience to accelerate and get myself out there.” “The structure of Make, Market, Launch IT is so logical and clear. If you just follow everything online or you follow the DVDs, you’ve got 25

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs an absolutely beautiful algorithm of how to develop a product,” she continues. One of the biggest changes Sue made came after Make, Market, Launch IT strategies got her to start thinking like a marketer, rather than, as she says, a “didactic teacher.” Sue redefined her target audience and renamed her program. “I had to say to myself, ‘I am my target market person right now. What do I want to receive from me?’ That turned everything around. Because of the way Pam changed the emphasis, now it’s easy to see the process,” Sue explains. The result was Live Your Retirement Dream, a new brand that embodied both what Sue was doing herself and what she wanted for others. “I’m my own avatar, and I think that’s why I feel so passionately about this. I know how to do it. I’ve gathered so much information that I know I can fast-track any individual,” she continues. To reach her audience and make money, Sue also realized she couldn’t play small. “If you really think about how many millions and millions of websites are out there, they’re all waving little flags trying to get your attention. You’re just not going to be seen unless you do something different from everybody else,” she says. “You have to be prepared to go out and absolutely make yourself be seen everywhere.” Make, Market, Launch IT gave her the help to make that happen. “No one can do this on their own. I spent a lot of time looking at different experts before I found Pam and Mike and knew they were the ones I needed.” Sue released her book, Live Your Retirement Dream, on Kindle in October 2012. “If I hadn’t found Pam and Mike, I’d still be paddling around in the shallow end and wouldn’t have gone off into the deep end and started swimming,” she says. “[Make, Market, Launch IT] is an excellent product. I think anybody who wants to develop a product, be effective, and market it well needs to buy this. It’s a no-brainer. It’s a savings not an expense,” says Sue. 26

Make, Market, Launch IT In the end, Sue’s divorce and her subsequent life changes transformed her for the better. “It’s like I’m reborn. In a way my divorce was the best thing that ever happened to me because it allowed me to go into this new world which I absolutely love. And, if I can do it, everyone can do it.” Sue’s advice for those wanting to follow in her footsteps? Play at a higher level. “You’ve got to do it very well. If you don’t do it very well, nobody is going to look. I made a lot of mistakes because I did it all myself. If I had known about Mike and about Pam four years ago, I’d be so much further ahead than I am now.” Thanks to Make, Market, Launch IT, Sue also has the strategies and the confidence help her own clients make the most of their time: “I can take people from zero knowledge so they can fast track to their goals, without doing all of this wandering around in the shallows first. I know how to get them off the deep end, now.” Ultimately, Sue couldn’t be happier about where her Make, Market, Launch IT journey has led her. “I find it very exciting. I mean, this isn’t work because I’m enjoying it so much.” Sue Ferreira’s Live Your Retirement Dream is available on Amazon.com. She launched her online business in mid-2013 at www.LiveYourRetirementDream.com.

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“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” —Abraham Lincoln

Make, Market, Launch IT

Step 1: Mindset—Shift IT

“The difference between good and great is determined by the mindset you choose to bring to the work.” —Douglas Conant, President and CEO, Campbell Soup Company

The Make Market Launch IT journey is about more than just an idea for a product—or even an amazing product by itself. It is about setting yourself up for what you want for yourself, professionally and personally. Where do you want to be in the next five or ten years? How will you share your unique perspective with the world? Where does that perspective intersect with your passion? How do you want to spend your time? Where do you want to go? Who do you want to be? What do you want to create? What’s your vision for your future? And maybe most important, how will building a business around your ideas and your products help you get there? Most people dive into the product creation process but they never take the time up front to decide the outcome they want. And without a clear destination, it’s really easy to get sidetracked or distracted by the latest shiny object or magic button. 29

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs That’s why Step #1 in the Make Market Launch IT formula begins with a BIG SHIFT in your MINDSET. Mindset is about knowing what you want, and then creating a business to get you there. When you know exactly what you want, it’s easy to figure out what to do. Businesses come in many forms. In the Make Market Launch IT community, we have a six-figure wrapping paper business, Facebook ads experts, financial planning gurus, radio personalities, a funeral director— you name it! No matter what your business, however, successful entrepreneurs have some aspects of their mindset in common, and they follow a common path:

Desire + Action + Faith = Success

Achieving your vision starts with your mindset. Before you start generating ideas, drafting outlines or assembling prototypes, you need to put yourself in the right frame of mind to understand the pieces that will get you where you want to be: where your heart’s desire intersects with your hard-earned knowledge. In this chapter, you’ll clarify your business and lifestyle goals, discover how to tap into your biggest strengths, and develop the three elements you need to get started with a quality product that sells: (1) the “big idea” that becomes the foundation of your product funnel, (2) the right format for your product or service, and (3) a compelling product title that will attract your ideal audience. Let’s start your journey by accessing the “super powers” of your mind and emotions to set goals and create a vision for your business.

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Make, Market, Launch IT

1. Access Your Super Powers When building your business, remember this: your mindset is the key, not only to your business health, but also to your own personal well-being and that of the people around you. Successful entrepreneurs build businesses based on three things. First, a vision for their lives and business. Second, an attention to the importance of their physical and mental health. And third, an awareness of their strengths and flaws, and an acceptance of both. Create a Vision for Your Life and Business What’s your ultimate vision for yourself? Take the time to really think about the answer, even if you’ve done it before. Where do you envision yourself in 6 months? 5 years? 10 years? What have you always dreamed of creating for yourself? How do you spend your days? Where do you put your energy? How do you renew it? And why? What’s behind that vision? What is your “big why?” Who’s with you in that vision? What’s driving you and motivating you to reach it? When you arrive at this destination, who will you be? How will you feel? Now, do the same process for your business. Where do you envision your business in 6 months? 5 years? 10 years? What products have you created? How do you spend your days? Where do you put your energy? What successes have you produced? Who’s with you? What’s driving you and motivating you to reach it? When you arrive at this destination, who will you be? How will you feel? These visions—and the emotions that come along with them—are your motivation. They’re the things that wake you with a stir of anticipation in the morning. They’re the Energizer in your bunny that will keep you going, day after day, when things are going swimmingly and when times are tough. When you are excited about your vision and your goals, hitting your target becomes that much easier. Your vision is the fuel that will ignite the passion and hunger to turn it into reality. With a vision for your life and business in hand, you’re ready to discover the other powers you already possess that can catapault you to success. These are your healthy and vitality, your strengths, and yes, your flaws. 31

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Energy & Vitality Breeds Success Your health and vitality is a hugely important element in how successful you are. Creating the right mindset and working toward your health goals can not only make you live longer, you’ll live better. No matter how busy you get and how crazy your business, you must take care of your physical and mental health. You do this in very simple ways that you almost certainly know about: enough water, enough sleep, enough exercise, and so on. Unfortunately, these simple healthy habits usually get trashed when we go into business (if we ever adopted healthy habits in the first place, that is). Both of us are incredibly passionate about the importance of health, even moreso after Mike went through some tough times physically. So let’s make this simple—here are five best practices for health and wellbeing (be sure to consult a physician or licensed health practitioner to assist you on your journey): 1. Drink water: a glass when you get up, and at least 6 to 8 glasses throughout the day. Water has a huge impact on your energy, vitality and wellbeing. 2. Clean up your diet. There’s a ton of research out there about the negative effects of consuming sugar, dairy, wheat, soy, and corn. Reduce or eliminate as much of these detrimental foods as you can. 3. Eat high-quality proteins and vegetables, cooked simply so your body doesn’t have to work hard to process your food. Eating well ensures high energy levels throughout the day. And consider taking probiotics to keep your digestion healthy. 4. Exercise. Even if you’re busy, it will get your blood flowing and keep your brain strong as well as your body. 5. Practice yoga and meditation. Just 10 minutes a day will reduce your stress, calm your mind, and re-center your thoughts.

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Make, Market, Launch IT Discover Your Strengths and Flaws There are a ton of studies out there that prove people are more successful when they know and are allowed to use their strengths in their businesses. All of us have things we are great at doing, and other things that we dislike and we are miserable if we are called upon to do them. For example, Mike is incredibly good at product launches, speaking direct to camera, predicting the future of Internet marketing, and results-based teaching. And, as he’ll be the first to tell you, he’s terrible at anything to do with logistics, overcommitting, and long-term focus. Pam is great at breaking down content and information, project management, teaching, and getting things done. Ask her to follow directions, consistently be on time, or participate in the trenches during combat (this includes business outcomes, too!) and you’ll get a less than stellar result. That knowledge is gold when it comes to creating a successful business. It tells you where you can make great strides quickly yourself, and where you are better off hiring someone or “subbing out” a particular job because you will hate doing it and will be really bad at it to boot. You learn about your strengths and flaws by examining your personal history. Try this exercise. Write down the answers to these questions: 1. What have been your greatest successes? 2. Where do you have 5 to 40 years of irrefutable proof and history in terms of your accomplishments? 3. Where you find you’re consistently getting natural and repeatable results? 4. What do people come to you for? What do they say that they love about you? 5. What are you most passionate about? 6. What are you known for? What’s your reputation? 33

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Your answers reflect your strengths and your reputation in the marketplace. They will become great “nuggets” that can be used for your bio, the back of your product, introducing yourself, media hooks, and different kinds of marketing. They also will make up the core stories inside your product that inspire and motivate and feel natural to your customers. Now it’s time to write down the opposite of your strengths—what we call your “fatal flaws.” Write down the answers to these questions: 1. What would you consider your failures? 2. Where do you repeatedly get into trouble? 3. What do you absolutely hate to do? What are the things that you feel it’d be unnatural for you even to attempt them? 4. What do you struggle to have to think about? 5. What are the things that people say about you behind your back that have hurt you—but you know they’re real and there’s truth in them? We know, it’s not a pleasant exercise. But this is a case where self-knowledge can lead to freedom. You do NOT have to be great at everything, nor do you have to DO everything in your product creation business. In fact, one of the joys of being in business is the ability—really, the necessity—to have a team of people to help you. And all of that stuff you absolutely hate to do and suck at doing? There are people for whom those are EXACTLY the things they love to do and are great at! Now aren’t you glad you know your flaws as well as your strengths? Knowing your strengths and flaws is a vital part of a product creator mindset and will help you create greater success in your business and life. Indeed, it’s part of the formula for happiness and productivity: 1. Get clear on your strengths and fatal flaws. 2. Say NO to things that aren’t your strengths. 3. Delegate your flaws to others whose strengths complement your flaws. 34

Make, Market, Launch IT 4. Be self-deprecating and laugh at yourself. This is how people feel your vulnerability in your heart. Customers will buy from people they’re connected to and people who are passionate. 5. You don’t have to be something you aren’t. Give yourself permission not to try to be someone else. Be good with who you are. Now that you’re clear on your strengths and flaws, you have a clear vision for your life and business, and you have put a priority on creating vibrant physical and mental health, you’re ready to step into the mindset of product creation and learn the three key elements to turn your idea into a viable, sellable product.

2. The 3 Core Elements to Turn Your Ideas Into Products When you decide that you are going to be a business owner, the first question you have to ask is: where is the money? The money is in your products and services. Without products and services, you don’t have a sustainable business. In fact, you really don’t have a business at all. Many people who wish to build a product creation business find themselves making one of two mistakes. First, they focus too much on positioning. They get in front of audiences and focus on their message, their place in the market, refining their content—but they have nothing to sell to the people who are interested in their material. The other extreme are people who have warehouses or garages filled with products because they never spent the time building up an audience to buy. A successful product creation business requires three core elements. You need a powerful and clear message (positioning) that attracts the right audience (platform) so that you can sell your products and services effectively. When all three elements are in place, your business will be strong. Element #1: Positioning—Clarify Your Unique Message Your unique message is one that will resonate deeply with your ideal, target customer. It will let them know who you are, what you’re about, what you have to offer, and how it will help them. It also will help your customers related to you in a meaningful way. 35

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Your message also needs to show your customers that you can help them solve a big, urgent problem they have and get what it is they want and need. They need to believe that you have the best solution for them, and you are a qualified, competent, and trustworthy individual who will follow through on the promises you make. Tall order, right? It’s actually not that difficult when you break your unique message into the following components: • Who are you? • What sets you apart and makes you unique? • What’s the benefit you give your audience? What problems do you solve? • How do you connect emotionally with your audience? • What’s your hook (something that intrigues people right from the start)? • What’s your personal story? • Do you have case studies and/or testimonials? • What’s your bio/resumé? • What awards have you received? Powerful positioning can help you establish instant authority while you earn credibility and build trust. It can open doors to new audiences as well as key relationships and strategic alliances. The right positioning can elevate and differentiate your position in the market and provide a hook for media and influencers. Most of all, it can create a deep, meaningful relationship between you, your product, and your target customers. They will see you as a trusted advisor and a source of superior information and advice. Great positioning can insulate you from your competition and set you apart as THE go-to person in your niche. Exercise: Brainstorm elements of your core message (or positioning) for your business. But positioning is no good without the right platform that gets you in front of the right people—your target audience. 36

Make, Market, Launch IT Element #2: Platform—Get Your Message in Front of Your Target Audience When you build a platform, your goal is twofold: capture customers, and create demand for your products and services. The key to a successful platform is to control when and how you communicate with your target audience. There are six elements of a product creator’s platform: • Your email marketing list or rolodex • Your media/social media reach • Your distribution vehicles: live events, webcasts, podcasts, shows, etc. • Your relationship with colleagues and influencers in your field • The influence you have with your audience • The dollar value and cache´ your name or brand brings to the table Your first task is to build a database of potential customers, with their contact information and permission to communicate with them. In marketing, this database is called an “owned platform,” because you can control when and how you communicate and market your products to these customers. However, when you first start out it can be tough to capture new customers and create new demand for your products. But what if some of the competitors in your market might actually turn out to be potential allies—especially if what you have to offer is just different enough to add distinct value to their audiences? This is what it means to have a joint venture or affiliate relationship. You support each other because you have similar customers with similar needs and you can each bring a unique solution to the table. The audience of a joint venture or affiliate partner is called a “Borrowed Platform”—they are a great match for your message, but you are “borrowing” them from the affiliate or JV. Examples of this would be speaking on someone else’s stage, being a guest on a podcast, or having an affiliate send an email to their list on your behalf. It’s a much less expensive way to get in front of more people. Just be sure to reciprocate with your partners and add value back to their business as well! 37

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Exercise: Write down two to three ways you can build your platform to get your message in front of the right target audience. Once you are in front of the right audience, the final step is to sell them something—your product. Element #3. Products—Sell Your Solution Selling products and services is the only way to generate income in your business. The key, however, is making sure your products or services are in fact profitable—in other words, the target audience will buy. In marketing terms, this means that you must offer a good or service that (1) closely meets the requirements of a particular market and (2) yields enough profit to justify its continued existence. There are five key requirements for a successful product. 1. It has to be profitable. 2. It has to satisfy a market need or desire. 3. It has to match your positioning. 4. It has to be salable from your platform. 5. It has to be created by a sustainable, repeatable process. Bottom line: If it’s not making money and the investment to create it can’t be justified, it’s not a viable product! Exercise: In two to three sentences or less, describe the unique solution you are providing to your audience. In other words, how does the product you are selling solve a unique problem, fulfill a desire or serve a need for your target audience? With positioning, a platform, and a product, you have the basics upon which you can start your business. However, if you wish to be in business for the long term, you need more than one product: you need a series of interconnected offerings that can lead your customers into a deeper relationship with you and your content. You need a product funnel to escalate your success.

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3. Your Product Funnel: The Power of Escalation As outlined in the Introduction, the “Classic Product Funnel” has three components. Introductory Products: These products introduce you and your business to your audience and help get your message out. People are raising their hands and buying your products and services as first-timers. Primary Product: This is your main offer and will essentially become your calling card and bread and butter in terms of profits. High-End Products: These are products and services higher in value and higher in cost as they are usually more customized, personalized and deliver a high return on investment for your customers. Your products should be designed to solve the problems your customers are facing. Just as there are introductory, prinary, and advanced products, there are introductory, primary, and advanced problems. The Client Problem Cycle

Let’s use a dating product as an example. The primary problem your customers face is frustration and failure in using the typical online dating sites. Either they get way too many responses or not enough, or the people that respond are not really good matches. They are spending too much time and money for lousy results.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs One of their introductory problems might be difficulty choosing the best site for their needs. Another introductory problem could be inability to write a good dating profile for themselves. An advanced problem might be what to do once they’ve actually found some possible candidates and they’re ready to go on dates. They might feel they need a dating coach, or image consulting, or training on how to behave like a gentleman or lady while on dates. Or maybe they need to develop the skills to move past dating and into a longer-term relationship. All of these problems are part of the “frustration around online dating” issue. Once you understand the problems you’re solving for your client, you simply come up with your solution to the primary problem first, then build your introductory and advanced products to solve those problems at suitable depths and price points. A product funnel is about “escalation”—starting your customers off with an introductory product that gets them into your unique brand so that they start getting results and become familiar with other products and services you offer. Then, as they keep investing in additional products with you, your higher-end programs solve their problems at even deeper levels of engagement. The Three Levels of Product Offerings Introductory Products

Go after your target market online by giving them free content and a clear incentive to take the next steps and invest in your core products and services... • Entry-level products • Diverse content & delivery • Free or small price point

Primary Products

Package your meatiest content into a product or service (a structured course or system) that produces results and leads them to your... • Usually structured, i.e., a step-by-step system • Main offer • Higher but competitive price points for industry

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Advanced Products Offer your most customized content— based on individual training, personal relationship and customized services. • High-end training • Highly customized • Individual relationships • Premium price points

Make, Market, Launch IT A product funnel gives your customers clarity about what to invest in first and subsequently. Your introductory product resolves a problem that leads to your main product, which leads to your higher end programs. The key is that every offer leads to the next offer because you’ve adding more value at every stage along the way. Putting together a suite of escalating products starts with this core question: What do your customers need at each stage of the game in order to get to the next level? At each step, you’re solving a specific piece of your customer’s problem. You’re meeting your clients where they are and taking them to where they want to be. That’s when you create clients for life—and a business that never has to look for customers. Create your Main Product First The temptation may be to create the introductory product first, because it will be simpler to build and you can get it to market quickly. However, we suggest that you start with your Big Idea—your main value proposition and big benefit that you want to share with people. Create your primary product first—it will become your calling card. And it should not be your introductory, low-end product. Instead, it should be the manifestation of your big idea, lying at the center of all the other products and services you may invent in the future. It looks like this:

Once your main product is established, you can build “product extensions” on the lower end and higher end that build out your product funnel. By focusing your initial efforts on a single product, however, you establish 41

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs your brand, become known for one main thing and build a base for your business on which you can extend to additional products and services. Think about any big brand company that exists today: Apple started with a single computer. Coca-Cola started with their initial cola product. Nike started by simply selling shoes. You’ve got to develop and refine your main, “big” idea and make it profitable as your first step. Then, you are free to build out your concept and extend into additional products or services that support your brand. Exercise: What is your one “big idea”—the foundational product or service that will build the base of your business? How the Product Development Process Really Works First and foremost, you have an idea and you get that first core product done. You get it to market and into the hands of customers, and you start interacting with them and getting their feedback. This information then helps you refine your initial product or service and also develop additional products and services. You then put those new products in front of your existing customers, and also use these products to attract new customers as you keep expanding your product lines. Once a client or customer uses your product and achieves their desired result, they’ll naturually ask, “What else do you have?” It’s at this point that you have the opportunity to solve additional problems or challenges through programs of advanced complexity, which are worth a higher price point. Your one solution opens doors to other solutions you may have for other challenges your audience is facing. As you continue to help new customers transform, success stories will start to grow. These stories bring new customers and then create repeat customers. And because your goal is to build a business, your focus should be on serving your clients at multiple levels, helping them continually escalate their results through a suite of products. You’ve got the products or services you’d like to promote, your message and your ideal audience. Now, what format do you put this product or service in? 42

Make, Market, Launch IT

4. Product Formats: Packaging Your Products for Success A product format is simply how you’re packaging and delivering your product or service to your target audience. Is it in the form of physical DVDs and CDs? An online membership site? Software or an app? A live event? As important as it is to determine the format of your product or service, however, this is not the question that you should be asking when you’re starting out. The number one thing you should be worried about is the quality of your product or service. Formats are going to evolve and change. More important than the format is what you’re putting into it: the message or the solution to your customer’s problems. Your goal is for there to be so much value in the content or in the solution you’re delivering that the format can change a zillion times, but people will keep investing in your products or services because of the value it provides to them personally. To deliver value regardless of value, ask yourself these questions. 1. Who is my target audience? 2. What do they want and need? 3. Why don’t they already have it? (By the way, your best customer is not someone who’s never invested in a product or service that does whatever yours does—it’s someone who’s already in the market for a solution to this problem. Your product just does it better!) When you’re starting out, start by focusing on who your ideal customer really is and what’s preventing them from getting what they really want and need. In other words, why don’t they already have the solution to the problem? Or, why is this deep need or desire of theirs not yet fulfilled? The answer always comes down to psychology: beliefs; ease of use of product or service; what’s going on in their brain; they’re too busy, etc. The more you can understand what’s driving them, the better you’re able to help them overcome the obstacles they’re facing. 43

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs If you can give your market a solution where none has worked before, you are well on your way to out-positioning your competitors and to sell your product or service. This is what you think about before you start thinking about your format. Two Sides to the Format Coin Your product needs to be designed with a particular format in mind. For example, if you’re creating an audio product on CD, your content has to be condensed into 74 minutes because that’s how much information you can fit on a single CD. If you have loads of content, then you might think about a package of three or four CDs, or you may want to go with a different format—maybe online streaming or podcasts. On the other hand, the formats available for your product or service are going to change constantly. As technology advances and learning methods and markets change, so will the vehicles in which you can deliver your products and services. That’s why it’s more important to be flexible about your format and focus instead on the quality of your product or service. When it comes to choosing the format for your product or service, go with your first initial gut reaction. However, it helps to have a quick look at your options before making a decision that will introduce you and your product/service to the world. There are 11 primary product formats currently sold in the online space. We’ve listed them below with a few upsides and downsides for each format. Review these and ask yourself which one or more are best suited for your main/primary product. (You can wait until later to choose the formats for your introductory or advanced products.) The 11 Product Formats 1. Online Membership Sites—private websites that provide exclusive content and training for your customer online with step-by-step instructions. Upside: Many people appreciate the convenience of online training—it’s inexpensive and provides for a great deal of flexibility. 44

Make, Market, Launch IT Downside: There is a perceived value in a physical product that isn’t the same with online content. 2. Physical Training Products—tangible, multi-media products that feature a series of physical components, including a workbook, DVDs, CDs, mp3 players, etc. Upsides: Greater perceived value. Clients like CDs and/or DVDs and the written material/workbooks that are included. Physical products are great asset for your brand—a physical product sits on your customer’s shelf or table, and serves as a constant reminder of your value. Downsides: You can produce off-the-shelf material fairly inexpensively, but if you try to create a custom package, costs can escalate quickly, eating into your profits. Shipping (including international!), inventory and fulfillment costs can eat into your profits as well. You have to know that you have built up a big enough platform where there is a high likelihood that you’ll sell all of your physical products. This is why building your platform is crucial. 3. Subscription Programs/Continuity—products or services you bill your customers at regular intervals (typically monthly) until they cancel. The product or service can be almost anything: training, skin care products, recipes, flowers, etc. Upsides: Ongoing revenue. The idea is that the customer pays a monthly fee (usually, but not a must) and they receive something new. Downsides: It’s harder to retain current customers than it might appear. You have to strike a balance between acquiring new customers and retaining old customers. Continuity programs tend to be lower priced, which makes sense if you’re asking someone to pay a monthly fee.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 4. Coaching Programs—you are providing one-on-one guidance with your client. These programs can focus on any topic from dating to exercise/weight loss to performance enhancement. Upsides: High-impact personal connection with your audience Good accountability for both the coach and customer. Great addon and upsell to your other products. Higher dollar value because you’re giving people personalized feedback and training. Downsides: Time commitment. There aren’t very many people who just do coaching and are wealthy as it’s more difficult to scale. 5. Software and Apps—people love software and apps for their convenience, and it’s a great way for your message to go viral and for your business to collect leads. Upsides: Lower price point—it’s easier to get apps created these days. Downsides: Be aware of scope creep. Programmers can often underestimate the time and money it takes to create software or an app. There are also support costs, which you may not even think about until you’ve already begun investing. Technology is fickle so make sure you deliver on what you promise and that your app actually does what you say it does. 6. Corporate eLearning Systems/Learning Management Systems (LMS)—all-in-one training solutions that have tracking, reporting, testing (compliance standards) and many other features that centralize training, reporting and delivery. There are hundreds of companies that have eLearning platforms around the world. Upsides: All the technology and functionality is contained inside a single system. Downsides: May not be appropriate for a new business just starting out because they can be expensive—for example, you might pay a large sum to set it up, then you pay per user per year with an off-the-shelf proprietary LMS. 46

Make, Market, Launch IT The interface usually isn’t as user-friendly because most LMS developers are not marketers or designers. They don’t always understand how to make information compelling, interesting, and engaging. 7. Live Events—an educational or training experience delivered in real time, whether virtual or in person, with an audience present. Upsides: You get to know your customers more intimately—high touch, high value. Customers can go deeper, immerse themselves, meet the community, and create invaluable relationships. Downsides: Tend to be expensive to produce. It’s not only hard to get potential clients to buy into an event but also get them to show up. 8. Mastermind Programs— more intimate live events that act like a membership where the members belong to the group, attend several events a year and have a formal commitment to supporting the other members. Upsides: Creates a tremendous sense of community and leverages your best customers to support each other. High impact, high touch, high volume = high end niche market = greater profit potential! Downsides: Not having the right customers and/or not managing them properly. These programs often demand a greater commitment of time from you. 9. Certification/Training the Trainer—empowering others to deliver your core content. Upsides: Extends your impact and reach without you having to be there. Downsides: Without clear guidelines, your brand can be difficult to enforce when you’re not there.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 10. Manufactured Products—more traditional products that include consumer goods, physical tools, appliances, etc. Upsides: You can (at times) create products on demand fairly cheaply. These products can also be a great passive income source. Downsides: Warehousing/storing manufactured products. Greater market competition. 11. Consulting—sharing your expertise or advice in a specialized field to a specific type of customer. Upsides: High dollar, high impact, high touch = high end = greater profits! Downsides: Clients can become demanding if not managed effectively. Delivery can make more significant demands on your time. Three Steps To Determine Your Format To determine the best format for your product, ask yourself questions about (1) you, (2) your audience, and (3) your business. You: • What do you want your lifestyle to be? Do you want to do live events and fly from city to city? Or do you prefer working from home, affording you the flexibility to spend more time with your family? • What type of earning potential is important to you? • What do you like to do? Do you like to teach? Train or coach? Do you love technology? • What do you hate doing?

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Make, Market, Launch IT Your Audience: • Who is your target customer? • What types of products are they already buying? • Where are they already investing—in live events, coaching, online training programs? • What format makes it easiest for them to get the result? Your Business: • What’s appropriate for the size, stage, and scope of your business? • Your product format has to match your business structure and capacity and take into consideration (1) budget constraints, (2) time constraints, (3) resource constraints, (4) life stage of your business, and (5) brand considerations. Once you’ve made the decision about the best product format for your primary product, you need to come up with a product name that hooks your audience and makes the promise of the product compelling and clear.

5. Instant Product Titles Why is a name so important? You could literally have the best product in your field—the best sales program, the best energy drink, the best adhesive, whatever it may be. You might know it’s the best and potential customers may figure that out for themselves. But they’ll never have that experience if you don’t get them at “Hello.” A general rule of thumb is that the title of your product should be as short as possible but as long as necessary. You don’t need to communicate how you’re going to solve something in the product title. All you need to do is present what problem your product solves and the result customers should expect. They can figure the “how” out for themselves. Basic human psychology is that people want to avoid pain and achieve pleasure as quickly as possible. Your product title should reflect the timeliness and effectiveness of the solution to your customer’s problem! 49

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 5 Steps to a Great Product Name Your name doesn’t have to be perfect. You certainly want to put time and considerable thought into your product title, but at a certain point you just have to run with what you’ve got! 1. Quantity, not quality. People who come up with great product names usually brainstorm about 100 options before deciding on one. The good news is that you don’t have to think that hard! Look for a bunch of words that make sense for your product and how it resolves a problem, and then slapping those word associations together concisely. 2. Get feedback from like-minded friends and colleagues. Try collaborating with Google Docs to share ideas and receive feedback relatively quickly and conveniently. Frame your product idea in a way that allows colleagues to give relevant feedback. Tell them what it’s about, who it’s for, and the results that are promised, and they’ll tell you if the name works or doesn’t. 3. Brainstorm. Look at what other people are doing. This helps with word association. Look for imagery (online and in your surroundings) that helps generate word stacking. 4. Use online search for ideas. Start with GoDaddy.com: just type in names and words that are in the ballpark of your product idea to see what domain names are available. You also can search for domains for sale on eBay, look at Amazon for other books and products in your category, and see what specific words or images attract your attention. That’s how you want to attract attention to your product! 5. If all else fails, Google “product naming software” or “great product names.” Once you’ve come up with a tentative name, put it to the final test by checking these eight things. 1. Keep it between one and four words long. If your product title gets too long, it’s going to be overwhelming. For example, “Publish and Profit” or “Make Market Launch It” are short, concise, and to the point. Everything you need to know is captured in less than four words.

