What Chetan Bhagat’s 3 Mistakes of My Life Teaches You About Selling

By Ramkarthik on August 30, 2010

A year ago, I read this book called “3 mistakes of my life” by Chetan Bhagat. For those who don’t know, Chetan Bhagat is an Indian author, who is labelled as paperback king of India by Guardian.

Last Sunday, I had some time to kill till the English premier league weekend action started. I picked up this book from the book shelf and started skimming it again.

3 mistakes of my life

The book is about a young boy in India named Govind, who along with two of his best friends Ish and Omi, opens a cricket shop. The story goes on to explain everything they face in their life: love, politics, religion, success, failure and so on.

If you have free time, read this book (non-affliate link). It is a good story and there are many hidden lessons too.

Talking about hidden lessons, this post is about what 3 mistakes of my life teach you about selling. And no, I won’t give away the story. So you don’t have to worry.

Before I begin, some of what you are going to read might already be known to you. If you have been selling products or services for quite some time, you will find a couple of new points and some known fundamentals. But if you are completely new to selling, you will learn a lot in this post. Keep reading.

Now, let’s take a look at what you could learn about selling from the book. I have listed the key 10 lessons about selling:

1. Sell what people want

In the story, the three young boys open a cricket shop and sell cricket equipments. In India, cricket is the most popular sport. Every kid, as soon as he starts to walk, grabs a cricket bat and starts to play. And in the district these guys lived, there weren’t any good local shop that sold cricketing equipments. So it is very obvious that they decided to sell those.

You can sell your product only if there is a need for it. Before you start putting in hard work to create a product, analyze the market for the needs of people. The product that solves the problems of people will almost always sell well.

So whatever niche you are in, search all the places where people talk about your niche and find the most common problems and needs. Then create a product to solve the problem.

2. Be passionate about what you are selling

The guys in the story were complete cricket addicts, just like millions of other people in India. But they knew more than an average cricket fan. They were so passionate about the game that they would even go for a fight when someone disturbs them during a game on TV (an incident detailed at the start of the story).

In order to sell a lot of products, you need to be passionate about what you are selling. You should know more than your average customer about the topic. If your product teaches how to get a six pack ab in three months, you should know more about the exercises and the effects more than your customers.

When you are selling something, you should expect a lot of questions from your customers. Unless you are passionate about your niche, you will find it difficult to answer your customer’s queries.

You can outsource the work of answering questions, but surely it won’t help you in the long term.

3. Give free information

Out of the three guys, Ish is extremely knowledgeable about cricket and he is also a school level player. Anyone who came to buy equipments got free advice. Ish would teach them how to grip the ball when bowling and what is a perfect stance when you are batting. These kind of advice made everyone in that place, buy from these guys’ shop.

This is another reason why should know more than your average customer. People love free information. It helps you build trust. You start to build a connection with your customers. These are clearly evident when you see top bloggers sell so many copies of their books or ebooks or even membership programs using their blog alone. They get the rewards for offering solid content for free over a long period of time.

4. Do Cross-Selling

Cross-selling is a technique where the seller usually offers something related to a product the buyer is buying or has just bought.

The boys were smart, especially Govind. He always had innovative ideas to improve their business. In fact, the idea of opening a shop was Govind’s. He had everything a good entrepreneur should have. He also knew how to cross-sell.

Cross-selling is totally fine if you do it the right way. If you over do it or do it wrongly, your customers might get frustrated. But it often never happens.

The best thing about cross selling is that it is easier to sell a related product to a customer since they already have interest in the product. At the same time, it also makes them happy because they would have otherwise not found the products you just cross sold to them. How many times have you decided to buy something from Amazon and ended up buying more than what you decided? I have been there many times myself. I decide to buy a book but end up buying one or more related books. And the important this is, I feel happy for buying the extra books as it is very useful to me.

discounts
Image Source: discounts by TheTruthAbout…

5. Give deep discounts

Govind knew that if he gave discounts, people would buy more. The parents in the district would buy equipments for their kids whenever there was a discount on products.

You always see in day-to-day life, companies giving discount on their products for short period of time. If you are giving a discount, make sure you do these three things:

# Offer only for a short period of time
# Give a good reason for why you are offering the discount
# Make the offer irresistible

Bloggers do this all the time when they sell their books. You can offer discount for Christmas or for reaching a milestone like 10,000 sales etc.

6. Make use of trends

As I said before, Govind is a really smart guy in the story. He is innovative and can spot a trend. In cricket, when a player performs well, it is obvious that equipments related to that player will sell more.

Likewise in your business, spot the trends. Check out sites like Google Insights to find what is trending and try to make best use of it. Products based on these trends will perform much better than the normal ones.

