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8 Ways To Make More Money As A Consultant

June 30, 2014 by Marc Guberti 1 Comment

Consultation Session

I have been exploring more ways to make money through my expertise. There are plenty to choose from such as creating training courses, writing books, and other options as well. However, I recently tapped into another source of income that has many benefits: consulting others. You get to charge an hourly rate, and as you get more people, you will become more successful. However, many people who say they are consultants struggle to make a respectable revenue from their job. While some consultants make thousands of dollars every month, others are struggling to get 1 person to consult with every month. In order to make more money as a consultant, follow these 8 tips.

Charge more for your consultations. This one seems like a no-brainer, but it is this kind of attitude towards this method that prevents people from getting better results. Think about it this way. Consultant A charges $50 per 1 hour consultation and gets 6 people every month for an hour each. Consultant B charges $100 per hour and gets 3 people every month for an hour each. Consultant A got more clients than Consultant B, but Consultant B was able to make the same amount of money as Consultant A by only spending three hours talking to clients instead of six. You have three extra hours to do things that will boost your credibility.
Boost your credibility. There are many consultants that clients can choose. They are only going to choose the consultants who are the most credible or charge the lowest price. If you want to turn consulting into a full-time income or at least five figures every year while living a comfortable lifestyle where you are in control of most of your schedule, do not rely on lower prices. Lowering your prices will result in too many clients and divide your time into too many segments amongst each client (which results in less quality).
Ask for the money up front. Many consultants make the mistake of asking for the money at the end of the consultation. That’s when some clients decide to call it quits and act as if they never heard of you before. This results in many consultants chasing their clients around for the money those consultants deserve. It’s like the teacher in elementary school chasing students around for homework. That doesn’t happen in as many middle schools or high schools, and it almost never happens in college. What encourages students to hand in their homework (even when late) is avoiding the F. However, your client does not have that reason to give you the money. That’s why you need to ask for the money up front instead of having battles with some of your clients so you can make your money. If you have good credibility, clients will be more willing to pay up front before the consultation.
Only be a consultant for specific aspects of your niche that you are good at. If you know how to come up with an Instagram strategy, but you don’t know how to come up a GooglePlus strategy, then both do not belong. Only be a consultant for the specific aspects of your niche that you can do a good job at. This will encourage more returning clients.
Make the consultation process smoother. If you get the money up front, it will be easier for you to create reports for your clients. The fear of sending a report that normally costs $100 won’t bother you anymore because you already got the money. In addition, you want to know about the person before you do the consultation. If you spend 10 minutes in the consultation catching up with the person and that person’s goals, then that person will feel as if he/she is wasting money at your consultations. What you need to do is provide a questionnaire for all of your paying clients that consists of 5-10 questions. This process will make you more prepared for the consultation and allow your clients to get their money’s worth. This process will entice people to pay you up front the first time and then become returning customers later on.
Offer a discount for returning clients. You can tell your clients that if they do two of your consultations then they get the third one 50% off. If you price your consultation sessions correctly, you will be still be able to make more revenue with the 50% discount. In addition, some of your clients will have a 4th and 5th consultation with you just to take advantage of the 50% deal again (and to learn, of course). This discount will look attractive to potential clients, and you will be able to develop strong connections with the people you consult with three or more times.
Give your clients an enticing but unexpected free prize. When a client is consulting with you, you have their undivided attention. Clients are not going to be surfing the web, reading through emails, or checking what time The Big Bang Theory is on tonight. They are only going to be paying attention to what you are saying to them. Since you have their attention (and an extra $100 or so), you can spend some of that money on your client. Tell your client that you are really proud of him/her for sticking with the consultation and showing up, and for that you will ship over a free copy of one of your books at no additional cost and you just need their address. You must be sure to promise that the address will never get shared. No one would like for their address to get posted online, especially Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Most clients will give you their address on those conditions and be happy to get the free product. Sending a free copy of your book gives you a distinct advantage because you are able to sign the book and leave a personal note. That personal note can further congratulate the person for showing up to your consultation and ask that person to leave an honest review for your book on Amazon. Now you client is more likely to become a returning client and your book gets another review with one transaction. The best part is that you will still have a good amount of money left over if you price your consultation sessions right.
Tell your clients in advance that you will record the consultation. For all forms of consultation, you have the option to record an audio version of the consultation. All you need to do is have a smartphone and record an audio when the consultation starts. If you have a computer, the audio still works, but you also have the option of recording your computer’s screen. No matter how you record the consultation, this will mean your client won’t have to waste time taking notes and instead will be able to focus more of their attention on you (which in most cases results in a returning client, or at least a client who is going to leave a good testimonial).

