Prosper Newsletter: August 2007 > Entrepreneurship

You understand that the following information is educational in nature and is not intended to be legal, accounting, or tax advice. You are responsible for your own financial decisions and should consult your own legal, accounting, and tax advisors before making your financial decisions.

Become an Authority

There are ten basic things that help you become a recognized authority in your chosen field. They are as follows:

Last month we covered the first three topics, this month we will look at three more and will finish this series next month.

Publish a Newsletter or E-course

You could also publish a newsletter. A lot of people disseminate educational material through their newsletters. This involves relationship marketing, which means keeping up positive and frequent communication with two types of people. Those people are people who work with online websites and people who deal in off-line business. They are also known as buyers and window shoppers.

A step above a newsletter is an e-course. It has the same educational value as a newsletter. For example, you could give an e-course on internet marketing. It would contain the same material that you would find in a newsletter, but the difference would be that it would be an action and not just something that you read. It also allows you to program and institutionalize your relationship with your prospects. You are actually setting yourself up as the teacher. You are educating them and giving them assignments, and are programming people to think that you are the teacher and you know more about the topic that you do. People like direction and being led. This allows you to be their leader.

Try to stay away from giving away free items in your e-course because then you can be sure that people are coming to you to learn and not to just get something for nothing. People like the word free, but use it sparingly. For example, "Sign up for our free e-course, valued at $19.95." That way people know that your product has value, and that they are getting a deal.

Make Public Speeches

The next thing you can do is to make speeches. Trade journals and publications set up expos, seminars and annual conventions, so you can look into upcoming events and contact the hosts to set up a speaking engagement. You would need to send in a 100 to 200-word proposal for a topic that you would like to present. The tricky thing is they usually set up these events about eight to ten months in advance.

There are two things to remember as you are giving your speech. Your topic needs to be of general interest to a large market, and you have to spend some time focusing a little bit on your specialty. If you don't know trade publications or don't have lists of these conventions, pick up the Encyclopedia of Associations, published by Gale Research that can be found in most libraries. It will have names and addresses of all the conventions and annual meetings.

When you are accepting an invitation to speak at a convention, remember to ask a few questions before you say yes. Ask them who the audience is, who the host is, the theme of the convention, who spoke last year, and if your transportation costs are covered. Basically ask what is in it for you. If most speakers get $3,500 per speech, you can use that as your bargaining chip because you will be speaking for free. You can ask them to waive the fee in exchange for a list of attendees, to give you more time to speak, to negotiate your company's brochure into all their promotional items, or to let you publish some of your articles on their website.

Speak at Your Own Seminars

You can also speak at your own seminars. It will give you great practice for your speaking and communicating skills, but it will also be good for selling or consulting from the stage. You could give them a test or quiz to rate their skills and motivation, and then invite the people with a higher score to come down to the front, so you are aware of who the best candidates are. Then you can invite the rest of the crowd to go to the back of the room, take ten seconds to reevaluate if they are really interested and ready, and then watch as many more people come to the front more motivated and interested than before.

Testimonial

Irresistible Offer

This past week I used the concept of making an irresistible offer. This was with a client who was on the fence on purchasing a new web site and my services that went with the site. Price was his only real issue. To close the deal I went back and offered him a year of free hosting, a cost savings to him of $360.00, and my cost is $240.00. This is all it took for him to finally sign and move on the project worth $3400.00 to my business. I intend to do this more often to close deals where the same objection exists.

Patrick M.

Tip of the Month

Seasons of Love

How has all the Prosper coaching that we've received continued to manifest success in our lives?

Certainly the continued growth of our business is one powerful indicator of the success that Prosper has helped us achieve. In our most recent sales month of April, 2007 our revenue grew by 51% from a year ago.

Our Internet movie "Seasons of Love" has already touched thousands of relationships in over 60 countries around the world even before we actually started its marketing campaign.

And we see in our immediate future added streams of income because of our new Internet store and a new, larger product we are releasing next week. We also have many other initiatives that we are working toward more quickly than ever before.

We feel fortunate that we've been able to hire two virtual assistants and delegate many of the routine jobs that used to eat up so much of our time.

And yes, it's nice that we've had more money and been able to get many of the things that money can buy because of our new financial status. But Nancy and I are also equally appreciative of the added dimension to our lives of more fun, less stress and more balance.

We're taking dance lessons and go out dancing every week. We've had more time to be with friends. We've joined a new gym and take time almost every day to walk in nature, on our own schedule, without having to fight traffic every day just to earn a paycheck.

Yes, we still work hard, but we love our life and we love our business. We see a day when everything that Prosper has taught us will truly set us free. Because our trajectory is pointing us to the stars.

And that feels good to us.

All the best,
Lee and Nancy

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