This simple process is capable of generating $87 every single day and it only takes 22 minutes to set-up.
It is 5-step ‘point-and-click’ simple and taps into a little known free traffic source which typically deducts 10% of the sale price in payment for the traffic AFTER each sale is made.
If that seems fair enough then read on…
First you will need a platform on which to sell. Just setting up a website can be a problem for many people but with this system it is as simple as point and click!
Sign up with ‘Shopify’ and you will get the first 14 days free – after that you can choose which package to join. They start at just $29 per month.
You then need to add the free App called Oberlo to your Shopify store. This app enables you to add products easily to your store.
Oberlo is a drop-shipping supplier who will complete all sourcing and deliveries of products so we do not have to touch any physical stock. This means that we have no up-front costs of purchasing stock, storing and insuring it or packaging and delivery costs. This is as easy as e-commerce gets!
After you have connected the Oberlo App to your store, you need to search for products using the App.
Decide which market demographic you are going to target e.g. women aged 18 to 30, and then choose products that will appeal to this market demographic.
The more products that you add, the more likely you will have something that appeals to your customer. As it is totally free to add products and the products and product details are automatically added into your Shopify store when you choose them, adding loads of products is easy to do.
Import each product you like but don’t second-guess the marketplace as you don’t yet know what will appeal to your prospects. You can optionally clean up the product title and tags for each of your products if you wish or just run with what the supplier gives you.
All color and size variants will be added in by the supplier thus saving you the time and effort of doing this yourself. You can choose your price or just run with the automated price.
After you have chosen your products, you will need to click a button entitled ‘Push All Products to Shop’. You will then be able to view the products in your shop and begin selling!
You now need to start sending traffic to your new store in order to make sales.
To do this you can connect automated ‘Sales Channel’ apps to your store. Within Shopify, simply click ‘Sales Channels’ and add the following Apps one by one by adding and connecting each sales channel:
Kik
Pinterest
Wanelo
Houzz
Wish
Amazon
Buzzfeed
These apps will send out automated bots to your Shopify store and place adverts in front of their traffic. (When you are setting up each sales channel, you will be asked to identify the type of audience and categories that match your products so they can send you relevant traffic.)
So just to recap:
Register at Shopify (- set shipping at $5.99 and add in your payment method)
Add in the Oberlo App as your drop-shipping agent
Add products to your Shopify store – aim for a minimum of 50 but the more the merrier
Add in your sales channel apps (- remember you only pay if you make a sale and keep the profit!)
You start making sales – lets say you get an order for $40, you pay your supplier say $10 and keep the rest.
Don’t over complicate this method – this is as simple as it gets. How much you make depends on how many products you have and whether they appeal to the customers viewing your store. As it is free to test this, you have nothing to lose as long as your sales cover the Shopify fee.
Given how quickly this can be set up and the low cost of Shopify – free for 14 days and then starting at $29 per month, you have very little to lose and a lot to gain by experimenting with this method.
Advertising can be pretty boring but Ikea’s headline is inviting its customers to to wee on their advert. If their woman customer is expecting a baby, it will reveal a discount for one of their cots. Their headline is:
PEEING ON THIS ADVERT MAY CHANGE YOUR LIFE!
Apparently there is a chemical in the urine of a pregnant woman that interacts with another chemical on their advert to reveal the discount code.
Very clever.
You could say it is also a pregnancy test! However, it does mean that they have a tightly targeted audience who will get a great introduction to Ikea and encourage them to come into their store to buy more products for their baby.
Of course, most of us would like to piss on advertising for very different reasons!
Creativity is a key ingredient in advertising and in the past there have been some great headlines.
Here is one from Jon Morrow:
HOW TO QUIT YOUR JOB, MOVE TO PARADISE AND GET PAID TO CHANGE THE WORLD
You could easily change this for your own purposes:
HOW TO FLIP YOUR MIDDLE FINGER AT YOUR BOSS, WORK FROM HOME AND GET PAID TO IMPROVE OTHER PEOPLES LIVES
HOW TO CHUCK IN YOUR JOB, WORK ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD AND GET WELL PAID FOR DOING SO.
Here’s another by Ashley Ambirge:
CAUTION: STOP MASTURBATING WITH YOUR MONEY
We can change that to:
WARNING: THIS IS JUST ‘MIND-MASTURBATION’ IF YOU DON’T TAKE ACTION (- this should be a warning on all training courses and ‘how to’ books!)
DON’T MASTURBATE WITH YOUR MONEY – BUY THIS!
Here is another by Rita Templetion :
YOUR PENIS WON’T FALL OFF AND OTHER THINGS BOYS SHOULD KNOW
How about this:
IF YOU DON’T BUY THIS YOUR PENIS WON’T FALL OFF BUT…
WHY THIS COULD TURN YOUR BALLS TO RAISINS AND OTHER SECRETS INTERNET MARKETERS SHOULD KNOW
How about this one by Yvette Caster:
21 REASONS TO HATE KIDS
We can come up with:
21 REASONS TO HATE… (KITTENS, PUPPIES, PARENTS, MARRIAGE, SEX, GOLF, INTERNET MARKETING, MY BLOG etc etc)
These headlines are both outrageous and entertaining and invite readers to read on to find out what you are talking about.
Other than inviting your readers to piss on your advert, what outrageous ideas can you come up with for your adverts?
This extract from an article called ‘How to make $1 million in 3 years’ is very interesting because it is not difficult to create a digital product or a funnel of digital products that could sell for $100 or much more! Indeed there is enough information on this website to do just that.
I loved the advice in point #3 – this is really the key and I like the fact that you can break the problem down to a micro-level of selling just one copy of your product. This makes the problem much easier to solve.
Critical to the success of this advice is having a method to calculate the cost of acquiring customers – if you can then make more profit than the cost of acquiring a customer, it is just a matter of scaling up.
Here are the three keys I have observed in practice by those who are crushing it:
1. Pick something “boring” and consistent. I’m not saying boring in the sense that it doesn’t excite you or your potential customers. I say boring to mean that it is boring in its simplicity. Stop looking for the next big thing. Pick something that is proven and just do it a bit better.
From there, figure out what you should be selling it for. Figure out what it is going to take numerically to hit your goal.
To make $1,000,000 in 3 years (gross revenue), you only have to make $913/day. That’s it!
Here are a couple ways to arrive at $1,000,000. You have to sell:
100 items at $10,000 each
1,000 items at $1,000 each
10,000 items at $100 each
20,000 items at $50 each
A $100 product sounds pretty good. To make $1,000,000 you would have to sell 9 of those a day. That’s it!
I think this perspective is very important because it stresses the key behind this entire strategy. CONSISTENCY. All it takes is selling 9 items a day.
2. Use your own money to finance it. Don’t fall into the line of thinking that you need a ton of money and partners upfront to make your business work. I fell into this early on and went as far as almost raising capital for my first blog. I spent months working on raising money, developing business plans, thinking about partners, roles and responsibilities. Ultimately I discovered that this was all unnecessary. Bootstrap it yourself, rely on yourself and launch!
3. Figure out what it takes to get 1 sale. This is the most important rule.
Making a million is easier than most people think. The key is to identify your ‘profit centers.’
These are the areas of your business that drive revenue and are where you should focus the majority of your time. For most, marketing, promotion and sales are the core profit centers. Spend your time here, make it your strength and then outsource the other items that don’t drive sales and aren’t your strengths.
Once you figure out how much money it costs you to acquire your first customer or first sale, you’re off to the races and it all becomes a numbers game. Assuming you are able to get decent margins when acquiring customers you’ll spend your time here… optimizing and pivoting as necessary.
The most successful people I know have figured this out and understand that it takes money to make money. They spend tens of thousands of dollars a day and a week on Facebook and Instagram ads to acquire customers. They have figured out the return on these investments and it pushes them closer to a million each day.
