How to Increase Online Sales: One Question About How to Brainstorm for Business Ideas (and marketing ideas)

In this blog, I’m going to show you how to increase online sales for your business with this one simple brainstorming question.

This is one simple question that has helped me increase my sales. I’m going to show you how to brainstorm business ideas with this one simple question.

This question comes straight from my Scale Your Business Online Course (week #11). Week eleven is one of my favorite weeks in the course. Week eleven of the course is all about getting more sales and figuring out “How do we make more money? How do we convert leads into customers?”. It’s all about new sales techniques that you can use to tweak your marketing and improve your products to make more money and scale your business.

So today, I want to share part of the Scale Your Business Online Course with you. I want to share this one question with you. This one question helped me to develop new products, new marketing strategies, and new marketing material that pushed my business forward.

It’s one simple question that I learned from the book Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. A great book. It’s one of Tony Robbins best sellers. This question came from a one-off example in one of the chapters, it wasn’t even a major subject of the book, but this one question has really helped me to grow my business.

One Question: How to Brainstorm for Business Ideas (and Marketing Ideas)

This one powerful question is: “How can I increase the value of what I do by 10 to 15 times?”

Use This Question: Learn How to Increase Online Sales

You can use this question to brainstorm business ideas, new product ideas, and marketing ideas. I personally use this question to brainstorm how to increase online sales for my businesses.

What I recommend you do is, ask yourself this question over and over again. Sit down in a quiet space with a journal for 10 to 15 minutes at a time. Ask yourself this question over and over again. How can I increase the value of what I do by 10 to 15 times?

Ask yourself this question in relation to your target market. Ask yourself this question in relation to the website that you manage. Ask yourself this question in relation to the market you are trying to serve and your market’s biggest challenges. How can you increase the value that you personally offer your target market?

This question is forcing you to brainstorm ways to provide more value in your business because the value that you offer is the reason people are buying your products and services. This is how to brainstorm for business ideas, this one question to increase the value you offer. If you can multiply the value that you offer, you will multiply your income. The basis behind this question is trying to find unique ways, and brainstorm ways, to increase our value which in turn will increase our earnings.

Because of this one question “How can I increase the value of what I do by 10 to 15 times?” Tony Robbins wrote the book Awaken the Giant Within and created his audiotape programs that helped him to blow up on a national scale. With this one question, Tony realized, by getting his voice out there into the world in the form of books and audio programs, he could provide 10 to 15 times more value. Rather than doing one-on-one coaching to help one person at a time, rather than speaking to a couple of hundred people attending a seminar, Tony now reaches millions of people with his books and audio programs. He figured out how to increase the value that he offers to reach more people, and because of that, the money followed. Tony Robbins is now, arguably, the most famous personal development and public speaker there is. All because he found a way to multiply his value, to help more people by expanding the value he offers by 10 to 15 times.

In the book, Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins goes on to ask readers “Can you earn 1,000 times the amount of money you do now in the same amount of time? Absolutely! If you find a way to be worth 1,000 times more than your fellow man. The key to wealth is be more valuable. If you devise a way to consistently add real value to people’s lives, you will prosper.” Providing value is the backbone of every business. This is online business in a nutshell. We are solving some problems. We know our target market’s biggest pain points, so we solve those pain points with our products and services. We make money by adding value to the lives of others. People pay us for our products and services and exactly what we do.

So go ahead, ask yourself, “How can I increase the value of what I do by 10 to 15 times?”.

Brainstorming Question – Your Turn

So, I encourage you to sit down and ask yourself this question over and over again, sit down and journal. This is how to brainstorm for business ideas, this is how you will think of that breakthrough for your business. This is how to find your “aha!” moment.

Set a timer for ten minutes and just write. Do a brain dump. Write down anything that comes to mind, I don’t care how crazy it is. Ask yourself over and over again:

How can I increase the value of what I do by 10 to 15 times?

Write down everything that comes to mind. By the end of your ten minutes, after asking yourself this question, you should have a big list of ideas about how to increase online sales for your business. You will have a big list of ideas to launch new products, new marketing tactics, and new businesses.

Now, what I do, is take this list and review it. I give it a reasonability check. I take each item that I wrote down, no matter how crazy, and ask myself the following questions:

• Would this really increase my value by 10 to 15 times?
• Which idea is most achievable to increase the value that I offer as quickly as possible?
• What do I need to learn to accomplish this?
• How long would this take me?
• What reasonable increase in online sales can I expect from this idea?

I ask myself these follow-up questions for each idea that I’ve brainstormed. I do this to prioritize my ideas. I know that I can’t possibly pursue every idea on my list, so I need to narrow it down to the best idea. The one idea that will really push my business forward. Which idea from this list is truly going to increase the value that I offer by 10 to 15 times? Which idea is most achievable to increase the value that I offer as quickly as possible?

Repeat this same process once or twice per week for about one month. Keep asking yourself this question. Your subconscious mind will still be thinking about this question, even when you are not journaling or going through this exercise. That’s the basis of the “aha moment”. Your subconscious mind, seemingly out of nowhere, hits you with an amazing idea to quadruple the value you offer, which will increase your online sales. Keep jotting these ideas down as they pop-up in your mind throughout the days or weeks that you go through this process. You will find one brilliant idea to pursue first.

Brainstorming Question – My Experience

I have personally used this process multiple times in my businesses. This is how to brainstorm for business ideas. Each time I go through this journaling exercise, I come away with a list of 50+ new business and marketing ideas. Whether it’s new products, new solutions, new marketing strategies, or just crazy outlandish dreams. I come away with a whole list of ways that might financially reward me if I take on a new product, a new process, a new project, something to push my business forward.