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Make, Market, Launch IT 2. Make sure it’s easy to remember, say and spell over the phone. This is like the product-naming version of the classic “elevator speech.” If you’re telling someone the name of your product in a telephone conversation and they ask you to spell or repeat something, go back to the drawing board. That means your product name is too complicated. 3. Consonants and alliteration. The more your four words in your title begin with the same letter, the better. It flows. It rolls off the tongue. It makes it easier for people to say and remember. 4. Leverage. Can you leverage other common phrases and meanings in reference to your product title? 5. Can your title be a verb? An egg is an egg, but you can “egg” someone on or get “egged” about something you said or did. Your product title as a name and potential verb goes a long way in branding. 6. Are there any negative connotations or associations? You have to be sure that someone can’t flip your product title into a dirty word or thought. 7. Do a trademark search at www.uspto.gov. Once you have a product title that you think works, make sure someone else doesn’t already own it. Then check to see if there is already an Internet domain taken (ideally you want a dotcom). 8. Don’t try to be cute or clever! It’s Still All About Mindset Your mindset—your approach and the strategies that support it—can’t be underestimated. They’re the foundation of a business. That’s why we started your product creation journey here: to emphasize its importance. Your mindset will set you up for success. In this chapter, we’ve provided you the tools and strategies to mentally get yourself to the place you need to be. Before we move on, we’re going to ask you to (1) take stock and (2) make a commitment. Follow-through is the key to momentum, which is the key to progress. Doing the exercises in this chapter before you move on will provide you the momentum you need to follow through.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs We’d like you to meet another one of our success stories, Ila ScottFord. Ila used the mindset strategies in Make, Market, Launch IT to do what she hadn’t been able to do previously: turn her idea into a living, breathing product.

“I’m nearly ready to launch.”

Case Study from the Field: Ila Scott-Ford An inventor by spirit and an copywriter by trade, product ideas came naturally to Ila Scott-Ford. During an evening walk in 2005, Ila came up with an idea that she believed could become a household name. The result of that late-night idea, Let Family Know, is a suite of products designed to inform relatives and next of kin of pertinent details they need to know about a deceased family member. Because so often a passing away comes as a surprise, Ila sees a great need to share vital family and financial information in a simple, straightforward way. “I see it as something I can do to serve others and get meaning out of what I do. It’s my true life’s purpose, my calling,” she says. After shaping the idea, Ila began work developing her brand. She took an eight-week entrepreneur class at The University of Iowa and developed a series of products with a corresponding website. However, with a fastpaced job as an advertising executive, progress was slow going. Everything changed when she discovered Make, Market, Launch IT. “The whole Make, Market, Launch IT experience changed everything for me. It gave me a sense of not only the ‘hows’ of product creation, but also the ‘whys’ and the ‘ways,’” she explains. “I knew without a doubt that this course is what I needed to make something happen.”

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Make, Market, Launch IT “[It] was the catalyst I needed to give me direction and break the big process of product creation into manageable sized steps so I could see the path for creating even more products,” she continues. This new injection of direction gave her the fuel she needed to set forth on a results-driven path. By breaking the process down into doable-sized, step-by-step chunks, Ila feels confident that her product line will continue grow and develop. Make, Market, Launch IT also helped Ila remove several roadblocks during the creation process. As she was a one-person company, Ila felt like she was living an “isolated and time-starved life.” Make, Market, Launch IT connected her to a network of people with bigger ideas, which helped to draw her out and renew her excitement for her project. The demands of her full-time job also made it easy to put her product on the back burner. The Make, Market, Launch IT structure, including the weekly training webinars, helped her stay on course. Ila also credits the Module 1 advice to “get [her product] out there” without trying to “make it perfect” on the first release as helping her make significant progress. Finally, Ila shares that she has a fear of overwhelm—“getting in over her head”— which often sidetracked her previous efforts. However, by following the steps within the product and tackling them one at a time, Ila is making great strides in finally getting Let Family Know off the ground and into the hands of the consumers who need it. “Even with 27 years of marketing experience under my belt, Make, Market, Launch IT took me to another level. [It] brought me up to date with today’s digital and online marketing strategies and gave me the tools and connections to make anything happen so I can get my products out and start helping people,” she explains. 53

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs After seven years of brainstorming, Ila is finally able to bring her product to life, in a fraction of the time. “Without Make, Market, Launch IT, I wouldn’t be as far along as I am.” Ila Scott-Ford’s Let Family Know launched in 2013 at LetFamilyKnow.com.

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Make, Market, Launch IT

Step 2: Target: Attract IT

“The customer’s perception is your reality.” —Kate Zabriskie

Creating a real business out of your idea requires a core group of people to support it: customers to buy what you have to sell. You must understand who specifically you’re selling to and what will get them to buy. You must drill down on who are your ideal customers, and how to create a brand message and story that will resonate deeply with this audience. Fulfill your client’s core needs and you will have a customer for life—and a consistent sales source for your products. The most important element in a successful product is not the product— it’s the market. It’s about helping a very specific group of people solve their biggest, most urgent problems and get what it is they want most. When many people sit down to create their product, they don’t know exactly who they’re going to sell it to. They might have a general understanding that their product will appeal to moms looking to lose a few pounds, or business owners looking to sharpen their sales techniques. 55

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs When we create products, we literally make them with real people in mind. We know everything about them – their age, sex, names, kids names, biggest challenges, their dreams, aspirations, fears, psychological wounds and more. We know what kind of car they drive. You need these particulars on who your customers will be, in full and vivid detail. Even better, you need names of actual people who fit this profile.

What will set you apart in your market is spending the time to understand conceptually and realistically who you’re going to sell your product to—BEFORE you start creating it.

Let’s look at why. As a product creator, your goal is to (1) add value and (2) create customer success by (3) targeting the right people. And who are the “right” people? They’re the people who you can help. The people who value your expertise, who will pay you for the solutions you can offer them. It always goes back to the problem. When you solve their most pressing problems—or your client’s biggest pain point—your product’s value increases geometrically. If you pour a glass of water for a person who’s just hiked across the desert, you’ll be their new best friend. But that glass of water simply doesn’t have the same value to a person who’s sitting next to a water fountain. Master copywriter Gary Halbert liked to ask his students, “If you and I both owned a hamburger stand and we were in a contest to see who could sell the most hamburgers, what advantages would you most like to have on your side to help you win?” The students would give various answers about the hamburger itself, or the price point, or a better location for the hamburger stand. But Halbert knew better. “The only advantage I want,” he’d say, “ is a starving crowd!” 56

Make, Market, Launch IT Successful marketers are always on the lookout for a wounded, starving crowd and then they find a product or service to fill that gap or opportunity. The problem is that product creators tend get emotional about their products. They hypnotize themselves into believing they have a solution to their customer’s problems, and meanwhile they took the time to understand and communicate with their market! Step 2 of Make Market Launch IT is to target exactly who will buy what you’re creating and understand them deeply so you can attract them to your product or service. Clarity on your target market will have a ripple effect that you’ll feel through your entire business. Here are just a few results: Your marketing messages will write themselves. You’ll understand what your customers need to hear and how you should deliver it. Writing sales copy or making a video becomes easy, like writing a letter to your mom or a good friend. Your messages will feel real and authentic, and your customers will be more likely to buy. You’ll attract more customers to you. Understanding your customers’ needs—especially the ones they don’t articulate—will bring people to you in droves. You’ll also be able to time your messages to when your prospects are more likely to buy from you. You’ll command premium prices. Think back to the example of our friend who crossed the desert. What if you could offer her a specially formulated drink to replace the electrolytes she’d lost, relieve her calf cramps from dehydration, and help her body recover for the marathon she’s running next week? Wouldn’t she pay more for that drink than she would for that glass of water? Absolutely—because you understand her specific needs and you’re meeting her where she is, not where you guess she might be. You’ll lose that icky “selling” feeling. Pairing problems with their solutions is like being a matchmaker. It’s easy. It’s fun. This is the difference between elegant salesmanship and pushing your product on anyone you can to meet your revenue goals. Feeling good about your product and solution and helping people solve problems is the heart of good salesmanship. 57

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs When you know your market and what they need, you won’t have to worry about excess inventory. You’ll be selling it. You won’t have to worry about who else is doing what in your market because you’ll have a superior product that your target market needs. You’ll know how to find your ideal clients and what will make them buy, and you won’t have to worry yourself sick over your sales numbers. You’ll have a thriving business centered around providing them solutions that they’re more than happy to pay you for. Here’s how you’re going to uncover and attract your ideal customer. You begin by understanding how to integrate the three pillars of product creation: Market, Message, and Media.

1. 3 Pillars Of Product Creation: Market, Message, Media Successful marketing in any context is a direct reflection of how well the market, message and media are aligned for the customers you want to attract with your product or service. You must determine who your ideal market really is, what the message needs to be to uniquely set you apart, and how to use the right media to get in front of your ideal customers to be seen and heard. The first step, however, is to focus on your market. Step 1: Transform and Revolutionize the Way You Look at Your Market You have to know as much as possible about the people your product is aimed to help. Start with three basic questions: 1. Who are they? 2. Where are they? 3. And most important, what do they want? The difference between want and need is hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. The overweight guy sitting on the couch watching a latenight infomercial for an ab roller may need the product, but he probably doesn’t want it. 58

Make, Market, Launch IT The goal of marketing is to offer people what they want, and then deliver to them what they need, so that they can get what they want. To accomplish this, you must get to know your market as closely and diligently as possible—to know what your market wants and to FEEL it through empathy. Until you feel what your market actually feels, you’re not going to be an effective marketer. Think about what perceived obstacles they may have that will enter the conversation. Think about how to communicate your message and how to address the things they want and their obstacles— perceived or real. When you know what your market feels, you will have a better idea of how to frame your message for maximum impact. Step 2: Message—Develop a Unique Selling Proposition Once you understand your market, you can develop your Unique Selling Proposition, or USP. This is a clear and concise description of the main benefit you provide your marketplace in a way that clearly differentiates you from your competition. There are many different facets of your business that you can use to create uniqueness, including: • Unique guarantee

• Authority / celebrity

• Speed

• Expertise

• Service

• Experience

• Reliability

• Niche or perceived niche

• Price

• Positioning against

Your USP needs to be unique, or perceived as unique, and it needs to be short, ideally one sentence. For example: “Fresh hot pizza, delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed.” That’s Dominos’ USP. Being known for, being great at, and providing exceptional value as it relates to one thing will focus your efforts and position you as top of mind in the market.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Exercise: Brainstorm your USP. Start by writing down some options and then give input from other people inside and outside your business. This way you can try out a few things before you settle on the USP that works best. Don’t be afraid to let your personality come out! The key is to not overthink it, but to practice describing your business around the unified concept of a USP. Step 3: Media—Use the Right Channel to Reach Your Audience Once you have learned about your market and determined your message, then you can figure out what media you need to use in order to push your message to your market. Every business is different, and every business requires a specific media strategy based on its wants and needs. For example, business that caters to Chief Marketing Officers wouldn’t use social media or online advertisements because CMOs are unlikely to buy products that way. Instead, they’re more likely to buy a product based on a referral or a direct and customized presentation made through a strategy session or a 1-on-1 consultative close. On the other hand, businesses targeting Millennials (ages 20 to 29) should make extensive use of social media to reach this audience. Media is divided into two categories, online and offline, or traditional. Here’s a list of some of the different types of media in each category. Look at these lists and decide what will work best for your target customer. ONLINE MEDIA • Social Media

• Video

• Online Advertising

• Webinar / Teleseminar

• Blogs

• Webcast / Livecast

• Podcasts

• Website (or Microsite)

• Special Reports/White Papers

• Search Marketing

• News Releases

• Mobile Marketing

• Email Marketing

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Make, Market, Launch IT OFFLINE OR TRADITIONAL MEDIA • Books

• Live Events

• Print Advertising

• Sales Visits / 1-on-1 Presentations

• Print Articles, Magazines, Publications

• Posters / Signage

• Direct Mail • Conferences (Presentations at Industry Events, Seminars)

• Billboards, Taxi Tops, Subway Signage • Retail Placement

• Trade Shows One way to find out what media your market pays attention to is simply to ask your customers. Send out a survey, post on social media, or ask people one-on-one at events, meet-ups or groups comprised of people in your market. Ask them what publications they subscribe to, associations or groups they belong to, blogs or online forums they have joined, radio or TV programs they watch, etc. A successful use of media connects to the specific marketplace by using messaging that addresses their likes, dislikes, goals, needs, and obstacles. Your messages will not appeal to everyone—marketing is attracting and at the same time repelling—and that’s fine. Begin by looking at the market you’re trying to attract, and take it from there. Exercise: Brainstorm 2-3 media outlets where your ideal customer is already spending time. This is where you’ll want to start to focus and test your marketing efforts. Once you’ve gotten clear on the basics of your market, message, and media choice, you can start to drill down and get absolutely specific on who your ideal customer is. You do this by creating a customer avatar.

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2. The Power of Avatars: The Key to Customer Empathy Creating a customer persona for your ideal customer is the key to getting inside their heads and understanding their psychology. Once you understand their emotions, wounds, desires, pain and dreams, you can create products and services—and the ideal message—that solve their problems and help them achieve their goals. The success of your product or service really comes down to one thing: choosing the right market. Determining your avatar could mean the difference between products that languish versus products that attract raving fans for the life of your business. Step 1: Identify your market. There are two strategies when it comes to finding your ideal customer. Both strategies help you eliminate the customers who will never be customers and gives you room to focus on those who will. Strategy #1 is the 80/20/2 Rule, which states that 80 percent of your income comes from 20 percent of your customers—and your highest net comes from the top 2 percent of all your customers. The “2 Percenters” are your perfect customers, the ones who buy everything you have, implement everything correctly and get great results, refer new people to you and keep coming back over and over again. It’s not practical for all businesses to build an entire company on that 2 percent, which is why the 20 percent is also important. However, if you model and create all your marketing for the top 2 percent, you will attract the best of the best as your customers. Strategy #2 is to seek out “above the line” rather than “below the line” buyers. An above-the-line buyer will see your product as an investment versus an expense. A below-the-line buyer thinks, “If I spend money on your product, I won’t have money for something else.” Do not waste one cent of your money or one second of your time on below-the-line customers. Step 2: Build and understand your avatar. A customer avatar is a specific persona who represents your market—your perfect, ideal customer. However, you need to turn your avatar into a real person, and not just 62

Make, Market, Launch IT a person you want to persuade to buy your product. When you develop a high level of understanding, compassion, empathy and excitement around your ideal avatar, you will fall in love with your customers instead of falling in love with your products and services. The more specific you are with your customer avatar, the easier it becomes to create marketing and products for them. And when you start creating content for your ideal customer you’ll attract more customers like them. There are two types of customer data that will help you build and understand your avatar. The first is demographics: quantitative, statistical data (gender, education, profession, income, where they live). There are 10 basic categories of demographic information you should know about your ideal customer. 1. Gender: Are most of your customers male or female? 2. Education: Does he/she have a high school education? Post-graduate degree? 3. Profession: What does he do for a living? 4. Income: How much does he make per year? 5. Home Ownership: Does he own his own home? What is the approximate value? 6. Geographic Location: Where does she live? 7. Family and Lifestyle: Does she have a husband? Kids? A mortgage and two cars? Or is he a bachelor with a loft apartment in the city and a motorcycle? 8. Online Activity: What technology does he own? Is he an early adapter? 9. Ideal Qualities: What kind of qualities—personal philosophy, ideas about money, view of the world)—would she ideally have? 10. Nightmare Qualities: What kind of qualities shouldn’t he have? Once you’ve narrowed your avatar’s basic information, you’ll want to dig deeper into their personal psychology for the second kind of data: psychographics. This includes your avatar’s emotional drivers, interests, wants, needs, desires, etc. 63

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs When it comes to psychographic data, it works best to actually talk to your customers. Sit down with your ideal customer. These are a few of the questions that will help you determine your customers’ psychographics. 1. What do you love? What do you hate? 2. What’s going great? What’s not? 3. If you could snap your fingers and make three changes in your life happen immediately what would they be? 4. If you could change one thing about your life, what would it be? 5. What are your three biggest dreams and fantasies? 6. What are your three biggest frustrations? 7. What is your single biggest fear? 8. What are your biggest inner conflicts (i.e. you know you need to promote yourself, but you “hate to sell”)? 9. What do you believe about this product? What must you believe or feel in order to buy it from me? 10. What myths or objections do you currently have about my product? How can I overcome those for you? 11. Is there anything that would limit (or prevent) you from producing the result this product provides? As a creator, it’s your job to look at the answers to these questions and then ask the question, “What’s in their way? Why haven’t they gotten the help to their problem? Why don’t they have this thing that they want so much?” This is going to become the framework of your product. Based on the information you’ve gathered, you now can define your primary avatar. Exercise: Think about your best customer (or your ideal customer if you don’t have any yet)—the exact person you can help most with your product or service. This person is a delight to work with, implements everything and fits your perfect image of your best customer. Get a picture of this person in your head, and write down his/her demographic and psychographic characteristics. Remember, this is what you’ll be using 64

Make, Market, Launch IT in each of your marketing messages so you can speak directly to this person! Use these questions as a jumping-off point. If you’re inspired to learn more about your avatar, go for it. The more time you can spend getting to know this person and what they really want and need, the better. Especially when we’re creating high-end products, it’s not unusual for us to spend several hours to a few weeks investigating our ideal client avatar from top to bottom. To complete this level of research, we’ll go to live events, network with potential customers and participate in online forums to understand who our clients are and how we can best serve them. Once you have a clear picture of your ideal desired customers (and the nightmare customers to avoid), you must learn to connect deeply with those customers and move them to action. And the best way to do so is to create a powerful brand message and story.

3. Your Brand Message and Story The key to connecting with your market and creating a desirable brand isn’t about what your company does; it’s about the stories people tell about your company. People are not moved by information and facts; they are moved by people and stories. Being able to translate not just your products—but ultimately your business—into a brand story that moves people to action is the key that unlocks your ability to effectively persuade, influence, and motivate your target audience. Remember, it’s your job to give your customers a compelling story to tell. Step 1: Create your brand. A brand is how you communicate your promise to your customers. It’s how you connect their wants and needs to the value your business provides. You will use your brand to succinctly, emotionally and clearly identify who you are, what problems you solve, and how you can meet the needs of your target audience.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs To establish a brand for your product creation business, you must develop four elements. 1. A strong name. A good business name is similar to a good product name: it needs to be simple, relevant and memorable. Make sure you can get the domain name you want for your website and any important social media outlets before you settle on a name. Also, think about where you want to be two to three years down the road so you create a name that will work as you grow. 2. Consistent visual elements, including your logo, and the fonts and colors you use. The more professional and compelling the images around your product and business are, the better you’ll be able to attract new customers. 3. A clear tagline—a short descriptor that is easy to remember and understand. It should clarify and compel what you do. Taglines like Just Do It (Nike), Think Different (Apple), and The Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland) are all simple, memorable, and connected to the brand. 4. A core story—an emotional narrative about what you do, why you do it and who you do it for. Making an emotional connection earlier draws people in and it connects your audience to your business mission. Your core story should contain elements like your background, connection to your heart and mission, reference to your expertise, and admission of failures and fears as well as successes, to humanize you and make you more real to your customers. The outcome of your story is to convey your personal and business values, take your audience on a journey, make your experience relatable (they see you are like them), and to figure out their objections and what they’re thinking about so you can address these issues up front. Exercise: Brainstorm key points of your core story by answering these questions. Highlight any key themes or connection points you can emphasize in your story. 1. What do you want to be known for? 2. What makes your story unique? Think about when you talk to new acquaintances—what points do you typically highlight? 66

Make, Market, Launch IT 3. What problems do you solve? 4. What relevant parts of your own personal story can you reveal that your audience will relate to? 5. How can you make your story memorable? What are details that show a range of emotion—that may incite laughter, bring tears, etc.? Once you’ve finished, brainstorming, write your story down and create a structure for it. The key is that your story is about your journey (or the evolution of your business), but it really isn’t about you at all—it’s about the journey your customers are on and how you can help them. Then practice telling your story again and again. With practice, you will become a better storyteller. While the key pieces of your message may stay the same, what you emphasize and articulate will continue to evolve. With a strong brand and core story, you are ready to hone in on the exact characteristics of your market, and make sure that it’s a market where you can make money.

4: Market Discovery Tools The most important factor in your success comes down to your market— how well you can specifically identify, understand and attract your ideal customer to your product or service. But you also must make sure your market is a viable one—that it can provide enough customers and income to support your business. You must dig deeper to understand your market and how to get your message in front of them. Step 1: Evaluate Your Market Often people have a great product idea and they’ve defined their ideal customer (a perfect customer persona), but they struggle because they’re trying to sell to a market that they’re not going to succeed in. In other words, they fail to match their description of their ideal customer or avatars against very specific marketing criteria to make sure they can sell to these customers. 67

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Here are the seven criteria to ensure you are entering a market that’s going to have value and where you can be successful selling. Ask yourself these questions about the market you are thinking you would like to enter. 1. Do these customers have a clear, specific problem that’s urgent for them to solve? 2. Are they large in number? 3. Are they easy to find? 4. Do they have money to spend? 5. Do they have a history of paying for similar products to help solve their big problem? 6. Does this market have appeal to you? 7. Are you confident they can solve their big problem with your product or service? If you can define a very specific customer type in a market that meets these criteria, you’re on your way to a successful business built for longevity. Be sure to narrow down your market as much as possible. Remember, trying to be everything to everyone pretty much ensures you’ll be nothing to no one. Instead of selling “health” to “anyone who wants to be healthier,” sell “a proven 5-step strategy to lose weight and keep it off to moms of toddlers who are struggling to lose 10 to 20 pounds.” See how much more specific this allows you to be in your marketing messages? Step 2: Dig Deeper to Understand Your Target Market Once you establish that you have a viable and compelling market, spend some time to research that market at greater depth. Divide your research into four categories. 1. Your Competitors • Who are your competitors? What is the size and age of those competitors? How much market share do they control? • What products and services do your competitors currently sell? For how much? 68

Make, Market, Launch IT • What are the strengths and weaknesses of your existing and potential competition? • What specific customer types are they selling to? In other words, what specific market or customer are they targeting? • How are they marketing or selling their products or services? Is it effective? • Who’s doing the best work in this space? How do they solve customers’ problems? How do they position their solutions to customers’ problems? 2. Your Industry • What is the current size of this market or industry? • What are the current characteristics or trends in this market or industry? • What directories or databases are available to help you identify customers? • What are the biggest (most popular) trade associations and publications that exist in your market or industry? • What blogs, forums and/or social sites exist that can help you understand your market and identify potential customers? • What Internet sites or other media is used by purchase/ decision-makers of your target market that helps them make decisions about what to buy? 3. Your Customer Demographics and Psychographics You should have researched your customers’ demographics when you created your ideal customer avatar earlier in this chapter. But you can dive deeper into their psychographics by asking these questions. • What are his or her biggest dreams (top 3)? • What are his or her biggest frustrations (top 3)? • What is the single biggest thing that keeps him or her awake at night? 69

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs • What is the ongoing conversation inside his or her head? • What must he or she believe about you and your product or service to buy from you? • What core objections might he or she have about your product or service that would cause him or her not to buy? • What other products and services has he or she already invested in? Have they worked? In your opinion, why or why not? 4. Keyword Research Doing keyword research to understand what your ideal market is searching for and most important, what your competitors are advertising and selling to your market, can be a valuable source of information. First, you’ll quickly find out if your market meets the criteria discussed above. If there are few competitors advertising, if there is not a lot of activity, or if there aren’t a lot of searches in your market niche, then it may be time to re-evaluate if this is a market that makes sense for you. Remember, you want a busy, competitive market where there’s a lot of activity, as this means there are buyers actively looking for solutions similar to yours! Use tools like Google Adwords (free), iSpionage.com (basic level is free), KeywordSpy.com or SpyFu.com and ask the following questions. • What keywords are my competitors using in their advertising? • What they are spending? How many searches they are getting? • What ads and web pages they’re using to market their products and services? When you can pinpoint the profitable keyword and ad-copy combinations of your competitors, it can give you a great jumpstart as to what your market really wants and how to attract them online.

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Make, Market, Launch IT 5. Book Research What books are selling in your market right now? Again, this is another clue as to what your market is really interested in. Search Amazon.com for bestselling books in your industry or niche. Then, scan the Table of Contents of the best ones to see what types of solutions customers are looking for. Review The New York Times bestseller list for your niche (non-fiction, fiction, business books, etc.) as well. Take notes about what you see! Dive into these areas of market research as it supports you so you can match your ideal avatar to the data and marketing messaging that’s already working in your market. These are all tools that will help you get underneath and in front of wyour ideal customer. Review the seven criteria for an ideal market against your target market. If your answer to any of the questions isn’t a resounding “yes,” go back and tweak—or completely change if necessary—your target market so that it’s a match. Write down where your market is the strongest against these criteria as well as where it’s the weakest. What can you change or tweak to make sure you’re going after a market that’s likely to get you results? Even though it can feel disheartening to discover that the market you wanted to serve is not best suited to get you results (both in terms of impact and income), it’s far better to know now than before you’ve invested incredible time and energy in creating a product and/or marketing plan that’s targeted to a market that’s not positioned to buy. Now that you understand the power of defining your market, we’d like you to meet one of our product creators who successfully leveraged her avatar to sell her product to a staggering 40 percent of her list. Turn the page to meet Neelam Meetcha.

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“My income is much better now with fewer hours of work.”

Case Study from the Field: Neelam Meetcha About eight years ago, Neelam Meetcha got very ill. So ill that she was forced to stay at home for over 18 months. During her recovery time, Neelam worked on creative projects to pass the time with her sisters. As she worked, she tapped into a natural passion for creativity that she’d always had, but never nurtured. After she recovered, Neelam decided to go out on her own. Although her background was in lecturing, she also decided to offer her creative talents for hire, launching a gift-wrapping business. Within three months of going live, Neelam had her first inquirty from a large nearby shopping center. She continued to grow and now works mainly for large corporate clients, including National Geographic. After running this business for several years, Neelam began to realize that her business relied too much on her. She wasn’t going to be able to increase her income unless she could leverage her time. Around that same time, Neelam also discovered she had a knack for helping other women transition from the corporate world to launching their own small businesses. She just needed a more streamlined solution to offer. Sitting down face-to-face with each client was simply something she didn’t have time for. When Neelam heard about Make, Market, Launch IT, it was exactly what she had been looking for. “It was like it was written for me. This was exactly what I needed in my life, so I purchased it without any hesitance,” Neelam says. Neelam first big breakthrough happened when she was defining her ideal clients. She struggled with the concept initially. “I just felt like—’Why would I leave a certain group out? Why would I target just one group?’ But I realized that if I target one group, it will be easier for those people to find me, so I can become a big fish in a small pond, instead of the other way around,” Neelam shares. 72

Make, Market, Launch IT This made the creation process significantly simpler for her. “Once I started doing the module on the avatars and the exercises in the booklet, I realized that there was a specific woman who I was aiming for. When I figured that out, I was able to create my product around that woman, which made everything easier,” Neelam explains. After putting a product together that would speak to her unique audience, Neelam launched Business Success for Women in July 2012. Her commitment to this product is personal. “I’m very passionate about a family and [being] a business woman. I’m even more passionate about helping women to make sure that they have that quality time to spend with their family through having their own information products.” 40 percent of her list has already purchased it. She couldn’t be happier: “For me that’s a good income for me because it’s automated, I don’t have to do anything.” This passive income puts Neelam ever closer to her goal of working three days a week to spend time with her family, including her two teenage daughters. To continue this initial success, she’s committed to fostering the relationships she’s established by finding more and more ways to serve her audience. “It’s not just about producing a DVD and sticking it on the shelf for people to buy. It’s about developing the relationship. I think that’s so important because these people aren’t just going to be your clients or your prospects. They’re going to be people who will come back to you again and again for you and your products,” Neelam says. Developing these products has had a huge impact on how Neelam runs her whole business, which offers a suite of services to women, from career and business consulting to creative coaching. As part of her offerings, she used to host groups of 10-15 women in person. “I didn’t enjoy that because I didn’t feel like they were getting everything they wanted because it’s too much of a group—and my mind is still thinking, ‘I know I’ve got inquires coming through and I can’t get through to these people, or they can’t get a hold of me.’”