4. Make Money While You Sleep
The best way to make money is to do it passively. The great thing about the internet is that it is quite simple to automate this process. Once you have your product and cost per acquisition locked down, it’s time to automate the process.
There are countless platforms and services dedicated to helping you automate your sales, marketing and customer service. Use them!
At this point, you’re probably wondering what are some examples of successful business models that can make you $1,000,000 in under three years. Below are some ideas, but keep in mind that you need to create your own based on what you are both passionate about and good at. If you’ve read any of my articles before you’ll recognize that I tend to lean towards online business models and e-commerce models. For first-time entrepreneurs and people looking for side-hustlers, I recommend starting this way.
Here are some ideas.
Self-publishing and distribute a book
Dropshipping
Affiliate marketing
Online products (ebooks, Guides, video courses, membership groups, etc.)
Consulting
Speaking
Media appearances
Writing opportunities.
Build an email list you can sell other products around
Now it’s time
My last piece of advice? If you’re going to set a monetary goal like make a million dollars, do it for the right reasons. I have seen entrepreneurs purely motivated by financial gain create absolute sh*t products that offer no value and do nothing to teach them any lessons. They ultimately fail (and look quite silly in the process I might add)
Going on Alibaba, slapping a logo on a little trinket and trying to sell it online simply because you might be able to squeeze some profit is not in-line with the above.
The above was written for driven people who want to create something derivative of their passion. They want to provide value.
If you want to make a million dollars on your own, you have to provide value.
Take your creativity and give it to others so that they can benefit from it. In return, you will be rewarded for your time and effort.
That is the hustle I want to be associated with and I hope you do too.
(This is an extract from prsuit.com/life-in-review/make-million-dollars-next-3-years)
If you are starting out in internet marketing, you may be asking ‘what tools do I need to get to $5k per month’.
The problem with this question is that just about every marketer will give you a different reply to this question, particularly if they are trying to make money out of you by selling their own product or even someone else’s product or service.
It was refreshing therefore to receive an email from Sean Mize that sets this out clearly and simply (and truthfully)!
It’s sad, really.
And it’s not their fault.
One guru after another has told them, you need this $20 a month tool.
Another says you need this $40 a month tool.
All the way until they are spending $300 A MONTH on tools . . . .
And not making $100 a month, if that.
I talk to several folks a week in that boat.
It’s not their fault.
They’ve been told they need them.
Want to know the tools I personally used to get to $13k a month in one year?
Here goes.
Prepare to be disappointed.
1) a squeeze page
2) a way to make sales pages
3) an email autoresponder
4) good old word docs
That’s it.
$13k a month.
No bells.
No whistles.
That’s right.
ALL you need to get to $5k – or $13k a month
is:
a way to make squeeze pages
a way to make sales pages
a way to make download pages (to deliver)
and an email autoresponder
a word processor
And here’s a secret – you don’t even need a website to have squeeze pages and salespages and download pages.
Just some service that allows you to create them.
You could use mine . . preneurpages
or any other one that does the same thing
and you need an email autoresponder . . I started with aweber and still have my account
That’s it folks.
If you have $300 in tools and no revenue . . .
please, something’s wrong.
How would it feel if you only had $20 a month in expenses . . .
would that make it easier for you (and your wife) to relax
and just focus on selling something
instead of worrying about how to make $300 a month in payments one more time?
Do something!
In this email Sean is promoting his page builder ‘Preneurpages’ but there are plenty of page builders that you can use. Here are 5 other page builders you might consider (- I own all but the last one listed):
Thrive Content Builder plugin by Shaun Melaugh – this is my favourite from a design perspective and is constantly being improved
WP Profit Builder by Keith Dougherty – some good page templates within this plugin
Convertri – this is a hosted service – provides a very fast loading platform for landing pages and an infinitely customizable page builder. There are only a limited amount of page templates unless you buy a monthly subscription to their Pro service but if you are happy to design your own pages, is a good option.
For a cheap but good page builder, you could try Instabuider 2.0 that you can have installed on your WordPress site for $5 through Fiverr.com
Launchpages.co is another page builder that has just been launched as I write this article.
These page builders are a great way of developing landing page templates as part of your system for selling and promoting products and services. They are useless unless you have something to promote, a method of driving traffic to them and a method for monitoring your results.
However, in answering the question ‘What tools do I need to get to $5k per month’ Sean is exactly right and, if you do not already have a page builder system, his page template system ‘PreneurPages’ is worthy of consideration as he will be sharing his own sales page templates that are proven to work.
In this extract from a comment on Perry Marshall’s blog, he sets out the problem with the make money online niche:
The problem is you’re selling “how to make money on the Internet” information, and that’s how you’re attempting to succeed online.
There is a whole host of problems with that:
1) If you do this the way you’ve probably been taught, it’s nothing but a glorified chain letter.
2) You haven’t succeeded yourself, so you have no business teaching others how to succeed.
3) This general ‘get rich on the Internet’ topic is one of the most competitive categories in e-commerce, period. Telling a regular guy off the street he can get rich on the Internet by showing other people how to get rich on the Internet is like telling your grandmother that she can go down to the local martial arts dojang, take on 3 black belts at one time and kick their ass.
Fat chance. This particular niche is a game for razor sharp, A-level marketers. Not for entry level people.
All that happens to entry level people is, one way or another their money ends up in the hands of razor sharp, A-level marketers and you have nothing to show for it. All kinds of razor sharp, A-level marketers take advantage of this fact without the slightest twinge of guilt.
(Their rationalization for exploiting peoples’ ignorance is: “Well if I don’t take their money they’ll just waste it on some other equally stupid thing.” Well hey, it’s not like they’re exactly wrong about that…even piranhas have their rightful place in the food chain, right? Hey pal, I’m just saying, if you’re not a piranha, don’t swim with them. Find a pond that just has regular frogs and dragonflies and hang out there.)
4) Carbon copying other peoples’ product is a doomed strategy, no matter what niche you’re in. Sure you might try to be the guy who makes El Cheapo knockoff products in China and sure, some people make a lot of money doing that, but the bottom line is: If you don’t have a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) then sooner or later you’re dead.
My advice to you:
Abandon this niche entirely. Stop selling “get rich” stuff. Stop selling “how to market stuff on the Internet” stuff. Do a thorough inventory of yourself and your knowledge and your skills.
Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.
Find some OTHER niche (hey, there are only a MILLION other things you could sell on the Internet – yes, literally a million). Find some other product to sell. Find something that has NOTHING to do with making money on the Internet.
Maybe you’re familiar with specialized motor parts or some sort of industrial equipment or maybe there’s some odd thing you collect, like pink flamingos or wrought iron furniture. Or you grow orchids or collect 16th century romance novels or movies from the 1930’s.
Or maybe you can go to a trade show and find manufacturers in some market where most people are clueless about marketing, and build them an online presence. Work out some kind of profit sharing deal, or get them to put you on retainer. Sell that product.
(That’s a real useful tip I just gave you there.)
Or sell some kind of information about that topic. Like I said, do a thorough inventory of what you know and where you’ve been and go into a niche you’re intimately familiar with.
My nephew Josh asked me advice about starting a home business and here’s what I told him:
Josh,
1. Don’t get into a pre-packaged business. There are LOTS of them out there. Network Marketing deals, Internet deals, etc. You should capitalize on your individuality.
2. Doing something online…. boy I deal with that ALL THE TIME. Is is VERY competitive. An at-home online business is the white picket fence of the 21st century. Super great – if you can pull it off. Most common things are things like selling ebooks or selling things on ebay. If you do something like that you have to specialize in some particular niche.
