Episode #061: Cash Injection: 5 Creative Ways to Generate Income
Cash Injection: 5 Creative Ways to Generate Income
On this episode of Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, I'm talking all about how you can create a quick injection of cash when you need it in your business.
We cover five different strategies you can implement in the next couple weeks to increase cash flow without creating mountains of extra work. When you tune in you're going to learn:
The difference between proactive and reactive marketing - and why it matters to cash injections
Why thinking ahead and having a clear goal is important for generating cash - and how to create clarity around your goals
5 cash injections strategies you can implement if you want to bring in revenue quick and with focus
So tune in to learn all about how to create a simple strategy to generate a cash injection in your business.
LINKS MENTIONED:
TIME STAMP OVERVIEW:
[00:01:12] Proactive vs. reactive marketing - what's the difference and why does it matter.
[00:02:07] Prioritize the health of your overall business over instant cash - project in cash flow regularly.
[00:04:37] The value of a "thinking ahead" to not compromise the greater marketing plan
[00:07:53] Generate revenue through passive email marketing or flash sale promotions.
[00:11:24] Marketing tip: It's easier to retain and upsell a customer than acquire a new one. Reach out to past customers with a new offer. Example: monthly members can upgrade to annual membership.
[00:13:54] The importance of having offerings with limits, bonuses, and potentially discounts - and when that makes sense.
[00:15:20] If you want to sell 1:1 offers - the importance of having an application process.
[00:18:36] The power of backend offers, if you need a cash injection but don't want to derail your marketing calendar.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Zach Spuckler [00:00:00]:
This is not your average online marketing podcast, episode number 61. And in this episode, we're talking about creating cash injections. So if you're at a place in your business or think you will be one day, hint you will where you need to generate some cash. This episode is for you, so stay tuned. Hey, hey, hey. Not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast Asked.
Zach Spuckler [00:00:25]:
Now, I'm really excited for this week's episode because we're going to talk about essentially creating cash on demand. And I want to start by saying this is like, a really sexy sounding topic in theory, but in practice, there's a lot more that goes into, I want to make lots of money. Right. And I want to start this episode by saying, if you're in a position where you're saying, I need cash and I need it now, JG. Wentworth style. If you don't get that reference, it's okay. But if you need cash and you need it now, it might not be the perfect time to start thinking about a cash injection, because thinking about a cash injection should be a strategically and intentional thing. And I'm not saying if you need cash that you shouldn't put these strategies in play.
Zach Spuckler [00:01:12]:
But what I want to talk or start this episode by talking about is the thought process that I have and that I teach my clients about proactive versus reactive marketing. So reactive marketing is saying, I'm down $500 this month, and I need to cover this bill, so I'm going to do whatever it takes to make $500. That's reactive. Proactive marketing is saying, I need to generate $500. What can I do in my business right now that doesn't sabotage my marketing, that doesn't hurt my process, that doesn't alienate my customers, and still helps me bring in the revenue that I need to generate? Right? It's this subtle, different way of thinking, is not just, I need cash. I need it now. It's my business needs to grow. What can I do to sustain the business and what can I do that generates cash at the same time? Okay, so there's two ways to think about this.
Zach Spuckler [00:02:07]:
One is you may very well be in a situation where you're like, I just need the cash, Zack, and I'm feeling very reactive. That's okay. What I'm saying is be thinking ahead. Right? So if you're currently in that position, you can still implement the strategies we're going to talk about today. But I want you to come from this place of, I'm not doing this at the expense of my business. I'm doing this in favor of my business. The other thing I want you to think about is how can you set yourself up to be thinking ahead? So, for example, in our business, we project our cash flow on a regular basis. In fact, I probably check it every one or two days what the money looks like in our business, how much cash we're bringing in, how much cash is going out, what we owe on credit cards, because we use one credit card to get airline miles so I can take trips and we have an income outcome account.
Zach Spuckler [00:02:56]:
So I'm also thinking ahead. So I want you to, if you're listening to this episode, be thinking, is there a time in the next one to three months where things might be quiet, where things might be dry, where the marketing isn't going to keep up with the needs and I need to create a cash injection? Right? That's another way to think about this proactive marketing. The second thing that I want to talk to you about before we get into the cash injection strategies today is you've got to be thinking with clarity. So I talk to clients all the time who say, I need to generate cash. And I say, great. And they say, I'm going to sell this thing because it's an easy way to make money. And I just need money, I need money, I need money, I need money. And when we're in kind of this fight or flight place, what I find is that what goes out the window first is clarity.