7. Invest to grow

In the story, a conversation between Govind and his mother (who also runs a small business) goes like this:

‘If I have a good *Diwali season, I will get you a colour TV,’ mom vowed.

‘No need,’ I said. I removed my shoes to get ready for a shower, ‘you need a bigger grinder urgently, the small one is all wobbly’

‘I will buy the TV if only the business makes extra money,’ she said.

‘No. If you make extra money, put it back in the business. Don’t buy useless things. I can always see the match in colour in Ishaan’s house’.

*Diwali is a popular festival in India, also known as festival of lights.

Every month, calculate your profits and fix a certain percentage of it to invest back into business. I know a friend who invests one-third of the profits back into his business.

You can invest money back into business to achieve many things. It can be to improve customer service or outsource work or even buy niche related books to improve your knowledge and stay up-to-date.

8. Be prepared to face failure

Govind, Ish and Omi faced failure a couple of times. They started the business by opening a shop in a temple. Later they rent a shop in a mall. This mall, before they move over, gets destructed by the Gujarat earthquake.

Similarly, in your business, you have to be prepared to face failure. It might not be in the form of destruction. It could be no sale for 15 straight days or it could be your site going down just on the launch day. It happens. You have to accept it and live with it.


Image Source: It’s a long time to grow young by nattu

9. Everything Starts Small

The guys start in a small temple and have very few sales every day. They never really made any profit in the first month. But as they kept on working hard, they started to see results.

Everything starts small. You cannot expect a million dollar day in sales if you are just starting. John Reese didn’t achieve the million-dollar-day with his first product. You will make only a few sales at the beginning but don’t worry. As time goes on, you will start making more sales. Surely you’ll have more sales for your second product than the first (as long as it is at least equally good) or you will even see more sales of your first product as you work on your brand.

10. Delegate Work

Govind does a brilliant job in delegating work. He knows the positives of each of the three guys. He knows he is good at marketing and he takes care of all the marketing work. Ish is really good in cricket and has played for his school team. So obviously he is the one who knows a lot about the game and can offer a lot of tips for his customers. Omi is a guy who does the physical work well. They all perform only those works which they are good at.

If you are not good at copywriting, you will be better off hiring a professional copywriter. You could also hire someone to do the design work for the product. Delegating work gives you more free time to do what you are good at and also results in a better end product.

3 mistakes of my life is a really good book and it has many other hidden lessons. As I said before, if you have time, try to find a copy of this book and give it a read. Chetan Bhagat explains a lot about India and the story is also quite good.

These 10 lessons about selling are important for success. Do you agree with these? Do you have any other fundamental selling tip that you feel to be very important for success as a seller? Please share your views in the comments. And also let me know if you have any questions.

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The Three Schools of Twitter Marketing (And Which One to Join)

By Ramkarthik on May 6, 2010

There are three types of twitter marketing, which I’d like to call three schools of twitter marketing. You might already know about the first two. But I request you to read till the end of the post to find about the third school of twitter marketing.

Twitter Quantity

What matters the most in twitter when it comes to followers? Quality or quantity?
Continue reading “The Three Schools of Twitter Marketing (And Which One to Join)”

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How Air New Zealand is Flying High from Justin Bieber’s Tweet (Word of Mouth Marketing)

By Ramkarthik on April 30, 2010

Providing excellent customer service is one of the best ways to succeed in business. In the social media world, it’s your customers who write your story. But you, as a business, can make your customers write it the way you want by providing excellent service.

Without spending thousands of dollars for advertising, you can get free word of mouth marketing if you listen to your customers and care about them.

This post is just one of the many successful examples of social media word of mouth marketing.

Justin Bieber, the 16 year old Canadian singer, flew out on Air New Zealand flight and had a very good experience. Just like how everyone these days are tweeting everything they experience in their life, Justin also tweeted about his flight experience as below:

Justin Bieber Tweet

This is one of the best things Air New Zealand can ask for. The interesting thing is not the tweet but the after effect.

More than 600 people Retweeted (RT) the update (according to twitter search)

Twitter Search

If you see the stats from Tweet Reach, they are much more interesting.

Tweet Reach

The starts are for the latest 50 tweets.

As you can see, the latest 50 tweets alone have reached 14,763 people. Now I wonder how many people the 600+ retweets would have reached. Easily 100,000 I would guess.

And I’m sure many more twitterers (and Bieber fans) will RT the update for a few more days.

Media coverage

Air New Zealand not only enjoyed the benefits from twitter but also from online news. Many of the blogs have written about Justin Bieber’s tweet.

