WHY YOU ARE NOT MAKING SALES

Making Sales is a crucial part for your business.

No matter how good you build your products and your business strategy, your business will be in trouble if you fail to make decent sales.

Here’s the reality: if you want to earn an income from a product you’ve created – a web app, an e-book, an iOS app, or desktop software – you’re going to put a price on it and ask people to buy.

You might not like it, but there’s no other way. No one is going to just give you money so that you can achieve your dreams. Truthfully, customers don’t really care about you; they’re just regular people looking to solve their own problems.

It’s not about you

I keep meeting brilliant people who are building products wrong. It’s not the technical aspects that are wrong; the problem is they’re not starting with the customer in mind. They’re starting with themselves. Instead of finding pain that people need solved, they’re focused on their own needs: they want to use the latest tech, the latest framework, the latest design technique.

It’s not about you.

No seriously, it’s not about you. If you want a business, you can’t be your own customer.
If you started your project without talking to a single soul you’re doing it wrong. If you’ve talked to 100 people, it won’t matter until you connect with a group of people who need your help. That’s where you start. Not with yourself, and your ideas, but with other people.

You’re not connecting with a real need

Derek Sivers tells a great story about trying to make it in the music business. He hustled for years as a musician, but his career never really took off. Then he created CD Baby, a site that allowed artists to sell their music. This was before PayPal existed, and setting up a shopping cart was difficult. The company he’d accidentally created in a weekend, took off and became a great success.

“I’d finally created something people wanted. It was like I’d written a hit song. Once you have a hit, all the locked doors open wide. People love it so much, it seems to promote itself. Don’t persistently do what’s not working.”

Finding a hit means starting with people (as I mentioned above), and figuring out what they need.
You don’t start with code, or with an idea; you start by listening to people. It’s inherently difficult to find a genuine pain that others have for two reasons:


We’re inherently self-focused, and not thinking about the needs of others
A lot of legitimate problems have boring solutions, or solutions that require hard work


You might be a photographer that really wants to do artsy photo shoots for magazines. But the reality is that there are more weddings that need photographers than artsy magazines. Doing artsy photos is a desire you have for yourself; being a wedding photographer connects with a need people actually have. You can test this easily by searching Craigslist: how many people are looking for wedding photographers? How many people want to pay you just so you can express yourself creatively in a way that is satisfying only to you?

Tell me about what you’re selling

Whenever people tell me they’ve built a new product, I ask them to tell me about it, or show me the web page.
This is where words really matter. Every elevator pitch, landing page, or sales letter basically boils down to this formula:

You (the customer) have ___ problem.
Hire my product, and you’ll solve that problem.

That’s it. However, that’s easier said than done. The key is to keep it as simple and as direct as you can. The customer doesn’t need to hear about your philosophy or your ideals. They don’t need to hear your mission statement. All they want to know is: “Can you solve my problem?”

You need to appeal to the person with the checkbook

This is often the hardest part for creatives to swallow. When you’re selling to businesses, you’re not appealing to the cool, hip designer, or the brilliant engineer. Usually, you’re selling to a boring manager with a checkbook. They don’t care about what framework you used for your software, or about that beautiful font pairing you made. Generally they only care about four things:


How will this make me more money?
How will this save me more money?
How will this save me more time?
How will this make me look good?


I know: capitalistic, boring, pragmatic and vain. And yet while things like user experience, design, and technical architecture do matter over the long haul, they’re not going to get you the sale up-front. Your value proposition is what gets you the sale; everything else helps you keep the sale (or creates repeat sales).

Tips Before Launching Your Side Business to Make Money

No. 1: Figure out what you have to offer

Before starting your own business, it’s necessary to get a sense of the overall market, and where you might be able to fit in.

“Go to popular ecommerce sites like Etsy, or sites like Fiverr, Elance.com or Freelancer.com, to see how people are making money,” says Palmer. (Fiverr is a marketplace for online services costing $5, while Elance and Freelancer.com help people find freelance gigs online.) By exploring online marketplaces, Palmer says budding entrepreneurs can better understand what they might be able to offer that’s unique, or how to price services that others are offering.

No. 2: Keep costs down.

Palmer says a common mistake first-time entrepreneurs make is spending too much to get a business off the ground.

“It’s easy to take advantage of existing e-commerce sites,” says Palmer, like Etsy or eBay. By setting up shop on one of these platforms, Palmer says entrepreneurs can bypass the need for a potentially costly website.

No. 3: Identify your weaknesses.

While you may be an experienced graphic designer, you may not have a lot of marketing or sales experience. Once you figure out what you don’t know, Palmer suggests connecting with other entrepreneurs online to improve your own abilities.