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Now, by offering that same content online, these women have unlimited time to review Neelam’s content, wherever they are in the world. With existing clients in the UK, Hong Kong, Africa and India, the potential for growth into these markets is extraordinary. The online format has also freed up Neelam’s time to continue to develop her business, take care of her customers—and spend time with her family. She only wishes she would have had access to all the information the product provides sooner. In her words, “I was really surprised that I hadn’t known about any of this years and years ago because if I had, I would be a millionaire by now.” She has big plans for the future, but, even now, Neelam feels “blessed because my income is much better now with [fewer] hours of work.” Her product sales have already improved her business revenue by 20 percent and she is confident those numbers will continue to rise. These blessings have given rise to unexpected labors of love, like a book of poetry she’ll be publishing this year, called Poetic Challenges of a Woman Entrepreneur. The book was inspired by all the family moments she gets to enjoy now that she has a home office, after 20 years of working away from her home. Because, at the end of the day, for Neelam, “It’s not just about going out there, reeducating yourself, making loads of money. Life is too precious to just do that.” It’s about finding the balance within her own life through her business—and helping other women to do the same. In 2012, Neelam Meetcha more than doubled her holiday sales as compared to 2011, and her business continues to grow to this day. Her book, Gift Wrapping Ideas: Step By Step Guide On How to Exquisitely Wrap Your Presents launched in 2014. She continues to expand her businesses at BusinessSuccessforWomen.co.uk and GiftWrappingCourses.com.

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Step 3: Offer—Present IT

“Make your offer so great that only a lunatic would refuse to buy.” —Claude C. Hopkins, author, Scientific Advertising

All too often, products are created because someone has an idea they’re passionate about and they just assume it will sell because they think it’s a great idea. In Step 3, we’ll break down how to create an irresistible offer so you know your target customers will buy before you create your product or service. There is a step-by-step formula for creating your offer—how to get to know your customer’s pain point, paint a picture of what the future would look like if you solved that pain, and then explain the tangible solution you provide. The distinctions we’re going to offer you in this chapter are some of the most significant we’ve come across. Why? Because there’s no better feeling than working on a product that you know will sell. That’s what creating an irresistible offer is about.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Your success hinges on offering your customers something they want and can’t wait to buy. Your sales keep the doors open. They compensate you for the time and expertise you’ve poured into your product. But sales mean more than that . . . Sales get your products into people’s hands. They’re the means by which you’re spreading your ideas, the manner in which you’re adding value and creating change. Sales get people to pay attention. Our friend, marketer Joe Polish, says, “If they don’t pay, they don’t pay attention.” When people invest in your product, trading their hard-earned dollars for what you’ve got, they’ve got skin in the game. No one wants to waste their money, so paying customers are much more likely to follow through. It all starts with a sale. And too many product creators are really lousy at getting their customers to invest those dollars. They simply aren’t skilled at creating a killer offer that compels people to buy. A bad offer will doom your product. You could have the most amazing thing on the market. Your product might bring about world peace, or solve climate change. Or you could have a line on growing those money trees that we’d all love to have. But if you present it with a bad offer, no one will buy. No matter what you’re selling. Therefore, you must learn to create and deliver an irresistible offer that will compel your customers to buy.

1. Create an Irresistible Offer An offer is simply something people want that is explained so well, it encourages them to consider: if I could have anything, price being no object, would I have to have this? The keys to a great offer are whether your customer can answer yes to three questions: • Is it easy? • Does it work? • Can I do it? 76

Make, Market, Launch IT If so, they will have a turnaround, transformational experience with your product or service. A lot of new business owners make the mistake of starting with what they think their audience needs without actually knowing who the customer is, then they create the content to sell their product. The way we create our products now is to start with an offer, design the pitch and the scripts, and then we create the product, as counter-intuitive as that may seem. You design the product to fulfill the offer and the promise to that specific audience. A good way to develop your irresistible offer is to start with what people want and need, and what their objections might be. Go back to your ideal customer and associate mentally and emotionally to who they really are, what their biggest problems are and what they want most. From there, you hone the perfect offer. Once you know what conversations your customers are having among themselves, it becomes extremely easy to provide a product or service that solve their problems. The description of your product offer is essentially the Band-Aid or the cure to their big problem. One of the easiest and most effective ways to get this information from your customers is with a survey. A well-crafted survey will help you learn the language of your customers, shape the content you should include in your product and/or bonuses, give you massive amounts of personal information about your target audience, and indicate how strong the sales for your product will be. Plus, surveys actually can be almost a “pre-sale” campaign for your customers. People will support something that they feel they’ve contributed to, and by asking for their input, you’re giving them the chance to participate in the creative process. When Mike was getting ready to launch his “Publish & Profit” program, he sent out a survey asking his clients to help name the book. As part of the survey, he asked, “How useful would a course be that teaches you how to write and publish a book, become a top authority or go-to expert or celebrity in your topic for your business?” He received 587 comments on this one question! Everything Mike needed to know to compose the perfect offer came from this process. 77

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs He also put at the bottom of the survey: “If you would like a FREE copy of this book when it’s published, enter your contact information below and it will be sent to you.” Out of 935 total survey respondents, more than 900 entered their email and contact details. That’s more than 900 potential customers! If you don’t have much of a list to contact, you can post a link to your survey on social media or run paid ads on Facebook. One thing to note, however: make sure that the survey respondents fit your primary customer avatar profile.

2. Design the 7 Elements of Your Irresistible Product or Service It would be a much easier world if there were a direct correlation between how good your product is and how well it’s going to sell. However, there is zero correlation between the best products and the products that have sold the best. For true success, you need to have both an amazing product and an irresistible offer to sell it. To do this, we’re going to get practical and start by defining specifically what your product or service is—what you’re delivering to customers. It’s about creating the bridge between your offer and your product. Once you know what you’re going to sell—your deliverables—then you can craft an offer to present it in a way that becomes irresistible to your market. There are seven basic elements to every product or service that make up the details of what you’re going to sell. The more simple, concise and clear you can describe what you’re selling, the better response you’ll get. Lay it out so there’s no doubt about what they’re getting; in other words, drop the terms, lingo, jargon and fluff. We’re going to reverse engineer this idea and start with the end. In the simplest and most basic terms, what are you giving them? What is your customer going to get? What is the benefit you’re providing them? Your product should be clear and compelling, and it should speak to your audience and tell them what its benefit is. 78

Make, Market, Launch IT Here are the seven elements you need to define to establish what your product or service is going to deliver. By clarifying these, you will create a product or service geared for success. Element 1: Title & Subtitle In a few words, state what you are giving to your buyer. Don’t try to make it sound perfect. Describe your title in the simplest, most basic terms. Think about how to make your title concise and compelling while highlighting the benefits of your product or service. When creating a product title, you must: • Be clear • Avoid industry jargon • Avoid fluff (i.e., hype, words that don’t mean anything concrete) Your title and subtitle should make clear (1) what your product does and (2) what benefits it offers. Sue Ferreira’s case study earlier in the book, her title is a great example of this: “Live Your Retirement Dream.” See the Product Title Creation section in Step 1 for more ideas on product titles. Element 2: Format After you select your title and subtitle, you’ll need to decide which format your product is going to be in. How will your customers consume your product? Here’s a recap of the 11 Product Formats: 1. Online Membership Sites

7. Live Events

2. Physical Training Programs

8. Mastermind Programs

3. Subscription Programs / Continuity

9. Certification / Train the Trainer Programs

4. Coaching Programs

10. Manufactured Products

5. Software & Apps

11. Consulting

6. Learning Management Systems (LMS) Start with simpler format, one you know you can do and to keep your risk down especially if this is your first product.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Element 3: Deliverables Simply, what does the buyer get? There are countless elements you can include in your product or with your service. For example, here are some of the different components you can consider for a training or software product: • Videos

• Software / App

• Audios

• Coaching Calls / Q & A

• Summary Manuals

• Live Event Tickets

• Action Steps Checklist

• Community Access

• Fill-In-The-Blank Templates

• Done-For-You Services

• Scripts

• Hard Drive

• Sample Forms

• USB

• Summary Cards

• Instruction Gide

• Keynote / PowerPoint Slide Decks

• Personal Journal

• Mind Maps / Infographics

• Quizzes, Assessments

• Key Chains, Magnets, etc

How do you decide what to include in your product or service? First, pick one main thing. For example, if your service involves training we would recommend video as your main way to deliver the content (vs. audio or written materials) because of its high perceived value. Second, take into account people’s different learning styles. Some people like to watch, some listen, some touch, write, or read. Add in two or three other learning aids in alternate styles. In other words, if your main deliverable is video training, consider adding audio and written materials to supplement it. For example, you might create a series of mind maps that recap the key points of each main step. You may decide to include a personalized journal so your customers can take notes and write down their ideas as they complete your training. Third, add at least one thing that surprises and delights your audience and adds an element of fun. This can be as simple as a set of coasters or magnets with great quotes, a set of summary cards with funny sayings 80

Make, Market, Launch IT or key points—something outside of your main product delivery that makes your product fun and unique. Fourth, keep it simple. Your goal is to make your product easy to use, fun and interesting. If you add too much to it, not only will you risk overwhelming your customer, you will struggle to keep your costs down, making it harder to be profitable. Fifth, protect your content. Don’t make it easy for someone to copy or share your whole product with the click of a button or by inserting one simple USB drive. In addition, consider having an attorney who pursues shutting down anyone you discover illegally sharing selling or distributing your proprietary content or materials. Element 4: Bonuses Once you’ve decided upon your deliverables, pick a couple that you’ll use as bonuses. The biggest mistake people make when it comes to bonuses is they start adding more stuff to their product and they overcomplicate it. Your goal with the bonus is to increase the value of the offer. As a general rule, include two to three (and up to three to five) bonuses that go with your product or service. Organize your bonuses as follows: • One unannounced bonus (a surprise). When they order your program, surprise them with it. Your goal is to over-deliver on what you promised. • Two to three bonuses that complement the product—ideally in a completely different format or style than your main product. Is there something else you can give them that will help them be more effective with the training you’re already giving them, such as templates, mind maps, a journal, etc.? • One value bonus—something that makes the whole program worth it. With Make Market Launch IT, we promote customers who actually create and launch a product through our newsletter (this is something you can’t buy or access otherwise!).

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Element 5: Price There are three criteria for determining price. First, you must know your customer. What is the market willing to pay? There is a value your market places on the benefit you’re giving them. For example, make-money courses can always demand a higher price than a personal development course. Second, you must know your competitors. What do your competitors charge for similar products or services? Use this as your benchmark, and position yourself one level above your competition. Third, know your costs—specifically, your breakeven and ongoing expenses. If you product cost $5,000 to develop and $20 per unit to manufacture, that’s a cost of $6,000. If you’re selling your product for $300, you’ll need to sell 20 units to break even. When in doubt, err on the side of pricing higher than you’re thinking. Set your price based on value, not scarcity or fear. As long as you over deliver on value, this will give you the freedom to do that and also help ensure you make a profit. Remember, you can always offer payment plans, trial offers, and other means to make it easier for your customers to pay what your product is worth.

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Three Common Pricing Mistakes #1: Setting the price too low. Everybody loves a bargain, but people are suspicious of a bargain they can’t see, touch and verify. Have you ever seen an item priced ridiculously low online and thought, “What’s wrong with that? Is it a knockoff? The quality can’t be good…” It’s the same with your product. People will always look for value, no question. But when it comes to solving an important problem in their lives, they won’t always jump for a bargain-basement solution. In fact, they may be suspicious of it. #2: Setting the price too high. Granted, a high price can increase the perceived value of a product. But the price still has to reflect the value. And, in fact, we would argue that your product should always deliver immense value over and above the price paid for it. When it’s the other way around, products don’t sell. A recent study from Cornell University confirmed what we’ve always suspected: a higher price may mean that people perceive your product more favorably, but it doesn’t mean they’ll buy it.1 Given that our equation is that sales = success, your focus needs to be on communicating the value of your product, whatever price you choose. #3: Not benchmarking against your competition. If the Internet has done anything, it’s made every single one of us a comparison shopper, so it’s always wise to know how you compare to your competition. Whether you want to be the low-cost or the highcost provider hinges on your branding and the package you’re offering, but when in doubt, we suggest selling at a higher price to attract the type of quality customer you’ll enjoy serving.

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http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-31041136/high-prices-affect-perceptionof-quality-but-not-sales/

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Element 6: Risk Reversal/Guarantee The goal of a guarantee is to remove the perceived risk for a prospective customer and to give them certainty, especially at the point of sale. You want your offer to be as minimally risky as possible and to remove any doubt your customer may have about your product. Doubt creates hesitation, and hesitation kills sales. An effective guarantee is easy for the customer to understand and for you to honor. Make it simple—no fine print or long list of qualifications. The number of people who will take advantage of your guarantee is minimal compared to the number who will purchase with confidence when they see you offer one. Element 7: Call To Action To sell your product or service, you have to actually ask for the sale! If you don’t actually ask for the sale and tell your prospect what to do to buy, you can’t expect them to do it. As simple as it sounds, this is probably the thing people leave out most often that affects the sale more than anything else. Asking for the sales is as simple as saying, “click the Add to Cart button” or “fill out this form and turn it in at the back of the room.” As you lay out your version of these seven elements, remember, this is just the first draft. Don’t make it perfect, you just need a place to start! To be a successful product creator, you must craft your irresistible offer before you create your product or service so that you know it’s going to sell. Now you’ll take the foundation of your product or service and turn it into the perfect offer, one that creates urgency in your prospect to buy.

3. The Psychology and Structure of a Perfect Offer When creating the perfect offer, tell, don’t ask—tell your customer why they want your product and emphasize why they should act on the opportunity now. Do this by creating a “bleeding neck” scenario. Imagine someone had cut through your carotid artery in your neck causing you to bleed profusely. Your one thought above all else is what? Stop the bleeding. Your offer should be that strong—so good that 84

Make, Market, Launch IT someone would be willing to drop everything and invest, because what you are offering is so important it’s going to change his or her life forever. The psychology behind your offer should create this kind of immediate urgency, encouraging your potential buyer to act quickly to purchase your product. There are six steps to create an offer that gets people really excited and moves them to action. Step 1: Benefits. The expression in sales is, “Sell the hole, not the drill. Sell the shade, not the tree.” The single most important thing you can do is to take all the features of your product and turn them into benefits. Tell your customer, “Here’s what this means to you.” Then, start to fill in the blanks with benefits. When there is urgency to buy products, it’s not just because it will fix a problem. It’s because the product will fix a problem AND create benefits upon benefits that will improve a person’s business and/or quality of life. Your benefits need to speak to your customer. But how do you find out what your customer really wants? Ask them! Pose these two questions to your target audience: 1. “What’s your biggest challenge with _______________?” 2. “How hard has it been to find a solution?” Once you have their feedback, brainstorm a long list of benefits your product provides. Understand both their needs and wants and create your offers accordingly. Would you want a product that can auto-create a website, or do you want a product that can create a website, make you wake up carefree, instill joy into your life, and draw in revenue all while you’re sunbathing on the beach? Step 2: Bonuses. Who doesn’t like something extra? Your bonuses are your opportunity to over-deliver on the value of your product. And they don’t need to take a lot of time or resources. Your bonus is just a part of the program that you want to pull out and go into more depth with. You can transcribe your video or audio recording and turn the transcript into a bonus. Remember, you want to present your material in multiple formats anyway—why not position this as added value?

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Step 3: Price and price justification. There are many different ways to present the price of your program to your audience. One great strategy is to start with a high number and then keep dropping the price. For example, you can ask a question like, “What would the value of this be worth to you?” Then, share the higher price and drop it down by giving a clear, justifiable reason for why you’re doing it. For example, “the retail price of this program is $1,297. But because you took action and you’re at this event right now, I’m going to give you $300 off this price. So for today—and this is good for today only—your investment is just $997.” Another way to deliver your price is to start with a fixed price and then keep adding value. “The price is $1297, but if you act today I’ll add two extra content modules, plus a USB drive with my videos, plus a six-month subscription to my membership site, plus….” Regardless of which way you choose to go, it’s important that prior to sharing the investment price, you add up the value of every individual element of your product or service so they see the true value in advance. This is where you’ll also talk about any payment plans (i.e. a 2-pay, a 3-pay, etc.) that they can take advantage of in addition to your pay-in-full option. Once you’ve delivered your price presentation, be sure to follow it up immediately with your price justification: your explanation of the need for an item of expenditure, supported by documentation to show that expected returns exceed expected costs. The products you create have value. It is up to you to show that to the customer in a way that the pricing will make sense to them. Justify the price by making them see the value. Price justification doesn’t have to be about the monetary value; it can be any measurement of worth of the benefits given by investing in the product. Justify the price based on the series of benefits you created. The key to price justification is comparing apples to oranges, not apples to apples. An apples-to-apples comparison tallies up the cost of the different elements of your product (CDs, DVDs, a manual) based on the actual manufacturing expense ($50 for six CDs, $20 for the manual, etc.). Rarely will apples-to-apples comparisons work out in your favor—and in truth, they don’t represent the real value of your product. 86

Make, Market, Launch IT “Apples to oranges” compares the price of your product with how much of an investment it would take to gain the same benefits. Our colleague Ed Rush created a fighter pilot course. When people ask him the price, he’ll tell them, “You invested at least $10,000 in college, plus your housing and food, and all the years of your life you spent in school to get an education you’re not even going to use in your chosen career as a as a fighter pilot. This course is $97. So $97 will get you the exact training you’ll need and that you are going to use.” “Apples to oranges” is based on benefits and speaks to your customer directly in order to effectively justify the price. Step 4: Guarantee it. There are three types of guarantees that will give people peace of mind when they purchase your product. First is a term guarantee—you tell your customer, “If you don’t like the product, feel free to return it in 30 days (or 60 days, 90 days, up to one year), and we’ll refund your entire investment, no questions asked.” Keep in mind that typically, the longer the guarantee, the lower your returns. However, every market is different. The second is a performance guarantee, often used in combination with a term guarantee. This guarantee says, “Our product works and if it doesn’t give you the results you anticipated, we will back it up. If you use the entire system and you don’t get these results (x, y, z), we’ll give you 100% of your money back.” Performance guarantees are typically bold in language, but keep in mind that as long as your system works and the person buying it implements it correctly, there will be no need for a return. There is a third category, which is not to offer a guarantee. Some product formats, like coaching or consulting, often come with no guarantee. Whether the person implements all the coaching and business tips that you’ve given them is entirely up to them. They are in charge of whether they take the tools you’ve given them to create their success. Step 5: Scarcity. Scarcity is what gets people to buy something. Remember, you’ve got to create a “bleeding neck” type of offer. What is going to persuade someone to buy something as soon as you release your offer? When we give a deadline that expires at midnight, do you know how many people buy at 11:55 pm? Most of them!

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Here are five ways to apply the scarcity concept to marketing your product and perfecting your offer: 1. Numbers. Limit the number of products. “We have 100 kits available. Get yours before they sell out!” 2. Dates. “This one-of-a-kind offer expires this Saturday and will go up in price after this date.” Don’t say your product will never be offered at this price ever again once the deadline hits; be honest and straight-forward about your deadlines and what they mean. 3. Bonuses. “The first 25 people to sign up for this webinar will receive a free 30-minute consulting session.” You can also pull bonuses after your sign-up or purchase deadline instead of changing the price. 4. Event date. Create a deadline based around a specific event associated with your product. “The deadline for enrollment is this Saturday because the event is next week and we need to know the numbers.” 5. Opportunity scarcity. Sometimes your product doesn’t have a natural scarcity, so you’ll need to create an opportunity scarcity. Use the concept that any time a door opens, the door will shut again. If you don’t buy now, you’ll pay the price for your procrastination, you’ll say, “I wish I would have taken the opportunity when I could have.” Step 6: Call to Action You do not have an offer unless you tell the customer what to do. A call to action is not a negotiable and it’s not the time to be nice. Tell your customer what you want them to do. Not everyone is going to do what you tell them, but if there is something you want your customer to do that’s in their best interest, simply say, “Here’s what I want you to do.”

4. Presenting Your Offer to Your Customers No matter what kind of product you create, at some point, you’re going to want to pitch it. You might be on stage at an event, you might create 88

Make, Market, Launch IT a video that goes on your website or you might be standing in front of investors, asking them for capital. In all of these situations, you’ll put yourself on the line and ask someone else to take action by investing in your product—and in you. During a presentation, you’re doing three things: 1. Establishing credibility. You’re creating a base for why people should believe in what you have to say. 2. Revealing with intrigue. Like a movie trailer, you give people a sneak peek of what you have to offer. This might come in the form of a lesson that you teach or a preview of your solution. 3. Influencing/selling. Keep in mind that your ultimate goal is to move someone toward taking action. Every word matters. As long as your offer is genuinely something that will improve the other person’s life, you are selling from a place of integrity. The Anatomy of a Pitch When it comes to something this important, we don’t leave anything to chance. We structure our presentation around a three-part format. For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to explain our approach as though we were pitching our product from stage at a live event. However, with some small modifications, this pitch could serve a number of different purposes: to solicit funds from investors, to convince someone to publish your book, to recruit a joint venture partner. Part 1: Set Up and Introduction • Open up with a promise to interest your audience about what you’re going to show them during the presentation. • Shine a light on the problem your product solves. Don’t minimize it. Make that problem as uncomfortable as possible. It’s great to tell a story. • Tell your story to help your audience relate to you. You’re doing this to humanize yourself and your product. To be approachable, real and show your emotions and heart. How did you get here, to the solution you’re presenting today? 89

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Part 2: Reveal and Teach Three Lessons • Present three lessons that solve a portion of that problem, in the process revealing parts of your overall solution. You’ll want to make sure that you offer a tangible takeaway, but don’t offer too much. Leave your customers wanting more. • Give proof that these lessons work. Customer quotes or testimonials, especially “before and after” style evidence, is effective. Case studies, like the ones found in this book, are even better. • Focus on intrigue, not solving the whole problem. You want to tease the full solution, not give it all away. Intrigue is a like a skirt: short enough to gain interest, long enough for the imagination to get busy. Part 3: The Close / Offer • Lay out your offer, including: 1. A product photo, showing each individual component. 2. A description for each module/component and their benefits. Answer the question your prospects will be asking themselves: “What will this do for me?” 3. Bonuses, at least three of them: one small, one medium and one large. 4. The price and payment plan options. 5. A time limit: how long they have to take advantage of the offer. 6. A guarantee: Make it irresistible but also make sure it’s something you’re genuinely committed to follow through on. 7. A summary: Bullet points that recap the main points of your offer. 8. Instructions for ordering. • This isn’t the time to be cute or esoteric. You want to be clear and concise. Break down every single piece of what you’re offering and explain it in simple terms. Clever and cryptic doesn’t sell. 90

Make, Market, Launch IT • Then, ask for the sale. Do not skip this step. Remember how we said you’re going to need to ask people to buy your product? If you don’t ask people to buy, they won’t. • Follow up quickly with your buyers to reinforce the fact that they made a good purchase and ensure that you deliver value over and above what you promised. • Ideally, after a couple of weeks, but within the return policy period, send out a small gift. This shows you care about the buyer even after the sale—and it reduces refunds. Now that you know the elements of a great offer and the structure of a great pitch, practice is key. You’ll want to practice on your friends and your family. You should also practice in front of a mirror. Even better, set up a camera and record a practice session. You’ll see some surprising things during playback that you didn’t realize you were doing. One of our favorite exercises is the “opening of the box” presentation. If you have a physical product, set up a camera and open up your product as though you’re a real customer and just received it in the mail. Unfold, unwrap, open and walk through every single item and explain what it is, what it does and how it will benefit the customer. Hold it up to the camera and show every single item, piece by piece and step by step. This single exercise is one of the best ways to sell a product. If you can describe how a real customer used it to achieve an outcome or benefit, even better. Here’s the key to successful offers: If someone gives you the opportunity to speak, grab that chance! It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel 100% ready. The more real-world practice you can get, the faster the progress you’ll make. You might take to it like a fish to water, or it might feel awkward the first couple of times. As you gain experience, you can become more choosy about making sure you’re only speaking to audiences who match your avatar. When you’re starting out, though, experience is king. As you practice, you’ll start to feel more comfortable—even if you’re a natural. You’ll start to see a difference, not just in your emotion but also in the audience. Before you know it, you’ll be pitching with ease and grace— and selling more stuff. 91

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Before we close this chapter together, we want to introduce you to Rob and Michael Doxey. These two creators saw first-hand how powerful the right offer can be, especially when you beta test it. Rob and Michael’s story also offers you a glimpse into exactly how these Make, Market, Launch IT strategies play out in the real world.

“We felt it would be easier to scale.”

Case Study from the Field: Rob and Michael Doxey A few years ago, brothers Rob and Michael Doxey started Vampas Marketing to create online marketing and video solutions. Although this proved a lucrative business for them, they wanted to significantly increase their revenue potential without expanding their operations. Inspired by Make, Market, Launch IT’s step-by-step system to simplify the creation process, they decided to pursue a business around information products. “We felt it would be easier to scale once we figured out a system and were able to get some momentum,” Rob says. In short, Rob and Michael were ready to stop trading time for money. “Once you’ve created [a product], and you’ve created your system, you can’t sell out of it,” Rob continues. “Especially if it’s digital, you can sell as many as you can sell. Whereas, with [Vampas Marketing], that’s not really true. You have to add employees, or you have to have the structure in order to grow.” Rob and Michael have already created three different products, both on their own and in tandem with other creators. Make, Market, Launch IT has “definitely been influential. The thing I love about Pam and Mike is that they have a ton of experience. But, they don’t just have experience, they have actually had success—they’ve been able to turn profit on their products. You’re learning from people who not only teach it, but they do it every day.” 92

Make, Market, Launch IT Rob and Michael’s first product was Mastering Mealtime, designed to help busy, multi-tasking moms succeed in the kitchen. From the beginning, they focused in on how to add value to a specific audience, leveraging Michael’s background as a chef. “[The product idea] wasn’t really about my skillset, it was more about a problem I saw, and the problem was that moms were very stressed out every day about what to make for dinner,” Michael explains. After Mastering Mealtime, Rob and Michael went on to create a second product with a partner they met at a Make, Market, Launch It event. The result, Pranayama Running, has already exceeded the success of Mastering Mealtime. They credit Make, Market, Launch IT strategies with making the difference. “The most impressive thing to me . . . is just how amazing [Pam and Mike] were at being able to put together an offer. Understanding exactly who your customer is was one of the biggest things I took from it,” Rob says. Make, Market, Launch IT also helped to streamline Rob and Michael’s process. “Just the structure of how [Pam and Mike] do everything is so critical. If you have formulas and you have a framework, the time it takes to create additional products is drastically reduced. For example, Mastering Mealtime vs. Pranayama Running—it’s night and day in terms of how long it took us,” Rob explains. In addition, Rob and Michael learned how much quality beta testing could improve the quality of their offer. Mastering Mealtime didn’t go through a beta test, and their sales suffered. In contrast, before launching Pranayama, Rob and Michael are doing a significant amount of beta testing, and their results are promising. After getting “phenomenal results from the focus group,” Rob and Michael have also taken the idea to Icon Health & Fitness, creators of the Nordic Track, to explore possibilities for expansion. They secured the 93

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs meeting based on principles they learned at the Make, Market, Launch IT live event. Their advice for others ready to create or launch a product? Don’t create your whole product until you’ve gotten real feedback from real customers. In fact, they are currently working to tweak their offer for Mastering Mealtime to make it more compelling, based on the lessons they learned with Pranayama. As Rob explains, “We didn’t do a beta test before launching Mastering Mealtime. Later, we did a focus group, and they didn’t pay. For Pranayama, they paid. And that in itself is a huge difference.” Rob and Michael are currently still in the process of tweaking the Pranayama Running offer to accommodate the needs pinpointed during their beta testing. “It’s so important for us to get it right in terms of understanding who the real target market is,” Rob explains. Make, Market, Launch IT also reminded them how important it is to speak to their audience in its own language. This is particularly critical, they believe, in explaining the offer in a way that is meaningful to that audience. “That’s a big, big takeaway—talking in a concrete way and not in an abstract way,” Michael says. “Instead of saying, ‘You’re going to be happy when you use Pranayama Running,’ you’ve got to say, ‘You’re going to have more energy so you can run that extra mile with no problem,’” he continues. As they work to launch (and re-launch) each of their products, Rob and Michael are continually drawn to the freedom the information product business model has given them, as well as the ability to make a difference in the lives of others. “I think the big thing is, it gives you freedom,” Rob says. In Michael’s words, “Five, ten years down the line—I see myself doing what I love, and that’s creating products that help people, and doing it in a compelling way. I would like to make my work impact people’s lives and make a good living while I’m doing it.” 94

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Step 4: Leverage: Outsource IT

“Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.” —Stephen Covey

Once you have the right mindset in place, and your ideal market and offer determined, we want to help you get the leverage you need to build a profitable business that you enjoy. This is an important step before creating your product or service—otherwise you will waste time AND money on tasks and projects you should not be focusing on. You must discover how to find and maximize outside resources to get your product or service done and support your business. This way, your time is spent on the things that make you the most money and drive the overall vision for your business forward. As your ideas take shape and your business grows, you need to reach out to “trusted advisors” and people who will give you honest feedback. You can’t do it all on your own, even though there are times that it might feel easier to do everything yourself. In addition to establishing a 95

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs support system to help you recognize, tackle and process the challenges of entrepreneurship, you’ll also need to assemble the resources to make your ideas a reality. This includes the money, the people and the systems that will fuel your enterprise. Especially when you’re first starting out, we’re big fans of bootstrapping. By using limited resources in a smart way, you can get by with minimal overhead. When you’re starting out, keep your expenses low. In the long run, being fiscally conservative will always serve you.