Zach Spuckler [00:03:45]:
We say, I need cash. I need it now. And I say, but how much? Right? How much cash do you actually need to generate? How many customers do you need to create? What are you going to sell? How are you going to sell it? What's the process you're going to put people through to generate this cash that you need? So you shouldn't just be going, oh, my gosh, I need cash, I need it now. You should say, I need $1,000 by May 23 so that I can pay this credit card off and be set for the next month with some extra cash, right? The thing that I think a lot of people miss is that when they're in, like I said, that flight or flight response, they just go, whatever it takes, whatever it takes. I'll do whatever it takes. I'm just going to hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle. Work, work until it happens. And clarity and action are the keys to success.
Zach Spuckler [00:04:37]:
So once you kind of step back and said, okay, I'm going to be proactive, not reactive, I've got a clear goal, then what you can do is focus in on a strategy. And on today's episode, I'm going to share with you five strategies that you can use to create a cash injection in your business. But I wanted to start with this because I want you to understand the disclaimer is that you shouldn't just be going, I need cash now. You should be saying, I need to generate X amount of dollars in X amount of time, not at the expense of my greater marketing plan or business. And here's how I'm going to do it. So with that precursor in place, let's get into cash injection strategies. The first strategy that I like to use for cash injection is what I call the passive cash injection strategy. What I'll do is I'll increase the frequencies of email to my list with what we call the super signature.
Zach Spuckler [00:05:35]:
Now, the super signature is not something that I created, it's an invention by Dean Jackson. But what it is, is that I will send out multiple emails in a week with different stories, angles, insights on what I'm doing. And in the signature, I will have two to three products that people can buy from me. So I put my low ticket products in there, my Facebook ads for list building bootcamp, my challenge launch toolkit, my membership. And I just say PS. If you're looking for additional ways to work with me, here's three ways you can do that. What I'm basically doing is I'm emailing my list more frequently. Not necessarily promoting a product, though we're going to talk about that, but just sharing stories, giving them insights, being high value, sharing educational content.
Zach Spuckler [00:06:20]:
And then I'm saying, by the way, if you like this and you want more, here's ways you can work with me. Now, I also at least once or twice a week will have an email that directly promotes a low ticket product. So if you've listened to this show for any period of time, you know that I'm a huge fan of low ticket products. I think they're a great way to turn your leads into customers. And I like to be running list building ads all the time. So my list is always seeing offers from me. And if I'm in a period of time where I'm trying to generate extra revenue, I can just push my offers in front of my list. So the passive low ticket cash injection strategy is better for when you're like, I know I need a little extra cash, but I'm not necessarily pressed for thousands.
Zach Spuckler [00:07:04]:
It's like, I could use an extra two to $300 to buy this course. I could use an extra three to $500 to pay down this card. Or I like to do this more when I'm like, hey, I could use some extra cash. I'm not hard pressed for it. It's not going to mess up my marketing strategy and it's a very passive way to generate extra revenue. Now, the important thing about this is that you want to make sure that your emails are not buy my thing, buy my thing, buy my thing. You want to tell stories you want to link to high value content, podcasts, YouTube videos, trainings, freebies you want to give. And the reciprocity is people will check out your additional links and then you're seeding those links continually over the course of one or two weeks so that people see your offers over and over and over again.
Zach Spuckler [00:07:53]:
Now, this is one of my favorite ways to bring a cash injection because it doesn't scream buy my stuff, buy my stuff, but it generates revenue. It's not my most favorite because it does limit you to how much money you're going to make, right? If you're passively promoting a $30, $40, $50 product and you're only doing it to your email list, it's going to limit how much money you can make. And that's why I say this is good for generating a few hundred bucks. If you're like, I don't want to buy that thing that I need, but I want to pay for it. Right? So that's the first way that you can do this. It's just a really passive low ticket promotion. Second thing is if you're like, okay, I like this idea of email marketing, and I want to generate more revenue. You can do a flash promotion or a flash sale, and there's two types of flash promotion and sales.
Zach Spuckler [00:08:45]:
So we're going to start with what I call just a general flash promotion or a general flash sale. Now, if you'd have asked me two or three years ago, I'd have been like, don't do sales. Sales are so bad because then it trains your audience to think that there's discounts. But here's the thing. In 2023, people are used to seeing discounts. People are used to seeing sales, people are used to seeing special offers, right? So discounting or having a sale on one of your offers is not necessarily a bad thing. It doesn't mean people aren't going to buy from you. It doesn't mean people are going to always wait for the sale.
Zach Spuckler [00:09:18]:
That's been my personal experience, and I've seen it with a lot of marketers that I work with, and I've even viewed it in my own consumer behavior where I go, oh, I didn't buy that thing when it's on sale, but now I need it, so I'm going to buy it later. Or I buy something not on sale, and I come back as a return customer for something later. Right. But a general flash sale doesn't even have to be a discount. So what I'm saying is, what I'll do is I'll take a product that's typically not always available in the capacity that I want to sell it. So let's be really specific. I have my membership launch template pack, which is $247. It's a $250 product.
