Who am I kidding, there’s no such thing as a “low maintenance” business lol.
There are always a number of things to “maintain” in business but there are ways you can design your business so that it takes less time and effort to run (and so that it fits your lifestyle better too).
Most of the coaches & consultants who find me tend to share some common struggles.
They’re tired of being on calls all the time.
Consulting calls, strategy sessions, summits, group q&a’s, etc.
They enjoy what they do but it can also be draining at times and so they reach out for help on how to create something that is more “low maintenance” or at least something with less tail.
Meaning that once you sell something you don’t have to do extra work to fulfill what you sold.
My suggestion is almost always the same.
Step 1 – Transition part (or all) of your business to info-products.
Why info-products?
Because once an info-product is created, you can sell it over and over again without any tail.
You may occasionally update the Ebook, audio, or video series, but for the most part that’s the end of your work on the info-product.
You can minimize the number of updates you need to make by choosing a more evergreen topic rather than something that changes every few months.
Step 2 – Simplify everything down to 2 SKUs.
SKU #1 is a simple E-book, audio, or video series that solves a specific pain point your market has. This product is usually priced at $100 or below. This is what you’ll use to acquire customers.
Then…
SKU #2 is another info-product that goes deeper into the topic, more “Advanced” content or something that is more comprehensive rather than just the one pain point you solved with SKU #1. This product can be priced anywhere from $197 – $1,000+ depending on your niche. This product is where you’ll make most of your profit. You can sell this as a 1-click upsell to your first product.
Step 3 – Spend a few months creating, testing, and improving a solid sales page for your SKU #1 product.
If you do this part right, your sales page can last years with little to no changes.
One of the sales pages I’ve written so far has lasted for 4+ years with little to no changes, has generated over 17,000+ customers and is still going strong despite a price increase we made on the front-end product.
Another one generated 20,000+ customers over a 5 year period with little to no changes as well.
Of course, it helps to be in an evergreen niche where things don’t change very often!
Step 4 – Simultaneously, during those same few months, work on building a stable of working ads that you can rotate throughout the year.
It’s a simple fact that ads will wear out.
They work great initially but then will drop in performance as time goes on.
The mistake most people make however is that once an ad stops working they just toss it in the trash never to be seen again.
Instead of doing that, find a series of ads that work really well to get people over to your sales page. Once they stop working just put them back in your “ad box” and a few months later you can use it again with similar results to when you initially launched it.
Step 5 – Set Up 30 Day Retargeting Campaigns On Google & Facebook
These are campaigns that will show ads to people who visited your sales page but did not buy immediately.
This is like having a 30-day email autoresponder except instead of seeing you in their inbox (which some of them will via Gmail ads) they will also see you on Facebook, Search, and on Banner ads on almost every site they visit for the next 30 days.
These campaigns are pretty much “set it and forget it” type campaigns and usually deliver a great ROI because they catch a lot of buyers who had planned to buy but for whatever reason were interrupted on their first visit.
Step 6 – During the same few months, work on improving your Upsell Copy (that sells Sku #2)…
…so that you get an increasing numbers of Sku #1 buyers to “upgrade” to Sku #2 right away.
The more sku #2 buyers you get the more profit you’ll make.
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At this point, your “maintenance” is your focus on three key things…
Thing #1 – What does it cost me to acquire a customer?
You do this by taking your total advertising investment and dividing it by your total number of customers. That is your Customer Acquisition Cost.
Thing #2 – Do I make more revenue than that from sales of SKU #1 & #2 combined?
Take your total revenue from sales of SKU #1 & #2 and divide it by your total number of customers. This is your Average Order Value.
Thing #3 – To make the spendable cash I want each month, how many customers do I need to get each month/day?
Take the difference between your Average Order Value and your Customer Acquisition Cost. That is your NET average order value.
Then take whatever spendable cash you want to make each month and divide that by your NET average order value and that will give you the # of new customers you need to get each month.
If you want the daily number then you can divide that monthly number by about 30 days.
So let’s say it costs you $70 to acquire a customer and your average order value is about $200, then your NET average order value is $130.
Let’s say you wanted to make $10,000 spendable cash each month, then you know you need to get about 77 new customers each month (maybe a little more than that if you want to account for your merchant processor fees) – that’s a little under 3 new customers each day.
The best part about all this is every sale you make does not require any strategy sessions, no consulting calls, no group q&a’s, and almost no tail because these are info-products. Of course there will still be some customer service emails to handle and things like that but nothing too bad.
Having said all that…
While it’s a simple business model that is generally “lower maintenance”, it is NOT easy to set up and can take several months or even a year or two to fully dial-in everything to the point that you can “coast” and make more or less by simply turning a few dials up or down. That’s the truth, no matter how fast the gurus say it can be done.
However, if you’re wanting to cut some or all of the consulting calls, phone-time, or zoom-time out of your life then this may be a worthwhile solution for you.
You can run this as an additional profit-center to something you are already doing that you enjoy and reduce some of your “consulting/phone/zoom time” OR you can replace it altogether if that’s what you want.
See you next time…
-Eddys Velasquez
DigitalMarketingRx
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