Ahh…the holidays are upon us yet again. Thanksgiving has already come and gone, and many of us (fortunately, not me) have endured the unending lines and frenzied crowds to be a part of the insane Black Friday tradition. Now, as we jump knee-deep into Cyber Monday, many businesses are beginning to wind down for the year. But instead of a relaxing (or stressing out over holiday preparations), you should be using the next thirty days to build up a competitive advantage and set the stage for a record year in 2010!

While your competitors are content to simply wait for Santa Clause to climb down their chimneys, you can leverage your reduced workload to develop your own products to sell. You may have already thought about this a long time ago, but gave in to your own excuses. Stop that and get started! Each product you develop gives you a new stream of income that can work 24-7, is infinitely scalable (it doesn’t take any more effort to sell 1,000,000 than it does to sell 1) and helps you to generate revenue from the clients who you would have otherwise turned away because they couldn’t afford your services. Don’t leap before you look, though. There are lots of innovative ideas and tools for testing if there is a market for the product that you want to develop, and Pat Flynn does a great job of outlining them step by step.

You’ll quickly find that this can be a major turning point for your business that can grow exponentially and make life easier.

There’s a map for that, and now, there’s a lawsuit too.

AT&T has recently filed a lawsuit against Verizon for their ‘There’s a Map for That’ ad campaign. AT&T is claiming that the ads are “misleading” customers and causing the loss of “incalculable market share.” AT&T isn’t claiming that the information related to 3G coverage is wrong. Instead, they imply that customers who view the ads aren’t smart enough to understand that it’s only referring to 3G coverage, and not coverage in general.

The lawsuit will most likely backfire though, because it’s drawing more attention to the ad campaign and the weaknesses of AT&T’s 3G network. Exactly the opposite effect AT&T was looking for.

In a world where a phone is expected to do much more than just make calls, a significant difference in 3G coverage can be a deciding factor in choosing a provider. While AT&T may have the fastest 3G network, it means little if you can’t access that network. Instead of improving their service to at least the same level as their competitors, AT&T instead tried to prevent their competitors from highlighting the differences. That is an ineffective and counterproductive strategy.

If a competitor highlights a weakness in your services or products, don’t look at it as an attack. Look at it as an opportunity to improve.

Selling a service can be great because it doesn’t require you to produce anything up-front, but the downside is that it doesn’t scale. There are only 24 hours in the day and your revenue is limited by how many of them you can work.

Selling a product, on the other hand, means that once you’ve produced it, you can continue selling it forever. The advantage here is that you can sell your product online 24/7 while you focus on developing new products to sell. Over time, you will start to see exponential growth because each new product creates a new revenue stream.

You may think that you just don’t have the time to create your own products. You’re wrong. Even if you only spend 30 minutes each day creating your own products, that adds up to 10 hours each month. That’s plenty of time to package your knowledge in a format that others would gladly pay for. If you maintain this pace over the course of a year, you’ll have 12 new products to sell, creating a solid residual income that will free up even more of your time.

At least once each week, I talk to someone who tells me that their company produces something that everyone needs. Men, women, young, old, it doesn’t matter, everyone in the world is their ideal customer.

The thing is, they are wrong. There is no one thing that everyone needs.

Worse than being wrong, they are setting themselves up for failure. By convincing themselves that everyone needs what they’re offering, they end up burning out because it takes significantly more effort to convert their prospects into customers. It can be tempting to look at larger segments of the population as your target market, but it all comes down to one thing; conversions. Would you rather spend your time trying to convince 1,000 people who are slightly interested in what you have and converting 50 of them, or trying to convince 100 people who are absolutely passionate about what you have and converting 20 of them?

If you focus on a more targeted prospect, you’ll find that:

• Your sales process is easier and faster, which means you can spend more time finding even more like-minded prospects
• You’ll get more referrals
• The amount of time you spend handling customer service related issues goes down, which again, means that you can spend more time finding even more like-minded prospects

If you still think you can convince everyone, remember, 6% of the US population thinks we never landed on the moon. Good luck with that!

The concept of “free” as a business model, or at least a phase of a business model, is here to stay, but does it really work? The short answer is, yes and no.

One school of thought says to give your service away for free in order to get exposure and dominate the market, then find a way to monetize your service. There is some validity to this, but for most people/companies, it just won’t work. First, you have to have money to support yourself and/or your company during the free period, and this isn’t just a matter of providing the service because a large percentage of the people receiving your free service will expect you to provide free support as well. Another factor is that, quite often, the people interested in your free service won’t be willing to pay for it, so once you find a way to monetize it, you will lose them. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing because it will filter out people who will waste your time. Just make sure that you don’t base your financial projections on your pre-monetization users.

Free can work to create exposure, reach new prospects and increase market share, but only if done correctly. Some of these approaches may work for your business model:

• Offer free content, but also offer premium content. A good example of this is Aaron Wall‘s SEO Book. He regularly posts useful and informative articles in his blog, but he also has a very active paid membership community where you can find some of the most up-to-date SEO information available anywhere. The free content helps to create exposure, draw in targeted traffic and give visitors a taste of what’s inside, while the premium content is where the real treasure is.
• Provide tools and resources that your visitors can use for free, making your website a valuable resource that others will want to talk about and link to. This helps you to increase your exposure and traffic, and to create a defensible website.
• Develop useful and original free content on your own website and guest-post on other popular, relevant websites. If the quality of your content is superior, it will show your visitors that you are the expert in your field, which you can then leverage to sell them your services.