“I copied what the people I admired were doing,” says Palmer. In her case, the key to marketing her money workbooks was getting coverage on popular online blogs aimed at mothers; by reaching out to these writers, Palmer was able to increase sales.

No. 4: Test the marketplace.

“It’s hard to know or predict what customers want,” says Palmer. She says soliciting feedback from clients can help you figure out exactly what’s going to resonate with your target audience. In her personal experience, Palmer started out selling paper money planners, but soon discovered that buyers were more interested in online money workbooks.

No. 5: Embrace challenges.

If you’re a first-time entrepreneur, it’s unlikely you’ll hit it out of the ballpark on your first try. However, Palmer says new business owners can’t let early-stage struggles get them down.

 “Know there will be failures and bumps along the road. Being entrepreneurial means there’s going to be rejection. It just means you have to tweak things or slightly change what you’re offering,” says Palmer.

What It Takes To Be Small Business Owner

Do You Have What It Takes To Be a Small Business Owner?

Many people dream of owning their own business, but of all of those people, only a few will actually try to make that dream a reality. Of those people, even fewer will be a success. The economy, location, and other variables can mean the difference between success and failure, but at times it is the person that is running the business. Some people are just not cut out for doing something of this magnitude. There is nothing small about being a small business owner. Only certain personality types can really make a go of a business on their own.

For one, a small business owner must be a self starter. This means that someone will take on whatever needs to be done, even when it seems that there is no rush or even need for that thing to be done. They do not have laundry sitting in the washer because they left it for later, and they are always the ones that seem to have a plan half formed before a problem gets big enough to need attention. These are the people that did homework before they left school, went the extra mile for friends without being asked, and always seemed willing to help someone else when they needed it.

A good small business owner tends to be the same person that never had time to go out and have fun for themselves. While they may have time, they always think of something more important that needs to be done. This may make them a bore when you want someone to go out with on the weekend, but this also makes them a success if they want to start a business. They have a drive and determination to put in the hours needed to make a small business a success, even if it is at the expense of their personal life.

Running a business is not a nine to five, forty hours a week type of endeavor. You have to work twice that if not more. You may find a few people you trust in the long run so that you can take more time for yourself, but when a small business owner has the entire weight of the success of their business on his or her shoulders, they are not the type to let that slide. You may find them at work more often than they are anywhere else, as least while getting the business up and off of the ground.

Not everyone has what it takes to be a small business owner. That does not mean they do not have skills and talent, it just means that this is not for them. If you wonder if you are able and ready, think about an endeavor that can be overwhelmingly exciting, but also something that can take over your entire life. If you have the drive and the will do to that and don't mind giving it every ounce of energy you can muster on any given day, you may just have what it takes to be a success small business owner.

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Money Saving Tips

Money Saving Tips

It seems that nothing causes more stress than money. You have to keep in mind how much people need funding and rely on capital every day. Cold hard cash is what pays the mortgage, keeps you clothed, allows you to have a car and go places, keeps the light and heats on, enables you to bathe daily, and even puts food in your mouth so you don't starve. Naturally the majority of us cannot live without money. The only problem is that we tend to spend more than we actually have. This is the downside of credit cards. Everyone in this day and age wants to spend beyond their means because they can! It's time for some money saving tips.

Knowing a few money saving tips can really put that extra cash in your savings account where it belongs. One of the first things you should do is figure out your bills or monthly expenses. This means things like your mortgage or rent, car payment, food bill, utilities, and cable or Internet. Add all of these up and look at the lump sum you need monthly. Now subtract that amount from the money you make monthly, assuming you make enough to pay the bills, which most people do. Okay, at this point you need to think about all of the extras you spend on each week or day. This can be all sorts of things, but you may not typically consider them.

At this point, let's go over common extras that people spend on all the time. Knowing what these things are will help you start saving money. First of all, there is the caffeine bill. How often do you purchase a coffee outside of your home? These can cost anywhere from two to five bucks a pop. If you're buying one every day, that's a lot of cash each week spent on java fixes. So one money saving tip is to cut this out, or at least limit yourself to one or two lattes each week. Now consider your cable bill. Do you pay for the full movie package? More importantly, do you even watch what you pay for? Most people don't. So this is one of the more obvious money saving tips. Don't throw away your cash on wasted entertainment you won't even miss. What about dining out. This may be the number one issue with people in America today. Everyone spends oodles of money dining in restaurants daily. You would save so much if you ate at home. Now, these are just basic money saving tips that can benefit most people. You have to keep in mind that these mundane expenses add up very quickly.