Your Monthly Burn: A Story from Mike… Several years ago we started doing “product launches.” Our largest one generated $9.1mm in revenue in a single week. Over $1mm in 43 minutes and we exceed $2mm in sales in 1 hour and 14 minutes. That’s a great story. Here’s the downside. I started taking my eyes off the business—I got cocky and every problem someone brought to me, I did my best to offload it onto an employee or hired a contractor or another employee to “solve it.” People started seeing how I was (or should I say wasn’t) managing our money. They got greedy. Pretty soon low-level employees were getting paid twice what the industry rate was for that job. We suddenly went from 20 to 60 employees and contractors. Our professional services consultants were gouging us. Our overhead grew to over $500,000 per month. Our “monthly continuity” revenue from our software services was about half that amount —so it meant we had to “clear” several million dollars a year just to survive.

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Make, Market, Launch IT And then the bad news came: one of our “merchant providers” decided to “hold back” $1.2mm of our cash indefinitely. Your merchant provider “sits” between your credit processor and the bank. More bad news: my CFO announced to me one day that we would run out of cash in less than two months. Suddenly, I was on a never-ending cycle of having to do product launches in order to survive. A few months later, I was hit with a massive tax bill that exceeded the amount of money I drew from the company for the past two years. It took over a year to decrease expenses, downsize, get rid of one-sided contracts, overpriced contractors, professional services and resolve what seemed like an eternal list of unreasonable expenses. The week my team and I got the company finances under control, I was diagnosed with cancer. The good news? Thanks to having a second business with my partner Pam, a great customer database, continuity income, the ability to launch and release new products and a competent team that ran the business while I went through surgery, chemotherapy, radiation treatment and all kinds of complementary and alternative therapies, we remained stable and profitable. But I learned an incredibly important lesson that I had heard but not heeded for years. “It’s not what you make, it’s what you keep.” It was my fault. I took my eyes off the ball. Filled with hubris and a sense that I could always make money no matter what happened, I was suddenly given the “gift” of a life-threatening disease that gave me perspective.

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The morals of the story: • Business is a combination of relationships, permission and trust • Your list is your life-support and the gift that keeps on giving • Keep your expenses low • Live below your means • Don’t give someone else control of your checkbook • Build a business, not products • Focus on creating continuity/subscription income • You’re getting older much faster than you realize • Build a business you love, serving customers you love to serve • Get it done. Those who hesitate go out of business • Don’t quit until you’re ready to quit • Build a business someone will want to buy, even if you never sell it The good news is I’ve made a huge health turnaround and my business has continued to do incredibly well. And my health is better than ever!

This is Where Leverage Comes In True leverage is about maximizing your resources. It’s about making your business efficient and effective through discipline and focus. It’s also about creating results. Getting leverage is also the last thing you need to do before you move into full-on product creation mode. It allows you to do several things: • Create the best-quality products for the least amount of money in the least amount of time. Money loves speed. 98

Make, Market, Launch IT • Set yourself up for future success so that each new product adds geometric growth to your business. • Avoid the major business challenges that can eat up your profits, negatively impact customer experience or damage your reputation in your industry. Getting this leverage for yourself and reaping the rewards happens in three phases: 1. Securing the right resources You must learn to outsource effectively and then use the best tools to find, manage, and maximize your team. 2. Creating a project plan How exactly will you achieve these objectives? What steps will you take? 3. Get productive How how will you get more done in less time with less stress? A little planning up front will ensure that you’re on the right path to your ultimate vision. If you don’t plan for what you need—and when you need it—you won’t be able to get the best resources at the best price. Lack of planning might mean that your preferred contractors are already booked. If you can convince them to squeeze you in, it could cost you a bundle in rush fees instead of regular rates. Or it might result in your second- or third-choice contractor executing your job, producing a lessthan-impeccable result. You might even end up doing the work yourself, which isn’t always the right use of your time. Plus, when you’re executing on the fly, you end up working reactively. Timelines go out the window as you microfocus on what needs to get done in the moment. Stay strategic. That’s where leverage exists. There’s no way to gain maximum leverage and be tactical at the same time. All these scenarios mean added stress for you. You end up frustrated because things aren’t going the way you wanted. Your team may feel frustrated because you don’t have the time and focus to give them the direction they need to execute to your standards. 99

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs And, ultimately, the biggest loser in this scenario may be your customer. If you end up sending a product to market that’s not impeccable, they won’t get the value or the results they’d hoped for. This, in turn, will start to affect your brand and your reputation in the marketplace. You’ll also pay for it in increased refunds, support challenges and your long-term sales. Let’s take the next step together and plan for your success. Let’s utilize the power of leverage and put in place the right resources to help you build and run a great, profitable, low-stress product creation business.

1. 5-Step Guide to Effective Outsourcing When you’re starting out as a new business owner, you’re initially going to have to wear many hats: sales, marketing, manager, payroll—taking on roles that ensure that you get your business off the ground the way you intend. At some point, though—hopefully—your business will reach a level where you will absolutely need (and be able to justify) a team of people to help you execute essential business functions. This isn’t just a matter of your business’s survival. Getting help when and where you need it is crucial so that it frees you up to do the things you really want to do, which is why you got into business to begin with: working with your content, developing relationships with your customers, and creating your products and services. That’s why there’s outsourcing—the strategic use of outside resources (contractors) to perform specialized services for your business. In other words, do what you do best, and get others to do the rest. It doesn’t serve you, your business, or your team for you to take on functions that you know you don’t absolutely have to do. Today’s world makes it possible for us to have access to help literally across the globe. You can hire people for certain functions for the long haul, or you can perform “surgical strikes” for specific functions like video editing, packaging, graphic design, etc.—things your business may need to get a product to market, but that you won’t need ongoing or long-term. 100

Make, Market, Launch IT How Outsourcing Helps You: • Frees you up to do the work you love • Gives you access to better skilled resources • Helps you scale your business • Supports other people and provides opportunities for skilled workers to add value and earn a living—writers, designers, editors, numbers people, etc. • Provides new perspectives for you and your business • Adds ambassadors for your brand • Gives you access to Time Zone advantages (at times) • Helps you reduce and control costs as you scale up and down If you look at what your time is worth and its value, what are you not doing that could be bringing in more money, adding more value to your life, making things easier and better for you and your customers? This is called the “opportunity cost”—the benefit or value you’re missing out on by choosing to spend your time one place instead of another. If you’re not outsourcing at all, why not? And, why not now? What could additional support give you and your customers? One of the reasons you hire people is to get more products out the door! Live in that possibility. Within the first year, it can pay for itself!! There’s an acronym, HUBU—Highest Use, Best Use—that should become your business mantra. Highest use, best use means that you look at all the different elements of your business and choose the ones you take on personally based on three criteria: 1. Am I good at this? 2. Do I like to do this? 3. Am I able to sustain it? This will help you to understand your strengths—how you work—and set up systems so that other people can use their strengths to accomplish the functions that aren’t your strengths. (This isn’t just about the business side of your life. Think about how much time and energy you can save by hiring somebody to clean your home or pick up your laundry!) 101

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs There are two rules for effective outsourcing: 1. Start soon. Don’t play the “I’ll outsource when I earn X amount from my product,” or “when I feel overwhelmed.” Look at what you can outsource in your current business situation. 2. Start small. Look at the specific areas or tasks in your business that you know you’re not good at or don’t like to do, and choose one to outsource. You can get the hang of the process that way and prepare to outsource larger areas or tasks as appropriate. Here are the five steps to effective outsourcing: Step 1: Understand the Difference Between a Contractor and an Employee Contrary to what a lot of people think, it’s not up to you to decide whether or not the person you hire becomes a contractor (outsource) or an employee. The designation is made based on governmental guidelines and regulations. The first step is to define the business relationship between you and the person performing the services. As you do this, there are many factors that determine whether the person is providing service is an employee or independent contractor, the most importance of which is degree of control and independence of the worker. The key is to understand the laws, hire a qualified professional to help you make the right determination, and look at the entire relationship between you and the service provider. Please make sure to get legal and business advice from a qualified professional. Step 2: Decide What to Outsource It’s not about how big or small your team is or needs to be, it’s about making the best decisions about what support you need to work smarter and more efficiently so that you can increase your business results: increase your revenues, take better care of customers and improve your lifestyle and bottom line.

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Make, Market, Launch IT Who and what you hire for depends on five factors: 1. Vision: What are your short and long-term visions for your company? 2. Passion: What do you love to do? What kinds of things would you be perfectly fine with others doing for you? 3. Stage of Business: What’s appropriate for the stage, size and scope of your current business? 4. Ongoing Budget: What can you realistically afford based on your current predicted revenue and expenses? 5. Impact: What will make the biggest impact on your bottom line and the growth of your business? Step 3: Part-time or Full-time Help Categories of functions that you can outsource include: • Graphic Design

• Accounting/Bookkeeping: budgets, payables, reports, taxes

• IT/Web Programming • Manufacturing

• Administration: files, organizing, mail, emails, personal help, transcription

• Project Management • Research

• Attorney: trademarks, copyrights (IP), legal issues

• Sales

• Copywriting

• Video Editing

• Customer Service

• Writing/Editing

• SEO/SEM

The list above is pretty comprehensive, and whether you choose to outsource these functions full-time or part-time depends on the size of your business and your business model. Many of them will always be part-time, or on an as-needed basis (an attorney, for example). But if nothing else remember this: There are certain things you should never give up full control of in your business: your money, your marketing strategy and your innovation.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Step 4: 7 Steps to Hire Right Choosing the right people for your outsourcing is critical, and the costs of hiring the wrong person can be steep. In fact, according to a recent CareerBuilder survey, more than a quarter of 6,000 hiring professionals said that just one bad hire cost their company more than $50,000. Here are 7 steps to hire right: 1. Write detailed description/performance standards. Be as specific as possible with what you’re looking for. Consider (1) the role’s responsibilities, (2) the qualifications, and (3) the qualities you would want in an ideal candidate. 2. Post where your ideal candidate “lives.” If you’re looking for a junior writer, you may want to consider Craigslist versus LinkedIn (for more seasoned writers). 3. Conduct interviews (in person/phone/Skype). Get a sense if the person would be a right fit not only for the position, but your company as well. Don’t be afraid to do a few rounds of interviews (depending on the level of the position) to ensure that you have made the right choice. 4. Start with a test project. Even after doing a series of interviews, though you may like the person and their background seems to indicate that they are a fit, you won’t know until you try your prospective person out. Give them a test assignment that is representative of what they would be working on. Note: Offer to compensate them for the assignment IF you plan to publish or post what they have written. 5. Check their references and samples. This goes hand-in-hand with the test assignment. Who can you talk to that has a sense of how they work? What samples can you check online? 6. Make an offer. Be clear on rate, hours, how they will work, etc. 7. Set them up to win. Put the time in upfront with a new hire—they will need some hand-holding at first, but this will pay off in the end.

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Make, Market, Launch IT Step 5: Getting What You Need Once you’ve hired someone or selected your contractor, there are several things you must do in order to help them be successful (and lower your stress level in the process). • Set expectations from the get-go. • Teach them how and when to communicate with you. • Start with a trial period if possible. • Share key documents and systems with them so they have a context for your vision and how you and your business works. • Start smaller and give them the opportunity to grow. • Measure and check in often, especially at first. • Provide feedback: ongoing and based on final result. • Get your native files before you pay. • Ask your contractors (or employees) to document processes as they go. • Provide unexpected rewards and jackpots for best people. There are also several mistakes that you must avoid when hiring employees or contractors. • Not being clear about what you need. Be sure they understand what you want. • Not hiring the best person for the role or setting—i.e. keeping in mind team fit. • Not setting clear parameters. This includes timelines, budget, etc. • Not having realistic expectations. If you’re asking for a 24-hour turnaround for a project that takes 24 hours, you are setting them and you up for failure. • Not checking in at regular intervals. You’re responsible for the final outcome, so you must monitor progress and make sure things are on track. The impact can be even more dramatic for entrepreneurs as we are spending time to find the right person and train them effectively. You can multiply your business’s productivity and profitability while having more time for yourself. Make sure you are equipped with the right resources to save you time and money in the long run. 105

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2. Project Planning Essentials Product creation, first and foremost, is a project management process. The two go hand-in-hand. Before you jump into creating (or refining) your product, you will want to know how to manage each step of the way effectively to minimize stress, meet your deadlines and stay on budget. Principle One: Understand the power of people. Pam’s dad, William Bigler, was a successful process engineer and project manager at Corning Inc. for more than 40 years. He would visit different departments, and employees would react negatively: “Corporate sent him!” Fortunately, Pam’s dad knew how to create connections with people and play to their strengths, so he ultimately got great work out of them. He got the best out of them by cultivating relationships and making those employees feel that they were valued. If you are having a challenge with someone in the planning process, are you maybe asking them to do something that’s not in their skill set? Should you be using that resource elsewhere? Principle Two: Time up front will save you time in the back end. Before you begin any project, make sure you have all of the stakeholders in the room so everyone has a say upfront. Then once the outcome, guiding principles and action plan are decided on, break up into a small team of executors. Remember, the more people who need to be involved in a decision, or in the execution, the less efficient you’ll be. Principle Three: Specificity is power. Effective project planning is about knowing the nitty-gritty—no detail is too small. For example, when you’re planning an event, you will want to know every nuance of your contract with a venue, down to your food and beverage minimum, where and when you load in and out, and if you have made any special concessions. Principle Four: Take one step at a time. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when planning a project, especially an entire product! Don’t swallow the whale whole—take a step back and do one thing at a time. Create reasonable milestones so you can track smaller steps.

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Make, Market, Launch IT The 5 Steps to Planning Any Project with Precision 1. Define your outcome. Clarify your vision. Ask yourself: What does this look like? What do I want to achieve? How will I know if I have achieved it? Be specific so everyone is one moving with the same target. 2. Determine your resources and constraints. • Financial: How much will it cost? How much money will it bring in? What makes sense for my business (in terms of how much to spend)? • People: Do I have anyone on staff who can help? Colleagues I can partner with? • Time: Do I need to get this done by a certain time (e.g. do I have a webinar planned in two weeks and want to sell the product?). If you’re working a full-time job, how much time will you need to devote to this on nights and weekends? 3. Write down the sub-steps to get the project completed. For example, with Make Market Launch IT Academy there are seven steps. Instead of looking at the project as a whole, we break it down into those seven chunks, then by chapters, and then what needs to get done for each of those smaller pieces: Once you have those manageable chunks, you will need: • Action plan: The specific tasks you or your team need to complete. • Roles: Whether it’s you or a small staff, clearly identify the responsible owner. • Deadlines/milestones: When you plan to complete each piece. • Have a clear system and monitor your team 4. Make sure you have a system to check in at regular intervals. You can use a project management system such as Basecamp or Asana or simply schedule weekly or bi-weekly meetings. If you do end up using a software program, you may also want to have regular meetings to solve problems and anticipate challenges. As a business owner ultimately in charge of your product or project, you need to check in to support, coach and solve problems along the way. This is your opportunity to see what’s working, what needs more help and where you may need to fine tune along the way. 107

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 5. Acknowledge the close of your project. After completing any bigger project it’s time to breathe a sigh of relief and quickly move on to the next one. But hold on—acknowledge that completion: • Celebrate what you have accomplished. • Thank all of those that helped you along the way. • Make sure you have all of the native files and materials so you can make changes and updates in the future. • Debrief with your team: What was great? What can be improved for next time? 7 Mistakes to Avoid 1. Not being clear on the ultimate outcome. You and your team need to be aligned with what you hope to achieve, and how you’re going to get there. 2. Not anticipating challenges. The best project managers are problem solvers, anticipate potential solutions, and have a Plan B, C and D! 3. Not documenting as you go. Keep track of every milestone and any distinctions you learned along the way! 4. Not being flexible/resourceful. There will be curveballs with every project; the trick is responding to them quickly, and having a flexible attitude. 5. Not giving yourself a buffer. Anticipate that your budget will likely go over, and a project will take more time—so give yourself a cushion for your deadlines. 6. Continuing to make the same mistake over and over. Learn why the mistake occurred so you can put a system in place to solve for it in the future. 7. Allowing problems to fester. How do you solve problems? Bring more resources to the table to help you see another angle, consider another perspective. Things are going to go wrong! Your team is going to make mistakes; you will too. Your greatest resource: Keeping yourself in an empowering state, and rolling with the punches. Just like any other skillset, the more you practice, the better you will become with project management.

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When Projects Go Wrong . . . . . . and they inevitably do in some form, the key is not to panic. You can’t make good decisions when you’re in a state of panic. Take that emotion and focus it toward your ultimate outcome. There’s always another way. If you take a step back in a resourceful state to consider the bigger picture, another path will appear. Perspective is key – in the grand scheme of things, you’re going to be fine and nobody will remember your mistakes anyway. Ultimately, anticipation is your best weapon. For every major component of your project, ask yourself and your team, “What could go wrong?” Create a plan for dealing with these potential challenges in advance. If you can anticipate potential challenges to the point where you can prevent them from happening, even better. If you get stuck along the way, consider bringing another resource to the table. A brainstorming session with a colleague can shed new light on an issue. A project manager can clear your plate of the responsibilities that are keeping you from hitting your deadline. Finally, remember why you’re doing all of this. Connect yourself to your vision and recognize the future you have in front of you. Then come back to the present and take the next step you need to get on track. More time in the planning means less in the execution. These guiding principles will help you plan effectively and efficiently manage your product creation process to get the best results, fast.

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3. Productivity Tips: How to Get More Done in Less Time and With Less Stress Many of us get into business for ourselves so we have more time for what truly matters to us—for our families, to pursue a passion, to have greater freedom. But often we find the opposite; that running our own business has limited our time, and created more demands for our attention. With a few simple shifts of focus, we can change that reactive outlook into a more disciplined strategy, and days of less stress. Step 1: Understand what your time is worth. Take out some paper and do some math. (working 50 weeks a year) x (about 40 hours a week) = 2,000 available hours in a year Now think about how much you want to make. For example, let’s say you want to make $100,000 a year. Divide that by 2,000 hours—your time should be worth $50 an hour. If you want to create a million dollars of revenue in a year, when you divide that out, it’s a $500 hour! Are your hours worth that amount? If you still haven’t hit your revenue goal it could be that your hours aren’t worth that much! Now that you have a concrete amount, use that amount to set a bar. If you can pay someone less than your hourly rate to complete a task you’re not very skilled at (e.g. if your rate is $100 an hour and you are horrible at transcribing, paying someone even $80 an hour to transcribe for you), it would be worth it! In delegating tasks, you free up your own time to do the most important things for your business. If you really don’t have the cash to pay someone else, then it falls on you to start doing more in the amount of time that you have.

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Make, Market, Launch IT Step 2: Understand the different elements of time management. We can’t manage time, but what you can do is manage people, systems and yourself to make the most of your time. 1. People management. Limit your access to the people who are your interrupters. You’ll sometimes have employees who feel uncomfortable making decisions without your input so they’ll keep asking you questions. Give them a daily window of time to come to you with those questions, and otherwise tell them to just go ahead and make the best decision and tell you about it later, during the next window of time. On another note, when it comes to getting the most productivity out of your employees, consider paying by the project instead of paying by the hour. When you pay by the hour you’re incentivizing that person to work more hours! By paying by the project, they’re more likely to get the project done as quickly as possible to free up their own time. 2. Systems management. If you find yourself doing a task two or three times, it’s time to develop a system around that. Be aware of what you do every single day and create a system to make that task more efficient. More time in the planning is less in the execution. It will take some time upfront, but consider that time as an investment. The systems you create could be as simple as moving your printer closer to your desk so that you don’t have to walk across the room every time you print something. It may be a small change but when you start adding up the little things, they really add up. 3. You management. A lot of people don’t realize that productivity comes down to you as an entrepreneur; it’s about you learning faster, getting more done and being more valuable. When you sit down to complete a task, close your emails, close irrelevant web browsers, put your phone on mute or airplane mode, and just work straight through without any interruptions. It may take practice eliminating interruptions and distractions, but the amount of time it takes us to get refocused after an interruption is substantial. 111

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs The most important part of your business is YOU. Schedule “PDT,” or personal development time to make yourself more efficient as an entrepreneur (take 30 minutes to an hour a day to read, listen to audio, etc). To give yourself more personal development time, use Mike Koenigs’ system of “5 into 3.” He takes everything he has scheduled out over five days, and reduces that five day chunk into a three day period, so that the same five days is scheduled into a three. Tony Robbins says, “What’s talked about is a dream. What’s envisioned is exciting. What’s planned becomes possible. But only what’s scheduled becomes real.” Put it in your schedule and it will be far more likely to happen. Step 3: Set boundaries. How do you set boundaries to make sure your business doesn’t take over your life? Learn to say no. It comes down to opportunity cost. When you say yes to something, you say no to 10 other things—things that may ultimately have more value to you or your business. It’s typically your family, your time, your freedom that you’re saying ‘no’ to when you say ‘yes’ to an unnecessary business invitation. One of the most important words in business is NO. And you can say no without a sentence after it—you don’t need a reason or explanation! That little word gives you boundaries that help you be really present in the moments you choose to be present in. The Greatest Time Management System Remember, the best system is the one that works and the one you actually use! Keep a time diary and write down how you spend your time. You’ll find that 30-40 percent of the activities you do daily probably aren’t necessary! Go back to the idea of the value of your time. Is that hour you’re spending on that task really worth $500?

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Make, Market, Launch IT It’s also important to not mistake movement for achievement. There is a difference between activity and productivity. Productivity is about getting the value back out of your time and making money off of your time. Make your time valuable! To wrap up these concepts of leverage, we offer you the story of Bruce Jones, one of our Make, Market, Launch IT creators who was inspired to become “a one-man international company.” See how Bruce is getting leverage in his own business while expanding his suite of products to free up his time to spend more with his family.

“I can be a one-person international company.” Case Study from the Field: Bruce Jones Jones’s younger daughter started college, he decided it was time for a change. After almost 30 years of working as a graphic designer, he was done with the “laying-out-newsletter” clients. Bruce was ready to shift the focus of his business more strongly toward developing online products and free up his time. Bruce was no stranger to selling online products. He had long supported his freelance career by selling editable clip art maps to everyone from graphic designers to sales teams creating PowerPoint presentations to religious groups planning their missions. He had also branched out into books. “I have 19 books now that I’ve done,” he says. “They range from music books for guitar, mandolin, ukulele and banjo to geography books and children’s books.” He also has a series of coloring books. All of these, he created through Amazon print on demand site, CreateSpace. However, after jumping into Make, Market, Launch IT, Bruce had a couple of realizations.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs First, he knew he wanted to expand and do more consulting. After seeing the strength of his books, Bruce had a stream of authors ask for his help in publishing their own works. Bruce also looked at a course he’d taken with a journalist back in 2008 and saw the incredible potential to help it go global. And, finally, although Bruce had always developed products to support his freelancing, he was ready to grow. “I’ve been selling $49 products,” he realized. “I want to sell a $149 product. You can create books, and software and products and sell them online, and be basically a one-person international company. The power is really amazing.” Bruce took action. He pitched his idea for an online product to Bill Gentile, a veteran reporter with a deep bench of experience in foreign correspondence that included covering the Sandinista Wars in Nicaragua for Newsweek. After taking Gentile’s Backpack Journalism course in 2008, Bruce had stayed in touch and was helping Gentile with his social media. Make, Market, Launch IT helped him realize the full potential of Gentile’s content—and their partnership. It wasn’t always an easy sell for a traditional journalist like Gentile. “Most of these people have never done anything like this,” Bruce says. “They’re kind of suspicious. They don’t know how it works. [To them,] YouTube is just cat videos and skateboarders.” Bruce used Make, Market, Launch IT to show Gentile how they could partner up and put it all together. It was the avatar, the Make, Market, Launch IT concept around building a visual image of your ideal client, that sealed the deal for their venture. From there on in, Gentile was on board. Bruce modeled MML strategies to help Gentile completely revamp his site, creating an “Essential Tips and Tools” opt-in to attract more subscribers. Gentile started seeing results immediately. Enrollments for his intimate workshops had been dwindling to 3-4 people. The new website started filling his workshops to capacity.

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Make, Market, Launch IT To keep moving forward, Bruce knew they couldn’t do it alone. They would need leverage. “It takes a team,” he notes. “I’ve tried to do it by myself with my book publishing product. I’m just by myself, and I discovered it’s almost impossible. A team is really powerful.” “You don’t need a big team,” he continues. “You need a producer, which is my role. [Bill Gentile] is the talent. We have a web guy and we have a couple other people floating around. But you can be guerrilla at it. Don’t go crazy spending a zillion dollars.” They decided to film the content in front of a live audience. That wasn’t the original plan, he notes. They tried to film by themselves initially, but discovered that Gentile needed an audience to stay on track. They reworked their strategy. “We have real students paying real money. Pam mentioned that. That’s something I learned [from her]: Have some real people in front of you.” Gentile’s project is just one piece of Bruce’s overall plan for his business. “Think global, act local,” is his current product development philosophy. “There are a lot of potential buyers out there. You want to put stuff out in many, many different ways.” For him, that means continuing to develop bigger, higher-price-point products—with bonuses. “It was a huge insight when I saw what [Pam] did, ‘Here’s the welcome letter, here’s the product, here’s an expected bonus, here’s an unexpected bonus,’” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh, what do I have that I can throw into my box?’ I went running around my office going, ‘What can I put in my box?’” It also means continuing to expand his consulting business, as well as a publishing product to compliment it. Many of his clients are aspiring authors who want to get their books published, while others want help with video creation and marketing. For the confidence and strategies to take on this work, Bruce credits Make, Market, Launch IT, which he calls “very, very helpful in terms of being a consultant. It helped me organized my thoughts. The avatar workshop, the product funnel, the questions about the product, the personal psychology, those worksheets . . . were very, very helpful.” 115

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Bruce also sees great potential to expand into other fields formerly dominated by more traditional marketing—or no marketing at all. Bruce continues to expand his library of published books with now over 32 titles, including several best sellers, and sales in 2014 of over 3,600 copies. He has also open several new markets for his map products developing a low price option for home schoolers and a higher price package for corporate sales departments. And again using MML, he has just released his own online video course based around his book publishing knowledge, “How to Make Children’s Picture Books for Kindle.” He offers a final note: “Anybody can do this in whatever field you’re in. You can design and sell products based around your knowledge and distribute them to the world. That’s a pretty cool thing.” To learn more about what Bruce is doing you can reach out to him at www.brucejonesdesign.com.

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Step 5: Create: Build IT

“Content isn’t King, it’s the Kingdom.” —Lee Odden, Top Rank Marketing

Are you ready to translate your knowledge, know-how, expertise and experience into a product that will transform people’s lives? Are you eager to show your avatars your own unique blend of strategies and tools that will solve their deepest problems, add value and create visible change? Are you excited to put your stake in the ground and begin the core process that will turn you into a highly sought-after expert and creator? The foundation you’ve put in place with the first four steps will truly pay off here: Now you will see your vision come to life. In this chapter you’ll learn how to create and deliver your message for maximum impact— including the precise structure for creating compelling content that moves people to action. Most important, you’ll walk away with a simple structure for creating any product you want in any format, so you can use it again and again as you grow your business.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Most of us have spent practically our entire lives as consumers. There are products that we’ve come to know, trust and buy habitually, and then there are those newer products we search for, that we hope fulfill specific needs that will help us or make us better in some way It’s quite another thing to be on the other side of that equation: we want to create a business for ourselves selling something that we think can add value to a particular niche of customers. In a sense, we’re already experts in what makes a great product. Now we just have to go deeper into what goes behind taking an idea for a product and making it a reality. In this chapter, we’ll show you how to create products that set you apart in your field, that delivers on its promises to your clients and creates lasting change. Your ultimate outcome is this: You must provide your customers solutions that are relevant and useful to them—products that stand out from everything else that’s available because you are creating a personal connection and helping them fulfill a need or solve a problem quickly, effectively and permanently. Let’s look at what it takes to create amazing products.