The people who do best at that 1) know their subject and their customers EXTREMELY well; and/or are 2) very in-tune and comfortable with the whole online scene and culture and websites and everything.
The more nichy your topic, the more you can rely on #1 instead of #2.
3. Anything you know how to do – like plumbing or handyman stuff or swimming pools or repair hang-gliders… or knowing how to cook or take care of kids or organize a house… as soon as you have a way of advertising and getting customers, you have a business. Might not necessarily be an “at home” business, but it’s a business.
Oh, and by the way if you do a business like handyman stuff or repair or remodeling, all you have to do is show up on time, answer the phone, tell people the truth, finish projects on-time and on-budget, and you’ll kick everybody else’s ass in town. In a business like that, half the secret to success is literally “showing up.” You’ll get lots of referrals, customers will love you, and you’ll make a good living. Even in an economy that sucks.
4. If you know what you want to do, then I can advise you about promoting it. Let’s take plumbing for example… to advertise yourself as a plumber you need all the certifications and everything. Doesn’t keep you from doing it when people need it and getting paid for it, if you’re a ‘handyman’ instead of a plumber.
5. Any business that is going to work for you is based on the gifts and skills that you mostly already have. So it’s actually kind of sitting under your nose all along. You just need to start taking inventory. Asking other people what they see you being good at. Listing your skills and looking at all the things you’ve done etc.
Here’s something I sent to a personal friend of mine, Anita, last summer when she asked me pretty much the same question:
Anita,
OK, here’s some things I’d like you to do… Good stuff to do over your morning coffee or whatever.
BTW what we’re ultimately looking for here is intimate knowledge of various microcosms in the world, where you may have sell-able skills.
BUT….. right now I don’t want you to think in terms of selling or jobs or all that while you’re doing this. That would be a limiting way to think of it right now.That can fall out of it later. For now, just crank out the list o’ stuff.
-List every magazine you’ve ever subscribed to for any length of time
-Same for newsletters & various publications that you consistently enjoyed reading
-Every job or industry you worked in long enough to become really familiar – even if you’ve been out of it for a long time
-Every “group” that you’ve been a member of. Examples could be – golf, Presbyterian church, girl scouts, cancer survivors support group, bowling league, pottery making class, David Hasselhoff Fan Club, horsemanship, stamp collecting, backgammon, owning rental property, investing, chess club, etc.
-Every major schooling / training / educational experience you’ve had (like travel to Africa or airplane mechanic school or nursing degree)
-Every hobby or fascination you’ve had
-5 topics you know a lot about, that most people don’t know you know a lot about
-Specific products, services or experiences that you have great familiarity with (like a washing machine that broke down so much, pretty soon you knew how to fix it better than the repairman)
-Topics you own more than 5 books on
-A story of 2 major personal victories from each of the following: childhood; teen years; early adult; recent adult. Tell what happened and what made you feel GOOD about it.
Why don’t you chunk on that for awhile and let me know what you come up with. I bet somewhere buried in that list is a marketplace that would pay money for your skills.
From that you can form a USP, determine something unique to sell, have a ready-made understanding of the customers who buy that sort of thing, and have a MUCH easier go of it.
If you in fact do have a solid grasp of basic direct marketing principles, then I DARE you to do this homework assignment – and I mean, do *everything* I just said to do right here – I dare you to do that and not have some kind of successful business that you are really proud of, 1 year from today.
Perry Marshall
This comment was made in response to a frustrated make money online marketer after Perry had looked at his website.
What he is advising is to take the marketing skills learnt in the make money online niche and use them to promote products and offers outside that niche, preferably in an area that caters to your strengths, because the competition will be weaker.
I received an email from Tony Shepherd (one of my favourite marketers to follow) – it was entitled ‘The Entire Marketing Strategy’. What a great subject line – it is difficult not to open an email with that subject line. This is what he said:
Did you know that the term ‘Hooker’ for a lady of the night actually originated with US Civil War General Joseph Hooker, who brought working girls along on military campaigns for his men.
Or that during the Great Depression people were so broke they often made clothes out of potato sacks and seeing this, the potato distributors made their sacks more colourful to help people remain at least somewhat fashionable.
Why am I telling you this?
Because it’s daft content like this that sets my open rates among some of the best of any other marketers I know.
It might not be relevant to online business although it often is.
But it’s engaging.
And if you keep your readers engaged and then follow up with relevant IM content you’ll make thousands of dollars a month.
Whoops – just gave away my entire marketing strategy 🙂
I think this is why he is just a handful of marketers whose emails I open – they are always entertaining to read and laced with great marketing advice.
The other reason that Tony is so successful is that he is very down-to-earth and authentic in the way he writes and I instinctively like people like that.
This is his entire marketing strategy and it seems to work – perhaps it might for you too? (Did the picture of the naked lady make you open this article?)
I was listening to to a live video presentation by Sean Mize yesterday and the truth about traffic i.e. getting clicks to your content and landing pages, was revealed during the 2 hour plus talk.
Sean Mize seems to have had two principle traffic sources:
Ezine Articles, where is was the leading article submitter, having submitted thousands of articles
Warrior Special Offers, where he became adept at creating numerous offers based on his one hour audio format
Sean is now getting into YouTube videos as a traffic source. The presentation yesterday was his first foray into live YouTube videos and he had over 50 people listening in.
If live video interests you as a traffic source then you may also want to investigate Google Hangouts as Google gives good SEO ranking to Hangouts.
What became clear from the presentation is that Sean places an intense focus on one traffic source at a time. This enables him to master the traffic source and eventually dominate it within his niche simply because he is more hard-working and prolific than anyone else.
From his previous forays into Ezine Articles and WSO’s, he observed that a tiny percentage (say 3%) of his output was driving most of his traffic.
Once he identified where most of his traffic was coming from, he stopped creating content for the 97% and focused on scaling the 3% of topics, keywords etc that were producing the results.
Unfortunately there is no way around the hard work of identifying the 3% that will work in your niche. You must be focused and dedicated.
There are 3 keys to identifying this 3%:
tracking results using tracking links
grouping topics or keywords together initially, finding which ‘groups’ are working before then finding the gold within each group. (The analogy is panning for gold – most of your output is dross, with just a little gold dust sprinkled in! You job is to identify and extract the gold dust that converts to buyers from the torrent of traffic available.)
consistency i.e. systematically working over time to find out what works and, more often, what doesn’t work.
So the truth about traffic is that that hard work is unavoidable i.e. there is no easy button. You will need to test 100 to find the 3 or 4 that work for you. This means that most of your time and money will be wasted in order to find that sweet spot. You then need to scale the sweet spot and drop the rest in order to make a return on your work.
This truth is the same for affiliate traffic – out of 100 affiliates, you will find that 2 or 3 affiliates will account for the majority of your sales.
If you didn’t know this truth, it would be easy to get discouraged, and even give up, before you found ‘the gold at the bottom of the pan’.
Now that you know the truth about traffic, you need to get focused and work all-out to discover what will work for you.
My grandson, Daniel, who has finished reading his book!
How to finish what you started is the subject of the email that I received from Sean Mize today.
I think the essential skill that Sean outlines here is having clarity about what it is we want to achieve and then holding onto the ‘picture’ of what that is for long enough in order to achieve it.
The process he outlines is simple.
Personally I would use a mind-map in order to get my ideas into some sort of logical order and then tick off each element of my plan as I progressed. A mind map enables me to move things around easily and to add and subtract ideas as they occur to me.
The other important element of any plan is to put a deadline on its accomplishment.
Here is what Sean says:
It’s easy to fall into a pattern of just doing one thing then another in this business, but the parts never fit together to make a finished product.
Here’s how to out of that trap:
Create for yourself a solid picture, draw it if you are creative, write it out if you are logical, do it the way that works for you
But make a picture that tells you what you want in the end.
