My very first business model is my services. It was like an online service provider. This is where we started. We started offering SEO services Australia, we do article distribution, that’s what we do. We do things like Google Places listing and we also do web video. My assistant has just started to do web video for some of our clients and things like that.
Before I built Melbourne S.E.O, I’m all about using books. I drew a map out probably, maybe, eighteen months ago or a little bit more. I knew what it was that I was going to build upfront. So as you are expanding your business, you have to know what map you’re building up-front. I might spend time building maps like this in your head to begin with and then writing it down so you know what you’re going to build.
Once I’ve built a map, the next question I ask myself is how can I build this as quickly as possible? You need to start on cash flow first. You always want to get that cash flow right in a business first. That is going to fund everything else. I started on cash flow by delivering a service to clients where we were exchanging our time and I was investing time working with the clients. Then that ended up funding the creation of the rest of my business.
Then we started to get new team members and outsourcing staff and get everything in place. Then I started to document my core processes. Then the next step, we started to build out information product and I ran a series of workshops in Melbourne.
Just now we are starting to shift the business away from where I started and I’m starting to shift it up into information product land. What I do now to reduce the amount of clients because we are completely prepared. To reduce the number of clients, I start bumping the price up. Then people start falling away and then it makes it worth my while. We really have an SEO services review that you can check out should you need extra ideas on what I’m talking about.
I’ll work with a client. We presently have filters for the kinds of clients that we’ll work with. I only want to work with a customer who is thrilled to spend $4000 up front for the set up and then $2000 every month after that. That decreases the kind of clients that I’m targeting also. We often find the clients who spend more are typically easier to deal with anyhow.
It’s the customer who worries over spending $500 to build a domain or $300 a month on getting in contact with an online service provider for SEO, they are those who are going to ask the maximum of you and are most frustrating. You can basically find at the higher end and you start to target clients where they’ve a higher lifetime worth. A dentist is a good customer for us. We might only have to generate one or two clients a week for them and then we well and truly pay for our services.