1. Product Creation 101: What You Need To Know To Create Amazing Products Creating great products isn’t reserved for Research & Development teams at big companies—it’s about knowing what to focus on and what’s important to not focus on as you develop your product. Whether it’s a bigger, more established company or a business that’s just starting out; whether it’s manufactured products, widgets, info training or a live event, there are four things you need to know in order to make a great product. 1. Product creation is a process. 2. Speed to market is paramount. 3. Your products need to evolve. 4. There are only two reasons products don’t sell. 118

Make, Market, Launch IT Step 1: The Product Creation Process This isn’t the turn of the 20th century where a handful of industrialists buy huge manufacturing plants that churn out product after product. These days almost anybody can create a product. You just need a strategy: the most important part of which is to just get going. Remember, your first product doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, for most product creators, the minute you publish your product, you’ll immediately want to change 67 things! The key is to embrace this as part of the process: the feedback from your customers and from the market is what will help you continue refining your product to make it better. Product creation is on ongoing process. The crucial part of the process is that you continue to refine your products and services so that they bring in revenue without depending on you. As a business owner, you want to create a process that continues to benefit you into your future, where you are literally making money while you sleep! Also, you want that process to make it easier for you to continue creating new products and innovating those already in process, so the whole repeating cycle becomes easier and easier. All product development can be broken down into four steps. How deep you go into the idea portion of the product development process depends on your business. The stage, size and scope of your business will determine how deep you dive into these four steps.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 1. Idea. If it’s a good idea, it is designed to solve a problem that your target market has or to help your market attain a goal, make things easier, faster, or cheaper—that is, making their lives better in some way. The only difference between a new start-up with just a handful of people as resources and a big corporation with an entire research and development department is that the bigger, more mature company breaks down “idea” into four sub-categories: 1. Concept—what companies think the product will do and its position in the market. 2. Market Analysis—surveying competitor analysis, etc.

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3. Business Analysis—where does this product fit into the overall business’s goals? How does it help the mission or purpose of the business moving forward? 4. Define Scope and Fit—what’s more important than what’s in your product is what you intentionally leave out of it. If you’re just starting out, you may condense these four sub-categories into a more simple process where you simply take an idea and test it within your market to see if it works. 2. Develop. Once you have your idea, you develop it into a first iteration or, in product development terms, a prototype. Here are six steps to maximize the development of a quality product that sells: 1. Design and specs. In a logical, step-by-step way, you figure out what’s in the product and what’s not. The more plain English you can use when planning your product, the better. If it’s a training program, for example, you’re just outlining your content. If it’s a live event, you’re deciding the theme, number of days, key speakers and where you want to have it. 2. Financial models. If your product cost X amount of dollars to produce plus X to market it, what’s your price point for breaking even? Making a profit? What are your projected revenues? You can use an Excel spreadsheet or a more complex financial model. 120

Make, Market, Launch IT 3. Marketing strategy. Product development and marketing strategizing go hand in hand. You’re always marketing in everything you do. What is your core marketing strategy for your product or service? In other words, what are the ways you plan to market and sell it? 4. Production (prototype). You need to produce a prototype that matches your initial vision and concept. As you do this, consider starting with a prototype to ensure that you’re going to get what you are looking for when your product is actually produced, manufactured or programmed. When you’re in the production process, manage everything as carefully as you can, but don’t drive yourself crazy trying to make every detail perfect, especially if you’re starting out. Remember, the most important thing is to get to market! 5. Packaging/Collateral. This is about putting your product into a container or package that’s compelling and clear. If it’s online training, it’s the graphics of your website. If it’s a physical training program, this refers to the box that houses it all. 6. Testing and Quality Assurance (Legal). Before you deliver your product, make sure you complete some form of testing and Q&A. One of the best ways to do this is to put yourself through the process of ordering the product and using it yourself as if you’re a customer. 3. Launch. We’ll cover the details of how to market and sell your product in Step 6: Monetize. For now, here’s a look at the five core areas of focus that will ensure you deliver massive value to your customers and maximize sales at the same time: 1. Sales Training: Make sure that your sales team knows the core benefits of the product, and the problem it solves and how. 2. Market Introduction: Consider how you are going to position your product when you first introduce it to your target audience. 3. Product Delivery: This is the fulfillment of your product. Make sure you’ve walked through this process step-by-step so your customers get their product quickly and easily. 121

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 4. Customer Support: A great business can live or die by the quality of its customer service. Have the right systems in place to support your customers. 5. Marketing Adjustments: Be ready to update and revise your product (and/or your marketing) based on how the market reacts. 4. Iterate. In some cases, if your product really flopped, you might think about scrapping that product idea and starting with a new idea. (If this has happened to you, GREAT. It’s one more idea you know doesn’t work! Better to know that sooner rather than later.) Most of the time, though, new products are just a little off and you just need to keep refining them. Here are four steps to help refine your product: 1. Customer Feedback: You can use surveys or informal conversations (live or online). 2. Internal Feedback: What’s your team noticing about what worked and what didn’t? How can you improve the product, the delivery or your marketing? Are there places you can cut costs or improve your sales results? 3. Financial Reports: Did you make your money back? Did you make a profit? Were your costs in alignment with what makes sense for the size and scope of your business? 4. Maximize Life Cycle: How long has the product been out in the market? Is there something you can do to update it? Can you add something else to the offer? What are some ways you can extend the life cycle of the product as well as your customers’ experience? Once you have your first product done, this four-step product creation cycle keeps repeating again and again. You get better, it gets easier and your customers help you better meet their needs. Lots of people take a long time when launching their product yet skip some of the steps of the product creation process. The cure: just do it! Make a public commitment to actual customers. This is why it can be powerful to make an offer and sell your product or service before you create it. It puts you on the hook to deliver what you promised on time! 122

Make, Market, Launch IT The key is, schedule it to make it real. Step 2: Speed to Market is Paramount The best way to understand step two of creating a quality product is by understanding how lack of speed can hurt you. • Competitors beat you to market or innovate first. On the one hand you don’t want to become obsessed with what your competitors are doing, but if you delay, know that you run the risk of being beaten to the market. • Spending more time and money in the development process. The longer you wait, the more it’s going to cost you in terms of your two most important resources: time and money. • Viability? If you delay launching, you may not find out your product isn’t viable until it’s too late in the process. • Changes in market conditions. If you wait too long, your product can end up being ineffective or even obsolete in some cases. We’re all familiar with the saying, “What’s hot today is gone tomorrow.” The same could be true for your product if you don’t act soon. • Risk developing a reputation as a follower vs. a leader in your industry. In our society, leaders are synonymous with innovation and success. You can’t stay ahead of your competition without having in mind the need for innovation. Keys to Getting to Market Quickly • Keep it simple. Simpler is usually better. • Use documented plans and checklists–as in the ones we give you here in Make Market Launch IT! Don’t re-invent the wheel. • Ensure one owner per outcome. Be efficient in the delegation of duties and management. • Create milestones and schedule key activities. You want to know when you’re supposed to be meeting deadlines and what for. • Use technology effectively. Imagine trying to record high-quality, high-definition video and audio on 1980s-like VCR equipment. Keep up with the latest technological innovations. 123

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs • Reduce the number of decisions. If you’re making a million little decisions about everything, then you’re not making the big ones. • Fail. Fast. Next. Most successful entrepreneurs have failed early and often. • There’s no single right answer. That’s life—it’s no different in product creation. If it’s not right, you’ll figure it out and then do what is right eventually. Step 3: Products Need to Evolve Your first product should be what we call an MVP—Minimum Viable Product. This is a product that has the minimum features necessary to get the result that early adopters will buy and give feedback on. Think about the MVP version as your first iteration: what’s the minimum you can publish or produce that delivers on your promise? Your first customers are going to be excited to engage with you and your product, and give relevant feedback. They’re not going to care that it’s not polished and perfect around the edges. That’s not to say that they won’t have ideas on how you can make your product better, but they’re the ones who are going to help you continue developing your product so it can evolve. Here is the process of evolving your product from MVP to final, polished form. 1. Test your product among a small group of paying customers. If they’re not paid customers, they’re not invested. If they’re not invested, it’s not a true test of how your product is doing. 2. Track customer progress. Get their continued feedback and don’t be afraid to innovate on the fly. 3. Improve the product. Take customer recommendations seriously, particularly if you are receiving the same suggestions over and over. 4. Gather success stories and build your marketing case. Testimonials not only help you and your product’s credibility but also they help cultivate a sense of community. When your customers see others be successful with your product, it gives them confidence and inspiration that they can do the same. 124

Make, Market, Launch IT For First Timers If you’re doing your first training program, these are some great, easy and inexpensive ways to refine/innovate your content and delivery: • Small Group Workshops • Studio audience • Series of Webinars/Teleseminars • Live Webcast • Q&A Format • Have someone interview you Avoid this mistake! One of the biggest mistake new entpreneurs make is they try to make their product perfect when they are starting out. This not only delays you getting to market, it causes you to create your product in a vacuum— without valuable feedback about what your customers like, don’t like and want to see you improve. Remember, the product development process begins when your first product or service is in the hands of your customers. Give yourself permission and space to evolve! Step 4: The 2 Reasons Products Don’t Sell Keep things in perspective. As important as it is to produce a quality product that exceeds the expectations of your customers, if your product isn’t selling, there are usually only two reasons why: (1) you’re focusing on the wrong market, or (2) you’re not making the right offer. Do you have a product or service that isn’t selling well? Use these questions to help pinpoint where your challenge might be:

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Trouble Shooting Questions Your Market: • Did you narrowly and clearly define your market? • Is it a big enough market? • Are they qualified (i.e. is it a market with money)? Can they pay you the value of what your product or service is worth? • Are they easy to find? Do you have access to these customers? • Have they purchased similar products in the past to solve a similar problem? • Are you communicating directly with the decisionmaker—i.e. the person who is directly making the buying decision? Your Offer: • Is it a quality offer? Is it clear, compelling, and designed to attract the right audience? • Is there urgency to solve the problem now? Does it command people’s attention? • Did you ask for the sale? How many times? Remember, it takes an average seven or eight communications—or more—before someone makes a buying decision. • Did you justify the price? • Did you reduce or eliminate risk customer risk? • Did the timing of your offer make sense (in the sales cycle and in the market)?

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Make, Market, Launch IT Product Life Cycles Finally, remember that each product you create will have a life cycle. Your goal is to grow the sales of each product you create as rapidly as possible—and then to extend the life cycle of that product as long as possible, maximizing your long-term success. There are four steps in this cycle. 1. Introduction: At this stage, your goal is to build awareness and create momentum for the initial product launch. 2. Growth: As you gain momentum, sales will start to grow. As you reach the peak, your profit usually hits its highest mark. In many markets, this is also where competition tends to show up, which can require you to make adjustments to your marketing or delivery. 3. Maturity: This is where you reach maximum market penetration— meaning you are past the peak and many times you’ll start to see a slowing of sales growth. You can slow this decline by making product changes, going after new market segments, adjusting your marketing message or channels and refining your offer. 4. Decline: No matter how great your product is, there is a point in the life cycle where your sales and profits start to decline. This doesn’t mean sales completely stop, but it means it’s time to evaluate if your product life cycle has run its course and it’s time to move your customers into a new product that solves their current needs and desires. In other words, it’s time to decide to maintain, harvest or simply drop the product. maturity

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2. Production: Getting Your Product To Market Products and services are everywhere. You’re sitting on a product; listening to a product, writing or typing with products. When done right, they’re designed to make our lives better. We also know, though, that that’s not always the case. This is about how to produce not just a product but a great product—something that your audience can actually, practically use to get the results they want, helps them, or somehow makes their lives better, easier, or happier in some way. If you do nothing other than keep this fundamental goal in mind as your focus, you’re going to have tremendous success in over-delivering value with your product or service. The details of product development—the step-by-step process for how you make the product—is unique to every format. At the same time, the overall process is the same: 1. Design and Specs. Lay out what’s in the product. 2. Constraints. Consider budget, resources, etc. 3. Production. Make the product. 4. Marketing Strategy. Target your market. 5. Testing/QA. You ensure that real customers can use it and get a result. 1. Design and Specs Step 1: Refine your vision for the format and deliverables. Consider the seven items you outlined in your initial product offer: title, subtitle, format, deliverables, price, risk reversal, and call-to-action—this is your opportunity to iterate that again with tweaks, if needed. It almost seems silly to repeat, yet you’d be surprised how many people forget to go back and look at their initial offer—what they promised and what they marketed to ensure that they actually deliver what they said they would to their customers. Refining your vision will help reinforce the deliverables, musts, and exclusions (what’s not needed) in your product design. 128

Make, Market, Launch IT Step 2: Define your strategy and create a project plan that brings together: • Business objectives. • Product scope. • Launch date. • Key milestones. • Resources needed. What you’ll find is that you don’t actually have to follow-through on every single item in minute detail. Project plans are just a great way to chunk important steps in such a way as to make what seems like a mountain of work into doable, actionable steps so that you’re not overwhelmed. Step 3: Draft the product specifications (specs). The details of your product’s specs is unique to the format you’re using. For example, if you’re creating a physical training product, you’ll outline what you need one way. If you’re developing software or an app, it’s a different set of specs and scope. For a live event, it’s yet another. The key here is that you put in writing what it is your product is going to deliver. In other words, what are all the individual components required to get your product done? Simply make a list or create a spreadsheet that lists each component or element of your product or service. 2. Constraints Remember the biggest mistake people make when creating a product or service: they put too much in and either overwhelm, unnecessarily complicate things, or exceed their budget. To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, simply do two things: Step 1: List your resources and constraints in each of these areas: • People • Time • Budget • Technology • Manufacturing 129

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Step 2: Based on the above, revise your product specs as necessary. The biggest challenge people have when they create their product or service is overproduction. It’s one thing to want your customer to get what you promise to deliver. It’s another to spend too much money in the process and not recoup that in your price point. Pam’s Golden Rule: Never spend more than 5% to 10% of your budget on the “cool thing.” (Depending on the size and scope of your business, this percent may be slightly higher or lower.) You have to be disciplined about your expenses if you’re just starting out and you want to make money. Make sure you focus on the core promise of your product or service and ensure you make a profit before you start adding in all the bells and whistles. Simplify it for your customers and make sure it’s something that you can do quickly and easily. 3. Production—Creating the Product 2 Parallel Paths

Product Development

Collateral Development (packaging)

There are seven elements that any quality product or service should include: 1. Welcome/How To/Instructions. Serves as a “how to” in the form of a “Hello!” 2. The Core Thing You’re Delivering. The product itself. This is the main deliverable that fulfills your promise to your customers. 3. Reinforcement Tools. Attachments, gadgets (if applicable), or other forms of content to help your audience access the material in different ways. 4. Action Tools. Workbooks, online links, physical tools, etc. Or, simply a “how to” diagram that shows how to use your product. 5. Bonuses. Include both something you announced up front as well as at least one unexpected surprise. A good bonus complements the core promise of the product, and doesn’t simply provide more bulk (and potentially overwhelm). 130

Make, Market, Launch IT 6. Upsell/Cross-sell. Cross-sell other products and services that will benefit your customers as they continue on in your brand. 7. “Stick Content” and plan. You (of course) want to encourage your customers to actually use the product they invested in. Just because they bought your product or service, doesn’t mean they are going to use it. You have to make it easy and compelling for them to follow through! There are also seven “must have” collateral components to package your product or service: 1. Logo Design & Branding. This is the first thing you want to complete because this is what will drive everything else you do in terms of production. A nice-looking, compelling presentation will go a long way in not only selling your product, but in making your customers feel great about their investment. 2. Packaging Design. How are you going to package your product or service? This is your customer’s first impression. Does it look inviting, warm, easy to use? Does it look like it’s worth what they invested in it? Are things going to be moving around during shipping if it’s a manufactured product and get damaged? 3. Packaging Copy. Write compelling descriptions of each component inside the package. You’re constantly re-engaging and re-affirming your customer along the process toward their desired result. Think like a marketer here! 4. Internal Collateral (guides, instructions, etc.). The simpler and more clear, the better. 5. Copyright and Trademarks. Protect your product/idea! Copyright your ideas and content. Consider applying for a trademark for your product title or a patent if you have a proprietary process. 6. Support: Contact Details. Make sure your customer can get hold of your company to get any help they might need. Sometimes parts get lost or damaged and need a replacing. Make it easy to access and get help. Ideally, provide both an email and a phone number so that people can call and get hold of a live person if they are stuck. 131

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 7. Shipper Box (if applicable). Make sure the box and all core components are physically protected so that they won’t get damaged in shipping or during delivery. 4. Marketing Strategy Develop your product along with your marketing strategy, as they go hand in hand. This will also ensure that you get to market faster as you’re ensuring both your product and the marketing are done at the same time. • Launch Plan/Go-to-Market Strategy (Written) - Define your sales channels. - Create your messaging/scripting. - Make a list of the needed marketing components (video, launch site, etc.). - Finalize your offer strategy: finalize pricing, guarantee, scarcity, call to action. • Sales Collateral: Create any presentations, one sheets, brochures or sales material that will support your sales team or sales efforts. Ideally, you have at least one written and designed piece that summarizes your offer for your product or service. 5. Testing and Q&A • Legal Review. Use professionals to ensure that you’re in compliance, that you have appropriate approvals and permissions (images, music, etc.), etc. In addition, get legal advice to make sure you’re protecting yourself and your business in the process. • Test everything! - S.E.E. (Someone Else Edits). Get someone else involved in this process because more than likely they’ll see things that you don’t see. - T.A.T. (Test Across Tech). If you’re delivering anything online, remember to test across different platforms. Some things look great in Google Chrome but not on Firefox, mobile devices, etc. 132

Make, Market, Launch IT • Fulfillment Systems. Make sure automated functions work so customers are getting their online log-ins, shipping notices, etc. • Customer Support Training. It’s a good idea to hire someone to support your customers early on in your business, even if it’s parttime. • Sales Training. Empower your sales team with tools (Q&A, onesheets, checklists, etc.) before you launch. Prototype—Test It! A common mistake that businesses make is producing mass quantities of a new product before testing whether or not it’s up to par. To ensure not only a quality product but also reducing the risks of massive waste to you resources, make one prototype of your product and run it through what it’s supposed to do. If it works, then you bring it to market.

3: Structure & Story: The Two Pillars of Premium Content The amount of information available to us as human beings is almost incomprehensible. As a species, we make, store and increase our capacity for information by the second. With the creation and rapid growth of the Internet, almost any information we want or need is available at the click of a single button. It’s not information that people are paying you for. There are three things that will make your content and products highly desired by your customers: 1. Your unique perspective—how you use your unique background to shed new light on your customers’ problems, as well as how they can learn from your experience to get the same or better results faster, with fewer missteps. 2. Your ability to structure and package content so they can use it to get a specific result—how well you’re able to explain, demonstrate and break down concepts for them and present it to them in a way they can easily and effectively apply. 133

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 3. Your ability to humanize it—the level of empathy, compassion and connection you’re able to convey and bring out in them in the process. Why Do They Pay? With paid content generating more than $15 billion dollars annually in the United States and even more than that globally, research shows there are ten reasons why people pay for content. 1. They can’t get the information they need elsewhere for free. 2. They perceive a return on investment from the information. They believe paying for content will help them make more money. 3. They need assurance that the information is accurate and credible. 4. They know it will save them time, effort, and energy versus trying to find and aggregate the same information themselves. 5. They want access to additional resources they can’t otherwise get. 6. They’re paying for the ability to compress time. They can get better results, faster and avoid key mistakes by using the information the way you’ve put it together for them. 7. They want to be part of a community of like-minded people. 8. They want a multi-media experience. They want to consume content in multiple modalities—i.e. they want to watch a video or listen to audio or read written materials. 9. They want access to a celebrity or an expert in a particular field. 10. They want exclusivity. How do we make sure that the content you’re putting out is highly valued and that people will pay premium prices for it? 1. Have a clear outcome for each piece of content you’re delivering. When you create any piece of content, you need to clarify in advance what it’s for—why this piece of content is necessary to include in your product or marketing and the specific value it will provide your audience.

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Make, Market, Launch IT 2. Structure and deliver the content in a way that ensures your customers are empowered to apply the information they learn effectively in their lives. While stories and emotion are critical for creating connection and engagement, it all starts with a clear, organized structure. Without the structure, your stories have nothing to attach to—people may be moved emotionally, but they don’t have a way to apply what they’re learning in a specific or practical way. Content Structure Content is information and strategies that can be consistently applied in a variety of practical situations to produce a specific result. Whether you’re delivering content in video, audio or print form, you need to create a simple and clear structure that’s set up to help customers follow along and implement. Just like a piece of music, the structure or framework of your content is what helps your audience take concepts and information and transform it into something they can use, ideally in a step-by-step format. A good structure makes it clear exactly what your customers are supposed to do, when they should take these actions and in what order. It takes your customers by the hand and leads them through your content, step by step, making it simple—and enjoyable—to complete your entire program. Structure also combats overwhelm, which will be your customers’ biggest challenge to completion. But before you even start to create the core structure of your content, you need to identify two things: 1. The outcome of the content you’re delivering. What are you trying to deliver to your customers? What effect are you hoping to have? 2. How to deliver it for maximum impact. How can you present this information in the most effective way to achieve that outcome? 135

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs These two concepts form the essence of content creation. Let them be your guide as we dive into the core structure of your product. How do you create a clear structure or framework for your content? Take your ideas and organize it into main concepts that make sense together. Start by brainstorming everything you want to teach (all your ideas), then group related ideas together to form your main concepts, and then make sure it all matches up to the main outcome of your content). Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea Idea

Main Concept 1 Main Concept 2 Main Concept 3

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7 Steps to Creating Structure 1. Get clear: The first questions to ask when creating any piece of content are: “What’s my primary outcome? What am I doing this for? What key thing do I want the audience to take away?” 2. Narrow your scope: Often we aren’t clear about the scope of our content—what it is and what it isn’t. Defining the boundaries of your content will help narrow your scope, so you can focus and expand on the topics it does cover. You will end up with clearer, more structured content that delivers better results for your customers.

Use Pam’s 20 Percent Rule: You can’t be all things to everyone or you’ll end up missing the mark entirely. After you craft any piece of content, ruthlessly go through and remove at least 20 percent of what you created. This will ensure you narrow it down to only the most important and relevant elements for your audience. 136

Make, Market, Launch IT 3. Brainstorm ideas: Write down all of your ideas for content you can share to teach your audience about your topic. These can be big ideas, examples, stories, research—any content that relates to your topic and outcome. Here are some ideas for brainstorming content: • Take a “newbie” through your process and capture the steps as you go. • Feed your mind: Read books on your topic, go to events, listen to podcasts, talk to customers and stay abreast of trends in your field or industry. • Keep a journal. Anytime you run across a concept or idea to include in your content, write it down so you have it at your fingertips when you need it. • Ask your audience what they want to know. • Conduct research: books, journals, articles, newsletters, industry blogs, etc. • Change your environment. Get away from your desk and into another location—go for a walk, run, swim, bike ride, tea with a friend—anything that will change your focus and physiology. 4. Organize your ideas: Take your ideas and put them into a framework or structure that is easy to follow and makes sense. There is no right or wrong way to organize your content as long as it meets these criteria: • Easy to follow, flows logically • Takes a lot of information and makes it seem like less • Has a clear and easy to follow number of steps • Has easy and compelling titles or headings for each part • Has a beginning, middle and end • Ends on a positive, empowering note that makes your audience feel good, gives them confidence they’ll succeed and inspires them to take action

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 5. Create an outline. Use this six-step structure to outline any piece of content. Once you’ve written your outline, be sure to go back and edit it to eliminate any redundancies, tighten it up and make sure each step is clear. Section 1: Hook. The purpose of the hook is to grab your audience’s attention when they first come across your content. Ask yourself: Why should they care about this piece? Lead with a question or a bold statement that answers this question. Section 2: Why It’s Important. Once you’ve hooked your audience’s attention, you need to keep it. Why is it worth their time to listen to you? What are they going to get out of it? Communicate to your audience the crucial takeaway of your piece—why they need to keep reading, watching, or listening. What are the specific benefits they will get from implementing your content? How will it change their business, make their life better, make a process easier, etc.? Section 3: What It Is. Clarify what you’re teaching in one or two brief sentences. Different concepts mean different things to different people. By defining what it is you’re teaching, it helps ensure your audience is on the same page as you. For example, this chapter is about how to create and deliver quality content that your audience values highly and that they can use to achieve a specific result they’re after. Section 4: How to Do It (steps, strategies, tools, and tactics). This is the most direct, practical part of your piece. Break the process down into simple steps they can easily implement to get the result. There’s no right or wrong number of steps, but try to keep it down to 8 or less—12 at the most. Make sure your steps are procedural; each step should lead to the next. Section 5: Recap. In this section, remind your audience of the most important takeaways in your piece. Your recap can be a single sentence, a paragraph, or a 15-minute video module if you’re recapping an entire course. 138

Make, Market, Launch IT Section 6: Call to Action. To close, ask your audience to take the next step: take a specific action (to implement), answer a question or two, share their thoughts or even just “like” your content if it’s a Facebook post. The goal here is to transfer your content into actionable steps so your audience is empowered to use what you’re sharing. 6. Enhance your content to make it more compelling. After you’ve created the outline for your core content, it’s time to bring it to life. This is where you add emotion to what you’re teaching to make it enjoyable for people to use the information, interact with the content and most importantly, follow through and get the result they’re looking for. You can do this through stories, images or graphics, research and statistics, demonstrations, and exercises or actions that get your audience to participate actively in the content and apply it to practical situations. 7. Debrief and assess: After you share your content with your audience, debrief the results. Ask your team and your customers: What worked? What didn’t? What did people understand that they were able to use? What were their questions? Where did they get stuck? How can you help your audience get a better result more succinctly in the future? If you’re in an educational environment, you might consider what type of test or more formal assessment will help show you and your students what they learned and where they might need more help. The Power of Story After structure, the most important element in creating any type of effective content is the development of stories to illustrate your main points. Used properly, stories become the glue that holds your content together. Most importantly, they serve as incredibly important connection points with your audience. Here are four reasons that stories are powerful: 1. Stories convey universal themes of humankind. They can cross culture, race, religion and socio-economic background, barriers. They also connect people through universal human emotions that every person can relate to. 139

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 2. Stories mirror human thoughts. People love stories because they illustrate how people think and behave. They allow people to recognize patterns within themselves. 3. Stories create our identity for ourselves. The most powerful stories we tell are those we tell about ourselves. Whether we realize it or not, we all have a story that we use to define ourselves. Be conscious of what story you are developing about your own life! 4. Stories create a sense of community. Throughout history, stories have been the primary tool for passing down information from one generation to the next. In addition, stories create a sense of shared experience, meaning and purpose as humans. Your life is filled with stories that you can use as part of your product. You also can use stories that you have read or seen, but the ones you share based on personal experience will almost always be more powerful. As you prepare your stories be sure to take your audience on a journey. Paint the picture with vibrant details and lead them to the peak or conclusion in a way that’s compelling and that clearly reveals the theme or core message of your story. Your ultimate goal is to empower your audience—to provide clear structure and unwavering support—so they can combine their innate potential with proven strategies that help them get the result they desire.

