Leverage is the ability to achieve a substantial advantage from a small investment – whether that investment is time, effort or money.
We usually think of leverage as the mechanical benefit that derives from using a lever. In fact, Archimedes once claimed, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
But leverage isn’t restricted to the physical world of mechanical advantage – it applies in many other situations as well.
In the corporate world, Change Agents often speak of changing one or more business “levers” in order to bring about organizational change or transformation. Unfortunately, in today’s world, those business levers often have negative connotations and involve job cuts, down-sizing, bankruptcies, or other forms of corporate re-organization.
But leverage has many positive applications as well.
People apply financial leverage when they use borrowed funds to increase the return of an investment, or when they use options to control large quantities of stock for much less cost than if they purchased the stock.
Home businesses use leverage when they operate online. Simply by doing that, they’ve removed the boundaries of geography (and largely, time as well) and leveraged their advertising dollars, since it requires about the same amount of money to create an announcement that reaches only a small number of people as it does to create an ad that reaches a global market.
If we were managing a small “brick and mortar” store, we might be satisfied with a couple hundred visitors, but as an online business, we want massive traffic numbering in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions – and not just any prospects, but highly qualified prospects.
We are using leverage when we use tools such as Google AdWords: we use the power and reach of Google to identify targeted traffic for us and send it to our website.
The Internet provides us with many forms of leverage, but they basically all boil down to the use of technology. Technology is one of the greatest levers ever invented.
Most internet marketers are familiar with the use of autoresponders and search engines, etc., but they often fail to make full use of the technology lever in their back office processes – including everything from managing sales leads to fulfilling the order and taking care of the follow-on billing and customer service issues.
Those online businesses that take fully leverage technology are the ones who will succeed in this competitive environment.
If you’d like to learn how to leverage technology for your online business and gain the most leverage from technology, check out the Infinite Income Plan.
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