Zach Spuckler [00:10:00]:
I could sell it via email for a week with a limited time $50 discount, get it for $197 for the next five days. I could do that, but I don't have to. I could also say, buy the Template Pack this week, and I'm going to throw in the Challenge launch toolkit for free. And you're going to learn exactly how to launch your membership with a challenge and have all the templates in place to do that, right? So I can couple things together. So if you're someone who's like, look, discounting just ain't my jam. I ain't taking money off my product. I ain't doing it. That's okay.
Zach Spuckler [00:10:34]:
You can add something in for a flash sale. So even though I call it a flash sale, sometimes I refer to it as a flash promotion because what you're doing is you're creating a limited time period where people can purchase something from you and with an incentive. And whether that incentive is a discount or an additional bonus, it's not as important as the fact that it's time bound and it's limited, and you do that for a set period of time. Now, this is great for when you're looking to inject a little more cash than you would with the passive promotion. But here's the thing. A lot of people say, like, I don't have a big list or I don't have a big audience or I'm not sure that a flash promotion is going to generate as much cash as I need. And that's why I will sometimes do a second type of flash promotion, which I call an upgrade or upsell promotion. So at the time that I'm recording this episode, we're currently doing one of these in our business.
Zach Spuckler [00:11:24]:
And what we'll do is we'll reach out to past customers with an additional offer. So there's this kind of rule in marketing that doesn't get talked a lot about in the online space, which is it's easier to retain and upsell a customer than it is to acquire or get a new customer. Now, I'm not saying that you should just belittle and berate and throw offers at constantly 24/7 people who have already paid you. That's not what I'm saying. But what I am saying is it's easier to show someone who already knows your value, the value of a new offer, than it is to convince someone cold on the streets of the Internet that they should come pay you $200. So let me tell you what we're doing just to kind of give you the concept for this. We have our membership, and what we're doing is a special offer for people who are monthly members to upgrade to annual. And we do two big things.
Zach Spuckler [00:12:20]:
One, we make them a special offer, and it's only available to members. So if you're a monthly member listening to this, you probably saw our annual promotion. Two, we either add in or add a slight discount, add a bonus or add a discount. And three, we set it for a limited period of time. So basically, Monday through Wednesday, the week that I'm recording this, we said, hey, for the next few days, here's a special offer if you want to upgrade your membership to annual. And what happens is we're relying on our existing customers to generate revenue, right? And it's easier to make that sell because these people already know, hey, this membership is good. This is just my opportunity to upgrade. Now, it doesn't have to be the same product.
Zach Spuckler [00:13:03]:
It could be, hey, I know that Zach's Facebook ads for list building bootcamp is great, so I'm going to go buy his Facebook ads. Course, it doesn't have to be a membership. It doesn't have to be an upgrade. It could be a next step offer, it could be an adjacent offer, it could be an unrelated offer, but it speaks to the same ideal customer avatar, right? So flash sales and flash promotions are a great way to get people involved. So just a super quick pause and recap. These are three cash injection strategies that we've covered so far. Number one, the passive low ticket cash injection, which is just pushing out low ticket offers within emails that are already going out to your list, increasing your email frequency and then making offers passively. The second one is a general flash sale to your whole audience.
Zach Spuckler [00:13:54]:
Buy my thing for a limited time with either additional bonuses or a discount. And then the third is a flash promotion to existing customers to get them to upgrade or buy an additional offer and focus on your existing customer base. Okay? The fourth cash injection strategy is what I call the limited capacity coaching strategy. What we do is sometimes when we're in the online marketing space, we think the magic and the Holy Grail is in one to many. I don't want to do any coaching. I don't want to do any one on one work because we've been told that that's the way you grow your business. But guess what? One on one work services or coaching pays the best. When you're getting started, when you're trying to create cash injection, if you're at a point where you're like, I could use more money, guess what? People always want to work with people one on one.
Zach Spuckler [00:14:50]:
They always want high touch, high capacity, high engagement support. And that's just the reality. That's what people want. They want to connect. They want to know you. They want to really get high touch support and a service or coaching is the way to do that. So what we'll do is we'll send out an email that says, hey, I'm opening up three spots for this service, this coaching that you can apply for. And I think it's really important to note that I do an application.
Zach Spuckler [00:15:20]:
I don't just say, click here to pay me $2,000 to join my coaching, right? I give them an application and once they fill out the application, then I'll reach out and schedule a call to see if we're a good fit, right? I do that for two reasons. One, I've learned from experience that if I just say pay me $2,000, somebody will. And I don't necessarily want to work with that person. I don't mean that in a bad way. Maybe they're just not the right fit or they're not ready for the coaching, but they've got the money or they've got the equity or they've got the credit card. That doesn't mean I want to work with someone. The second reason is I want to get on the phone and see can I actually support this person? Because if they've got the funds and I've got the ability to support them, then I do want to work together, right? But I don't want to just work with someone because they can afford it. That's not always the best qualifier, but what I'll do is I'll have them fill out a short application.
