“Cash is king!” Can anyone dispute that? There have been instances when cash goes missing in an otherwise bubbling marriage and in a matter of time, it marriage lapses into disaster and frustration. When cash is not flowing freely within an enterprise, it is the same as straining blood out of a living organism. It is only a matter of time before the inevitable happens: it goes out of operation. It is not an exaggeration when King Solomon, the wisest man in the world as recorded in the Judo-Christian Bible that “money answereth all things”. When cash is present in the correct dosage, life can be enjoyable and fulfilling. When it is absent, life can be meaningless and frustrating. We all need money. Don’t we? We need money to finance our dreams. We need money to procure the good things in life. We need money to send our children to the best schools. We need money to buy tools that can enhance our intellectual ability. We need money to do so many things.
If cash is so important, why is it that only a few people can boast of having it in the desired measure? Indeed, it reckoned in a typical society, the collective wealth is in the hand of less than 5%. Why is this so? Does it mean there is something they know that the rest of the people do not know? Is there a formula that when applied, can with certainty, bring in cash? Can such techniques or strategies be taught?
In her groundbreaking and insightful book (a manual actually), Instant Income Janet Switzer claims, with some measure of authority, that there is indeed a foolproof strategy for creating cash on demand and the strategy is not only simple. It is also available to willing students. Here we present her practical insight on how to make this happen.
FULL SUMMARY
Janet Switzer is one of the very few American female entrepreneurs who have been able to master the art of converting their brands into raw cash. Having worked behind the scene for years to push a great number of American celebrities into wealth zones, Janet has now devoted her time wholly to turning her products and her brand into a huge information empire. And she seems to be making a success of it with the phenomenal success witnessed by her first book, Instant Income.
It might help to quote Janet directly: “Making money is easy, and whether you own a small business, work for someone else’s small business, or just want to earn thousands on the side pursuing what I call being an Occasional Entrepreneur, you have all the resources at your fingertips to boost your personal income immediately.”
Interestingly, Janet did not start as an entrepreneur and did not intend to learn how to generate cash. It was a combination of circumstances that pushed her into jobs and placements that helped her eventually spot the creative instinct in her. In her words: “In fact, as I reflect on my own career as the “expert” behind the incomes”, it seems incomprehensible to me that I fell into a line of business for which I had no formal training whatsoever”. To use her method, Janet says no qualification is needed other than the willingness to learn and experiment.
Janet had dreamed of becoming a diplomat, having studied International Relations, Economics and International Law. While still trying to perfect her qualifications for the foreign service, Janet decided to try some part-time jobs in several places as an intern. In one of those experiments, she had applied to a small regional bank as an entry-level clerk but she was surprised when she was given the job of marketing manager. She was speechless. She, however, explored the skills she had learnt in her public relations class to develop winning sales strategies that launched her and the small bank into the limelight. As a way of perfecting her strategies, Janet had worked behind the scenes to help celebrities such as Les Brown, Jack Canfield, Victor Mark Hansen and a host of others to turn their brands into instant cash.
With astounding success trailing her experiments, Janet has since launched out teaching small business owners and people in paid employment strategies for generating instant cash. Instant Income is her first documented approach to making the strategies available to the general public.
Instant Income is divided into seven sequentially arranged parts. In part one, Janet demonstrates how you can create instant cash when you need it through the easy-to-apply strategies she included in the part. You will learn how to reactivate your past customers and make more money from them than would be possible with new customers. You will know how to spot overlooked assets in your company and turn them into instant cash.
Part two of the book is devoted to showing you the road map for applying the instant income strategies in the book. In this part, you learn how to create an overnight audit that serves as a guide to all your instant income endeavours. Janet also generously lists all her resources that you can access for free to carry out your instant income strategies.
Part three of Instant Income deals with strategies that can be employed by people in paid employment to generate more money from their employers. It gives a step-by-step guide on how to launch your first campaign as an employee desirous of earning more money while you keep your day job.
Part four of Instant Income articulates all the strategies you can employ to be an occasional entrepreneur.
Part five shows with examples, how you can turn the strategies you would learn inside this book into lifetime wealth where creating cash on demand becomes a way of life for you.
Getting the best out of the books
Instant Income is more than a book; it could be well regarded as a manual of how to generate cash on demand. We are persuaded that every single word used in this book carries deeper meanings. As such we suggest that you adopt the following tips if you want to get the best out of the book:
· Take some time to read the entire book from the start to finish to have a general sense of the theme and strategies shared in the book.
· Go over the book slowly the second time to identify the sections and the areas that apply to your situation and then begin to dig deeper into such sections.
· To refresh your memory on the book, read the executive summary as frequently as you can and as well listen to the audio version a few times.
· Zero in on just one strategy you want to employ and launch out fully with it.
· Revise your success and see how you can make it produce better results. With success in one strategy, you would build the confidence to implement other strategies in the book that appeal to you.
Janet says a few things would happen to you if you read the book as instructed: One, you will learn how to get paid more at your current job. Two, you will learn how to make more money on your side business. There, you will learn how to implement any marketing campaign with ease. Four, you will learn how to develop an implementation calendar. Five, you will learn how to negotiate compensation deals. Can you possibly ask for more?