Like this:
I want to change the world by helping (name who you are going to help) and helping them do (what you are going to help them do/teach them)
I will use the following medium to do it:
For example, I will create 10-15 information products that will sequentially teach them
And/or I will create a coaching program to teach them and then coach, support, and encourage
And/or I will create a membership that gives them access to my teachings
Then once that’s done, make EVERYTHING you do be a part of making that happen.
You commit to not doing anything that doesn’t lead you close to the fulfillment of that flowchart.
And then just fill in the blanks.
A product one month.
A membership the next.
A product the next month.
Another product the next month.
A coaching program the next month.
A product the next month.
Just one step at a time, filling in the empty places, the spots in your dream that aren’t done yet.
This works, it really does.
This is the kind of process successful people use to realize their dreams.
It WILL work for you.
It’s practically a law of nature.
Sean
As you get into the process of creating your content:
create an outline for that content (again I would use a mind-map)
turn on your video recorder and teach that particular topic
write an email to your subscribers about what you taught
write an article, or get the video transcribed on Fiverr, and add it to your blog or membership site
I hope this simple process will help you to finish what you started in order to earn an income from it. Please sign up to the free offer on my blog if you want to receive more tips like this.
This article will help you to research content with Google. We are in the information marketing niche and finding top-quality content to offer to subscribers is vital. Use these tips to find what you need.
Top Tip: If you are looking for random content ideas then Stumbleupon is also an excellent tool.
How To Be A Google Power User [Infographic] by the team at NeoMam
Please join my list if you wish to receive more great information and tips on how to improve your information marketing business.
It’s different for different folks, depending on what you already have in place.
If you do not have a clear picture of who you are going to help and how you are going to help them, the most important thing you can do to build your business in 2017 is:
–> to clarify your purpose, who you are going to help, and how you are going to help them
(Selling stuff you don’t care about to people you don’t care about, doesn’t count.)
If you have a solid picture of who you are going to help, the most important thing you can do to build your business is:
–> build a list of people who are the people you want to help
If you have a solid picture of who you want to help AND you have a list of people you can help, the most important thing you can do to build your business is:
–> Find out how you can help them best and get paid for it, and start helping.
That might mean:
a free layer (daily email, blog posts, youtube videos),
paid layer (like $97 – $997 training programs, a membership) and /or
a coaching layer (coaching program, mastermind program, etc)
So . . .based on where you are at in the 3 – phase process of building your business, do YOU need to:
1) figure out who you can help them most
2) build a list
3) build a 3 layer delivery system
This is the way to start building your business in 2017! And a Merry Christmas to all my readers.
In the video below, the KGB defector says that marketing is a form of subversion. It forces people to consume more than is good for them i.e. it is ‘mind-rape’ of the consumer.
This is one of the mechanisms that is taught to the KGB as a means for destabilising our society. I personally feel that this may be true.
Our society has accumulated massive debts in order to consume more.
Debt is a form of slavery – we have to work within the system (many for a minimum wage) in order to repay the creditor for our excessive consumption. The creditor therefore has power over the debtor, who can easily be put into immediate crisis simply by increasing the interest rate on the debt.
As a self-employed entrepreneur and former banker, I have been debt-free for the last 20 years. I have exercised restraint to ensure that I am not too enslaved to the system – to some degree we are all enslaved, it is just a question of degree.
This is also relevant to the goal of personal freedom. By exercising some restraint in what we buy, or think we need in order to live a good life, it reduces the amount of income required to obtain freedom from working a job. It is much easier to achieve an income goal of £1,500 or £2,000 a month rather than, say, £10,000 per month.
I can clearly see how marketing, and many of the other ways of destabilising our culture and society, that are discussed in this video, have been employed successfully in the UK, Europe and the US.
For example, our membership of the EU was effectively giving away our democratic rights to 28 un-elected EU commissioners.
Also, the media has been taken over by the liberal left in order to de-stabilise our society – this has been recently highlighted by the US election and the Trump campaign against the liberal Democrats and the Globalisation agenda. The BBC news is also very biased to the liberal left in the UK.
The split in the EU referendum last June, where many young people, the elites and the new immigrant population largely voted to Remain in the EU, whereas the older, indigenous working and middle-class population voted to Leave, demonstrates the degree to which our UK society has already been subverted using the tactics outlined in this video.
I think that everyone needs to view this video in order to understand a little bit more about what is really going on in our society.
His comment about marketing is around the 25 minute marker and I will leave you to decide whether or not marketing is a form of subversion so you can be a little clearer about what business we are really in… After viewing this video, it will be difficult for me to ask you to ‘buy my junk’ even if it does show you how to make more money in order to consume more! 🙂
In this article, I want to discuss the differences between short term versus long term marketing relationships.
I think you know what I mean…
How quickly do you go for your customers wallet after they have subscribed to your list?
Should you have a packed sales funnel after the initial optin or should you seek to offer additional value before asking for more?
Personally, I have little objection to a long sales funnel immediately after optin, as long as the products offered in the sales funnel meet the following criteria:
they genuinely complement and add to the initial purchase
the initial offer delivers a valuable solution that is not dependent on buying the upsell i.e. that I am left with a feeling of being ‘tricked’ into the initial decision.
The upsell offers good value e.g. perhaps a discount or a genuine step-up in performance
You must leave your customer thinking that you are genuinely interested in delivering excellent value versus an impression that the vendor sees you as a gullible consumer who is there simply to hand over as much cash as possible before you move onto the next product or customer. In the make money online niche, this is known as ‘burning your list’.
For this reason, it is important to think about how your business can deliver genuine value. For this to happen, you need your customer to actually do something with your product.
Also, consider whether you can you really deliver value across a whole range of niches or unrelated topics within your niche?
Or is it perhaps better to focus on a particular area and ‘go deep’ so that all the products you offer to your customer list are related to delivering the solution you offered initially when they first came to your squeeze page.
This means that you become a genuine expert in a particular area rather than a superficial generalist.
I believe that by focusing on your area of expertise and going deep in the creation of your own products, you will have more credibility and will be able to create a longer term relationship with your clients.
This does not preclude you from then offering the products of other experts in your niche who have genuine expertise. These must be selected carefully because your customers are buying based on your recommendation and an unscrupulous vendor could quickly degrade your relationship of trust with your customer.
One of the biggest keys to business growth is increasing the number of times customers buy from your business and it is therefore sensible to sometimes sacrifice short-term monetary desires in favour of long-term growth of your relationship.
One way to think about this is by first considering whether or not you would send this email, or make this recommendation, to a friend or a member of your family. If you hold yourself to a standard like this and write with their best interests at heart, then you will not go too far wrong.
You may be saying to yourself that you would freely offer your product or services to a friend. I don’t think that this is appropriate and I’ll tell you why.
I have discovered in my consulting business that people do not value that which they get for free. If they don’t value it, they won’t use it or learn from it so you are actually doing them a disservice by offering it for free, assuming you have a genuine solution to their problem.
Far better to fully explain the benefits and get them to commit to the solution by putting some ‘skin in the game’ which requires them to do something to get a return on their investment i.e. pay for it and use it!
Whilst there is a short-term imperative to at least cover our initial costs of marketing, taking a longer term perspective on the relationship you create with your customer is usually the most profitable way to proceed. However, the only way to create a genuine long-term relationship is when you persuade your customer to take action on what they get from you so that they actually receive the benefit you offer.
In order for that customer to be persuaded to take action, most times they need to have paid for the product or service that they received from you because otherwise they will not attach any value to what you provide (particularly in the info marketing niche where value is somewhat subjective and often based upon the willingness of the buyer to act on what you tell them.)
It is still possible to promote early on in your relationship with a subscriber if you do it with some finesse and elegance. An example of this, is offering plenty of free value along with your promotional link.
