Steve Mills - Online Entrepreuership with the SPOKE system

Stress Of Connection Culture

I just saw an article today on the news.com.au website about the effect of email on productivity

The main thrust of the article is shown below.

“THE average employee is productive at work for just four hours a day due to a flood of disruptive emails and phone calls, according to a new study.
And the biggest culprit, say workers, is the constant interruption from internal emails.
The lost productivity is costing business billions of dollars a year and also taking a toll on workers’ health, with three quarters complaining of stress from too many distractions in the office, the Daily Mail reports. “

Now this is not a new phenomenon, there have been reports coming out like this very frequently for the last 10 years. As soon as business started to give their staff email and internet access the phenomena of continuous partial attention was born. There are so many things that you need to do, so many different streams of information that need to be monitored, and so many interruptions that you never get into a “flow” state. This leads with difficulty concentrating on complex tasks and working on large projects.

The thing is though, that as we move into an information economy this way of working is the norm. My job actually requires me to be monitoring and reacting to many different information streams, to be writing email, to be answering social media messages. The ability to be able to gather, synthesize and output large and diverse streams of information is going to be the skill to have for the next decade. The trick is to be able to do this, and then be able to “switch off” at some stage and manage your stress levels, interact with your “offline community” family and look after your mental and physical health.

There are a number of both subtle and large psychological changes that seem to occur in the always connected mind, from a mild nagging feeling that you are missing out on something if you are not online, to stress attacks from the overwhelming information. It can be as addicting as it can be empowering.

There is a current that is flowing through the blogging community at the moment as to whether social networking and microblogging on twitter is a distraction or if it is a vital piece of work to be integrated into the day. I think we need to explore what are the costs and benefits to connecting technologies, in the short term to our stress levels, ability to concentrate and ability to switch of, but also in the long term to beneficial results on career, connection, community and learning.

It is very early days for this technology, and we are just seeing the first glimpses of our future as a connected world.

Lifetime Customer Value Explained

One of the key concepts to learn if you want to successfully run a sustainable online business is the idea of lifetime customer value. I define LCV as how much the customer is worth over the lifetime of your relationship with your business.

HUNTERS & FARMERS

Some businesses can be seen as hunters, and some as farmers. The hunters are focused on a single sale, and will do everything the can to get a customer perform one specific action, buy their product. Once purchased, they don’t perform any specific actions to get that customer to purchase from them again. They are not interested in having to provide long term value or in retaining the customer.

Farmers however understand the importance of building long term relationships with clients. They want to nurture and grow relationships with their customers so that they can continue to provide more products and services with ever increasing value to them. The cost of retaining your existing customers if often far less then the cost of acquiring new “cold” ones via advertising and other marketing methods.

LCV is all about keeping customers as YOUR customers, stopping them being tempted to look at competing products, and when they do look elsewhere they retain a loyalty to your brand that makes them come back, based on the relationship that you have developed with them.

Real farmer businesses realise the LCV as so important that they will give their first sale away almost for free in order to get that customer into their sales funnel. I will leave the concept of sales funnels to another time, but in short a sales funnel is a range of different products that you can provide a customer after the initial purchase. In general, these products are a) more expensive and b) more closely tailored to the qualified customers needs. So by giving away the first sale profits to those that promote their business (affiliates, retailers) the very top of the sales funnel acquires a lot of customers that you can then promote other products too.

A REAL WORLD EXAMPLE

A real world example to consider would be the sale of inkjet printers. You can go and buy one from your local office supply mega warehouse for $100, which at the time seems to be a bargain. You use the printer for a few months, printing off photos, documents and CD labels, and all of this goes well until one day a flashing icon tells you that the ink has run out.
It is only when you go back to the store and look at the price of the ink cartridges that you realise that it is going to cost you $120 to refill the ink for your $100 printer.
The printer company now has extended your LCV with them by giving away the printers for near cost price, and now make all of their costs back on the ink.

While this example does not really do the sales funnel model justice (it only has one tier to the funnel, which is buy more ink), it does show you how lucrative it can be to develop a business model with LCV as a key factor.
WHY IT IS IMPORTANT

When you understand lifetime customer value the importance of mailing lists, social networking and making sure that everything you produce has real value to it becomes apparent.