PART 1: STRATEGIES THAT BRING IN CASH
The central theme of this section is that you are better off focusing your marketing strategies on your existing customers than spending money to woo new customers. A marketing expert once said that: when your business is in a financial mess the first place to turn to for instant cash is the customers sitting in your database. Not rushing to the banks or your friends to lend you money.” We tend to agree with him. But what do most business owners do? In most cases, they ignore their current customers and begin to spend money on promotional adverts designed to bring in new customers. Often, they result in waste.
Janet has a different but practical and effective approach: ignore new customers for now and focus on reactivating your past customers and giving your current customers the best treat to convince them that you value them.
Making it happen
Here are some of the approaches recommended by Janet for squeezing more money from your current and past customers.
- Getting Customers to Give You More Money
The starting point is to know your customers inside-out by doing the following:
· Begin to pull out their names by extracting all the details you can get: telephones; emails; buying history; status; residential addresses, birthdates and so on. Just any data can help you to gain more knowledge about your customers.
· Develop valuable special reports that are relevant to the problems that your customers are currently facing which you can find out through research. Get to know the problems your customers are facing and by all means, strive to find a solution to the problem. Once this is done, you can produce a well-packaged special report that you can circulate free of charge to your past and present customers.
· Plan a reactivation campaign. Having discovered what the problems of your current and past customers are, the next thing is to categorise them into how valuable they are to you, especially those that have patronised you greatly in the past but have left for one reason or the other. Having done this, you should think of the best way to contact them: telephone, email, or physical contact. You should decide which approach would produce the best result.
· Reach out first to your past customers. Having arranged the reports and identified the best way to contact them, the next action is to go ahead and contact them. You can go ahead and write a well-crafted letter or email and send it to them.
· It should be realised that the essence of all these efforts is to establish a solid relationship with your customers. Once this has been achieved, some strategies can then be applied to make more money from your past and current customers:
· You can, for instance, create continuity products that would turn the customers into repeat buyers which would ensure that you have a regular inflow of income.
· Once you have established a good relationship with your customers, you can also upsell them by offering them complimentary products that can enhance the use of the main items they are buying from you. For instance, a dentist can sell toothpaste and mouth fresheners. The whole idea is to ensure that you get more money from them.
- Getting Other People to Help Bring in the Cash
This is one of the most creative approaches to creating cash and instantly too. If you have ever found yourself struggling to get your business off the ground, one of the best income-creating strategies is to enter into a marketing arrangement known in the information marketing parlance as a “Joint Venture”. This simply means identifying your strengths and weaknesses, focusing on your strengths and going out of your way to look for a partner who can fill in the gap for your weaknesses. This is how Janet defines a JV: A joint venture is an informal business relationship, in which two parties come together for a single purpose to execute a single promotion or to participate in one small piece of each other’s business with both companies profiting from the result”. A joint venture does not mean you are buying into part of someone else’s business. It is usually a temporary arrangement where both parties play on each other’s strengths to achieve
collective results that are superior to individual efforts. Here are a few examples:
· A person who is a good product creator can enter into a JV with another person who has great selling skills.
· A person who has a great product but has no database can get an owner of a huge database to sell his product to that database on the understanding that the database owner will have a cut from the proceed of the efforts.
· You can enter into a JV with another person to develop a new product from scratch. This is one way of expanding the horizon of your business without much financial outlay. A creative info marketer for instance can get the owner of a huge database to endorse his product and broadcast that offer to the database. The effect of such can be phenomenal. There are a few rules guiding a JV:
· The parties involved must be persuaded that they have complementary skills that when pooled together can bring far superior results than individual efforts.
· The parties must believe that the skills they are bringing to the table are equally important and that no partner is superior or inferior to another.
· It helps if the parties involved in a joint venture agree ahead of time on the terms of the relationship and commit such in writing.
· The best form of sharing accruing income from the venture is a 50:50 formula where each party takes care of 50% of the expenses for running the business and also 50% of the income that comes from it. This assumes there is no senior partner or junior partner. - Prospecting for Instant Income
For a small business owner, generating prospective customers is the most important aspect of the instant income strategy. The trick is to seat down and organise all the tips and helpful strategies you have learnt into coordinated strategies. And a starting point is to find a niche you are comfortable with and do everything to own that niche. You should strive to become the experts people are looking for. In addition, you can also try a combination of the following strategies articulated in this chapter:
· Conduct preview workshops and start speaking: This is one of the quickest ways to establish authority in your line of business. Once you have identified your target audience, you can start to organise a series of preview meetings where people can have the opportunity of sampling at close range what you offer.
· You can place your literature in targeted locations: This is easy once you have identified your niche. You would simply identify business arenas where people in that niche can be found and you place your materials there.
· Ask customers and vendors for referrals. As you have read, testimonials are very powerful. You can take this to another level by asking your satisfied customers and suppliers to refer you to their friends and colleagues or introduce you to their circle of friends. - Making Instant Income on the Internet
Instant income through the internet should be one of the most fascinating approaches for small business owners but as Janet rightly writes in the section, most small business owners are demobilised by the technicalities of the internet and are there shut off from the amazing opportunities that are available on the internet. And it needs not to be so!
The interesting is that selling on the internet is just like selling offline as the same marketing process is involved. The only difference is that using the internet to market your product makes the marketing process faster and far more cost-effective. If you have been discouraged up till now, in this chapter you can access simple tips and strategies that can make it possible for you to integrate the internet into your sales process.
The rest of the strategies can be gleaned from the book.
