Easy Wins

Recently I shared my enthusiasm for a new vacuum cleaner we recently bought. A good friend replied, joking that my enthusiasm for the appliance had won him over and I’d sold him on the Shark. Obviously a joke, right?

Except the next day he WhatsApped me showing me his Shark receipt!

As coincidence would have it he really did need a new vacuum cleaner and my Top Tips email extolling its virtues led hi m to have a look. So in effect I did Shark’s marketing for them. And I did it for free!

But if I’d had my head screwed on I could have been rewarded for it by being a Shark affiliate.

Scratch My Back

Affiliate schemes have become huge business over the last decade. They’re a very simple type of performance-based marketing where companies, large and small, reward an individual or another company for sending customers their way. 

Last week’s email could have been both a Top Tips idea, like it always is, but it could have ALSO generated a small amount of revenue for me.

If I’d included an affiliate link to the Shark product that I was raving about, my friend could have followed that link, bought the hoover at the same cost and I would have been paid something by the company for my troubles.

But here’s the thing. I haven’t got an affiliation thing going on with Shark. Or even a third party seller like Amazon. Which leads us to this week’s theme: low hanging fruit.

How Do You Like Them Apples?

Why would you spend time and effort climbing all the way to the uppermost branches of an apple tree when there are heavily laden branches dangling juicy Lord Lambornes right before you? Why not pluck the ripe fruit before your eyes? The one that doesn’t require any effort to reach? 

In many areas of life it’s obvious that we should be picking the low hanging fruit first, before we move on to the harder work that needs to be done once the more accessible opportunities have gone. 

But many people, and I’m definitely one these people, somehow manage to miss the low hanging fruit and plough on with the hard stuff first. Even when the low hanging fruit is in full view!

Creating affiliations with companies whose products that I use, like and sometimes recommend is an obvious example of low hanging fruit for me. So why haven’t I set up a bunch of affiliate links yet?

Not sure, but writing this email has just shoved that task further up my prioritised to do list.

Looking back over a few months worth of Top Tips emails there are quite a few different products or services that I’ve mentioned in passing. And in theory I could have included an affiliate link to each of them in my emails. And then added them to the Top Tips blog. 

But I didn’t. I’ve walked passed the low hanging fruit. Repeatedly!

What are the low hanging fruits you are failing to pick? At work and at home?

Money Trees

Is it financial? There is easy money to be made, or rather saved, by simply switching mortgage providers. I have a friend (another friend - yes, I have more than one friend!) who is paying something like 5% on his mortgage. 

It’s not that I’m vague and don’t know the exact percentage rate. He’s the one being vague and really doesn’t know. Which means he’s paying over the odds. Rates are at an all time low and he’s very probably paying too much. He could be paying as little as 1%, definitely 2% max.

Easy rule of thumb: if you don’t know what you’re paying for your mortgage then you’re paying too much. You can literally save thousands of pounds for as little as thirty minutes work. That’s definitely low hanging fruit.

Strange Fruit

Is your low hanging fruit in business? People are more likely to buy from people they have already done business with. Think about the books you enjoy reading; you’re much more likely to buy another book from an author you’re already familiar with, than from a ‘new’ author.

Most of my business is repeat business. Generally someone hears about me and hires me as a coach for their organisation. That leads to training work. Or first they hire me to deliver some training and then that leads to coaching.

So if you have a service that your current customers already come to you for is there another, related service that you can offer to the same customers? 

They are already your customers so you’ve done all of your marketing and if you’ve done a good job then they already trust you. A new service or product could well be the low hanging fruit you’re missing out on.

Or is your low hanging fruit in your personal life?

• Is it a ten minute meditation at the start of the day that would boost your next twenty four hours?
• Is it chugging back a vegetable juice or smoothie to cram in all those extra fabulous nutrients and vitamins you’d normally forget?
• Is it turning off the screen earlier and climbing beneath the covers instead, to benefit from an extra half hour’s sleep?

Lazy Sunday

I’m not suggesting that you only go after the low hanging fruit. No, the lazy, easy, Sunday afternoon life isn’t the idea at all. Challenging yourself to become a better version of you is a great thing to do and striving for goals in a positive manner will only result in growth.

What I am suggesting is that you go after the low hanging fruit first. Get some easy wins under your belt because they will help you to make swift progress, create momentum and boost your enthusiasm. This will help to snowball your development which will definitely help as the challenges progress and get harder.

Let me know what your low hanging fruit is. Are you going to still keep ignoring it? Or are you going to set yourself the strangely difficult challenge of picking the easy to reach fruit? I love to hear from readers so do hit reply to tell me about it.

The low hanging fruit I’ve passed on is, as you now know, affiliate links. I often recommend certain products or software or books that have been impactful for me. Having affiliate links would be an easy win so my challenge is to research which ones have affiliate systems and set a few up over the summer. Watch this space.

The money involved won’t mean I can retire quite yet but if I’d given my mate an affiliate link to buy his shark vacuum cleaner then we’d have both been able to clean up!