Air New Zealand’s Reply

The CEO of Air New Zealand, Rob Fyfe, thanked Justin Bieber just in time. He sent him the following tweet:

Air New Zealand Tweet

Air New Zealand provided great customer service and they got the reward that they deserved. So if you run a business, concentrate on providing great service and have a social media presence. Justin Bieber might not use your service and tweet about it. But to improve your brand name and recognition, you don’t need Justin Bieber, just a couple of people with 500 followers would be enough.

P.S.: All the businesses and individuals out there, who think twitter is just a waste of time, think again.

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Guide to Increasing Productivity by Checking Your Feeds As Soon As You Get Up

By Ramkarthik on April 20, 2010

Checking your feed reader first thing in the morning is counterproductive.

That’s what most bloggers say. Although there is some truth to it, if you use it the way I’m going to show you now, you will have no worries about productivity. In fact, it will (in most cases) boost your productivity.

Side note: This is NOT the only known productive way of checking blog feeds. This is the method I follow and it works for me. And I’m guessing it will work for you too.

For this guide, I’m going to use Google reader for explaining. But I’m sure you can follow this method on most feed readers. I use Google reader for its simplicity. I have used a feed reader called snarfer before which is also pretty good. Anyway, which feed reader you use doesn’t matter as long as there are options to do what I’m explaining in this post.

When you get up and decide to go through your feeds as soon as you turn on your computer, you cannot spend a lot time on it. Obviously, you have got other higher priority jobs that need to be finished. So it isn’t easy to check your reader first thing in the morning and yet stay productive throughout the day. BUT it can be done and here’s how:

Organize

1. Remove the Clutter

That’s right. If you want to be productive, you have to remove the clutter. Clutter, in your feed reader, indicates the unwanted feeds. They are the ones which you rarely read. Or sometimes never. It occupies extra space. So remove them from your subscription list.

One of the best ways to manage online information overload is by subscribing to less blogs. Take some time and go through all the blogs you have subscribed to. Unsubscribe from blogs you no longer read.

I used to subscribe to many blogs (over 150). But the main problem with subscribing to so many blogs is that you will miss important information in the bulk of not so important ones. Whenever I used to take a holiday and return home, I had 300+ items unread. It is not humanly possible to go through all the feeds quickly and yet not miss any information. That is the reason why you should remove the clutter.

Right now, I’m subscribed to 45 blogs (which is still quite a lot). Most of these blogs publish one blog post every two days. So I never end up with many unread items.

2. Group the Feeds into Folders

Google reader has an option to group the feeds into folders. Snarfer (feed reader) also has that option. This is very useful and many of you have would have probably already done it.

This makes it easy to save your blogs under different labels. It’s just like how you store games, music, books and movies separately. You are simply organizing all the blogs under different labels for easier reading. I group the blogs according to the niche. I have folders named blogging, social media, productivity, copywriting, technology and brand monitoring. Brand monitoring is not blogs but the feed of searches for my name, my blog name etc.

By grouping, you can choose to read the content you want. When I feel down or stressed, I browse through the productivity folder. Depending on your mood, you can read the content you want at that particular time.

Read

Reading
Image Source: love read by luis de bethencourt

3. Go through Each Folder

As soon as you open your feed reader, go through each folder separately. Don’t use the “all items” option. You will a hard time understanding the post from their headline. When you go through each folder separately, you can easily find out what the post is about by just reading the headline. This saves you lot of time.

4. Read the Headlines

As you go through each folder, read only the headlines. If you are going to read each post, you will never finish your important works. Read the headline and understand what the post is about.

Once you know what the post is about and if the headline is very enticing, click on the link.

5. Skim

You liked the headline and you have clicked on it. Now it’s time to read/skim. Learn how to skim effectively. Skimming is quite a hard process. At first, you might miss some main points but as you keep doing it, you will get better at it.

There are many tutorials that teach you how to skim. I normally read the bolded parts, opening lines of paragraphs and quotes. If the opening line is interesting, I’ll read the paragraph further.

6. Star

This is the most important part. Once you skim the post and find it useful, “star” the post. Google reader has this option. It works the same way as the star option in gmail. When you click on the star like button to the left of the headline, it will get starred.

This is normally done for future reading. Since you are checking your feed reader first thing in the morning, you will not have time to read it completely. You star it for future reading.

You can find all the posts under the option called “starred items”.

How do all these increase productivity?

I’ll get there in a moment.

7. Brainstorm

At mid day or whenever you have free time, open your feed reader. Do you remember that we have starred the posts that are informative? Go to that list and read the posts.