4. Setting Your Final Foundation Armed with the new distinctions in the intervening chapters, let’s take another look at your plan. In three simple actions, you can set the final foundation for your product and ensure that you’re delivering an organized, powerful result: 1. Finalize Your Steps To get someone from Point A to Point B, you need to offer them a stepby-step plan, especially if the transformation is significant or complex. Think of it like assembling their road map for change: the turn-by-turn 140

Make, Market, Launch IT directions they need to reach their full potential. For example, the Make, Market, Launch IT process is centered around seven steps, which form the core structure for this book. If you complete each of the steps, you’ll end up with a product that’s positioned to sell. Examine your initial outline and decide on a final number of steps. We tend to like odd numbers (3, 5 and 7). Whatever numbers you use, make the system explicit. It will help your customers keep track of where they are. 2. Set Your Sequence The order in which people take action is vital. Consider the example of turn-by-turn directions. If you don’t list them in the right order, your client is lost and confused. Sequence can be the difference between success and frustration. When opening this book, you may have been surprised that this section—the actual content creation process—wasn’t the first chapter, or even the second. However, when we sat down to assemble these seven steps, we realized that there are so many things you need to tackle before you put pen to paper—four things, to be precise. After you outline your steps, review them carefully. Put yourself in your client’s shoes and ask yourself: Is this the right order? Could my customers be more successful by going through the process in a different order? 3. Simplify, Simplify, Simplify Before you settle on an overall structure, take one last pass. Is there anything you can eliminate from your sequence? This entire seven-step process is about simplifying. It’s about whittling the excess away until only the vital parts remain. If there’s anything you can do to make it easier for your customers to digest your content, it’s giving them fewer things to do. Five steps feels a lot easier than nine. Three is even easier. However, don’t forget your outcome and delivery goals. We truly believe it takes seven steps to create a product. Five steps might take less time, but they wouldn’t produce the same success. In other words, cut with caution. 141

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Put yourself in the shoes of someone just starting out. Could someone who’s completely new to this topic follow this sequence with success? Add in any steps that might be missing. Once you’ve decided on these seven pieces, we suggest making one final survey based on one of the core concepts of Make, Market, Launch IT: value. Look back at the offer you created in Chapter 3 and ask yourself: does the final incarnation of my content deliver on my promises? And, more importantly, does your product deliver value over and above the price you’ve decided on? If your package seems like it’s missing something, either go back and augment your content or reconsider your price point. Or, better yet, rework your product so that it delivers beyond the investment you’re asking people to make. To inspire you as you put your content together, we’d like to share the story of Make, Market, Launch IT creator Jeffrey Goodman. Make, Market, Launch IT helped him structure his course for results, creating both happy customers and speaking opportunities around the world.

“It gave me the checklist I needed to succeed.”

Case Study from the Field: Jeffrey Goodman When he signed up for a class in alternative healing, Jeffrey Goodman was content with his successful career in fashion photography and advertising. However, after the course completed, his path soon took an unexpected turn. “I took a class in alternative healing in April,” he explains. “By July, every aspect of my photography business was gone—I lost all my clients, my photo lab closed, my assistant moved and my stylist was no longer in business.” This turned out to be an opportunity in disguise, when Jeffrey realized how well he could combine his business knowledge with the world of alternative medicine. As he grew his own alternative healing business, other practitioners in the field came to him for help. 142

Make, Market, Launch IT “Healthcare practitioners, from doctors to chiropractors, to acupuncturists, to even people in energy healing, were coming to me and asking me how I got so successful,” he says. He began coaching these professionals, by teaching them how to run a business in a language they could understand. He describes business as a “living energy.” Just like a person can be stressed, or get sick, so can a business. “Just like I’ve learned how to heal a person, I’ve learned how to heal a business,” he says. As demand for his coaching grew, Jeffrey put together a live, three-day training course. When he encountered Make, Market, Launch IT, Jeffrey realized that it could provide him something he didn’t yet have—a strong structured product. By applying the steps he learned though the Make, Market, Launch IT program, Jeffrey was able to repackage his content into its current incarnation: a seven-step program based around the seven chakras. “By organizing it that way, you can see which areas of your business need to be addressed, and which things are missing,” he says. “Make, Market, Launch It allowed me to break 30-plus hours of content into a manageable product.” After repackaging his content and relaunching it to his existing audience, Jeffrey went from speaking only in his hometown of Phoenix, Arizona to speaking worldwide—in just three months. “It went from me teaching it locally, to globally. The other day I had over 11 countries watching my live event online,” Jeffrey explains. Requests for his speaking engagements increased as well. Since the Make, Market, Launch IT repackaging, Jeffrey has been able to readily upsell clients to live speaking events—something that was previously a difficult transition for him. “Make, Market, Launch IT helped me polish something I had and gave me the confidence that I was ready to launch. It gave me the checklist I needed to succeed, and it saved me a lot of costly mistakes I would have otherwise had to learn along the way,” says Jeffrey. 143

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs “I just got back from teaching in Canada, and I leave tomorrow to go to Australia and New Zealand. In the next few months, I’ll be in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Amsterdam. I was also invited to speak in Hong Kong and Singapore,” he notes. The best part? Jeffrey’s program is making an impact and helping alternative health practitioners transform their respective businesses models. “People get a lot personal growth out of it because I walk people through personal growth alongside the business growth,” he explains. As he looks down the line, Jeffrey is excited to finish an online version of his product, CareerHearted. He credits Make, Market, Launch IT will showing him that he “doesn’t have to keep being there, so I can have this as a course that people can go to whenever they need.” He also plans to continue leveraging the Internet to enroll new customers. “Make, Market, Launch IT helped me promote [my product] better. That’s one of the big gold nuggets out of Make, Market, Launch IT: how to develop that process to bring someone through to buy your product via online sales.” “With the product I had, it was kind of like jumping from the middle of the pool to the deep end. What MML allowed me to do was build the whole pool around it. All the pieces, the ladders in and out, the shallow end. [It showed me] . . . the little things that are really costly . . . and I was able to avoid [them] from the very beginning.” Make, Market, Launch IT also gave Jeffrey one more significant piece he needed to get his product out in a major way: “I already had a business. I already had the common sense. Make, Market, Launch IT really gave me the confidence to say, ‘Okay, I’m ready to go.’” Jeffrey Goodman continues to promote his products and events through CareerHearted.com.

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Step 6: Monetize: Sell IT

“Our jobs as marketers are to understand how the customer wants to buy and help them do so.” —Bryan Eisenberg

In Step 6, we’re going to help you determine how to monetize your product or service in a way that makes sense for your product and business. If you already have a product or service, this chapter will help you determine how to tweak—or flat out change—your marketing and sales strategies to get results. Your potential is limitless when you monetize your product the right way, using the right strategies. However, your first time selling can be a challenge psychologically, especially if you’re a natural introvert. The first five steps of Make Market Launch IT may have been just you and your computer, or you and a small team of people. You may not have even told a single soul what you were up to. Maybe you told your family and a few close friends. But now it’s time to share your product—your baby—with the world. Plus, your 145

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs expertise, your product and your ideal client avatar are unique to you, so your monetizing strategies will be different from everyone else’s. So it’s natural to be nervous and to want a roadmap to follow. Don’t worry. In this step you’ll find nine different ways to sell your product or service to your audience as well as the exact structure for maximizing your sales, increasing your revenue and lengthening the lifecycle of your product. In addition, you’ll be trained on how to sell effectively, write copy that converts, set up your marketing funnels and create the right traffic mix to drive qualified leads to your business. Being able to sell your product and service effectively holds the key to your success. Let’s get that great product into the hands of as many customers as possible, and start monetizing all of your hard work!

Meet Ed Rush! We asked Ed Rush, former F-18 Pilot and Marine, to share the concepts in this section with you (as well as some of the other sections of this book). Ed is also a high level consultant, and our go-to resource for marketing and sales strategy and execution. When Ed isn’t strategizing his next marketing promotion, he’s busy as a world-class outdoorsman and fisherman and knows exactly where the big halibut and lobsters are in San Diego bay (although when he took Mike and Pam’s kids fishing, all they caught was an old shoe).

1. 9 Ways to Make Money With Your Product or Service You may have a product, a list of leads, a membership site, and people interested in you and your product or service, but none of that matters at all until they pay you for your value! Happily, there’s a formula for 146

Make, Market, Launch IT taking the idea of your product or service and turning that into revenue: T.L.C.M.

Traffic + Leads + Customers = Members (ongoing sales)

An interested prospective customer becomes traffic for you when they see you speak, read your book, visit your website, or see you post something on Facebook or LinkedIn. That’s traffic; they haven’t actually done anything yet as they haven’t bought anything. A prospective customer becomes a lead when they give you information to contact them: an address, phone number, or email address. They become a customer when they pay you, and a member when they pay you again and again for more of your products or services. However, the biggest mistake people make when marketing and selling their products and services is that they only use one way to market and sell. Your goal is two-fold: (1) use multiple vehicles to sell your product or service and (2) find the best ways to market and sell that fit your particular market or customer type. Here are the nine of the most popular and effective ways to market and sell your product or service. 1. Traditional Funnel This is about using the formula terms—traffic, leads conversions and check-outs—to market and sell online (although TLCM applies to almost any method of marketing and selling). There are only four web pages that you need to make money and influence people. Headline Claim Your FREE X • ---------• ---------• ---------Call to Action

#1: A Lead Page or an Opt-In Page. You’ll direct traffic to this page and ask people to exchange their contact information for a valuable resource, such as an eBook, substantive report, white paper or short training 147

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs course. (Once they do opt in to your page, you might send them to a “Thank You” page to deliver your promised content.)

Get Started NOW!

What You’ll Receive… 1 --------------3 --------------2 --------------4 ---------------•

Check Out Item #

Item Name

Check Out NOW!

Price

S&H

#2: A Sales Page. This page gives your leads the chance to deepen their relationship with you and solve their big problem by giving you money for your product or service. #3: Check-Out Page. This is where your prospect enters his/her credit card information to buy your product. It may feature elements similar to your Sales Page by presenting your offer, but it also offers your leads the chance to pay for their purchase in a secure location. Including calls to action will help this page convert even more effectively, and it will encourage people to follow through on the sale and hit the “Buy” button. Note: From here, you might also consider sending your customers to an Upsell Page, where they have more opportunities to make more good decisions by taking their relationship with you to an even deeper level by buying another product or service, likely one that complements their original purchase. #4: Sales Thank You Page. In addition to coming to you for solutions to their problems, people are also coming to you for certainty. Use this page to affirm your customers’ buying decision and show them what to expect next. Should they look for an email from you? Give them the confidence that you will take care of them by providing specific instructions.

When does the selling end? Never! Remember, it doesn’t actually count as revenue until your customer keeps the product instead of returning it. Additionally, your customers won’t see the benefits of your product or service unless they actually use it. Make sure that all of your pages and your follow-up communications make it easy—and exciting—for your customers to use your products and services. In addition to helping 148

Make, Market, Launch IT them get results, this will also keep returns lower, and it will likely lead to future sales. Most people make information marketing complicated. With just these four pages, however, you can get a funnel of revenue up and running very quickly. It all comes down to a few simple principles. First, give your customers a good reason to opt-in. What can you offer them to entice them to give their email address away? As people get more protective of their communication details, this has become a bigger challenge. However, if you can offer them something of tremendous value—an eBook, for example, a threepart training series or a substantial white paper that solves one of their biggest pain points—you’ll have a much easier time gathering leads. Make sure that your opt-in page clearly spells out the benefits of what you offer—bullet points are best—in a clean design with a nice big button. You might try a tool like LeadPages (leadpages.net), which offers pretested templates to help you get started quickly. Second, give your customers a good reason to go to the check-out page. So many times, this comes down to copywriting—and the old principle of WIIFM? (“What’s in it for me?”) Don’t make them guess what’s in it for them. Give them several compelling reasons up front to discover more about your product, and they’ll click through to your sales page. Third, give your customers good reason to buy from you—NOW. Sales pages with deadlines convert much better than sales pages without deadlines, often anywhere from five to ten times better. In addition to any ongoing sales efforts, run a few promotional periods where you either add an irresistible bonus to your package or offer a small discount. (We like the former better to keep your profits up!) Announce the offer, then remind your contacts the day before the deadline and the day of the deadline, and you’ll be sure to see more sales—quickly. These tips—along with the four pages listed above—form the foundation of a traditional funnel.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 2. Email There are typically two ways to sell through email: (1) autoresponder, and (2) broadcast. With autoresponder emails, you don’t actually send the messages yourself. You set up a series of emails within your email management software so that when someone comes to your opt-in page they automatically get your emails. Some entrepreneurs use these emails to simply nurture prospects and introduce them to a few extra resources. However, you can also use this sequence to sell your products by including an offer. Just make sure that if you do include an offer, you send at least two emails about the offer to reinforce their opportunity to invest. Broadcast emails are when you take your list, or a part of your list, and you are essentially hitting “Send” to your prospects in real time. You may use broadcast emails to send content to your list or offers—or a mix of both. (Our recommendation!) Most major email providers enable you to send both kinds of emails to your contacts. Each have their own benefits and quirks, so you’ll want to do your research to see what works best with (1) your business and (2) the way you like to work. Many offer 30-day trials to allow you to explore the system. However, many providers are wary of large bulk imports. Many will allow imports if you get in touch with their team first, although they may try a “test” run of a percentage of your list to make sure they don’t get a bunch of complaints. Others will require your contacts to opt-in again, so you’ll want to discuss any existing contacts with any provider before you make a commitment. Some of the most popular systems include: • MailChimp: www.MailChimp.com • iContact: www.iContact.com • InfusionSoft: www.infustionsoft.com • Ontraport (formerly OfficeAutoPilot): www.Ontraport.com 150

Make, Market, Launch IT Follow-up Emails Whether it’s autoresponder or broadcast, your follow-up email sequence is going to contain four elements: CCTP—Content; (more) Content; Testimonials (Success Stories); and your Pitch. 1. Content. When they opt-in, what are they going to get in the first email? They’re going to get the video, or special report, or web page, or free book that you promised on your landing page (or the non-online equivalent). Make sure this email is warm. It’s the first communication your leads will receive from you and you want to make a good impression! 2. Second content. Give something else of value to them. They signed up to get information; give it to them. For example, if you offered an eBook as your original opt-in, you might share a follow-up video that expands on one of the points in your book. Wherever you can use multiple modalities (print, video, etc.), do it! Your prospects will each respond differently to a book versus a video, so the more modes you can use, the more likely you are to connect with a wider audience. 3. Testimonials. Some of the most powerful sales tools on Amazon.com are the product reviews. Sharing testimonials from your customers is just as powerful. Testimonials offer third-party proof that your products worked. Use one of your emails to share a few quotes from happy customers, or share a story about someone you’ve helped, and what they said about you. But make sure to note that you don’t deserve the credit! They just took your ideas and implemented them. Every bit of their success is 100 percent due to them and their fast implementation. Testimonials allow you the chance to “seed” a sale. You’re not pitching your contacts anything per se, but you’re warming them up for that. 4. Pitch. This is the most important part of the puzzle. You can make a mistake by veering too far toward either extreme: over-pitching or under-pitching. If your entire email follow-up sequence includes a pitch in every email, you’re probably over-pitching. However, if you absolutely never ask for the sale—or you ask for it just once at the very end of your last email—you’re probably under-pitching.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs When you send an offer, make sure to give your contacts more than one bite at the apple. Send them at least two emails. Remember, your job is to connect people with the tools they need to make a difference, and to do that, you absolutely need to sell. However, the pitch is more effective after you’ve given them value and social proof. 3. Teleseminar or Webinar The difference between a teleseminar and a webinar is that with a teleseminar, you walk around in the comfort of wherever you are on the phone, and with a webinar it’s the same thing except you’re delivering content on a computer screen, with a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation. Before the Presentation To get someone to come to either, invite them at least twice. Give them an invitation with a good reason, i.e. benefits: how this could change their life. Offer real transformation, and deliver! When sending out invites to prospects, send your emails: • As far out as a week at most • Next, the day before • Next, the day of • Finally, email right at the call time (i.e. “We’re on live! Join us!”) For both teleseminars and webinars, you make them an offer similar to how you would online, except all you need is the equivalent of the checkout page and the thank you. (The equivalent to an opt-in happened when they signed up for the call or webinar, and the sales page message was conveyed by the first hour of content you’re delivering live before you make your offer.) During the Presentation • As with any kind of presentation, preparation is key. Make sure you conduct your teleseminar/webinar in an environment free from distractions or interruptions.

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Make, Market, Launch IT • Log in at least 10 to 15 minutes early to troubleshoot as well as let attendees know you’re there. • Just like planning a road trip, plan personal necessities accordingly such as eating and restroom breaks before you start. • Start on time; first impressions are lasting. • Consider running two computers to maximize the effectiveness of your presentation as well as for back-up if something goes wrong. You can use a desktop to administer the webinar and a laptop to run slides. The core components of a good webinar include: 1. A compelling title and “hook” (i.e. the main benefit) 2. A summary of the main benefit of your presentation (and also your product or service) (this answers “What’s it for me?” – WIIFM) 3. Revealing the problem you’re solving 4. An overview of main concepts (usually 3 – 5 main points) 5. Going into specific detail on each point and giving examples for each 6. Recap main points 7. Transition to close 8. A summary of your offer (including the “big benefit,” bonuses, price and money-back guarantee) 9. Call to action (ask for the sale) 10. Question and answer session (do this AFTER your close to keep people on) Design Tips When it comes to the presentation itself, create a consistent look and feel for your brand as well as a consistent structure. Ideally, you should have two or three slides per minute with compelling images and one idea per slide. Then give examples that further explain these ideas: case studies, compelling stories of transformation, etc. 153

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Finally, don’t take your closing slide lightly! Have one summary graphic that includes the components of your product or service and, most importantly, a call to action that might include an “Order Now” button or a link that takes them to a page where they can buy. When you make your offer, have a deadline! After the Presentation One of the biggest mistakes new business owners make is following up with both those who attended the teleseminar/webinar and those who didn’t. Make sure to send customized follow-up emails within 24 hours. Additionally, plan to have a follow-up campaign for those who did attend but didn’t actually buy your product or service. Continue to employ scarcity and urgency to solidify their commitment. Finally, transcribe your webinar’s content for use across multiple channels such as blogs, mini-articles, and social media posts. Making transcriptions of the webinar is an effective way to get your message out in a variety of mediums. 4. Livecast / Webcast During a livecast, you’re delivering your content and offer live via the web. In essence, a livecast or webcast is a video event transmitted across the Internet. You may stream it using Google Hangouts or YouTubeLive, or through your own production studio, but you are talking directly to your market online. The process is the same as with teleseminars and webinars. The opt-in happens when your prospects register for the livecast and the sales page content is what you’re delivering live on the webcast when you ask for the order. All you need to address is the “Check-out” and the “Thank You!” There are eight keys for a successful livecast. 1. Make sure you attract the right market to the livecast so you’re only delivering your message to qualified prospects. It’s easy when you’re marketing an Internet-based event to attract the wrong market, so make sure you target the right people. 154

Make, Market, Launch IT 2. Create a memorable theme. Because you’re delivering live, you’ll want to have a consistent theme you carry throughout the broadcast. 3. Engage the audience. Use a chat feature (i.e. Chatroll.com is a good one) during your livecast so that the audience can comment directly and interact with you during the show. 4. Consistently seed the sale. Be transparent about the purpose of your livecast: to deliver outstanding content and answer questions about your product or service. This is important because you need to think about your presentation like an infomercial: small chunks of content with a call to action every few minutes. Put the “buy” button directly on the livecast page. 5. Speak to “the one.” Even though you’re broadcasting to a community of like-minded people, speak in the singular so you create a personal relationship with each viewer. 6. Brainstorm 5 to 7 benefits of your product or service. Repeat these over and over again during your livecast. 7. Make it fun! Use props or other entertainment to keep viewers excited and engaged. 8. Unlock bonuses as you go. If people know they can get a special deal or bonus by staying on the livecast, they will. The structure of your livecast will be in short 10- to 15-minute increments, repeated over and over again with different content and guests. Think about a livecast as a 2- to 3-hour event or more. Each livecast must include these elements. 1. Introduction / what it is about / benefits 2. Value added content chunk (related to your product or service) 3. Success story interview 4. Your offer 5. Your close

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 5: Joint Ventures/Affiliates. Promotional partners can be extremely valuable for both new business owners and for those already firmly established in their market. Keep in mind, though, that if you’re just starting out and looking to join up with someone who has a market similar to yours, they will be very discerning as to whether or not you’re a good fit for them and that you can add value to their market but not as competition. They’ll look for you to be a quality, reciprocal partner so you’ll need to earn your relationship with each partner. The secret to finding the perfect affiliate is to find a partner whose message matches your market. Attend live events like seminars, workshops or conferences of top performers in your industry. You can also sign up as an affiliate to promote products and services that are relevant to your business. The trick in garnering the attention of an affiliate is timing: never ask for favors or attention before you’ve demonstrated that you’ve contributed to their cause in a meaningful way. One of the most effective ways to partner with an affiliate that’s relevant to your market is to be a testimonial witness to his or her product. Buy their stuff! This is particularly effective when they’re having a product launch and you get in on the ground floor, becoming one of their best case studies. This will give them an incentive to include you as a promotional partner on their next product launch. Then, you’ll need to prove you can deliver—in the form of quality leads and sales to their products or services (as their affiliate)—often before they’ll give you a reciprocal promotion. Of course, this will all be for naught if your potential affiliate’s customer base isn’t appropriate for your product or service. You have to know and understand that market as well as you know your own. Don’t try to sell high-end items to a market that buys low-end products. If you’ve already established yourself in a market and are looking to link up with a business that you think might be a great reciprocal partner, here are some criteria to look for: • A product that works and complements your own products and services • Real success stories 156

Make, Market, Launch IT • Congruent but not competitive • They pay on time Regardless of the nature of a partnership, there are both spoken and unspoken rules for fostering optimal relationships. When it comes to affiliates in particular, these are the rules of etiquette. • Distribute promotional materials (copy, links, etc.) on time—at least a week in advance, as well as follow-up emails for additional content and support. • Pay on time—this is obvious but crucial to acknowledge because just like products, word-of-mouth gets around and could land you on a blacklist of sorts. • Consider hiring an affiliate manager—just like with any aspect of your business, it could be not only helpful to hire a professional salesperson/copywriter to lead your affiliate campaign but it could also help boost your sales. • Handle problems gracefully—if issues or conflicts arise, call your partner immediately or be willing to handle problems face to face. Both of you are putting each other’s names and reputations on the line, not to mention the work you’re doing for each other. • When in doubt, pay up—disputes over who got an individual sale aren’t worth the long-term benefits of the multiple sales you’ll be making working with each other. • Pay attention—give them your time and attention without necessarily expecting anything in return. Just as with any relationship, people need to feel respected, heard, and that you’re being honest and loyal. You want to know that you’ll be able to work together not just once, but for a long period of time. Finally, make sure that before you enter into any kind of partnership with an affiliate, protect yourself legally and attend to specific details to protect both yourself and your customers or clients. Be extremely clear about what your affiliates can or can’t do with your brand (especially when it comes to things like Facebook ads, etc.).

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs We highly recommend that you hire an attorney who has experience in the information product/internet marketing industry and can help write an iron-clad affiliate agreement for you. (Then, your partners sign the affiliate agreement before they can promote.) Stay away from copyrighted materials. Don’t use intellectual property in your marketing or your product that you didn’t create or don’t own. Conversely, make sure to copyright/trademark your name and be vigilant about those who might try to bandwagon on top of your brand. When it comes to your affiliate/JV relationships, take problems in stride. Don’t freak out when things don’t go the way you wanted or expected. You can’t always anticipate problems, but you are always in control of how you handle them. 6. Product Launch Successful product launches can be legendary: ask Mike Koenigs and a few select others! It’s the business equivalent of premiere night in Hollywood, where you get to make your mark upon your market. For a product launch, you create a sequence of 4 launch videos—3 prelaunch videos that contain highly valuable, free content that’s sent out to prospects 1-2 weeks in advance of your offer and then your offer video, which shows the details and benefits of your solution (your product) and asks for the sale. Usually the offer is only available for a limited time (i.e. 5 to 7 days). Video #1: Opportunity or Introduction. Clearly state the problem, the opportunity, reveal your hook and deliver value that establishes credibility and proves your results. Video #2: How It Works. Give your audience “results-in-advance” and show them the pathway to get there. This video needs to answer the question: “How does this work and how do I know it will work for me?” Video #3: Proof. Give tangible examples and case studies from your best customers to show how your system has worked for other people—just like them. 158

Make, Market, Launch IT Video #4: Offer. This is where you make your offer in a clear and compelling way. Be sure to include all of the elements of an effective offer: clear benefits, attractive bonuses, price justification, a guarantee and a call to action! You’ll put the “buy” button right on the same page as your offer video. To get the best results, consider combining some of the other promotional strategies in this chapter, including JV or affiliate partners, and livecasts the week your offer is available to answer questions and gain more sales. The bottom line is: build your list and put together a launch sequence (it doesn’t even have to be four videos). The most important thing is to push the deadline for your offer! 7. Selling from Stage The most effective way to sell something is face to face. The most efficient way is to stand on stage! You can’t replicate the synergy, camaraderie and relationships that you build with your audience and that they build among themselves. You can change the conversation that people are already having in their minds. To be an effective speaker, consider the following. • What type of speaker are you? Are you more comfortable in smaller, more intimate settings like workshops, or do you prefer the grandeur of being in front of a larger audience? The more clear you are about the speaking niche you want to serve, the easier it will be to book speaking engagements. For example, you can become a platform speaker, a workshop speaker, an emcee, a facilitator, etc. • Create a business model. After your first event in front of an audience, what’s next for them? Products? Coaching? In other words, what’s your business model and how does that play into their journey through your business? • Present to existing groups. Instead of re-inventing the wheel and initially taking on all of the expenses of a live event upfront, partner with a group or person who already has an audience and a meeting location. Also, consider starting out locally: Chamber 159

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs of Commerce events, Rotary Club, Kiwanis Club, etc. You can also look for industry association or tradeshow events, locally or nationally. • Build your portfolio. No matter how small your presentations, record them all. You can use these as demos, as part of a product, as marketing giveaways, for your website, and as learning tools. • Build a product library of DVDs, CDs, workshops, ongoing coaching, etc. as extensions of your live event presentations and that you can sell from stage. • Create a speaker page on your website (for example, http://www. pamhendrickson.com/speaking/) as well as a demo or “sizzle” reel. • Get a promoter to help you sell yourself after you have done all of the above. It’s important to keep the big picture in mind and know where you’re ultimately heading. Your goal is to establish a respectable level of history and credibility that gains the interest of a seasoned promoter while moving your business forward. 8. Consultative Selling You’re trying to get your prospect to come to you because you’re an expert on a topic and they’re asking for advice. Then, you can move the prospect into a customer/client relationship. A consultative close works best for higher-end offers as well as B2B (business-to-business) markets. It typically, will have a longer lead time to close the sale, but it’s a powerful way to attract high quality customers and sell big-ticket items. Here’s how it works best. First, position yourself as the authority or expert in your field. Build credibility with a book or a podcast or through speaking engagements. Your outcome is to be perceived as the trusted advisor on your topic. Second, get the lead. Be sure to capture the prospect’s direct contact information. When you contact the prospective client, give quality advice (authority and credibility). You can follow up with all kinds of 160

Make, Market, Launch IT added value and/or an opportunity to give a free strategy session. Get them to be a client though an in-person (phone or ideally live) meeting. During the meeting, you’ll add value, ask great questions that uncover their needs, desires and pain points and then transition into your close where you ask for the sale. 9. Evergreen The primary purpose of an evergreen promotion is to extend the life of your product or service beyond your initial launch. This method could be employed either as a consistent part of your overall business strategy or to extend sales on a one-time offer. Whichever way works best for you, evergreen requires you understanding your product’s life cycle. The three ingredients of going evergreen are: 1. Free content. Spread valuable content out over a longer period during an evergreen launch rather than providing maximum value over a shorter period. Whereas a launch might happen over a week and a half, your evergreen launch might stretch over 2-3 weeks. This is the main difference between an evergreen launch and a one-time launch. 2. Automation of Content Drip. You want to provide valuable information periodically to perspective customers/clients as soon as they enter into your sales funnel. When timed correctly, this kind of automated communication makes it easier for you to potentially sell a higher-ticket item to them later by building a relationship over time. 3. Social proof. People must hear about what your product or service did for their peers before they commit themselves to buying. Testimonials serve this purpose. Never underestimate the power of social influence in helping you sell yourself and your business, particularly in the age of social media! Basic evergreen launch techniques are not radically different than traditional marketing strategies or product launches. You start a conversation and offer value through videos, surveys, teleseminars or webinars. You connect with them on an emotional level covering multiple aspects of a successful life, not just the one your product or 161

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs service intends to focus on. Then, you make an offer for your product or service. Tips for all nine ways to monetize your product or service: • Put your personality into your brand and business. Don’t be afraid to be appropriately vulnerable or show your flaws and imperfections. • Study how other successful entrepreneurs launched their products and services. Become a student of the game. Mimic what works and test those approaches in your market. • Keep in mind: however it is you captured your market—and even whoever that market may be now—it won’t last forever. Your market might change. They might need to be communicated to differently. Real people want you to connect with them in a real way. Be ready to adapt. There is no shortage of material out there—including what you have in your hands right now—that provides traditional formulas for taking your product from an idea to a sell. As we’ve stated throughout this book: don’t try to re-invent the wheel when it comes to sales and marketing! Many people have made themselves very rich by sticking to methods that have been proven to work over and over again. Still, as long as there are new ideas continually impacting our culture and our world, there will also be new ways to be creative and innovative in approaching sales. A couple of small tweaks or tips can often make a huge difference in your results. You can multiply your revenue by deploying small, but significant, marketing strategies that magnify sales.