When I’m at a stage in my business where I’m not getting enough sales, or I’ve plateaued and can’t seem to get my business to that next level, I ask myself this question. I ask myself, “what can I do to multiply the value that I offer to my consumers?” because I know more value means more money.

Here are some real examples from my businesses of new products and innovations that I created because of this one question. These are real products, services, and businesses that I have scaled because of the ideas that transpired from this one brainstorming exercise:

• Launch a dog training book – This was one of the first products I launched after going through this brainstorming exercise for the first time. This was one of my best ideas. This is a book for my website the Pomsky Owners Association. My thought was, rather than answering one-off emails about dog training and helping one person at a time (which I was doing five or six times a week) I should write a book to help everyone with similar questions. So that’s what I did. I could reach more people, and therefore increase the value that I offer. I took all of the dog training questions that I usually answer, all of the common questions, and I wrote a book about how to train this type of dog breed. This book now sells 60+ copies per month ($500+ revenue per month) and is available as an audiobook. I am now reaching upwards of sixty people per month, providing value to sixty new people, rather than six people per week through emails. I was able to increase the value I offer (knowledge of training this type of dog) by ten times by writing this book and reaching more people. So, by sitting down asking myself this question “how can I increase the value I offer by ten to fifteen times”, I came to the idea that I can add more value by having one big resource out there (my book) that answers all these training questions automatically. It reduces my time answering emails, which gives me more time to provide value elsewhere on the website, it helps me reach and provide value to 60+ people per month, and it helps me reach new people on Amazon that would not have otherwise known about my website.
• Entrepreneur online courses – This blog that you are reading comes from a video that I recorded for my Scale Your Business Online Course. This online course was born from the question How can I increase the value of what I do by 10 to 15 times? I love one-on-one coaching, but with coaching, I can only help one person at a time. So I asked myself, how can I increase the value that I offer? Well, I can package it into an online course and group coaching program! Simply take the content that I am continually teaching my coaching clients, put it together in blogs, resources, and videos and package it in a course or group coaching program and teach it to multiple people at once. Perhaps these courses will turn into a book in the near future so I Can reach even more entrepreneurs!
• Insurance Textbooks – With one of my niche sites, AssociatePI, I sell insurance online courses. They are online courses to help employees in the insurance industry earn their insurance designations and certifications. I used this exact same exercise for my insurance niche site. I sat down and asked myself, how can I increase the value I offer? What can I do? With this website, my revenue has plateaued. I have been stuck for almost two years now, right around in the range of $6,000 to $10,000 in income per month. I have been trying to blow past this plateau and scale this website up to the $20,000 per month range. So, I have been thinking about how to scale my insurance niche website using this one powerful question. Asking myself, how can I double my income with this website? What can I do to double my value or triple my value (so that I can double my income)? I came away with a few ideas. First, launch a textbook version of my online course. Currently, on this website, I only sell online courses. Why don’t I take the exact content from my online course, use the Amazon KDP program, and convert my courses into a textbook that I sell on Amazon to reach people that want textbooks instead of an online platform? There are not many competitors out there selling textbooks, and there is not one authoritative source on Amazon selling this product. And I know that people want it, I get emails a few times per week asking if I sell textbooks. So that’s what I am going to do. That is how I will increase the value I offer to my audience; I will launch a textbook version of my online course. Additionally, another idea that I came away with after asking myself how I can increase the value that I offer, is to enroll in my competitor’s affiliate program. Currently, I sell ten online courses on my insurance niche website, but there are probably another twenty courses that I want to sell in the future (but I have not got around to writing them). I have people asking for these courses, they email me asking when the next course will be released but I am not planning to write a new course anytime soon. I am not providing value for these members of my audience. So, to provide more value, I enrolled in my competitor’s affiliate program. Now, rather than spending the next five years writing twenty new insurance courses, I use the affiliate program to recommend an adequate course for anyone in need of a course that I do not yet offer. I recommend my competitors’ products, if someone buys my competitors course, I earn twenty dollars per sale. This is a way for me to provide more value to my audience, by recommending a course that will meet their needs, while it also it helps me earn a little extra income. I now make an extra $200 to $300 per month by recommending somebody else’s products. This one simple affiliate relationships increase my income and the value that I offer my audience.

As you can see, a lot can come out of this one question. By asking yourself “what can I do to increase my value by 10 to 15 times?” your brain will find creative solutions and creative ways to increase the value that you offer to your audience. Which in turn, is how to increase online sales for your business.

One Brainstorming Question: How to Increase Online Sales – Conclusion

“How can I increase the value of what I do by 10 to 15 times?”

I highly recommend that you ask yourself this one question. This one question is how to brainstorm for business ideas. This one question will help you brainstorm business and marketing ideas that will push your business forward. Sit down in a quiet place with a journal for ten minutes, and ask yourself this question “How can I increase the value of what I do by 10 to 15 times?”. Let your mind wander and write down every idea that comes to mind.

Use this one question to brainstorm ideas, and figure out what you can do in your business to increase the value that you offer. As you add more and more value to your customers, the income and the revenue will follow. Look at my examples above, see how I used this question to launch new products and services. I am now launching textbooks, creating courses, and expanding my affiliate partnership because I know those are the best ways for me to increase the value that I offer my audience by ten to fifteen times.

Take this one question, ask this to yourself and brainstorm, because this will help you increase your sales. This will help you increase that revenue and scale your business. Go out there, brainstorm how to increase the value that you offer, how to increase online sales in your business, and how to scale your business today.

That’s it! That is the one question that will help you scale your business. I highly recommend checking out the book Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. You can purchase the book on Amazon here. It’s a great read and one that I will definitely come back to in the future.

Happy brainstorming!