Getting clients to go to your consultation sessions is important. However, you also want to make as much money as possible with your consultation sessions. Those are 8 ways that you can make more money as a consultant and reach 5 figures every year from consulting. If you are not there already, it is possible for you to get there by following these tactics in less than a year. A big part of your success as a consultant depends on your credibility. You may not want to have consultation sessions right now (I didn’t for a while), but it is still important for anything that you do to boost your credibility and become an expert in your niche.

What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips on making more money as a consultant? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

5 Ways To Use Your Social Networks To Promote Your YouTube Videos

June 29, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

YouTube is a free and easy way to upload videos on the web that anyone can see. Getting a lot of people to view those videos is the hard part. Even though YouTube gets billions of unique visitors every month, some videos on YouTube have no views while others have less than 10 views. For a long time, I noticed a common trend with my YouTube videos: I was not getting a lot of views. I was able to get 20-35 views every day, but I knew that was not enough. When I looked at these statistics, I became committed from that point on to getting over 3,000 views on YouTube every month. It’s a starting point which will allow me to expand on YouTube.

In order to get these extra views, I went to the same source that made this blog popular: my social networks. Using my social networks to promote my YouTube videos had a big impact on the views, likes, and subscribers my channel received. Having 100,000 readers did help, but the main concept of using social networks is to reach out to the audience that you already have. These are the five ways that you can promote your YouTube videos on your social networks.

Tweet about your YouTube videos at least four times every day. There’s nothing bad with tweeting a lot of content every day. On a typical day, I send out 90 tweets. No one seems to be bothered by it, and ever since I sent out that many tweets every day, I have been getting more engagement for those tweets and followers. As you upload more YouTube videos, you should also consider tweeting about five of your YouTube videos every day. The more the better, but it needs to be consistent.
Pin your YouTube videos on Pinterest. On Pinterest, you have the option of pinning your YouTube videos on specific boards based on specific aspects of your niche. This allows you to specialize your YouTube videos and allow the ideal people in your targeted audience to see those videos. If you include an annotation in your video that allows people to subscribe to your channel by clicking the annotation, you will be able to get more YouTube subscribers right from Pinterest.
Use a Facebook Page to promote your YouTube videos. Facebook is a social network that encourages oversharing. If you have a good YouTube video, people will be very likely to share that video. All it takes is the click of a button, and someone has shared your video with 20% of their friends. Then, as more people continue to share your video, it will go viral on Facebook and ultimately lead to thousands of views in a matter of hours.
Use GooglePlus To Promote Your YouTube Videos. GooglePlus and YouTube are both Google products that have a big impact on where you appear on Google’s search engine. Using GooglePlus to promote your YouTube videos will give your videos an edge on Google’s search engine.
Let’s not forget about YouTube as a social network! Many people forget that YouTube is a social network as well. People can comment on your videos, and you can respond to those comments just like any social network. At the end of all of your YouTube videos, you can promote six of your related YouTube videos. This will allow you to grab your viewer’s attention for a longer period of time.

Those are the five ways you can use social networks to promote your YouTube videos. Just by promoting my YouTube videos on my social networks to a small extent, I was able to get 50% more views for my videos. While I will easily be able to get 1,000 views this month, I envision myself following the same tactics and eventually getting 3,000 monthly views before the end of the year. In addition to promoting your YouTube videos with your social networks, it is also important to connect all of those social networks together in one of the greatest strategies of marketing known as Circular Viralocity. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you use other methods to promote your YouTube videos on your social networks? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

4 Powerful Ways To Get More Blog Subscribers

June 29, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

One of the most important ways to build your presence as a blogger is by getting more subscribers. Although a majority of bloggers want more subscribers, getting those subscribers is very difficult for a newbie blogger. Most of the subscribers newbie bloggers get are their friends. While it is a great start, it is important for bloggers to extend their fan base beyond their communities. In order to do that, you need to optimize your blog so you get more subscribers. These are 4 powerful ways to get more blog subscribers.

