Category: Entrepreneurship

Working with a lot of people in a lot of different industries, a few years ago my focus was shifted towards the music business while working with Ryan Leslie on a project of his.

In doing so, talking to him and looking at what he’s doing I came to realise that being independent in business takes longer… But results in owning more of your sh*t.

What I mean? 

Owning something could make the difference when your business is on the line. Let’s create a theory here: you start a website, buy a domain and order hosting from a hosting company like GoDaddy. You pay them to deliver a product and you become their customer and you’ll be depending on their services. They own the server, they are the registrar (fancy word for domain registration company ;)).

You run your business as normal, but one month you’re short in money to pay your hosting bill. 

Wouldn’t it be better at that moment to have your own your servers and be your own registrar rather then using another company’s resources?

It would wouldn’t it?

Am I saying that everyone should go out, start their own hosting company and thus “owning” more of their business? No.

This works for me and Sharon, and let me remind you: everything works. Not everything works for YOU.

We’re in the service business. We create tools and softwares that we need to run our own business from our little home near The Hague. No fancy cars, no fancy clothes, no extra rooms. About 75% of our home is dedicated to our business like full-size desks with 27’ iMacs, seating area to receive guests, a (very small) kitchen where we cook and a tiny bedroom that barely fits the bed we sleep in.

It’s all we need. Can we get a bigger house? Sure. But we don’t want to just yet, it’s sowing season ;).

Point of my post is, that in the end it’s better to have as much control as possible and if you want control, you’ll have to literally own the process. You’ll succeed where others fail and will make more money along the way…

The value of this post: How can you do what we do?

Another theory: you’re looking into sending bulk emails but have no clue who’s good, what works and what doesn’t and you don’t want to find out either: you’d rather manage it yourself.

Here’s what we did: we started our own email system. Our own opt in forms. Our own lists on our own servers. Our own autoresponder system that does EXACTLY what WE want it to do for our business. We spent hours and hours setting everything up, getting it ready to rumble and making sure we’d achieve the best results possible for our email marketing.

While working on other projects, we figured out customers needed the same software we needed… So we sold it to them for a monthly fee months ago… AND THEY ARE STILL PAYING EACH MONTH TO RECEIVE OUR EMAIL SERVICE.

So trust us when we say: It’s worth it owning your sh*t.

In today’s market, I can’t help but see that people don’t care about a product anymore… They just want a product that converts. 

How? Don’t care. Why? Don’t care. When? ASAP. X% Commissions? Mucho important!

But what if the product is bad? What if it does not deliver what is promised? “Well, I made a commission!”.
Years ago I was working at a call center. I worked a 9 to 5 calling people who had an internet plan with their provider, and it was my job to upsell them to a higher plan… Whether they needed it or not. 

I found myself calling people at the age of sometimes as high as 80, offering them “double the internet speed and double the internet quality for the same price!” which of course is something no 80-year-old would ever need. They hardly used the internet at all other than to stay in touch with their children and grandchildren, but were not downloading albums, movies, and software. They browsed the web and sent some e-mails… No need for a double-speed internet plan.

Being me, I asked my floor manager if there was another product to sell. It didn’t feel right.
When I walked out of the door at work, you know: the point where you are supposed to “leave your work” it didn’t stop. I was thinking to myself why I just sold a high-speed internet plan to an 80-year-old man living in a retirement home, where the most exciting part of the day was what type of meat he’d get during dinner. How could I sell this man high-speed internet…

That’s the feeling I’m talking about: People don’t care. Let me adjust: Marketers don’t care.

They think about the conversion rates, the commission they get on a sale, and before promoting a product making an estimate for themselves how much they could earn off their promotions.

Now don’t get me wrong: we’re here to make money, but shouldn’t the first priority be what the product is? If it’s of good quality? Would it actually suit and benefit the person I’m offering it/selling it to?

These are all questions that revolve around ethics and in my opinion (and Sharon’s too) should always come before the need and/or desire of making the sale.

If you’re in this game long enough, you know how to close a sale: perhaps that’s for another blog post, what I’m trying to say here is that your name is more important than making a quick buck. Look into your audience, reach out to them, get to know them, and see what product matches their needs.

Make sure you know exactly what they want, and understand what they want, and look into your product arsenal and see what you can deliver. Go to JVZoo, look for a product that matches their need (search for a product as an affiliate) and request your affiliate link. Depending on the offer and product you’re looking for, you can rake in up to 100% commissions per sale. 

You don’t need your own product, you don’t need a website and you sure as hell don’t need to invest in a $1000 course to learn how to do all this… It should “make sense to you”.

All you have to do is be well informed. Know your products, own the products (if possible), and recommend them with the knowledge that it actually fits the person you are selling it to, not your wallet. 

In this post we’re going to predict the future: Bots for Messenger is going to be one of the next biggest selling platforms that will be available to the general public.

It could be used to generate income online more easily than ever.

The simple fact alone that you can now auto-reply to a Messenger message is going to absolutely change the game:
Imagine being able to predict the question that the customer will ask you, and auto replying to that within just five minutes.

But not only that the: Facebook API is now allowing you to build your own custom bots. 
What we’re planning to do is create an application that allows to define keywords and based upon those keywords you’re going to be able to auto-reply a Message to your potential customer.

Once this is done we’ll release a beta version to the public where people are able to get in for life and get limited updates, support, feature requests and so much more. 

Imagine the ability to create an autoresponder for your messenger app…
That’s all we’re going to say about it though because we’re already working on a platform for you to use… We’re looking forward to inviting you soon to what we predict is the future of online selling.

Cheers,
Aron & Sharon