Content Frameworks
Also, a great way to not be overtly promotional is to extensively use personal stories based on your experience that somehow end up leading to your promotional link.
Great exponents of the story-line technique are Matt Furey, Ben Settle and Andre Chaperon. I am on Ben Settle’s list and I own training by the other two so I can speak from first experience of their techniques.
Andre likens short-term (or front-end) marketing and long-term marketing (or ‘backend’) marketing to an iceberg. The front-end being the tip of the iceberg in terms of profitability and the backend being the 90% of the iceberg that is hidden underwater and that generates the bulk of his profits.
In Autoresponder Madness, Andre refers to his story-line as a ‘soap opera’ – in other words his emails are an ongoing story so you are eager to open up the next email to find out what happens next. This is particularly powerful if you can leave the reader on a ‘cliff-edge’ at the end of the email.
What I particularly like about Autoresponder Madness is that when I read it it was in its third iteration i.e. the product was under constant revision and improvement. (I suspect that buyers of the initial book were offered a discount to buy the updated version.)
In Matt Furey’s case, the email story-line often has very little to do with the promotional link at the end of the email. The promotion is almost an after-thought to the story. Matt’s training is called Tao of Email Copy That Sells and I highly recommend it.
One of the best products I ever bought was a simple 45 minute webinar by Peter Garety called ‘Content Creation Framework Secrets’ in which he outlined a system for creating a structured framework for content creation that meant that all content created whether for blog, products or email marketing is created around a coherent framework which when taken together creates a coherent whole. This framework could be for all content created within a specific time-frame, say 3 months, dependent on the size and scope of your project.
Hopefully, these few ramblings offer you some insight into the differences between short-term marketing and the benefits of taking a longer term view of your content creation strategy.
Here are some business quotes to help us through the day:
Every moment of every day, transformation happens. By its very nature, life changes, and you can direct many of those changes.
Worrying, complaining, feeling sad or sorry for yourself won’t do you any good. Choose instead to be realistic, putting thought, energy and action into creating the best outcome.
If it’s complicated, embarrassing, or inconvenient in the moment, so what? Do what will make the biggest positive difference in the long run.
You have this day, and it is the opportunity that exceeds all opportunities. Embrace what’s now possible, and make it all count.
Inject the power of passion and purpose into every experience. Choose to get better, act to get better, every moment, every day.
You are confined only by the walls you build yourself.
What is the one thing I could do today that when completed would make you feel that you had a successful day?
Fate whispers to the warrior, you cannot withstand the storm. The warrior whispered back, I am the storm.
What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
Compared to immediate gratification, everything else feels like work. Be strong, be purposeful, rise above shortsightedness, and do the work.
What lies behind us & what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Don’t allow yourself to see the obstacles as excuses. See them as opportunities.
You’ll get much more done when you start the day with a detailed list of what you intend to do. Intention immunises you from the distractions and interruptions.
Remember, the greatest failure is not to try.
When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen you may learn something new.
It’s important to hold people responsible for their actions. But it’s a waste to obsess endlessly over who is to blame for every undesirable turn of events.
All dreams come true if we have the courage to pursue them.
It is hard to fail, but it is worse to never have tried to succeed.
Stop wondering why you can’t, or why you don’t or why you won’t. Figure out how and why you will.
You cannot grow unless you are willing to change.
Be careful not to become too smug about the successes or too discouraged about the failures. Instead, direct your attention, your focus, your energy and efforts toward what you can do now.
Experience the power of your own focus. Stay centered on the specific difference you’ve chosen to make.
Push yourself past the doubt, fear, uncertainty. With your sustained effort make some momentum, and confidence will come with it.
Yes, be ambitious, set goals, work toward them. Just remember that there is much goodness, life, fulfillment to be enjoyed along the way.
Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.
The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem.
You know you’re on the right track when you become uninterested in looking back.
Complaining and feeling sorry for yourself will produce no real benefits. Skip all that wasted time and energy, get the job done, and move on ahead.
You are confined only by the walls you build yourself.
Inspiration without action is wasted. Not only that, but with no action the inspiration itself soon turns sour.
Your actions and your words should always agree with each other.
Hope… Sometimes that’s all you have when you have nothing else. If you have it, you have everything.
If you’ll not settle for anything less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in your lives.
Don’t waste another day with excuses, procrastination, self-pity or doubt. Get up, get moving, get focused and get a lot of great things done.
There’s some challenge right now that can change your life, your world for the better. Choose challenge, and choose to live at your highest level.
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Rise above the concerns, frustrations, distractions of the moment. Feel the substance, the goodness, the momentum, and carry it forward.
What happened yesterday, last week, ten years ago is not what matters. What you do today, right now, where you are, with what you have, is what counts.
Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.
There are only so many hours in each day. Your priorities are demonstrated by the way you invest that time.
You are more than your capabilities, more than your achievements. Those things are great, and important, yet they are things you do, not who you are.
Though the effort will be complicated and inconvenient, the reward will be worth the trouble. Go ahead and simply do it.
Though you may not get it perfect, you can get it done. Make the commitment to do your best, and simply do it.
Remind yourself over and over again that what matters is never what you’ve been dealt. You can handle any turn of events when you’re willing to give your best.
What is it you really want? Do you want to sit around doing nothing, or do you want to make a difference?
Ideal conditions are nice, but not necessary. You can get good work done no matter what the situation.
From every disappointment, gather more determination. Seize the opportunity when things go wrong to learn how you can do it right.
Your struggle is part of your story.
If you want something you’ve never had then you’ve got to do something you’ve never done.
The mistakes, disappointments, and poor choices have occurred, and cannot be undone. Yet they can teach you, motivate you, make you more determined and purposeful.
Sometimes, not always, a waste of time is a great use of time. Sometimes, when you’re not sure what you’re doing, you can do some very creative things.
Deal with the world the way it is, not the way you wish it was.
Never let the things you want make you forget the things you have.
Pain is nothing compared to what it feels like to quit.
What good is having the latest update if all you do is replace it with the next update? Make real, meaningful use of information instead of making it into an addiction.
Events and circumstances matter, but not nearly as much as what you do with them. When you so choose, everything is an opportunity.
Success always starts with failure. Success is a process.
This article covers why Brexit happened i.e. the UK voted to leave the European Union on 23rd June 2016.
This was a seismic event for the UK establishment and the bureaucrats in Brussels who never contemplated that this could happen. However, I thought that it probably would happen as set out in this article that pre-dates the referendum vote.
There are many reasons put forward for people making the decision to vote Leave:
the undemocratic nature of the EU
the sheer weight and cost of regulations that flow from the EU
the amount of money we pay into the EU
no control over our borders and immigration
the loss of national identity and sovereignty
Underlying all these reasons for discontent are these incredible facts:
Between 2007 and 2015 average real wages in Europe have only increased by 4 or 5% over this 8 year period. However, two countries stand out as having a real wage DECREASE in the same period – Greece and the UK. Greece is hardly surprising but the UK may be more so as in real terms wages have dropped by 10% in the UK.
This means that the spending power of the average citizen in the UK has been severely squeezed whilst the richer top 1% of citizens (mainly based in London) have continued to thrive.
On top of this, the Governments austerity measures and the continuing high rate of immigration, have seen a squeeze on public services – roads, hospitals, schools, care services etc are all operating at capacity and in some cases are failing.
This means that the quality of life for the average citizen in the UK has taken an enormous reduction over the last 10 years. No wonder there is a growing discontent with the status quo in the UK!
For this reason, I think the only way out of this poverty trap is to take matters into our own hands.
One way is for workers to create worker cooperatives rather than work for a boss. If you want to see a very good example of a worker cooperative, take a look at Mondragon Corporation in Spain. (The John Lewis Partnership is an example of a worker cooperative in the UK although it is really a hybrid of a traditional business and a cooperative.)
