Leverage is the ability to obtain a significant benefit from a lesser investment – whether that investment is time, effort or money.
We typically think of leverage as the mechanical advantage that results from using a lever. In fact, Archimedes once stated, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
But leverage isn’t limited to the laws of physics – it applies in many other situations as well.
In the corporate world, Change Agents commonly speak of varying one or more business “levers” in order to bring about organizational change or transformation. Unfortunately, in today’s world, those business levers are often perceived negatively, resulting in job cuts, down-sizing, bankruptcies, or other forms of corporate re-organization.
But leverage has many positive implications as well.
People apply financial leverage when they use borrowed funds to increase the return of an investment, or when they use calls or puts to control large quantities of stock at a cost far less than outright purchase.
Home businesses utilize leverage when they function online. Simply by doing that, they’ve avoided the limitations of geography (and largely, time as well) and leveraged their advertising dollars, since it costs the about the same amount to create an ad that reaches only a small number of people as it does to create an ad that is global.
If we were running a small “brick and mortar” store, we might be satisfied with traffic that numbered in the hundreds, but as an internet marketer, we want massive traffic numbering in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions – and not just any prospects, but highly qualified prospects.
We are utilizing leverage when we use tools such as Google AdWords: we use the G0ogle technologies to generate targeted traffic for us and send it to our website.
The Net 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 affiliate income businesses that take full advantage of the leverage that technology provides 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.