Mom With New Baby Blesses Her Family With Online Business!

Let me introduce you to Michelle. Michelle and her husband flew
from Boston to our FamilyEbiz Expo in Austin last year. At the
FamilyEbiz Expo, Michelle took advantage of my offer for
continuing coaching  and here is her story…

Hi Steve and fellow business builders,

Sorry I didn’t reply sooner to your request for info on how our
recent sale went … We’ve been flat-out-busy processing over a
thousand books to be shipped along with preparing a survey and
ebook freebie to go with it that is the next step in our
business. (Not to mention Christmas and two of our six kids’
birthdays!)

Here’s a summary of what we learned.

To recap: For three years or so we’ve been slowly building an
email list of loyal customers as we sold used children books
online, often for a good profit but with a lot of labor that was
hard to automate.

It left little time to work on the products we really desired to
create. So we decided to close down monthly operations with a
giant shelf-clearing sale that would generate cash flow and
quickly grow our opt-in list.

Wow! It worked. In ten days we made about $3,000, doubled our
list and learned a lot in the process. Best of all we gained the
freedom to pursue what we’ve really wanted to do all along.
(And what I need help with!)

Some lessons we learned:..

*However busy you are, take time to copy customer compliments to
a file as you read them. You never know when you may need a
glowing quote and they’re hard to locate later.

*With the right techniques we can generate a surprising amount of
enthusiasm and excitement in customers. We sent out the sale
emails at the same time each day with previews of coming
attractions each evening. Twenty minutes after posting the sale
mail we were flooded with book requests. I couldn’t believe how
many times we heard, “This is SO fun!” from customers throughout
the sale.

*Listen to your spouse! My husband suggested we repeat the sale
next year and move what was a year-round operation to a brief
annual event. This enables us to keep what we’ve built yet still
frees up time to build other aspects of our business. He also
suggested creating a category of more expensive books.

*Get feedback. I presented the ‘annual sale’ idea to my list at
the end of the sale and asked them to reply with ‘YES’ in the
subject line if they liked it. We were flooded with positive
emails. So now future sales already have eager customers waiting
for them This could evolve into a membership site with other
benefits year round that don’t involve as much input from us.

*The worst thing you can do is not take action or follow through
with an idea. It was only as we took action that new ideas came
to us.

*Don’t be bothered by un-subscribers. Quite a few people have
un-subscribed from our list since the sale closed (none that
actually bought books). However, the net result is that the list
still doubled.

*Be generous. Customers thanked us repeatedly for selling our
books at such an unbelievably low price and hoped we were as
blessed as they were. One family was able to have Christmas
presents though the dad had just lost his job and they were
wondering how they’d manage.

In all we were blessed to know we helped so many people, made the
sale so fun and have brought what was a moderately successful
small venture up to a new level.

We have a well-thought out survey about our new business idea all
ready to go at SurveyMonkey.com.

We have several major homeschool lists willing and waiting to
send the survey to their members.

We have a value-filled ‘thank you’ ebook in pdf format ready to
give to survey responders.

We have an account with Aweber to capture those respondents’
emails.

Michelle Geffken
Home Library Builder

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/homelibrarybuilder/

Do you think that Michelle benefited from the FamilyEbiz Expo?!?

Of course she did. She used the information and opportunities she
found at the FamilyEbiz Expo to EXPLODE a lethargic book
business. Most of all, she learned TIMELESS marketing principles
that she can apply to any business any time!

I am so proud of Michelle and so happy that the FamilyEbiz Expo
had a part in her and her family’s success. Last Tuesday, one of
our speakers made an offer that makes coming to the FamilyEbiz
Expo a NO BRAINER!

I repeat, Ray Edwards made an offer that has taken away the
financial barrier to the FamilyEbiz Expo. Listen to the recording
from last week to get the link to his offer.

http://www.FamilyEbiz.com/expo.php

PS. Kerry and I will be coming through Dallas, Houston, Austin
and San Antonio in three weeks and we will be offering a FREE
workshop on teaching your children how to become entrepreneurs.

Blessings,

Stephen Beck
http://www.familyebiz.com/