The other way is to set up your own small business that transcends local markets. I am of course talking about setting up an online business. You can sell goods and services in any English speaking country in the world from your low-cost home-based business.
Why Brexit happened is not a surprise when you look at the facts of every day life – the question is, what are you going to do about it? You could join my list and break the strangle-hold that having a job has on your income prospects.
In this article I want to discuss the topic of choosing goals.
I was watching a TV programme last night called ‘How The Other Half Lives’. The programme specifically covered the lives of billionaires living in New York (which apparently has more billionaires than any other city in the world.)
After watching for a while I turned to my wife and said ‘I honestly don’t think that they have anything I really want‘.’
In fact their lifestyle slightly disgusted me because of the excess consumption. It was almost as if they really didn’t know what to spend their money on.
We were introduced to $4m plus ‘sneakers’ covered in diamonds, a picture that cost $3m which was a black ‘V’ on a white background, watches costing $400,000, a city apartment on sale for $54m (reduced from $60m) etc. Most of it looked like worthless, over-valued junk. The owners no longer knew the value of anything in my honest opinion.
One of the wealthy widows lived in an opulent apartment inside an exclusive hotel at a cost of $38,000 per week, excluding room service! The apartment looked somewhat cramped because it was over-filled with ‘priceless’ objects. The main advantage to the apartment was that room service was on call 24/7 and the lady had security. In fact,from the outside, it looked like a gilded cage to me!
The latter profile introduced the idea that having wealth was in fact a huge security problem. In other words, these wealthy people needed to secure themselves from other people that wanted to steal what they had.
Also, it occurred to me that in our relationships with other people, we would never know whether they liked you for who you are or because they wanted something. This suspicion would infect every human interaction, no matter how innocuous.
In fact, having wealth carries it’s own high price – firstly in acquiring it and secondly in keeping and spending it.
Perhaps we are all guilty of over-looking the things that truly have value:
Time – such as the time we have left between now and when we die. Queen Elizabeth I said on her deathbed ‘My kingdom for another moment of time’. If someone said to me, ‘you have a week left to live’ suddenly each minute would have a much higher value than it had before – would we really spend it chasing after more money and more ‘stuff’?
Living in the moment. Most of us live our lives in our head, worrying about things that happened in the past or may happen in the future. This means that we don’t live properly in the present moment and appreciate everything we already have in the current moment. We are looking for life satisfaction at some time in the future through the acquisition of more things, which only provide a short-term pleasure before we soon start looking for the next ‘fix’.
Peace of mind. Without peace of mind, we cannot truly enjoy anything. I don’t believe that the constant desire to acquire more stuff and the effort required in keeping and maintaining it securely from other people can really deliver peace of mind. Too many possessions, beyond the necessities in life, can in fact be a burden (- buying, insuring, storing, organising, maintaining, repairing and selling are all necessary actions that absorb our valuable life.) My wife and I have two garages full of surplus junk – a huge burden to us because we cannot summon up the energy or motivation to deal with it.
Maintaining health – both physical and mental health. Ironically, we usually take our health for granted until one day we have a health problem. Then nothing else in life can be enjoyed until we recover. Whilst it is true that we can purchase better health care if we are wealthy, perhaps we need to ask ourselves to what extent the pursuit of wealth impairs our physical and mental health?
Our connection with nature. I walk my dog for at least two hours every day – in the early morning and early evening. These are my favourite times of day – on many days it feels almost like a meditation as I try to enjoy the present moment in nature. Sometimes, I get lost in wonder, simply watching life around the river or staring vacantly up a tree. (Nothing gives me more delight than walking past a long line of commuter traffic with people staring out of their car windows as I amble slowly past with my dog on my way to the river and the park.)
Doing what I want to do. Simply having the time to do what I want to do – whether its working or simply reading a book or watching a video or gardening or visiting my grandchildren – without someone else dictating what I do with my times is priceless to me. I don’t think that I would have the same time freedom if I was super wealthy, even if I employed others to do what I didn’t want to do, (because I would have to employ them, pay them, monitor their performance, meet with them, lead them, train them, sack them etc etc)
Relationships with others. Often the time and effort required to accumulate huge wealth means that we have less time for loving and caring human relationships. Is this a price that is worth paying? On your death bed, you may not think so…
I think the secret to living is largely embodied in the teaching of Eckhart Tolle and the degree to which we can live our life in the present moment. This enables us to connect more deeply with life – even the simplest of things have increased value and piquancy. It is a way of savouring life as it already is without craving satisfaction at some time in the future or the need for anything more than we already have.
I have a theory that the reason why people are constantly travelling and going on holiday is that they are constantly looking for something more in life – some satisfaction that can be acquired by going somewhere else.
The problem is that wherever they go, they take themselves and their faulty thinking.
It’s true that we can sometimes get a new perspective by changing our circumstances, but often, as soon as we return to every day life, we are back in the same way of thinking and living– worrying about things in the past and what the future holds, always looking for satisfaction at some future indeterminate time and date.
I wonder how many people take the time to sit down and really think through what they want in their life. Even if we do this, it easy to think superficially and put down a lot of stuff like houses, cars, boats etc
The reality is that those that actually achieve goals like this often find very little satisfaction (or at least only short term satisfaction) and quickly need to strive for something more to make sense of their life.
What if personal freedom was the goal? Or helping others?
This means setting a goal that delivers a reasonable quality of life without having to surrender personal freedom of choice.
This might mean that we look at what is essential to living a comfortable life and giving up excessive desires.
For example, having a fast super-car may be struck from our list of goals when we consider that our existing car essentially does the same job i.e. gets us from point A to B albeit with less speed or comfort.
Setting a goal to make a million pounds in our business may be a goal that is abandoned in favour of a business plan to deliver enough to live a simpler, more connected life – a life where we don’t have to give up enjoyment of the present moment in order to strive excessively to achieve a goal that ultimately delivers a superficial benefit without real value.
Projecting forward to our death bed, what is it we would want to say about our life? That you made a huge pile of money and bought a lot of man-made stuff ?
Or… you savoured each moment of your life and connected deeply and gratefully with what you already had?
Perhaps you would want to say that you enriched the lives of everyone you interacted with? That you lived a life that added some real value to their lives?
These are questions that we all need to answer when making our life choices if we are not to lead a life of ‘quiet desperation’. Sifting through choices and selecting what is truly important is time well-employed but you will need to connect more deeply with yourself in order to do this effectively.
I hope that this article will help you to reassess your personal and business goals and to think about what you really want to achieve in your life.
You may even find that you already have everything you need in order to live a happy and fulfilling life! How amazing would that be?
Work for yourself first is a mindset that feels totally wrong.
Usually the advice is to concentrate on giving your customers the best product or service and success will surely follow.
However, in my consulting business I learnt a valuable lesson that may help you.
I found my consulting income fluctuating wildly simply because I was so focused on giving my current customers exceptional service that I did not give sufficient time or resources to marketing to find the next job.
It’s the same in internet marketing. If you are building a list, then the #1 task in growing your business is to grow your list and communicate with it by offering fresh value and offers that will grow your income.
Sometimes we get swept up in all the distractions of working online such as Facebook, our email inbox, surfing the internet etc
However, the smartest thing we can do is to set aside time at the start of the day to consistently market our business.
This means working on growing our business is the first and most important job before helping others to grow their business.
For internet marketers with a list, writing and sending a daily email to existing customers and prospects should be the first task of the day before we move on to other tasks.
Ideally, these ‘other tasks’ should be directly targeted at work to grow the list either through creating and selling new products or marketing the products or services that we have already created.
We all have 24 hours in any day, the difference between success and failure is in the art of allocating how that time is used.