Zach Spuckler [00:16:16]:
And if we're being completely honest, the application does create this sense of exclusivity that increases the conversion rate of the sales call and gets you better quality leads getting on the phone. Okay, so I do a short, simple application process, but I'll say I have X amount of spots available. Click here to apply. So if it was me, what I would say is we have our agency side of our business where we run ads for people. I'd say I have two spots open in the agency. It starts at $2,000 a month. Click here to fill out an application. We would love to work with you if we can have them fill out an application, book a call, get a couple of clients.
Zach Spuckler [00:16:55]:
And now I've generated a higher amount of revenue, but it also requires a higher delivery from me. Right. I have to create or develop or show up in a higher time bound capacity. So keep that in mind that while this is a great strategy for influxing, a higher amount of cash with less work, it's going to create more work on the back end. Okay? So keep that in mind. That can be really simple, but a really, really effective strategy for generating revenue. Now, the last strategy that I want to talk about is one that I talked about in a workshop I held a few weeks ago, which is doing a paid launch. So I love paid launches, whether it be a paid five day challenge, a paid workshop, a paid video series.
Zach Spuckler [00:17:42]:
I love charging $10 to $25 to come join me inside of a program. And what we did was a paid workshop. So a few weeks back, we were like, hey, we had proactively planned this. We were like, in the month of April, we want to cash inject an extra $7,000. And so what we did was we hosted a $25 workshop on how to run paid launches, paid workshops. And on the back of that, we sold a $300 4-week course, right? This is an exceptional way to create a cash injection, because, number one, we have a process that we use where we test, is this going to be a good offer? So I get to sell the paid workshop for $25. We ended up selling a little over 100 spots, about $3,000 in revenue. And then we did another $4,000 in revenue of the $300 product.
Zach Spuckler [00:18:36]:
So we generated about $7,000 in revenue. And what I love about this is that it only detracts so much from my primary offers and marketing because I'm selling the $25 workshop. But the back end offer, the $300 4-week course that we sold, is only promoted to the 110, 115 people that signed up for the paid workshop. So I can promote the paid workshop as aggressively or non aggressively as I want, but then I promote the back end offer only to those people, right? So it's kind of cool because my whole audience gets to see the front end message, but the back end message isn't blowing up my list and detracting from my membership, detracting from my coaching, detracting from my offers. It's just a next step offer for the right segment of my audience. And like I said, we've done. These cash injections have gone as high as 1020. $30,000 in revenue, ten $15,000 in profit when we do it right.
Zach Spuckler [00:19:35]:
And you can get people on board. You can even get affiliates on board. You can get your past clients on board to share it. So there's so much that you can do with paid workshops. I know that that's a really high level view of them. But just to recap those last two that we talked about, you can do a limited time group coaching, coaching or service based offer, or you can do a paid launch offer. So here's where I want to leave you with this episode. I hope that you got massive value, and if nothing else, it at least got the wheels turning about ways that you can bring in extra revenue if and when you need it.
Zach Spuckler [00:20:12]:
But the big thing is be proactive. Don't wait until you're in a desperate need for $5,000. Think ahead. Plan ahead. What if this launch doesn't go well? What am I going to do? What if this promotion goes not so great? What am I going to do? What if not everyone joins my coaching program that I'm launching next month? What's my next step? Right? Proactive planning is the way to go. And so these are just simple ways that you can create additional cash in your business if you need it. And if you don't need it, stick to your marketing plan. And if you do need it, great.
Zach Spuckler [00:20:44]:
Now you've got some ideas. So as we wrap up this episode, I want to ask a huge favor. If you've been listening to the Not Your Average online marketing podcast for a period of time and you've enjoyed it, would you do me a huge favor and leave us a review, either on Spotify or Apple podcasts? It makes a huge difference, and it lets us know that you're enjoying the show. It's very much me talking to myself when I record an episode. And when we get reviews and feedback from you guys, we know that we're on the right track. So if you could do us a huge favor and leave a review, we would super appreciate it. Now, if you want a complete transcript and show notes from this week's episode, you can head over to Heartsolhustle.com/nyap61. Again.
Zach Spuckler [00:21:30]:
That's Heartsoulhustle.com/nyap61 for not your average podcast. Episode number 61 will have the show notes, the links that we mentioned, transcript, all that good stuff waiting for you over there. So get out there, generate some cash. It can be easy. And I'll leave you with that. It can be easy. So have an incredible week. Stay hungry, and until next time, stay not so average.