2. Copywriting Secrets Great marketing copy is how you translate your message—the keys to the problem you’re solving for your audience—into action. Sales copy provides a persuasive message that compels the prospect to purchase or invest in your product or service. As with any skill, copywriting is a learned art that can be mastered with training and practice. Whether you are writing copy, speaking copy, or assessing copy for your clients, copywriting can be one of the most 162

Make, Market, Launch IT lucrative skills you can learn. Once you master the art, it takes very little time to write copy and the results for your business can be highly profitable. The four basic elements of sales copy are as follows: 1. Headline The headline is what you use to get your audience’s attention—a single statement that summarizes the big problem and your solution in a way that compels the reader to want to know more. The key to the sales letter is the headline—if they don’t get past the headline, they’ll never get to the rest of the letter. You can also create a sales letter in video format or in a talk. This is the first thing that comes out of your mouth, so be conscious of how you start off your presentation or talk! For example, here’s a headline from Ed’s basketball referee site: “Discover a REAL and Proven Method for Getting Noticed, Getting Hired, and Getting a Better Schedule Year After Year … Guaranteed.” What’s initially interesting here in this headline? Quite frankly, nothing— but the headline is based on this market’s biggest challenges: getting noticed, hired, and getting a good schedule. The key is the headline: if they’re not captured by that, they won’t be captured by the rest. The headline is the ad for the ad. Here are some buzzwords you can use as you write your headlines: “discover” or “announcing” (at the beginning), “guaranteed,” or “no risk to you” (at the end). TIP: Write your headline before you write the copy of your copy because it will guide how you write the rest of your sales page (or whatever you’re writing). Brainstorm 10, 20 or more headlines and then edit them down until you get to the best one. 2. Body Copy / Your Story After your headline, make sure you share the benefit of your product or service, ideally in the first sentence or two. This introduction needs to answer the questions: (1) Who am I? and (2) Why should you care? Then, as you move into the body copy, write a story around your product or 163

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs service. People love telling and hearing stories. When you can wrap a story around the benefits of the offer, it works! As you unveil the story and the reasons “why” the prospect should take action, use these ingredients to pull it all together: • Sub-Headlines (or sub-heads): These are key messages (mini-headlines) inserted throughout the body of your copy so that when the reader scans the copy (vs. reading every word), he or she can get the whole marketing message. This is called a “dual-readership” path: a style of writing that takes into account both the person who will read most of what you write (very few) and the skimmer who will breeze over your copy only stopping to read what grabs his attention (i.e. your headline and sub-headlines). HINT: You can use some of the headlines you decided not to keep for the main headline as some of your subheads. • Bullets: These highlight your main points and list the core benefits of your product or service. Remember, bullets should peak curiosity but not give the answer. For example, instead of saying, “Learn how to drop vanilla on your light bulbs to increase the likelihood your house will sell,” say, “Learn the secret to increasing the potential of your house sale by 10 percent.” • Testimonials: This is where you present actual cases from real customers, who affirm the benefits they received from your product or service. You include testimonials to show that the system works. Testimonials overcome skepticism and counter objections. To be effective, a good testimonial also has headlines because you can’t assume that people will read the entire thing—so you want to draw attention to the social proof of the effectiveness of your product or service. 3. Present Your Offer Present your offer with total clarity. This is where you want to tell them what they get, how they get it, how much it is and how to buy. Structure and clarity is king when you present your offer! Your offer doesn’t need to be super long—in fact, the more succinct and clear you can be, often the better your offer will convert. 164

Make, Market, Launch IT Here are the elements you’ll include in this section: • Offer: Lay out what they get (both the deliverables but with a focus on the benefits each one offers) • Stack the Value & Reveal Bonuses: Insert two to three bonuses that the prospect will get if they take the next step and invest in your product or service. This creates urgency in your sales letter and makes the prospect feel that he or she will get additional benefits by acting now, as opposed to waiting. Bonuses further help remove resistance and should be valued at as much as the main program, and ideally more. Use bonuses that are highly desired and complimentary to your product—don’t just throw in extra stuff without rhyme or reason. This not only creates confusion, it can overwhelm your customers and it won’t serve them. • Price Presentation & Justification: Next, you reveal the price. Whenever you present the price, you simultaneously have to justify the price. In this example, it shows exactly why—in dollar terms— the product is worth it to the perspective customer: Your sales presentation is almost done when you tell them what the product will cost. However, save something really meaty and juicy toward the end. If they’re still reading (or watching, or listening), they might still be on the fence about whether or not to buy the product. Give them just enough reasons to get off the fence. • Guarantee: A guarantee is a great way to provide risk reversal to your prospects. In essence, you’re taking on the risk by providing them with a money-back guarantee. 4. Call to Action Remind the reader of the benefits of your product, continue to build urgency and ask for the sale. You have to be specific, clear and directive when you do this. For example, “Click the button below right now…” After your call to action, give your final closing argument, ask for the sale again and then add a final “P.S.” A P.S. can be read more often than your entire sales letter. Use this opportunity to add more benefits, build urgency, or add even more credibility and proof. 165

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs As with all examples of marketing that has worked for others, the challenge with great copywriting is making it work for you. The best way to do this is to practice. Create a “swipe file” where you keep track of other great sales copy that you want to model and practice writing copy of your own as much as you can.

Scarcity Finally, be sure to use scarcity in your offer. You can do this by having a deadline, or a fast action bonus—something they get but only if they enroll right now. This not only drums up scarcity in time to act but also serves as a reason for them to take action right now. The most effective types of scarcity are (1) time scarcity and (2) quantity scarcity. Just be authentic—don’t arbitrarily make something up just to have scarcity. Make sure you follow through on whatever scarcity you announce in your offer.

3. Traffic Strategies To Build Your Email Marketing List When you’re getting ready to launch your product, it’s common to imagine a super-highway of people rushing to your door. You spend time working on your membership site, making sure your customer service is in place, and checking that any software you’re using can scale to handle the load. But where will all of these new customers come from? As a proud product creator, it’s good to think about how you can deliver a high quality product. You want people to have a great experience and avoid a situation where you are handling complaints. In short, you want people to love your product as much as you do—so you focus more on the content and delivery of your product than the sales process. But here’s the harsh reality. Without a strategic plan for getting people to see your offer, you could end up with something more like an empty baseball stadium during the off-season than a super highway of customers: no butts in seats! 166

Make, Market, Launch IT If you’ve ever seen the 1980s movie Field of Dreams, the main character in the movie builds a baseball field on his farm, imagining all of the baseball greats of history playing together. When he finally finishes building the field, at first it’s just an empty baseball diamond. But as the movie goes on, his favorite dream players start to come from out of the cornfield and walk onto the newly created baseball diamond, ready to play. At the end, it’s just like he imagines it will be. The best players in baseball history are all on his baseball field, playing together. During the entire movie he has a mantra going through his head—“If you build it, they will come.” And in the movie, they do. As product creators, we often believe that … but it’s not true. They won’t come. They’re not just going to magically pop out of the cornfield. They won’t come until you attract and invite them.

Meet Victoria Griggs! We turned to our resident traffic expert, Victoria Griggs, and asked her to share her strategies for driving traffic to your business. Having graduated from Yale University, her experience is in high-tech and emerging technologies where she has been able to produce targeted marketing campaigns with measurable results. Today she works with business owners—large and small—to drive traffic, engage prospects and maximize marketing results. When you’re thinking about the big picture of selling your product, it really comes down to two simple goals: Traffic and Conversion. You need people to see your sales pages (traffic) and you need a series of steps for them to walk through in order to buy your product (conversion). Traffic can be either free or paid.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs One trap is to start thinking of getting “attention” or traffic to your website or social media property BEFORE you know how you are going to convert this traffic to sales. But if you don’t know how you want to take people from casual observers of your web page and convert them into a customer, how will your web visitors know what to do? Before you plan any of your traffic sources, you should have the back end sequence of your business laid out, or at least know what it will look like in the future, so that people who land on your web pages have a very clear path to buy your product (or give you their name and email to become a lead, or call you for a strategy session, or any other conversion goal you have in mind). Also, be clear on what your offer is. Otherwise, you may waste valuable time and money getting the wrong people to see your web pages—or perhaps the right people who aren’t clear on how to engage with you. This diagram shows you some examples of both free and paid traffic. It’s not an exhaustive list for either category, but it’s enough to frame the rest of our discussion.

Although “free” traffic may be alluring, it’s important to know how it fits into your marketing and sales. There are two main considerations for when to use Free vs. Paid Traffic. 168

Make, Market, Launch IT 1. Budget. There are times in our business when we have more time than money. In these situations, you might need to rely on free traffic for a while until you can set aside enough money to pay for ads or tap into other paid options. (Hint: Paid traffic can be much cheaper than you think, so don’t let lack of a big budget scare you off!) 2. Where you are in the lifecycle of your product. When you’re starting out and want people to get to know you/what you’re about, or build authority, free places are fantastic. However, when you’re trying to drive sales and set up a consistent revenue stream, it’s next to impossible to do that with free traffic due to its unpredictable nature. Let’s look at the pros and cons of “Free” traffic: Pro 1: It’s FREE. Free traffic is also a great way to gain general exposure and build your brand. The best part about that is you don’t have to be paid to be seen. Con 1: It takes time. As entrepreneurs, one of the most valuable assets we have is time. Posting free content can be time consuming, unless you’ve found a way to outsource it completely, which is rare. Con 2: You are not in control of the type of people who come to you via free traffic sources. Your target audience very likely hangs out on free websites, including popular video sites, blogs, and social media. But when you are trying to attract people from these sites into your sales funnel using free methods, you’re not able to control exactly how many people will enter your sales funnel, or when. Free traffic can be a great tool for building your brand and authority in general, but when you need to drive traffic to a funnel that sells (like for your product launch), you need to be in control of who is clicking when, and at what cost to you. Knowing your numbers will ultimately allow you to build a profitable business with consistent and predictable revenue. If you rely solely on free traffic sources, you won’t be able to achieve the insight and control you need to grow. Is free traffic all bad? Absolutely not! It’s strategic when used at the right time for the right purpose. 169

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs How to Determine the Right Traffic Mix The framework below is a great tool for determining your ideal “traffic mix”—meaning the types of traffic you’ll use when.

Quadrant #1: People find you. You’re posting content on social media, publishing podcasts on iTunes—people who are interested in what you have to say will subscribe. It’s the same thing when you publish a book on Amazon or a blog on a website. These are fantastic places to help get your word out. However, it’s also passive, because you’re waiting for people to come your way. That’s why it’s a great tool to have at your disposal especially in the early stage in your product. Quadrant #2: You can also target people on free sources. You join social media groups to join in on the conversation. You can message people privately. You can find your ideal customers and reach out to them oneto-many (via groups) or one-to-one (via private message or email). It’s a little more targeted than waiting for people to find you. It’s also more time-consuming as well. Quadrant #3: This quadrant is usually the most interesting for people during a product launch (and when growing your business). You pay to get in front of the exact right people who have a high chance of being interested in your product. You can reach them via pay per click ads like Facebook or Google, or via sponsored ads or mailings to groups that are a good match for your product or service (such as associations, niche blog sites, and meetup groups that are looking for guest speakers or sponsors). Quadrant #4: In the fourth and final quadrant you’ll see websites and directories where you pay to be listed on targeted sites, and people find you by visiting those sites on their own schedule. This includes things like directories, press releases, and training sites. Even though these sites technically fall under “paid” traffic, they are usually NOT a reliable 170

Make, Market, Launch IT strategy for a product launch. These strategies tend to be used later in a product or business’s life cycle—or as a way to drive extra traffic and exposure in addition to more predictable sources. Finally, here are some traffic tips as you’re getting started: Traffic Tip #1: Don’t dismiss the little guys. You’d be surprised how many sales you can generate from sources that aren’t big conglomerates. Niche bloggers can be a great source of highly targeted traffic that you can reach for cheap. Traffic Tip #2: Start with Facebook for paid traffic. It’s too easy to pay a lot for traffic. Some magazines—and we’re not even talking Vogue or People—can charge $31,000 for a one-page ad. For $5 on Facebook, though, you can reach 2,000 people interested in that same magazine. Get your foot in the door and test your ideas on who is going to respond. Facebook is a low-cost, highly targeted way to do this. Traffic Tip #3: Join conversations. Social media is a great way to do this for free, however when you click on, for example, a magazine’s website, they’ll have a section on the bottom for those interested in advertising— as well as a calendar of upcoming topics to be covered. In every niche, there are patterns, ebbs and flows. You can map editorial calendars across major publications to look for themes that match your content or product launches. You then have clear paths into these publications and can step up to provide content at times when they’ll be starving for it. For more information from Victoria Griggs: www.StraightLineMarketing. com.

4. Three Components of Long-Term Sales Success The goal is to create a consistent business: one that more than pays the bills, one that provides consistent streams of revenue, one that supports the lifestyle you’ve always wanted to live. That’s why you must create a long-term marketing strategy to keep new clients coming into your business. To do this, you will need a great sales and marketing plan that focuses on attracting prospects and turning them into buyers. 171

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs As you create your marketing plan, make sure it supports three major goals in your business: 1. Growing your list of prospects. 2. Promoting and selling your products to these prospects. 3. Building and protecting your brand. The most important thing is to do all three of these things consistently. Even small, consistent actions add up to more than occasional, frenetic activity. That’s why you need to sit down and make a plan for at least the next six months. Stripped down to its basics, a marketing plan can be as simple as: 1. Identifying your top-level goals for your business, either using the above list or creating your own. 2. Defining where you are and where you want to be in what period of time. 3. Brainstorming what they steps are to get you there. 4. Making final decisions and put dates on them. 5. Measuring as you go to determine what works and what doesn’t. 6. Sitting down at the end of the next six months to start a new plan, based on your new knowledge and results. We suggest sitting down once a year to construct an overall plan for the next 12 months, then carving out time every quarter to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies (using the metrics we discussed earlier!) and tweaking as necessary. Finally, you need to measure your results compulsively, so you can tweak your marketing to increase your sales. You must know your metrics. Metrics are your guide for decision-making. They show you how to do more of what’s working for you and less of what’s not. This is especially critical during a product launch, in which you’re trying to great results quickly. Today, measuring your metrics is simple. If you have a Google Analytics account, they’ll even serve them up in a dashboard. Most email programs 172

Make, Market, Launch IT do the same. It’s easy to check your numbers regularly and focus your efforts on improving them. Metrics will help you pinpoint your exact challenge areas and show you where you need to take action. They can open powerful pathways to success by helping you optimize your campaigns exactly where you need to. Get in the habit of checking your numbers, testing new ideas, then discarding what doesn’t work. Here are the basic metrics you should know. • Traffic: How many people are seeing your page, your ad or your email? • Action Rate: What percentage of those people are taking the action you want them to? - Clicking (Click-through rate) - Opening your email (Open rate) - Opting in (Opt-in rate) - Buying (Conversion rate) • Return on Investment: For every output of marketing dollars, are you bringing in enough money to cover the expenses and, even better, turn a profit? When you’re looking to build a relationship with your prospects, you want to see your numbers improve over time. That’s how you judge how well you’re doing. Comparing your numbers to someone else’s may provide you a goal to aim for, but they won’t tell you a story worth listening to. With any traffic source, you should be examining your return on investment on each. In other words, how much does it cost to get a new customer? If you’re using paid sources to drive traffic, you will measure things like cost per click versus conversion percentage. In other words, if it costs you $1 per click to bring 100 people to your page, and your conversion percentage is 2 percent, then your cost per customer equals $50 per customer (2 sales from those 100 people, and you spent $100, so $50 per customer). Are you making enough to justify paying $100 per customer? If not, you’ll want to rethink your paid strategy.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs When you pursue the sales channels that are best for your product, and you build the systems that support it and the plan that keeps it on track, you’ll be on your way to creating something special. That’s what Mary Poul had in mind when she created her Sales Mastery Summit. As she began work on her primary product, she realized that she needed a way to continually build a list to market it to. The Sales Mastery Summit was born and, she soon had a list of 11,000 potential customers—and growing. See how she did it in the following case study.

“I built a list of 11,000 viewers.” Case Study from the Field: Mary Poul It’s one thing to be able to build a product. It’s quite another to build a following. But that’s exactly what Mary Poul did after going through Make, Market, Launch IT. After her previous employer decided not to act on an idea she’d created, Mary seized the opportunity. She created Business Bankable Value, an information product that helps service professionals build a business platform around their area of expertise. However, as she worked on the product, she knew there was something missing. After starting Make, Market, Launch It, it hit her: she needed a list. As Mary explains, “There was always something telling me, I’m missing something here, and an ‘a-ha’ came through Make, Market, Launch IT—I didn’t have a ‘what comes next.’ I didn’t have any kind of escalation built around my product to make it really worth the effort to launch. So, I figured the first thing I needed to do was build an audience.” Mary honed in on her target audience—high-end sales professionals and strategic account managers. After evaluating their needs, she decided to create an online event to draw them in. She called it the Sales Mastery Summit and featured top sales experts who shared their “best-ofthe-best” strategies with Mary in an interview format. 174

Make, Market, Launch IT The idea took off. After launching her first Sales Mastery Summit, Mary added over 11,000 followers to her list in less than two months. By setting up her experts as affiliates, she was able to leverage these relationships to promote the summit. Most of the experts reacted favorably to this arrangement. “Nobody was squeamish,” she says—with one exception. One well-connected expert had agreed to the interview, but didn’t want to promote it to her list. However, Mary’s interview style won her over. “At the end of the interview, she said, ‘I really like what you’re building, I’m going to go ahead and promote it for you,’” Mary recalls. The fact that Mary presented herself as a reporter—rather than a competing expert—helped her build these relationships easily. “Since I’m not presenting myself as an expert, I’m very non-threatening to them. It’s not as if I’m trying to take over their client base or anything. It was just an overall smart way to build my network in a space that I don’t work in,” Mary says. It also gave her a strong network for the future. “With all of the experts I’m now networked with, I’ve got a nice partner network to help me in whatever I want to launch in that space,” she says. In addition to affiliate relationships, Mary also credits Make, Market, Launch IT’s offer-building process for the success of the Sales Mastery Summit. “Really thinking through the offer was so helpful— and what’s going to attract somebody into it,” she said. For the summit, that meant allowing people to tune in for free on the day of the broadcast and charging for upgraded access. Make, Market, Launch IT also helped Mary expand her possibilities. As she was developing her offer, Mary realized there were others who could benefit from her services as well. She decided to expand into a new niche. “I started out really targeting sales professionals as the niche because the really is the client base for most of the experts,” she explains. “However, I 175

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs quickly realized that the appeal was much broader. Small business owners also want to be able to upgrade their [sales] skills really easily. And, they have a lot of hats to wear. This is a nice format for them.” Mary is now in the process of going back through the Make, Market, Launch IT process to craft a marketing plan to reach this new audience. She is also planning to test a few additional components she can add to her sales funnel. As she continues her own product development, Mary has complemented these activities with consulting services. Mary has begun working with experts and authors to help maximize the sales of the products they already offer. One client, she says, “does a bang up job in his Keynotes and consulting, but didn’t really have anything to offer after that, no back-of-the-room products.” That’s where Mary—and the Make, Market, Launch IT framework—comes in. Finally, Mary credits Make, Market, Launch for being the final polish on her package. “I got the education that I needed so that I could actually deliver something that was going to succeed,” she says. She finished the program with the “confidence to just go for it and know that I . . . would really provide value to the viewer so it was worth their time to tune in.” Mary continues to expand her impact at www.salesmasterymag.com.

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Step 7: Grow: Sustain IT

“To get rich, you have to be making money while you’re asleep.” —David Bailey

Once you set the foundation for the revenue-generating activities that will fund your business, the final step in Make, Market, Launch IT is to grow your business and set up systems that give you a consistent and repeatable process for bringing in revenue and serving customers at the highest level. Surprisingly, the way to figure out how to sustain your business is to begin with the end in mind: how you will build it so you eventually you can choose to sell it for a profit.

1: How to Build Your Business Strategically for Sale You go into business because you know you have something awesome to offer to a select audience who has a particular need or pain. You also know that when you deliver on your promises, the income and profits 177

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs will afford you the life and peace of mind you want. Now ask yourself, is there more you want to do beyond your business? Retire early? Maybe start another business? Whether you’re just starting out or looking to move on to a new venture, it’s all about growth, sustainability, and most importantly, your exit strategy. Start With An Exit Strategy In Mind 1. Get clear on how much money you want to make during and after the acquisition. Maybe your intent is to never be acquired. Still, it’s important to approach every business you build with this in mind. Getting clear on your financial goals is a key part of that because bigger isn’t always better. Consider this from a lifestyle and values perspective, as well as the level of intimacy you get to have with your clients/customers. 2. Keep and build. If your goal is to keep and build, you’re going to act, behave and perform very differently than if you plan to sell. 3. Sell—but to who? If you’re building a business with a sale in mind, whom do you want to sell to? This will define the character and the brand you’re building. If you have a specific type of buyer in mind, every decision you make can be looked at through that filter. It will determine what kind of customers you go after, how you behave and communicate, how you establish your brand and package yourself. 4. Value is a variable. A product packaged a certain way may struggle to get $80 a month, but if you find the appropriate market, it may be worth $800 or $8,000 for the exact same thing! The same is true for a buyer. Being able to tell your story and present a business type can get a valuation early on for a great sales price. 5. Be realistic and stay simple. When you are clear on how much money you want to make, simplicity is the most important word. If you want to stay in your business, keep these suggestions in mind: • Focus on what you keep. As simple as that sounds it’s very complex because as entrepreneurs, opportunities are placed in front of us all the time. 178

Make, Market, Launch IT • Keep your business clean and simple. Make sure that you’re set up to meet your personal and lifestyle goals—now and in the future. • Simplify, simplify, simplify. Ask yourself, “What can I get rid of?’ When recording engineers listen to the final mix, they listen for the most obvious thing in the recording and remove it from the mix completely. If you think you have the perfect product or service, take out about 20 percent. It makes things much easier for both you and your customer. • More isn’t better. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. • Renegotiate constantly. Question things (billing, for example). Bring in an independent third party. If you want to prep your business for sale, consider these ideas: • Have a proven market. You can have a great product but if you don’t already have your market in place, it won’t go anywhere. • Build a great product suite. Typically what happens with a successful business is that customers will ask, “What else do you have?” Being an opportunist in the market is the future of product creation. • Have predictable traffic leads and sales process. Create a replicable presentation that someone else, with a month of training, can go in and use effectively to close deals. No one is going to buy your business without this. • Predictable versus lumpy revenue/continuity. A personality-driven business is not typically acquirable nor desirable because most businesses can’t sustain (or even pull off) product launches without the personality in place. The formula: How many people in, how many dollars out? • Business systems and processes. Unless what you do is documented and has a repeatable process whereby someone can walk in, read it and do it, you don’t have a system. • Management strategy. This works even if it’s something as simple as “Sales First,” and product creation and marketing that is in alignment with that.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs • Hiring strategy and a team (contractors aren’t assets). If you’re small, lean and efficient, great. But if all you have is a bunch of contractors, you often don’t have much to sell. The cost to hire and train a team is incredibly expensive, especially if you have a technical business. • Make sure it’s not personality-driven unless it’s licensed. • Have impeccable financials and clean records: audits, no tax issues, lawsuits, etc. When it doubt, play it safe—pay it. Big Lessons • Practice NO. Don’t get trapped spending 80 percent of your time on the 20 percent of the business that you’re bad at or don’t like—managing, running, or working in the business instead of innovating, selling, promoting, marketing, and spending time with customers. • Brand and marketing are critical. If you can have a good-looking cover on a product, you can get two to four-times more money for it. Do not do it yourself. Even if you have an aesthetic sensibility, have a consultant give you feedback. • Sell to a profitable, accessible market. Focus on a premium market, or don’t do it at all. When you elevate your brand and package that alone will give you access to a premium audience and a premium marketplace. • Focus on influencers. If you make yourself accessible, approachable and brand-worthy to people whom already own relationships with influencers, you can get all the leads you’ll ever need. Sell to fewer people for more money. • Refresh your product. Everyone likes to be included in a party, especially a community/party they already belong to and find value in. You’d be surprised at how many people will buy an old product that’s simply updated. • Rapid prototyping and development. When you make your business and your life a living laboratory, you take your clients/customers on another journey. 180

Make, Market, Launch IT • Fast speed to market. Invent something, communicate it to your audience and existing customers, sell it, build it on the fly, and roll it out. You can start with literally no money. You need to be expanding your reach, brand, platform, and power. At the end of the day, building, growing, sustaining, and potentially selling your business has to do with your ability to communicate with your audience.

2: Success Systems: How To Ensure Your Business Doesn’t Take Over Your Life What if you could set up aspects of your business that could bring you significant leverage for your business? Where you were truly focused on your gifts, and your passions? The best systems can support your strengths, fill in your weaknesses, and help you build a long-term business that thrives without you driving every detail day-to-day. The official definition of a system is a set of detailed methods, procedures and routines to carry out a specific activity or duty; an organized, purposeful structure or interdependent elements in order to achieve a goal. Systems do many things for us. • They help you transition from being self-employed to being an entrepreneur. • They provide consistency. • They make things predictable. • They make it easier to train new staff members. • They allow staff to focus on their strengths. • They can become an asset of your company (and can potentially increase its value). Without quality systems in place, it’s difficult to create a business that’s not dependent on you to be there to run it. In addition, it can have all kinds of adverse affects such as unanticipated expenses, poor or inconsistent execution, delay in getting your products to market, added stress for you and your team, or even higher refunds and a bad reputation 181

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs in the market. No one wants to do business with a company that seems disorganized and as though it’s reinventing the wheel each time you interact with them. There are six areas of systems you want to consider for your business. System 1: Money There are certain areas of life and business that don’t want to give over control entirely to experts—and your money is one of them. Even if you’re a bigger business and you’re bringing people in to manage your money, make sure you’re managing the process and that you take into account these two things: 1. Know your monthly burn. How much is it costing you on a monthly basis to run and manage your business as well as to support your customers? All in, what is the cost (on average) each month to run your business? 2. Understand the money trail. When a customer places an order, how does it get securely processed and end up in your bank account? Money doesn’t go straight from your client’s bank to you. It must go through some kind of payment processing—PayPal, wire transfer or check, or from your shopping cart to a payment gateway, to a merchant account. Cash, checks and PayPal money transfers are easy to process and figure out. When you collect credit card payments, however, it goes through a three-part e-commerce process: Shopping Cart: Similar to a physical shopping cart, in e-commerce, the shopping cart allows a customer to find and buy products and services online. Shopping carts allow customers to search for a product on your website, select and add products to a virtual shopping basket, and check out with their items, resulting in a purchase. Commonly-used shopping carts include Stripe, 1ShoppingCart, UltraCart, WooCommerce, Magento, and Infusionsoft (all-in-one marketing system).