Make sure that you set time aside at the start of the day to work on tasks that specifically grow your business before you move onto other work.
‘Work for yourself first’ may be a game-changer for you if you can consistently adopt this habit – register on The Sky Inside to get many more important tips on improving the mindset for success.
There are 5 vital parts to your information marketing business, regardless of the income level to which you aspire, and the skill you teach your clients, members, buyers, and subscribers.
1) The thing that you teach that changes lives, that solves problems, or relieves challenges.
2) Traffic – A way to get people who have the problems you solve or the challenges you relieve, to your website and ultimately to become a subscriber so that you can communicate with them, discover how you can help, build trust, and ultimately sell to them your solution.
3) A List – A way, or ways, to get them to join your list as a subscriber i.e. a way to ‘put their hand up’ to show that they are interested in what you have to offer. Usually, this is a squeeze page that gives them something of value in exchange for their contact details.
4) Email Marketing – Daily communication with your subscribers such that it builds trust through teaching (to show that you are a trusted expert).
5) Products or Services – The delivery agent and medium of the information or skills that you sell. The delivery agent could be products, coaching, or memberships, and the medium can be print (ebooks, manuals, etc), audio (mp3s), or video (mp4s or movs)
To summarise, you have a solution to a problem that people online, who have that problem, are already searching for – a solution at some place online, be it a blog, a forum, a search engine, social media, and you invite people there to come to your site, they join your list, you send them a daily email to build trust, then offer them access (for a price) to your training, join your membership, or enroll in coaching.
These are the 5 vital parts to an online information marketing business.
What does monetization look like in YOUR business?
This is the topic in Sean Mize’s latest email to me and he went on to say:
Sometimes I feel like when I see folks working on their business . . . they don’t know WHY they are doing what they are doing.
They don’t have a purpose . . .a big why . . a why what they are doing is changing lives.
Or they have that, but they are just doing parts in their business . . .but nothing fits together.
They are writing articles . . . but they aren’t pointing them to the right places.
They create one product, and somehow think it will do the work of 100.
They send out sales emails when they see something converting well . . but rarely send out training emails to improve lives.
Ok, I’ll tell you my business model for years:
Irresistible offer in the form of a squeeze page that gives them something valuable –> daily email (like this) to teach and to train –> create products or trainings that change lives and sell those trainings –> create more training and sell it –> create more training and sell it
Of course, one effective part of my business is creating training I put on Warrior Plus, people promote it and tell others . . .and those buyers join my list. So those are buyer subscribers. And I have a mix of both on my list.
And the KEY to having people buy from you again and again is that they learn from you when they buy once – then they WANT to learn again and again.
So . . what about you? What does monetization look like in YOUR business?
When you look at your model of monetization, does it make sense?
Is it working?
What needs to change to make it work better?
In case you missed it, notice how simple this business model is.
It consists of the following simple actions carried out consistently, day after day:
A squeeze page and free offer to create a list
A daily email to the list
Creating a new product that improves other peoples lives
A sales letter
Driving traffic to the sales letter from:
the list by email
Warrior Special Offers i.e. taking advantage of the traffic already on the Warrior Forum
Rinse & Repeat
So what does monetisation look like in YOUR business?
I have been reading ‘Mans Search For Meaning’ by Victor Frankl. Victor Frankl was a survivor of Auschwitz and also a psychologist.
Here is my favourite passage from the book – I will cover how this is relevant to internet marketing and running your own business afterwards:
The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offered sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers that threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.
Seen from this point of view, the mental reactions of the inmates of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological conditions. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it became clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.
Fundamentally, therefore, any man , even under such circumstances, can decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.
Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently come to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behaviour in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom which cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
Business Lessons From Mans Search For Meaning
As you can see I have emphasised certain words above:
man does have a choice of action – when you start your own business, you greatly increase your choice of action. Many people start their own business because they no longer wish to limit their choice of action to carrying out the wishes of their boss or company. Even in a job we always have a choice of action but if you do not conform, chances are you will not last very long in your job, particularly if you make a mistake whilst not conforming. So the reason for starting a business in the first place is the freedom to make choices.
to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. This is a powerful lesson for people in business. For example, if you fail after taking an action, can you view it merely as a test that failed and begin again more intelligently or will it completely destroy your motivation to try again? The choice is yours to take and it will define your ability to succeed because all businesses will test your attitude and fortitude.
there were always choices to make – the same is true in running any business. Will you ‘become ‘the plaything of circumstance’ or will you fight to shape your circumstances?
the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision – I would suggest that the sort of business you create (and the sort of person you become as a result) are the result of an inner decision. This is why having the right mindset for business and life, is critical to your success. Success is usually the result of an inner decision rather than circumstances outside yourself.
any man, even under such circumstances, can decide what shall become of him – this reconfirms that YOU decide what will become of you so you don’t need to seek anyone else’s permission.
It is this spiritual freedom which cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful. The freedom to choose one’s own way will give meaning and purpose to your life, particularly if your goal is to improve the lives of other people through your actions. Making money is not a factor in any of this but rather follows as a consequence of making the right choice and adopting the correct attitude. (Of course, you could decide to make money through some criminal act but this may ultimately kill your spirit and potentially limit your freedom!)
Mans Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl has many insightful lessons learnt as a result of extreme human suffering. Whilst we do not have to go through such extreme life and death suffering, it is inspiring to know that we ultimately make the decisions that give purpose and meaning to our life and therein lies our personal responsibility. Sign up to my free ‘Sky Inside‘ offer for more mindset insights.
Seriously, I see people so focused on making a million dollars tomorrow or their next big $10,000 campaign . . but they haven’t made a penny in the last 30 days.
If that’s the case with you, the question is: ‘what are you doing TODAY to make $10?’
Or $100, whatever your next step is.
–> Even if you have no list, could you:
post a $1 manual you wrote on Facebook and 10 people buy?
could you post a $10 manual on Facebook and only one person buys?
could you offer a full hour of coaching for $10 on Facebook, how many people would take you up on it?
Now, I can hear you now, well, I don’t want to work for $10 an hour.
But the thing is, right now, if you are working 30 hours a week online and making say $100 a week or less . . .you are only making $3 an hour right now.
And if you have no products and aren’t selling anything you are making $0 an hour . .
Why not start at $10 an hour and then next week raise to $15 an hour, then the next week raise to $20 an hour and so on?
Why not hold a live training next week for $10 and tell everyone you know on Facebook, LinkedIn, Warrior forum or anywhere else people are hanging out online?
Seriously, what can you do TODAY to put an extra $10 in your account?
Part 2 – Getting Bigger
Now, I want to push harder.
What can you do in the next 2 days to tell 100 people about your offer?
What if you posted it on Facebook, on LinkedIn, YouTube, or any one of the other zillion places online?
What if you offered a $10 coaching gig, or a $10 eBook, or a $10 live class and for one weekend, instead of sending folks to your squeeze page, you sent them to the sales page for your $10 offer?
How many buyers could you get on your list this weekend?
I know, I know, you don’t want to work so hard for $10.
But unless you are already making much more than that . . . isn’t it better to start at $10 than to keep hoping some system will get to you a zillion?
And by the way – that’s the thing . . .when you sell at a price that is believable for YOUR impact in your niche right now . . .which is low when you are starting out – you make more sales.
Sean Mize said:
‘I remember my first year in business, when I got to where I was selling around 400 eBooks a month at . . $9.77. Just shy of $4k in revenue . . and each time I released a new one, my buyers bought . . .’
What would happen if you made it your 2-day goal to make as many $10 sales as possible?
What would you do to make that happen?
Part 3 – Ending Big
Once you start building a buyers list you have the ability to make additional income from:
selling more products created by you
earning affiliate commissions from recommending other peoples products that you use and recommend.
