If not, or if you're not sure what leveraging means or why you would want to leverage your assets, then keep reading.

What do I mean by leverage? Well, in financial terms, to leverage a resource means to multiply the productivity of the resource. That is, to get that particular resource to yield a greater return without additional input of effort.

For example, if you can show your sales people how to get your customers to increase their average purchase amounts by 15% with no additional cost or effort then you have just leveraged your sales staff and increased your profits by 15%.

One technique for leveraging your sales personnel is by having them offer your customers an upsell at the time of sale. I'm sure that if you ever ordered a hamburger from McDonalds you will have been asked, "Would you like fries with that?" or "Supersize it?" These are examples of upselling at the time of sale and a leveraging of the sales agent by simply having them ask a simple question when taking the order. No additional expense or effort is required, yet a surprisingly larger number of customers will purchase the upsell item thus increasing the amount of the sale.

For an online business, the order form may have options for upsells as well. The upsell may be a Silver, Gold or Platinum version of the basic product or service or perhaps an additional related product at a reduced price if purchased at the same time as the basic product.

To leverage the online thank you page after a person subscribes to your ezine or requests a free special report, you can place a one-time special offer on the thank you page.

In each case, some percentage of customers will take you up on the upsell offer. Depending upon the offer, you can often expect that anywhere from 15% to 40% or more customers will accept the upsell offer, thus increasing your profits without any extra effort on your part (other than adding the upsell offer to the thank you page).

How about leveraging an ad? Let's say that you consistently run an ad in a local newspaper or trade journal. If you adjust the copy in your ad but keep the overall size of your ad the same and then find through testing that your new copy outpulls your old ad by 10%, that's 10% more profit for the exact same cost and effort.

What resources can be leveraged?

You can leverage a wide variety of resources including, ads, headlines, prices, publicity, in-store sales, field sales, average purchase amounts, repeat sales, referrals, new customer leads, lead conversions, order pages, thank you pages, ebooks, special reports, articles, and on and on. Just use your imagination and you'll be surprised by the number of resources you can leverage significantly.

For example, this article could have been simply posted on my website for site visitors to read or included as a feature article in my offline newsletter or online ezine for my own subscribers. Using it in more than one place for different audiences is a form of leverage. But the article can be further leveraged by also posting it to article directories, forwarding it to other ezine publishers who may wish to publish it in their ezines or on their own websites, including it as part of a special report or even as part of an offline book or online ebook.

Remember, for maximum efficiency and profits, be sure to leverage your assets.