This is why membership sites, online courses and mentoring are such great opportunities online. You are constantly in front of the customer, providing real value and a service which they would rather get from you then anyone else.

There are lot of terms and specific theory around Lifetime Customer Value such as churn rate, retention rate, retention cost, discount rate and a lot more which I will cover in some detail over the coming weeks.

The Vital Spark For Your Online Projects

There are no shortage of programs, courses and books out there showing you how to make your business work online. You will read one and it will tell you to go through steps A…Z and at the end you should be making X amount of dollars per month.

It looks simple, and if you followed their step by step approach you too should see similar results (if they are being truthful, please do a bit of checking out any incredible or unbelievable “too good to be true” statements at least a little bit sceptically before jumping in headlong).

For most internet marketers, blog owners and other online business people the road to profits starts to look a bit harder as soon as the information has been digested. Because now, when it becomes time to put the theory in to action you hit the first road bump. You need a market to apply this fantastic information to, and idea to base the system on, a topic to write your fantastic new ebook about.

There is plenty of information out there about using Google tools to find a niche, and this is a very good method of finding what people are searching for, and what they are finding as a result of those searches. If you can offer something that is significantly better then what is currently being offered in that niche (or can market / convert the traffic better) then give it a go.

Also, be creative around your research into niches. As the online marketplace has matured, new niches (ones that are profitable) have become as rare as hens teeth. But they are still out there, and new ones are created every day. Just keep your eyes and ears open, look at innovative ways of using the technology. For instance there are a few books starting to appear about using twitter as a marketing tool. Keep your finger on the pulse, be an early adopter of the next big web thing and then inform all of those that jump on the bandwagon later on.

The idea around your internet business and the niche that you target with your material is one of the fundamental keystones to your online efforts. If it is a good niche it could be plugged into any model. Ebook sales, membership site, adsense, affiliate sales.

Retune your information stream

If you are a blogger or internet marketer, you will be only too aware of the overwhelming amount of information that is released every day. It is an endless torrent in which some days you find something of relevance, or a concept that you can apply easily to your business. Other days it feels like you are drowning in a sea of sales pages, marketing hype, time wasting posts and RSS.

 

This saturation of media can be thought of as a stream, a constant input of information that your mind has to process, fit into your current model of the world and make sense of.

To simplify things, we can be seen as a computer that takes inputs from our environment and creates outputs in our actions, words and communication with others. Just like you are what you eat, you are what you read, watch and hear to a large extent.

SHAPE THE INFORMATION STREAM 

In order to succeed in business online, you need to be able to make focussed, clear actions in a defined direction. If you set out to write one concise post every three days, or to write 1000 words on a new book or interactive course then you should be shaping your information stream to help you attain that goal. If not, the sea of competing ideas can easily distract you.

I am not saying that you shouldn’t read some things that are off the topic, but perhaps a good rule of thumb is 80% on topic (for the project that you are currently working on) and 20% other information.

TUNE IN AND TURN ON

An apt analogy would be that of listening to a radio (the old, analogue type, not internet radio) when the dial is a bit off the station. The signal is filled with noise, useless junk information that is stopping you from clearly hearing the message that is supposed to be coming through (or at least that nickelback song they keep playing).

If you tune the radio and get rid of the noise and static (useless information) then the signal (useable & actionable information) becomes clearer.

The best way I know to re-align my information stream with my goals is to go through my automatic information collections (rss feeds, email lists, bookmarks, blogrolls) and optimize them for the market or niche that I am working in.

Sort your RSS so that you are constantly seeing information from the top experts, and not being inundated with useless information or empty hype.

I am currently going through this exercise myself, trimming down my RSS subscriptions to a manageable level, only keeping the ones that have consistently provided me with valuable or interesting content.

Removing those that have failed to deliver gives you space to add new interesting feeds when you see them and not have them get lost in the noise. I have been unsubscribing from mailing lists that never have anything of interest, and only keeping the ones that fill my inbox with useable, relevant information.