Jay Abraham Club

Attending the Jay Abraham event was a mix of participants from Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, China, Thailand, Indonesia and Hong Kong. Here are some brief ideas and examples I picked up from Jay Abraham on the first day. It does not include a fair bit of material that was emphasising on marketing mindset.

Continue reading » Strategic Business Building Weekend Singapore – Day 1

This is part 4 of a 12-part comprehensive summary of Mastermind Marketing System.

A Trick Question

How many ways are there to grow your business?

Not 1000, not 100, not 10. There are only three things you need to focus on:

Continue reading » The Three Most Powerful Ways to Increase Business – Increasing Your Number of Clients

How many referrals are you getting for your business right now? Take that number and multiply it by 40. That’s the potential increase in business you could be getting if you currently do not have a formal client referral system and you go on to implement one.

It might take some effort to put such a system in place but it will be well worth it. What is the customer lifetime value of a new client worth to you?

Furthermore, referred customers usually spend more money, buy more often, are more loyal, and tend to refer more.

Perhaps you feel awkward asking your clients for referrals. Look at it this way.

If your family or close friends are going to buy something important and you know that they might make a less than ideal choice or decision, you would definitely interede if you knew better.

Now, feel the same way for your clients. If they have friends who are looking at products or services in your area, you want them to make the best choice. If you know you can contribute and bring value to them, you certainly want your clients to refer them to you so that you can help them.

“If you show you care about your clients and how your products or service makes a difference in their lives, businesses, or careers, they will eagerly refer a constant flow of quality clients to you. All you have to do is show your clients what to do.”
Paragraph extracted from “Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got” by Jay Abraham.

I will like to share with you a referral marketing system that you might want to implement. Watch this 11-min referral movie to find out how you can keep in constant contact with your clients and show them that you care.

Gary Halbert, the great copywriter, has just passed away.

Got the news from a John Reese message in copywriters board.

It so happened that in the last Gary Halbert Letter he wrote before he died, he mentioned about me.

I have never met Gary in person before, but I can’t help but feel a sudden sense of loss. Even though he was a guru, Gary was a humble person who actually bothered to read and reply to my emails.

John Carlton, one of Gary’s best friends, wrote a touching tribute about Gary.

This is indeed a sad day for all of us.

Just a couple of days ago, I came across a well executed viral marketing campaign called Death of Internet Marketing (warning: site might take a while to load due to heavy traffic) that is worth a mention here. Read on to also find out how you can easily make some spare cash by being a part of this campaign.

The person behind this campaign is Mike Filsaime, a person who makes more than $4 million a year from his internet business in the highly competitive niche of internet marketing.

These are the numbers of registered users he has received (so far) as a result of this viral marketing campaign.

Saturday – 11,807 (Day One – 13 hours total)
Sunday 14196 (Full Day)
Monday – 8343 (First 17 hours)

Total = 34,346

A quick summary of his method:

1) Write a useful report and make it available for free.
2) Offer a direct cash incentive for people to give it away.
3) Introduce a time limited offer period.

If you are not familiar with the niche of internet marketing, some of the names and products that are mentioned in the report might be foreign to you. But the insights shared in his report can definitely be applied to the niche that you are operating in as well.

The method that Mike Filsaime used is hardly original but he made sure that it would become very viral by introducing an irresistible cash incentive to readers of the report.

If you share his report with your friends (something that you could easily do since the report is useful), you will get a token $1 for everyone that signs up to read the report.

The amount might not seem like much of an incentive but Mike made it viral by introducing a 2nd level payout. If the friends that you refer also do the same, you will also get the same payout on their referrals.

For example, if you refer 10 people to the report and they each refer 10 people as well, you will earn $100. Suddenly, this becomes much more attractive. Who knows, one of your friends might share the report with hundreds of people.

Mike is essentially paying $2 per person that signs up to read the report. I’m sure he has done his maths and he think it’s worthwhile to pay that amount. The danger of course is that there might be people who are totally uninterested in internet marketing and sign up just to earn the cash incentive. This will increase his real customer acquisition cost. Not to mention the likelihood of fraud.

So, if you want to do something similar, better sure make there is some way of qualifying the people properly. It is also a good idea to run the promotion for a specified time period.

Another problem that you might want to plan for is overloaded servers due to massive amount of traffic. This is something that Mike encountered as well. And last of all, make sure that you have enough budget!

Here’s a question from one of my readers:

I work for a driving school and i am going to start implementing Jay’s teachings

: Referral system

: Risk free guarantee

: And joint ventures

My question is this: I want to give all local business in the area postcards, that endorse us as the best driving school. And for every client we get, we will pay them �10.

The biggest problem i can see is that, business owners may feel that we will rip them off and not pay them the money. How do i get around this hurdle?

Also joint venture partners: finding people who can’t drive but want to learn is not that easy because there isn’t a list you can rent, or clubs or associations..

The only JV Partners i can think of are:

Colleges/ students- who don’t have much money

Estate agents / (Realtors)

Here’s my reply:

Given that your potential customer falls in a very targeted group, it is unclear to me how an untargeted local business would actually give out your postcards. If it’s only to a select group of their clients, will you be helping them to narrow down their list?

And getting them to endorse you as the “best” driving school might be a tall order, since you can’t really quantify that.

Instead of trying to “hit” on all local companies, you might want to narrow down to companies with clients that have a closer profile of people that you are looking for.

You also mentioned your concern about skeptical companies worrying about being paid. Most incentive based referral systems work because both parties have a prior working relationship, e.g. existing customers, etc.

As the �10 referral fee is quite low anyway, why not try this approach?

For example, you identified college students as people who might be interested to learn driving. Are there any local stores at your place that serve mainly this age group?

Approach them and tell them something along this line, “I represent a driving school and would like to give you something of value that most of your customers would find useful. At no cost to you, you can use it to enhance your relationship with your existing customers and also use it to bring in more customers.

Here’s a booklet of driving lesson coupons with values ranging from �10 to �50 that you can use for your promotions. One way of using them is to offer a �10 coupon whenever someone makes a �10 purchase.” And so on…

In this way, there’s absolutely no risk to the local business in doing a joint venture with you. To take it up even further, you can also request them to provide similar coupons to you that you can offer as bonus to the students at your driving school. In this way, you will be driving new customers to them and also giving something of value to your students.

Last point. Does your school offer refresher driving lessons or advance driving lessons (possibly with some defensive driving elements)? If there is, you can also try setting up JVs at places where people buy cars!