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Make, Market, Launch IT Payment Gateway: A payment gateway is a link between your customer and you, established by authorizing and processing the electronic transfer of funds that happens between your customer’s bank and your bank. This service provider allows you to receive your customer’s credit card information on a secure network, where the information is not only encrypted and securely transferred, but also verified to avoid fraud. It also allows you to submit and receive the transaction information, providing the infrastructure that secures credit card transactions over the Internet. Through your gateway account, you can control the level to which the authorizations are approved—easily (less fraud protection) or with more stringent rules (more fraud protection). One commonly-used payment gateway is Authorize.net. Merchant Service Provider (MSP) and Merchant Account: In order to create an online store, a merchant service provider or merchant account provider must agree to establish a merchant account with you—an account with your bank that accepts credit card payments. In this case, the bank is involved in working with a third-party processor to arrange a way of accepting payments. Typically, these providers will first ensure that your website provides a safe shopping experience for customers. This type of account is required in order to accept credit card payments via e-commerce. Much like applying for credit or a loan, you can be denied a merchant account or be forced to accept terms with higher costs or security in place. Make sure you establish your merchant account early in the process and that you communicate regularly with your contact so they know your plans as it relates to selling your products online. System 2: Legal Remember, as a business owner, it’s your job to know the details surrounding compliance, regulations and other laws. You also want to make sure you have the right legal team for your needs. There are (at least) six types of attorneys you can hire for your product-based business: 1. Corporate/Business 2. Intellectual Property 183

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 3. Human Resources 4. Tax/Financial 5. Contracts 6. Litigation You can get all of these attorneys in one firm (which tend to be bigger and more expensive), or you can get different attorneys based on each of your different needs. Ultimately, do your research to determine what you need for your business. Be sure to figure out what you need (and what you don’t know) so that you have resources on tap when you need them. System 3: Marketing and Sales Marketing is about defining a customer need, delivering the solution and communicating the solution to the customer. Most important, you need to know who your ideal customer is, and how and where to market to them. To be sure, this takes some testing as well as a willingness to put your business out there and hustle a bit! This is also why we’ve put so much focus on marketing in Make Market Launch IT. If you did nothing other than switch your focus from that of a “doer” to that of a “marketer,” you’ll increase your results remarkably. As you grow your business and become more experienced as a marketer, here are four strategies that will help you get the best results. 1. Think in terms of campaigns. A campaign is a group of marketing and sales messages that are coordinated together in a series of communications that are all leading to a particular sale or a particular offer. For example, a product launch is a campaign—you’re sending out prelaunch content, content to get people to take action and buy, and then you’re sending follow-ups. You don’t want to just send out an offer in the middle of nowhere. And, you don’t want to ask them to buy only one time. You want to ask them again and again because it takes customers more than one time being in front of you to make a buying decision. Every sales promotion you execute needs to fit together and it make sense as a business and to your audience. You want to make sure that all of your sales and marketing messages are coordinated and in-sync and not a series 184

Make, Market, Launch IT of one-off efforts. And when you can organize your marketing around a series of campaigns (anywhere from a few days to a few weeks in length), you’ll get much better results than if you haphazardly approach your promotions as one-off marketing efforts. It’ll also feel much better to your prospects and customers because your communications will make sense and have a context related to a particular want or need they have. 2. The more lead capture systems/pages, the better. So often business owners think about having “an opt-in” for their business. But if you have more than one opt-in page (or “lead capture page”) online, all of a sudden you have multiple ways to capture new leads for your business. You have much more flexibility to test different methods of getting traffic and converting that traffic to leads and you have more than one “funnel” set up that’s driving leads to your business. Internet Marketer Andy Jenkins and Pam were talking about business and he asked her, “How many ways do you have for people to join your list? How many opt-ins do you have?” “Well the homepage on my website is an opt-in…” Pam said. Andy responded with, “Oh no, no, no! You want to be thinking about getting people into your business as many ways as possible!” One market segment might appeal to this type of message or this type of opt-in, whereas another might respond to something else. You can use things like your blog or your podcast or your book, but having separate pages set up where people can opt-in and drive traffic to your site are essential to capture leads. 3. Always seek and test new sources of traffic. You live and die by the leads you get each week, as those leads (potentially) convert to sales. As a result, you want to constantly maximize traffic to your site through a number of different paid and free methods. As you test new traffic sources, make sure you’re tracking your results. What is the true cost per lead for your business? How well are those leads converting to sales? At what point do you break even with new leads into your business—in other words at what stage of the buying process, do 185

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs you break even on your costs to drive traffic and acquire leads? What is the lifetime value of a new (qualified) lead to your business? Certainly, you can hire experts to help you with traffic and lead generation strategies for your business. The key is that (1) you ensure that the content you’re using to entice this traffic to opt-in and become a lead is high-quality and high-value, as well as a message-to-market match, and (2) you know your numbers. You are actively involved in understanding what’s working, what’s not, what it’s costing and how you can maximize it. 4. Take care of your list. In almost any industry or market, the highest cost for most businesses is the cost to acquire a new lead or customers. Once you get somebody on your list and into your database, or even better, once you convert that lead to a customer, take care of them! First of all, it’s the right thing to do and it feels good to know your customers are getting the service they desire and deserve. Second, it will create momentum for your business as happy customers will refer more customers and buy more products and services from you. It’s far easier and more effective to sell to existing customers than cultivate new clients. Once you have someone opt in, make sure you turn them into raving fans of your product and services. It’s not the size of your list, but the quality of relationship you have with your list that’s the biggest factor in your success. System 4: Customer Support When we talk about “customer support,” this includes what you’re doing to retain customers, grow more customers, and most importantly, show your customers that you care. Because your customers are how you grow your business, expand your impact and build your legacy, you need to make serving these customers a big focus. Create systems—policies and procedures that support all of your valued clients at a high level—and hire the right people with the right mindset to carry out these tasks. Remember, however, it all starts at the top. Whether you’re a team of one, or a team of many, it’s up to you to back up your words with actions. It’s not enough to care, you need to show that you care about customer 186

Make, Market, Launch IT experience through what you do and what your team does to take care of people. Four Ways to Support Your Valued Customers 1. Invest in your customers’ success and make it the core focus of your business. First, and most important, adopt a mentality early on in your business that you are here for one reason: to take care of your customers and help them solve their problems and achieve their dreams. Your business isn’t about you—it’s about them. When you understand this on an emotional level, you can make decisions, both big and small, that help your customers succeed at the highest level. This can mean anything from providing Q&A calls with your programs to give them direct coaching, to giving out awards to acknowledge people’s wins, to helping them track their progress, and making sure that your products and services are created with the goal of making it as easy as possible for your customers to get what it is they’re looking for. 2. Identify your heroes early on. This means identifying the people who are using your products and services and are getting results. Highlight those stories! Not only does it help your marketing effort, but it also helps grow your customer-base by giving new customers the belief that they can do it, too. You also may want to send these customers a special note or package to thank them and give them opportunities to lead inside your community. Make sure you know who your heroes are so you can (1) document their results (2) support them in their continued success and (3) help them spread the word. 3. Reward your best customers. Treat your clients with a philosophy of “what we do for one, we must be willing to do for all” mindset. This means that, whenever you make a decision to do something for one client, you want to ask yourself, “Am I prepared to do this same thing for any client?” This will help you maintain integrity and consistency within how you treat your clients. 187

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs At the same time, your best customers should always get the best deals and the most time and attention from your organization. If you have a new offer coming out, let them know about it first and make sure they get the best deal. 4. Create guidelines. Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for your business. An SOP is a routine, or a system, that acts as a step-by-step guide so you and your team are aligned in how to support your clients. When you have SOPs in place, you don’t have to worry about your customer support team because they will know how to take care of your customers in every situation that may arise. Guidelines also mean you can more easily train new hires. This is important as you must empower your “front line” to make decisions and solve problems. As it relates to customer service, remember heart isn’t enough. You want to have heart plus systems to make sure your team is empowered to really take care of your customers. System 5: Technology Whether it’s marketing technology, financial technology or whatever type of technology you have in your company, it can be overwhelming to keep up with the pace of changing technology, much less figure out how to match the right technology for your needs. The key with any technology is to make sure you have the business intelligence you need to get where you want to go. Here are some keys to making good decisions around your technology—and making sure you don’t over- or under-spend based on your needs. Top Mistakes with Technology 1. Choosing a technology based on a sales pitch instead of based on your need. Even with good intent, a sales person will show you all the right things but never the wrong things. Be careful as you have these conversations as often their answers revolve around how they can serve your business, not why or how you need the right piece of technology.

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Make, Market, Launch IT 2. Being too quick to choose a technology without understanding its impact. Does it work with your other stuff? Does it integrate with the systems you already have in place? Does it do what you need to do at the end of the day? Or, did you buy based on emotion instead of what you really need? 3. Not having clear goals and not understanding what you really need. Most people don’t have absolute clarity about their business goals. As a result, they end up investing in the latest “shiny object,” but then get something that doesn’t scale the way they need, do what they want, or it ends up requiring too big of an infrastructure than what’s really appropriate for their business. 4. Thinking you need more than you really do. There’s a fine line between what you need today vs. two years from now. Instead of overspending, you need to be honest about the level of business intelligence you really need (vs. what’s nice to have) to be successful. 5. Seeing what someone else is doing, and thinking, “I’ll just copy that.” Just because it works for one business doesn’t mean that it’s the right solution for you. Technology decisions need to be specific to your business needs. Be careful about just blindly modeling someone—you never know what their incentives are to promote a piece of technology, or the personalized customization they may be getting on that technology behind the scenes. Often, there’s no reason for you to go the same route just to have the same level of brand recognition that they have. 6. Doing what’s easy instead of what’s right. It can be easy to get sold on something that you can throw together that works today without understanding that it won’t work down the road (i.e. it will become cost prohibitive as soon as your business reaches a certain size, etc.). Look at what’s right, not just what’s easy. Think back to your business goals from module one: What type of business do you want to build? What you want to do with your business is going to impact the technology you need and the level of intelligence you need. Take some time to really think about it so you can match up your technology needs with your specific business goals. 189

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs System 6: People Systems around people help you both empower your team to deliver great results and leverage you to help grow your business. You want to have a good team that will ideally stay with you and grow with your business, but you also don’t want to be too dependent on one key person, without a back-up system in place, should they leave for any reason. The key is to manage and motivate people, but put systems behind your business that aren’t dependent on any one individual. Here are just a few examples of the systems you can put in place around your people to give you leverage and help scale your growth. 1. Teach them how to communicate clearly and efficiently. For example, give your team members (this goes for employees as well as contractors) a specific format for sending you emails. We use a simple one: The subject line is either FYI, Action Requested, or Per Your Request. The body contains a brief greeting, a stated outcome, any background in the form of bulleted info needed as an update or to help you make a decision or fulfill their request. The next section is the call to action, including next steps, specific requests, deadlines, and budget (if applicable). 2. Be specific. If you provide context and details for your requests, you’ll avoid miscommunication. 3. When things are uncertain or have high-consequence, over-communicate. Reiterate your outcome, check in along the way, and make sure you have regular touch points with your team. If there’s a project that is of high consequence to your business, when in doubt over-communicate and schedule more frequent updates so you can be sure everything is on track. Take a little bit of time to set up the systems that make sense to you and that will work for you and your business. This will give you the freedom to spend your time on what really matters to you, and what is really going to drive more revenue to your business.

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3: The Power of Partnerships Out of the nearly 20 million sole proprietorships in the U.S., more than 1.5 million see the benefits of partnerships.1 Just like a marriage, however, partnerships need to grow, evolve and be nurtured to reap the benefits. There are several benefits of partnerships. First, partnerships can bring complementary skills together. If you’re good at creating new products and someone else is good at selling, it makes sense to bring those skills together. Partners also can take on risk together. By taking a leap of faith together on projects you lessen the blow of failure and reap the rewards as partners. Partners can share resources. One partner could have an established list, for example, that the other partner can benefit from. The other partner could bring an existing set of services. Finally, partners can provide emotional support to each other. It can be lonely at times to run a business; having a partner provides a sounding board for advice and guidance. We believe there are five keys to a successful partnership. 1. Get the right partner. Look into the future: where is this going? What are we each bringing to the table? Is this a person that I want to grow old with? Will we like each other or is this a relationship of convenience? Creating a long-term relationship is at the heart of a partnership, but it’s also necessary to remember that both partners need to bring a unique value to the table. Is there trust? Creating a partnership means sharing your secret sauce or your database, intellectual property or access to your customers or staff. It all comes down to the one great currency in a partnership: TRUST. Don’t be afraid to start small with your partnership—with a project or brand—then build the trust and turn it into a business.

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http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonnazar/2013/09/09/16-surprising-statistics-about-small-businesses/

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs 2. Be realistic about roles. A partnership doesn’t automatically mean a clear 50/50 split (and the best partnerships often are not equal splits—both in terms of money and time). When one partner is already established in the industry or has an existing business, they may take a greater percentage (at least to start). This may change over time as the other partner brings more to the table or secures new business for the partnership. 3. Get it in writing. Ensure that you have clear partner agreements in place. Remember, the agreement is a living, breathing document and should match the ebb and flow or the partnership. In addition, think of it as a “performance agreement” where the compensation and rewards are tied to meeting specific performance requirements. When it comes to negotiating, don’t do it until you can put all the main points of the partnership out on the table. Then, get an attorney to take care of it. They are bound to behave ethically, and will impartially interpret the impact and the risk for both parties. They can also create a “phantom stock,” where someone has to earn their way in and if they leave the partnership, that move doesn’t get converted into real equity. If they do walk away, an attorney can make sure there is a non-compete agreement in place and if that party violates it there will be consequences. 4. Set expectations. How will you work together? What role will each partner play? What do you expect each to deliver? How do you want to communicate? How will you respond if there is an upset or challenge? 5. Constantly re-evaluate. Revisit the agreement six to twelve months down the line and re-evaluate roles and renegotiate compensation. How have circumstances changed? Has workload or responsibilities shifted? Should the compensation splits be re-evaluated as a result? Determining Contributions All contributions to the partnership are not the same. The value attributed to creating products, running finances and managing support is different than the value attributed to marketing and sales initiatives that directly affect the bottom line. At the end of the day, a business can’t exist without two things: innovation and marketing/sales. Those make up 65 to 80 percent of your business (versus pieces such as support and accounting that you can outsource). 192

Make, Market, Launch IT Mike once had someone approach him with a business proposition: “Give me half of your business and I will give you X, Y and Z.” In order to make X, Y and Z happen though, that person needed a staff, which would end up costing (Mike) more money, and this guy needed this, and that, and, and, and…. Mike was supposed to take on more risk, give this guy half of his company and there’s no guarantee of performance? Different components of a business are not always equal to another— each element has a unique value. Challenges in Partnerships As with any relationship, challenges can come up when you’re in a partnership. When, this happens, it’s usually due to one of four things: ego, emotions, expectations, or economics. How do you resolve the 4 Es? With clear rules of conduct. Here are the partnership guiding principles/rules of conduct we recommend. 1. Don’t try to change your business partner. Learn how they work, and set the systems up to support them to be able to do what they do really well, where they have the freedom to deliver their biggest gifts. 2. Monitor resentment, because there will be periods of time where situations may feel unfair. Think of your emotional and legal partnership agreement as a living, breathing document that has to be able to evolve as you grow. 3. Make sure you leave room in your relationship for a safe space free from judgment. Have compassionate conversations about what you can bring to the table, and be honest with your partner about what you can and cannot do. 4. It’s always a three-way partnership because you have your customers. It’s going to always come back to, “What is the agreement you made with your partner and your customer?” It doesn’t matter what’s going on with your partnership, you need to show up for your customers and you need to deliver—100 percent of the time.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Before Embarking on a Partnership: Inner Work It’s important to remember that whatever personal problems you walk into a relationship with are going to show up in the partnership. The more inner work you do, the better likelihood your partnership (and communication) will run smoothly. Participate in some type of formal growth and development process, such as a personal development event or program. It can be instrumental in helping you prepare for a partnership—and it will likely help you experience more joy in the process.

4: The Long-Term Entrepreneur In this book you’ve learned a powerful step-by-step system for turning your ideas into income, making a difference and creating a lifestyle that meets your goals. While we hope you’ve also implemented as you’ve gone along, remember, it’s not a race. Go at your own pace. Ultimately, your goal is to create a business based on products and services that provide you with a consistent and sustainable system for bringing in revenue and serving customers, without you having to be there all the time to manage it. It’s a journey—some things will work extraordinarily well and others you’ll need to tweak and refine (and sometimes abandon) as you find the magic combination of strategies that work for you and your market. We’re obsessed with taking impeccable care of our customers. We’re also incredibly committed to taking care of our staff and contractors because we’re so grateful for all that they enable us to do. On the personal side, both of us have embraced the entrepreneurial lifestyle to make sure we have the time for our partners and our children. But in order to take care of all of these people, both emotionally and financially with your business, you need to take care of yourself. And that’s why it’s so important to establish your product creation business as one that runs without you, so you have the time, the energy and the resources to look after yourself.

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Make, Market, Launch IT With our encouragement, get away from the day-to-day running of your business. Spend quality time with your customers and listen to their success stories, ones that you helped create! Give yourself the gift of hearing the impact you’ve had on other people’s lives. Draw boundaries of your own, both in your day-to-day life and by carving out time for your favorite hobby or whatever it is that recharges your batteries. In other words, make sure to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Take the kids to Hawaii. Go hiking, or camping or whatever you enjoy. Let your brain slow down. Relax and enjoy. Spend some of that hard-earned money. You deserve it. You’ll return a happier, more focused entrepreneur, which will allow you to embrace the next piece of psychology we offer: be present. It’s so easy to divide your energy into little pieces and half-focus on everything, personally and professionally. But it’s important to focus on the here and now. Don’t dwell too much on what happened yesterday and don’t get tunnel vision over the future. Take the actions that you can take now, today to move your vision forward. If there’s a common thread we see running through the most successful entrepreneurs, it’s that they’re always keeping their pulse on what’s next. In other words, keep learning. Do it in whatever way excites you. If you’re a reader, splurge on an Amazon.com order and keep a stack on your bedside table or fill your Kindle with recommendations from friends and colleagues. Get your favorite blogs and news websites in one spot through an RSS feed and monitor it daily for articles that pique your interest. Join a community to generate new and interesting ideas. Some colleagues have had great success with local Rotary clubs. Others have found their stride by participating in mastermind groups. Expose yourself to new people and new ideas. If you move beyond your usual haunts, you’ll enable yourself to cross-pollinate your business with ideas from other disciplines. Communicate with your customers. We can’t tell you how many lessons we’ve learned from the people we’re serving. Check in with your support staff and see what themes are emerging. Hold a Q&A webinar and see what people want to know.

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs There are sources for learning all around you. Part of the beauty of being an entrepreneur lies in being able to take advantage of these trends much faster than large companies, who run their decisions through a long chain of executives. That’s why we’ll always encourage you to be nimble. Especially when you’re leveraging online technology, it’s possible to capitalize quickly on new ideas. Use this to your advantage as much as possible. Being nimble also means being flexible. Unlike the giant grinding gears of a large corporation, your light and fast operations should be able to make a needed turn, if warranted. Think of your operation like a sports car. You can hit the gas quickly. You can maneuver around the field of slower cars. And, if needed, you can make a sharp right turn and go in a new direction. Three Master Lessons from Make, Market, Launch IT We’ve given you a comprehensive set of tools and industry secrets that will give you guidance in all aspects of your business: mindset and understanding your target market, how to create irresistible offers, the blueprints for creating quality products in any format, multiple and proven ways to market and sell, and a business system designed to help you achieve the income and impact you’re looking for. Most importantly, to achieve your dreams—to build a sustainable business that brings you consistent, repeatable revenue that serves your customers without you having to be there all the time—focus on these three skills: 1. How to Make: Create a great product that meets your ideal customers’ needs by solving their biggest problems and helping them attain their biggest goals. Remember, it’s not about creating the perfect product—you’ve got to let yourself and your business evolve with your customers. This can only happen when you get your product or service in front of the right people as quickly as possible, so you can add value and make money while you learn and grow.

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Make, Market, Launch IT 2. How to Market: Master the art of creating offers: know what you are selling and to whom you are selling. Continuously refine your sales presentation and practice making the offer over and over again. 3. How to Launch: Take consistent, massive action. Sell your product(s) in as many channels as possible so you can figure out what works best for your audience. As you do this, take impeccable care of your customers so you can escalate both the value you add and the money you make by providing more, higher-end solutions to your best customers. As we near the end of our journey, we offer you one final story from the field. Colin Hiles, a longtime blogger and established training specialist, saw Make, Market, Launch IT as his chance to leverage both his time— and the following he’d created with his website—to create a whole new revenue stream for himself.

“The end result will not be an hour’s work for an hour’s pay.” Case Study from the Field: Colin Hiles Colin Hiles has been blogging since 2009, not because he wanted to build a following and not because he had anything he wanted to sell. Colin was blogging simply because he enjoyed it. With an established career as a training and development specialist in both corporate and sports environments, Colin never imagined he could turn his blog’s ideas into anything more than a hobby—until he started getting emails about Make, Market, Launch IT. Make, Market, Launch IT planted a seed. Colin started to think about creating a product around his belief system that he could sell to his existing blog followers. Around that same time, Colin also started getting queries from worldwide prospects asking him for a way to access his retreats, held mainly in Spain and Morocco, from other parts of the globe. 197

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs “That was perfect timing for me. It really got me thinking about [creating a product] seriously,” Colin says. Make, Market, Launch IT gave Colin a two-pronged opportunity to turn both his blog and his 20 years of experience in mindset and belief training into products that he could leverage. The solution seemed obvious. He decided to stop, in his words, “messing around” and to build two products, Follow Your Smile and Mind Power+ Toolkit. To make sure he was on the right track, Colin started his product development in the Make, Market, Launch IT way: by understanding what his customers really need, then designing a product around those desires. “This was just following the process that Mike and Pam laid out. Get some feedback, find some needs, and then begin to address those needs,” he says. He started by reaching out to his existing community. “I sent an email out to my list and asked them to fill out the poll. So I took that and said, how do I help with [their biggest issues]: clarity, fear, and issues with money? And that’s where the idea of Advanced Mind Power Training came up,” he explains. To test these ideas, he created an initial product, which he called the 90-Day Challenge. However, Colin decided to release it only to an exclusive group of people: his loyal followers. Only those who have been with him for the long haul were granted the opportunity to invest in his program—at least for now. Since this group knows him well and trusts his work already, Colin used them as a testing ground to see what really sticks. By restricting access, he’s also making his community part of the journey, which will ultimately keep them even more invested as he continues to expand his product line. In other words, with his first product, Colin is already nurturing his Power Tribe. His initial launch brought 55 people into the program for beta testing.

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Make, Market, Launch IT Colin used the tools provided by Make, Market, Launch IT to set up his entire system, including his launch sequence, a membership site, four videos, a book, his products and all his branding. “Everything you see on my site didn’t exist before. It’s all born out of Make, Market, Launch IT,” he explains. Colin’s long-term vision involves creating a passive income stream out of the final incarnation of this online business model. He wants to be able to travel with his wife and sustain a lifestyle as a “digital nomad,” running his business from a laptop anywhere in the world with working Wi-Fi. He’s excited by the possibilities. “The end result will not be an hour’s work for an hour’s pay, and that’s very compelling. That’s what keeps me going.” Make, Market, Launch IT, he believes, is the key to getting there. “If you have an aspiration to earn a passive income and take what you know, to package it so that you can have a passive income, then go for it. This is the opportunity.” Make, Market, Launch IT also gave him a new distinction regarding success in the information product market. “What I’ve learned is the actual difference isn’t in the product. The difference is in the way the product is marketed. You’ve got to have good product, but if you have a great product and your marketing isn’t any good, you’re not going anywhere.” However, after going through the program and building his initial product, he has begun sharing this knowledge with others who have hired him as a consultant. “I’ve already had a few people approach me to say, ‘Can you help me?’” he says. “And I’ve earned income from that as well.” His parting advice to other creators? “Set a big goal, step up to it. Especially if what you can package is making a difference to other people’s lives, I mean, what a great way to go about spending your time.” Colin continues to develop his suite of training products through MidlifeMaverick.com.

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“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” —Carl Sagan

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Closing: One Final Gift to Change Your Life

“You changed my life.”

After our combined 40+ years of creating products in every format you can imagine, those four words are still our greatest reward, bar none. Those words fuel our passion. They drive our creative process. They give us a visceral thrill of excitement—and they leave us in a peak of joy. We hope this book inspires you to take on a new role, as a teacher, a leader and a visionary—or to raise yourself to a new level of achievement along this path. As you accept this new position, you step into a truly unique and powerful gift: that of transformation. As you pass this gift on to your students, your clients, your friends and your loved ones, we hope you feel the same abundance of joy, passion and excitement that we do. You’ve earned it—and you deserve it. As you’re sharing this gift with others, we encourage you to share one more gift with yourself. It’s a small gift, but it’s a significant one that can create a seismic shift in your entrepreneurial journey. 201

Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Give yourself the gift of urgency. We know that you have a lot of priorities. You may have a partner. You may have a family. You may even be working another job as you get this business off the ground. However, you’ve invested enough of your energy to make it this far, which says to us that you’re incredibly committed to an entrepreneurial future. Honor that commitment by making your product—and the business around it—a priority. You may have only one chance to transform the life of a customer or client. Stay focused on these results. Stay focused on creating a business around it and stay focused on realizing your vision at the highest level— always with a sense of urgency. We’ve seen the power that this commitment has had on our customers, some of whom you’ve met in this book. They were once in your shoes, looking at the same opportunity you’re considering today. It’s here in front of you now. If you reach out and take it, the possibilities are limitless. Take it from us. Neither one of us could have predicted where our journeys would lead. We’re so grateful for the milestones we’ve reached, the products we’ve created, the relationships we’ve fostered—and the lives we’ve changed. In fact, gratitude can’t fully express it. That’s why we’ve made it our mission to pass it on, to empower people like you to do what we’ve done and turn your expertise, experience, perspective and good old-fashioned know-how into a valuable product that changes people’s lives. As we finish this book with you, we hope it marks the start of your journey, from wherever you are now toward the fullest expression of your vision. We’re incredibly grateful to you for trusting your time to us. We’re also incredibly excited to see what you come up with. In fact, we can’t wait. We also hope this marks the start of our journey together. If you’d like to continue your discovery of turning your expertise into a product you can 202

Make, Market, Launch IT sell—and building a real business around that product—please visit us at our website, MakeMarketLaunch.com. As we’ve shown you, there’s an incredible opportunity in the marketplace right now to significantly improve your value, bring in new revenue streams and create a lasting legacy. Don’t wait to take action. The right time is now. Until then, thank you for making us a part of your entrepreneurial journey. We look forward to working with you again—and we wish you all the joy, delight and excitement of making the impact on the world that’s both your gift and your birthright.

Appendix: Tools & Tech Guide Video & Content Production:

Freelancers:

• Smartphone with Selfie Stick and iRig HD microphone

• Fiverr

• Screencasting: Screenflow (Mac & PC) or Camtasia (PC)

• Freelancer

• eLance • oDesk • 99Designs

• Slides: Keynote or PowerPoint

Video Storage: • Vimeo

• Microphone: Nessie or Yeti (by Blue Microphone)

• Wistia

• Webcam: Logitech c930e

Data Sharing:

• Royalty Free Music & Sound Effects: AudioJungle.com or YouTube Audio Library • Stock Images: iStockphoto. com or BigStock

• Dropbox • Google Drive Livecasts: • Google+ Hangouts On Air • YouTube Live

• Video Themes: Envato.com or VideoHive.com

• Webinar Jam

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Pam Hendrickson & Mike Koenigs Please visit us at MakeMarketLaunch.com for your free video series on how to turn your ideas into income. We’ll share our best, cutting-edge strategies for creating a product from scratch, or maximizing a product you already have, but that may not be producing the income or impact you desire.

3830 Valley Centre Drive #705-314 San Diego, CA 92130 866.654.6534 858.720.8720

www.MakeMarketLaunch.com

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It’s never been easier, faster or more profitable for you to make, market and launch your own product… and we’re going to show you step-by-step exactly how to do it in this book! If you’re like us, you’ve either read a book, listened to an audio program, watched a video or invested in a product and had your life literally change. An expert, somewhere in the world, distilled their knowledge down to a product and it founds its way to your home. In this book that you’re holding right now, we’re going to show you how you can have that same level of transformation in the world with your knowledge. Make, Market, Launch IT is a 7-step system for taking any idea to market quickly, effectively and profitably. When you combine this system with your own knowledge and experience, you can change people’s lives, create a lasting legacy and increase your marketable value to earn significantly more for your products, services and time. Make, Market, Launch IT represents nearly 50 years of combined experience from entrepreneurs Pam Hendrickson and Mike Koenigs. Pam and Mike have produced and promoted hundreds of products and services in every format imaginable—products that have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and created a difference in millions of people’s lives. Through their refined system, you’ll discover Pam and Mike’s proven blueprint for leveraging your knowledge and expertise into a sustainable business that brings you ongoing revenue and makes a difference for others. Because this system isn’t dependent on specific technology or platforms, you will be successful regardless of your business type or niche. It’s your time to build your legacy and live your dream. Everything you need is inside this book—and inside you now.

Pam Hendrickson has been producing, launching and marketing highly-profitable products for many of the top names in the personal and professional development industry for almost 25 years. Pam spent almost twenty years at Robbins Research International, Inc. where she worked directly with Anthony Robbins as the Executive Vice President of Content & Product Development. A magna cum laude graduate of Brown University, Pam lives in San Diego, CA with her husband and two sons. Mike Koenigs is a 7-time #1 bestselling author, “Chief Disruptasaurus,” and founder of Traffic Geyser and Instant Customer, which simplifies and automates marketing for over 40,000 customers in over 60 countries. His mission is to create 1,000,000 entrepreneurs. Mike has been featured on CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, and in Inc. and Success Magazine. The son of a barber and originally from Eagle Lake, Minnesota, Mike likes in San Diego with his wife and son. www.MakeMarketLaunch.com