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Obtaining Financial Security with One-to-Many Strategies

By Anton Pearce

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 03Sep2009 Word count: 1011 Viewed: 252 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Whether you're a coach, consultant or other solo professional, one of your primary goals should be achieving income security. While working for yourself has many benefits, a guaranteed and stable income isn't usually one of them. Over time, and with the right practices, however, you can reach a certain level of income stability. To do so, you need to maximize your profits.

You've heard it a thousand times, maybe so many times that it's almost meaningless to you by now: "work smarter, not harder." While it may sound trite, it is also true. If you want to be successful in the long term, you need to do less work for more money.

So, how do you do it? How do you squeeze more profits from every hour you put into your business? One of the best ways is by implementing one-to-many strategies.

If you've done any amount of coaching or consulting, you know that somewhere around 70% of questions your clients have are the same as questions other clients have had, or will have in the future. Certainly, this percentage can vary from one industry to the next; a specialized industry may only have a 30% common base.

Still, if you can identify that common ground between clients, you can save yourself time and trouble. Even if you only save a few hours a week using these strategies, that frees you up to take more clients and build a more steady income base.

Basic One-to-Many Strategies

One of the easiest, quickest and most basic things you can do to start implementing a one-to-many strategy is to build templates. You can create a template response to use with clients to answer a given question, or with regard to a specific topical area. When that topic or question comes up, you can simply pull out your template and work from there, rather than starting from scratch. While it will take a few minutes to customize the response for the specific client, it can still save you a good deal of time overall.

You shouldn't just stop there, with a template response, however. A common topic like this may have a quick answer (your template) but it could also be that the topic can be addressed in a more in-depth fashion. Rather than spending coaching time working through the topic with the client, turn this into an opportunity for additional profits.

One way to do this would be to put together an ebook or video training series that addresses a specific issue in-depth. Once the product is in place, you can upsell your coaching clients. Give them the basic information they're asking for in your coaching sessions, but offer them a more extensive analysis through your add-on product.

From there, you can turn the product into a profit center on its own. You can take that product and sell it as a standalone. You might set up an affiliate program, and let other people do all of the legwork for you when it comes to sales. Or, you might choose to market the product separate from your consulting. Whatever way you decide to go, keep in mind that you can also use each offering (whether it is consulting services or separate products) to cross-sell one another.

Another great way to implement a one-to-many strategy is through group consulting. As part of your coaching or consulting package, you can offer opportunities to coach multiple clients at once .This can be through an in-person session, or it can be virtual. You might have a conference call, webinar or live seminar. You can then offer these group opportunities either as a core component of your consulting services, or you can offer them as add-on options.

Membership sites are one way you can take the group consulting idea and run with it. When you create a membership site, you can make nearly all of your coaching efforts a one-to-many situation. Your clients pay a fixed monthly fee for access to the membership site. As you interact with a given client on a specific topic, that conversation then becomes part of the membership site library. The next time the topic comes up, you can simply point the client to the previous discussion.

Here again, you can offer the membership site as a standalone product, or you can offer access to the membership site as an add-on to your consulting service. You can do it in reverse, as well, offering one-on-one access to membership site subscribers for an additional fee.

Multiple Streams of Income

Part of the overall strategy you may recognize here is creating multiple streams of income. You have your service-based consulting or coaching services, where you provide clients with direct interaction for a fee. But you also have these other streams of income. You have residual income from your membership site, where clients continue to renew their membership month after month. You also have residual income from product sales.

One of the keys to staying profitable with these alternate streams of income is to give them the attention they deserve. For example, if you don't visit your membership site and directly answer new questions or address new ideas on a regular basis, you're going to lose subscribers. Likewise, if you don't keep your products updated with the latest trends and information in your field, it's likely that your sales will suffer.

So, while you are freeing up time with many-to-one strategies, you're also creating more overhead in terms of the work you need to do. It pays to take a few minutes every month, or at least every quarter, to try to evaluate each income stream. If your ebook sales have never taken off, for example, it might be time to choose a different strategy. Give the ebook away to each new coaching client, or perhaps hire a professional copywriter to do a sales page for the product.

Ultimately, using these many-to-one strategies will help to increase the size of your client base, create several streams of income, and make your profits more reliable than they have ever been.

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