Ten highly successful income generation ideas for your business

I have just spent two days with 60 inspiring entrepreneurs discussing new ways to generate significant income.  In Solihull.

Nothing wrong with Solihull – it has a John Lewis and a lot of charm – but more importantly it’s home to Nigel Botterill and his many successful businesses.

We paid a lot of money for this conference/masterclass and Nigel delivered everything promised – the insights into all his businesses, what worked and what didn’t and his formula for what is essentially making money out of knowledge.  It’s not easy, requires sophisticated digital marketing and just about every method of lead generation you have ever used or heard of.

Here are just a few of the tips and ideas that I took away and could be applied to any business

1.      Give a talk about your own expertise

Nigel said that putting his talk together reminded him of so many things that he needs to do more of in his own business.

I’ve been preparing masterclasses of my own for businesses on using social media – for the University of York.  And I now have a checklist of a dozen things that I am telling others to do and need to do more of in our own business!

Pull out materials that you produced a few years ago.  Re-use them in newsletters (you can give them a heading ‘from the archives’), tweet about them, do links to old blogs.  We’ve been doing a series of ‘from the archives’ on Twitter for a number of our clients, linking to old blogs which are still really good and valid.

3.      Play the role of stern parent

Nigel runs an Entrepreneur’s Circle and reckons that at times his entrepreneurs want him to be cajoling and bullying.  I suspect we are sometimes a bit too ‘cajoling’ for our clients at times, but most businesses welcome someone who is on their side and helps them to make things happen.

4.      Monthly newsletters must be monthly

Apparently there is evidence that suggests that the value of a buyer diminishes by at least 10% per month for each month that passes after the previous transaction that you fail to communicate and nurture the relationship.  So you need to stay in touch with your customers after they have bought.

5.      Great software

Nigel uses Kajabi – software that you can set up your own membership sites through.  Ideal for managing access to information products – they capture email addresses etc and analyse who visits, clicks etc.  Another delegate mentioned Delavo which is apparently very similar and also great.

6.     Infusionsoft

Anyone who has followed us on Twitter will know we have had nightmares with Infusionsoft this year.  But it is our CRM and campaign software and the pain to move has been too great so far.  However, Nigel raved about this and said he would rather cut off the electricity than lose Infusionsoft.  As we were leaving someone recommended another software which we will investigate.

 7.      Repurposing

This is really important in information marketing.  What content have you produced that you could reformat and use in different ways?  Turning a blog into a video; an article into an audio version; transcribe a video and publish as a pdf?  People like information in different ways – you don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.

8.      Feature successful customers

We produce endless case studies for our clients and indeed, ourselves.  But do we actually feature these enough in an interesting enough way?  It’s a win/win for everyone.

 9.      Print is not dead

Nigel and others in the room were all extolling the virtues of printed newsletters – but give them personality and make them vibrant.  And there was someone in the room who has a business to help you create them easily – the Newspaperguy!  He was asked to talk about his business and – I hope he’s not offended – but he didn’t make a great fist of it.  Then three others said how great he is and proved the value of third party endorsements!

10.      And the tenth?

Well, Nigel asked us to keep a lot of the insights from these two days to ourselves.  So if you want to find out more, I guess you will need to join his Entrepreneur’s Circle!  

To sum it all up, there is a huge amount of potential in information marketing.  You have to get a lot more ‘out there’ and salesy – is that the right word? – than I always feel comfortable with.  But there is no doubt there is a massive opportunity here and we plan to become expert in this.