Now when you are reading these posts, have a notebook and pen to jot down all the important points you come across. These points can be very helpful when you are writing a post. Some points could actually start up a debate and you can write a series of blog posts about it.

Read the posts in other niches also. As Chris Brogan says, you can get ideas for blog posts by reading things that have nothing to do with your niche.

Increase Productivity

As I promised, here are few ways how it increases productivity.

1. Less posts to read

When you organize and star the posts that interest you to read later, you significantly reduce the number of posts you have to go through. By having lesser posts, you can concentrate on each post for a longer time.

2. Early inspiration

You could actually do the skimming and starring part even in the evening instead of first thing in the morning but why do I insist on doing it as soon as you wake up? And how does that increase your productivity?

It gives you inspiration. The posts in the productivity folder will give you the much needed motivation for the day. Skimming a post quickly can provide this inspiration.

Ideas for blog post. You might start a day with some ideas for a blog post to write that day. When you skim through your feed reader in the morning, it will give more ideas on how you can improve your blog post which you are going to write that day. You might even find something relevant to what you are going to write on that particular day.

3. Lesser distractions

Since you have already checked your feeds, you won’t have the urge to check it at the middle of work. How many times have you opened your feed reader when you were working on something very important? I know I have done a couple of times. But when you check feeds as soon as you get up, you are not going to get distracted in between.

This is the way I use Google feed reader and increase my productivity by checking it first thing in the morning.

This might not be for you. But it is surely worth giving a try.

P.S: I don’t recommend checking feeds as soon as you get up if you easily get affected by what you read. Sometimes people read about a new application and they quickly jump over to that instead of completing their work. Follow this method only if you think you have a control over your mind.

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3 Things You Can Do Today To Get Started As A Freelancer

By Ramkarthik on January 19, 2010

Want to become a freelancer within a week? Have time but don’t know what to do to start enjoying the life of a freelancer?

The joy of doing what you love and getting paid is second to none. Really. Think about it. Do you love to write about productivity? Have you been following a club from your early age and want to express your opinion? Love designing? Are you skilled in marketing and advertising? The best thing is that you can do these and get paid for it.

That is the job of a freelancer. You get paid to do what you love.

Freelancer
Image Source: i_do_graphics by Brent Nelson

Okay. You have decided to become a freelancer. So the next question that pops into our mind is “How do you get clients?”

I’m giving you three tips that you can act on right now and get a client within a week. That’s a guarantee if you really do what I say and do it well.

1. Guest Post

This is the best method. I don’t understand why people don’t rate guest blogging. It should be on top of their list if they need to get clients.

Of course, there are other uses to guest blogging.

How do you get clients by guest blogging?

Find a blog in your niche. When I say your niche, I mean the one that will suit you the best.

Are you a copywriter? You can write a guest post at Copyblogger.

At the end of the post, in the author byline, promote your service.

“XYZ is a blogger at ABC.Com and a freelance writer. You can see his sample works here. If you are hiring him, say “123 blog referred you” to get 20% off.”

Replace XYZ with your name, ABC.Com with your blog url and “123 blog” with the blog where you are guest posting.

By the way, this is how I got started.

2. Forums

Most people don’t visit forums when they need to find a job. The thing is there are quite a lot of job availabilities advertised in forums but very less takers.

Go to Warrior Forum and you will see thousands of marketers who are in need of a writer or designer. In warrior forum, you pay $20 to post about your service. But trust me, if you promote your service properly, you will get a lot of work. Lot more than you can handle.

The pay that you get for your work might be less but for starters it is a great place. Why not charge a couple of dollars when you are starting out instead of doing work for free to get testimonials?

If you are short of money, then you should read this lengthy post that I wrote about getting freelance work using forums at Freelance Folder. You can read it here.

3. Video Marketing

Video marketing is the next big thing. Or it already is. You have inspiration in the form of Gary Vaynerchuk for video marketing. When a person can build a huge business using video marketing, of course after a lot of hard work, you should be able to get a job using video marketing. Although I haven’t tried this, I know people who have done it successfully. I might give it a try in future.

Create a video explaining about yourself and your service. Post it on every video site. The only negative about this method is that you might get a lot of negative comments. If you are a person who doesn’t mind that (just like me), surely this method is for you.

Tip: Try to add humor. This video might help you with that. (:P)

YouTube Preview Image

Let me know what you think about these methods in the comments. Once you have done that, take action right now. Any one method will do. Sit down and think which method will suit you the best and go for it.

This blog post is inspired by the post over at Freelance Folder written by Laura Spencer on Five Ways to Start a Freelance Business Right Now. Make sure you read that too. The points in that post are completely different.

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