You must offer an enticing free prize. Your enticing free prize gives people a reason to enter their email address. In order to convince more people to enter their email addresses, your free prize needs to be spectacular. Your free prize can’t be just another blog post. Instead, your free prize needs to be more than that. It should be at least a 20 page report, a 20 minute video, or something along those lines. My free prize is a 20 minute How To Master Pinterest Video Tutorial and a 80% coupon for my Twitter Domination training course.
Write quality content that makes people come back to your blog. Most people visit your blog numerous times before they finally decide to enter their name and email address. In most cases, I visit blogs for several weeks before I decide to enter my email address to receive their updates. The reason I came back to these particular blogs was because of the amazing content on those blogs. After visiting those blogs numerous times, I finally decided to enter my email address.
Make your subscription box noticeable. Although there are many methods to get more subscribers, the only real way to get more subscribers is by making your subscription box noticeable. If your visitors have to navigate across your blog to find the subscription box, then they won’t bother looking. Instead, these people will visit your blog every week without entering their email address. The easiest way to have a noticeable subscription box is by putting it at the top of your blog’s sidebar. Another way to make your subscription box more noticeable is by having a small pop-up appear at the right corner of your screen when someone is halfway done with reading one of your blog posts. The Buffer Blog does a brilliant job at this, and this strategy has allowed The Buffer Blog to get over 20,000 subscribers.
Build your presence on multiple social networks. Your social networks are public proof of how popular you are. If you have thousands of followers on multiple social networks, people will learn that you are popular. Some people only subscribe to popular blogs. By building your presence on social networks, you will become more popular and entice the targeted users who only subscribe to the best of the best. By growing your presence on social networks, your blog will also get more visitors, and in particular, returning visitors. Getting more traffic from your social networks is another way to get more blog subscribers. The people who decided to click the follow button will be more likely to enter their email addresses and subscribe to your blog.

Those are the four powerful ways to get more blog subscribers. Implementing these tactics will not result in a dramatic increase within a few days, but by implementing these tactics for several months, you will eventually see a dramatic increase in the number of your subscribers later on. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips on getting more blog subscribers? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

There’s A Big Difference Between 90,000 and 100,000

June 28, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

When most people think about the difference between 90,000 and 100,000, they think of 10,000. When it comes to business, blogging, and social networks, the difference between 90,000 and 100,000 is an entire digit, and that difference means a lot. The moment I reached a combined total of 90,000 followers on all of my social networks combined, I included a widget with all of my social media icons that said, “Follow Marc and Join 90,000 Other Readers.” A few weeks later, I had a combined total of 100,000 followers on all of my social networks. That’s when I changed the widget from “Follow Marc and Join 90,000 Other Readers” to “Follow Marc and Join 100,000 Other Readers.”

The results were huge, but in a way that I did not expect. Originally, I only saw this as a way to boost my credibility, but something else happened as well. I got more blog subscribers. On the day I made the change, I got four times as many subscribers as I get on an average day. The 100,000 boosted my credibility and resulted in more people wanting to subscribe for updates.

The main reason that 100,000 is different from 90,000 is because few people make the six figure club. Everyone who is not in the six figure club wants to be in the six figure club. 90,000 may be close to the six figure club, but in the end, it only has five figures. Real numbers are becoming more important than ever because they highlight potential, and if you have the big numbers, people will follow you so they can learn how to get those big numbers as well. What are your thoughts about the difference between 90,000 and 100,000? Please share your thoughts below.

10 Advantages Of Having A Big Audience On Social Media

June 28, 2014 by Marc Guberti 1 Comment

Everyone is focused on getting more followers on social media. There are millions of searches conducted every day about getting more followers on a social network. While blog posts like this one go into detail about getting more followers on social media, few people know all of the advantages associated with having a big following. While many people think that fame is the big advantage, there are 10 other big advantages of having a big following.

You gain more credibility as your audience grows. The social media expert with 10,000 followers has more credibility than the social media expert who has 50 followers. In numerous cases, people will want to see your numbers (i.e. number of followers) before buying one of your products. Most bestselling authors also happen to have over 50,000 followers while others exceed 300,000.
You will see a dramatic increase in blog traffic. More than half of this blog’s traffic is because of Twitter while about 10% of this blog’s traffic is from other social networks. As you get more traffic from your social networks, the traffic you get from search engines will also increase. Building a strong audience on social media is one of the easiest ways to get more social media and search engine traffic.
You get more opportunities. When people organize speaking events, they want to choose the best speakers with the most credibility. Since having a bigger audience gives you more credibility, the people who organize these types of events will choose you to speak at their events. However, these organizers (and a lot of other people) do their research. It is easy to catch someone who bought fake followers by using TwitterAudit.
Your products suddenly look better, and you will get more sales. The person with 300,000 real followers knows a lot about social media and their niche. Chances are if you are just like any typical social media user, you want 300,000 real followers too. As a result, many people will buy products that the person with 300,000 real followers sells. The reason your products suddenly look better and you will get more sales is because your credibility has dramatically increased.
Your unpaid army of promoters becomes larger. An unpaid army of promoters is a group of people who promote you for free. These people tell their friends and colleagues about you. This word of mouth spreads your content in a positive way that boosts sales and ultimately allows your audience to grow.
You have more connections. While most of these connections will be people who have conversations with you and visit your blog, some of these people will know other people who are looking for people like you. With a big audience, some of the people who are looking for people like you will be reporters, newspaper writers, the people who organize speaking events, and more.
You become a celebrity of your niche. By becoming a celebrity in your niche, you do become famous to the people in your niche. By being a celebrity in your niche, you will get more fans. Fans are the people who will do everything in their power to buy your products right when they get launched and eventually buy all of the products that you sell. Basically, being a celebrity in your niche allows you to get more returning customers.
Your content spreads faster. When you have a larger audience, your posts on your social networks will get shared more often. Imagine how different you would look on social media if all of your posts got shared at least 10 times. Then imagine what would happen if thousands of people shared your posts every day.
You will learn more about your niche. As you grow your targeted audience, you will also learn more about your niche. Some of the tweets in your feed will contain valuable articles about your niche. In addition, you will get more experience in your niche as more people ask you questions.
Your confidence will soar. Being part of a small group will make your confidence soar. Being in this small group is a way for you to say that you are good enough to be in this group. Since you are in this small group, you will also feel more confident in your expertise and in yourself. It is an amazing feeling that fully blooms as your audience grows.

Growing your following is something that many people want to do. The biggest reason people do this is for the fame, but there are other benefits that come along with growing your audience. If you want to have these 10 things have an impact on you and your social media strategy, then you need to grow your social media audience. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

How To Get Everyone On Your Team To Support Your Idea

June 27, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

The Answer Is Yes

One of the common human needs is to get accepted. Before you started your own business or got employed, chances were it was all about getting accepted on sports teams, certain extracurricular activities that have cuts, high schools, and colleges, just to name a few. However, when it comes to ideas, not everyone supports those ideas. In most cases, the ideas that get rejected are not necessarily bad. On the contrary, some of these ideas are extraordinary, but they get presented poorly and do not get the desired result.

There is a way to get everyone on your team to support your idea. No matter what you do, not everyone will support your idea. However, if you can get your entire team or a majority of your team to support your idea, then that’s enough to get your idea in motion. Seth Godin, the bestselling author of numerous books written in over 30 languages described a method in his book Free Prize Inside that you can use to persuade everyone on your team that your idea is worth doing. This method is called the Fulcrum of Innovation.

The Fulcrum of Innovation has three parts:

Worth doing. This is the part of the Fulcrum where you explain the benefits of implementing your idea.
By you. This is the part of the Fulcrum where you show people that you are the right champion to lead the implementation process of your idea.
Doable. This is the part of the Fulcrum where you prove that your idea is possible with the team that you have.

By mastering the Fulcrum, you will be able to persuade everyone on your team to implement your idea. Of course, the idea has to be good, but thinking of a good idea is not as hard as it sounds. Implementing the ideas you think of takes a lot more time, but if you master the Fulcrum and get everyone to agree with your idea, then the implementation process will run smoother.

What are your thoughts about using the Fulcrum to convince the people on your team that your idea must be implemented? Have you ever used the Fulcrum to convince people that your idea works? Have you read any Seth Godin books (if not, you should definitely buy one, but be warned, you’ll end up buying more in the future)? Please share your thoughts and advice below.