Create a good relationship with the buyers on your list through email marketing by offering both free and premium information – this is the standard internet marketing model and you can start with making the first sale of just $10.
You should also add additional products into your upfront sales funnel i.e. after the $10 sale offer a higher priced complementary product. Split test your sales pages to optimize conversions and add additional products into your sales funnel.
Also, explore additional sources of traffic and keep scaling your ‘$10 business’.
I Believe In You – the message that Frank Kern sent to me!!!
He went on to say…
Let me tell you something about YOU.
YOU can do anything you want. YOU are in control.
YOU can achieve as much success as you want to.
YOU can and will pick yourself up when life knocks you down.
IBELIEVEINYOU.
—————————————————–
HERE’S THE POINT
——————————————————
If you’re looking back on the past year and
you’re NOT happy with where you are now,
IT WILL NEVER GET BETTER.
Not if you keep doing the same stuff that’s
gotten you the results you’re not happy with.
So if this is you then let me do you the
same favor my Doctor did for me.
—————————————————– LET ME SHOOT YOU STRAIGHT
—————————————————–
Look man, you gotta change what you’re
doing.
It’s not working.
If it was, you’d be thrilled with your progress
since my message to you a year ago.
But if you’re not, then it’s time to change.
Here’s how to do it:
1. Get absolutely focused on what you really want.
Do this by TURNING OFF THE DAMN COMPUTER
and just writing down the answer to this question:
“What do I REALLY want?”
Screw what the emails tell you you SHOULD
want.
Screw what your wife, husband, parents, kids,
or anyone else WANTS you to want.
This is about YOU.
What do you really want?
Want to sell training plans to cross-dressing
MMA competitors?
Great. If that’s your thing, go for it.
Wanna run off and play guitar in coffee shops
across South America?
Good. You only live once. Be happy. Play
“Freebird” at least once. For me. Thank you.
Whatever you do, get clear. Otherwise you’re ripe
for falling into someone else’s agenda.
2. Dump The Crap Out Of Your Brain.
You do this by writing down a huge list of EVERYTHING
you THINK gotta do to in order to do what you REALLY want.
Just doing that will kind of “clear it from your brain”
and free up space in your “mental computer’s”
RAM.
3. Decide what’s doable.
You know that big list you just made that’s probably
freaking you out?
Go through it and put star by all the stuff you can
actually do.
4. Decide what you can do NOW.
Now. You know all the stuff with stars by it?
The stuff you can actually DO?
Go through all of it and find the stuff you can do
in the next 30 days.
Put two stars by those items.
5. Screw the other stuff.
All the other stuff can be dealt with later.
Now – let me address critics in the audience who
want to debate whether or not that’s a good strategy.
“Isn’t that procrastination?”
“Isn’t that other stuff important?”
The answer to both questions is …PROBABLY!
But here’s the deal.
You can’t do anything about it right now, and if you
worry about it then you’re just taking away focus
and energy from the stuff you CAN do.
And that’s not going to get you anywhere.
Also – actually DO the “immediately doable”
things for the next 30 days, my experience
tells me that your momentum will be so great
you’ll actually be able to easily do a lot of the
things from your list you originally thought
were impossible for you.
You’ll also have new clarity and will probably
find that much of the other stuff on the list
isn’t even needed.
6. GET TO WORK.
Listen.
If you get all caught up on the little details,
you’ll be in the same place a year from now.
Don’t let that happen.
7. ACCEPT REALITY
You wanna know something?
This is NOT gonna be easy.
Remember how I told you I lost 20 pounds
of fat?
Man, that first week in the gym was a
NIGHTMARE.
And to make matters worse, my trainer
(who is a terrible person) would make me
display my physical weakness in front of
GIRLS!
So not only was it hard, it was embarassing!
I was failing in public.
But that’s what it took so I did it.
And in the end, it wasn’t so bad.
So if I can muster up the gumption
to struggle through my first few pushups
in front of a room full of pretty girls,
you can break through you comfort zone
too.
I’ll leave you with a quote from the wise
men of Kool And The Gang:
No Products = Nothing to Sell = No Revenue – I received a email from Sean Mize with this headline.
Frankly, that subject line says a lot . . .not all, but a lot!
So often I see folks who are struggling to get their business going online and make money and I see them doing all of kinds of things well-meaning (hopefully) gurus have told them to do . . .
like run facebook traffic
do click flipping
buy and sell things
And then those things don’t work and you get stuck surfing, reading emails, and generally getting lost . . .
But it all comes down to basic economics:
in order to make money, you have to sell something to someone
Reminder: no products = nothing to sell = no revenue
What is your solid plan for creating products to sell and telling the right prospects about them?
(Yes, that’s part 2: you need a list of people who desperately need help and build a relationship with them so that they trust you enough to buy your products)
So many people get half of this equation right – either half – and never make a penny because they don’t have the other half. (Truth be told, I mastered the craft of creating products long before I mastered the ability to send targeted traffic to them! It took a long time for me to wake up to the truth that simply creating products was not enough to succeed!)
Making money online is essentially very simple – having something valuable to sell and sending people who will appreciate that value to a page that offers them an opportunity to buy it.
It is better that the ‘something’ you sell is your own product but it doesn’t have to be. It can be an affiliate product.
In both cases, you should aim to capture the buyers email address so that you can continue to offer further value to your customer. A buyers email address can be worth much more than the initial sale if you nurture the relationship properly.
So the two essential skills of internet marketing are:
mastering at least one traffic source (preferable a paid source that is scale-able) and
conversions i.e. creating or sourcing valuable products and services, copywriting, sales funnels and other conversion skills like list building, email marketing, re-targeting, creating scarcity etc.
One thing is for certain, if you have no products and nothing to sell, you’ll have no revenue. If you have a product and send targeted traffic to your offer page, you might just find you are in business!
So . . . are you marketing or teaching your passion or craft?
This is a copy of an email sent to me by Sean Mize and I think it is great advice.
So many folks I talk with are spending hours each day trying to “market” or “sell” or something like that.
But marketing isn’t really your passion is it?
Your site topic is your passion.
So catch this: if your topic – the topic you teach is your PASSION – why not spend 80% of your time on THAT TOPIC instead of marketing?
What if you spent 80% of your time teaching YOUR TOPIC, and writing articles about your topic, and recording videos about your topic, and writing emails like this about your topic – like if you are a knitting coach instead of marketing for 4 hours a day, why not do knitting videos and knitting emails and knitting instagrams and knitting emails (can you teach knitting in an email? oops – maybe a video email!)
I mean, live your passion.
And ALL you have to do is put at the end of each piece of knitting training, the following words, with a link to your squeeze page:
Do you want to learn more about knitting? If so, download my top 10 knitting videos here: (then put a link here to your squeeze page which when they sign up you are going to send them to your download page with 10 5-minute knitting videos)
If you do this, you will spend the bulk of your time teaching your PASSION – and people will be coming onto your list in droves and you just write a daily email and then tell them about your knitting course and your knitting membership . . .
By the way, this works for karate, and crocheting, and woodworking, and blogging, and tight abs, and lose weight, and get happy and ANY niche you are in!
Here are some of the reasons why I want to leave the EU on 23rd June:
Institutional Fraud
The EU has not had an audit signed off since inception.
Each year billions of euros wash through the hands of the bureaucrats in the EU. In my previous experience in the banking industry, any time that the accountants could not sign off an audit meant that there was a serious mis-allocation of funds.
Whilst I have no absolute proof of fraud, I believe that this is what is going on. We only have to see the opulence of the living and working conditions that the bureaucrats have awarded themselves to see that something is not quite right.
There are 10,000 EU officials earning more than our Prime Minister and each EU member of parliament is costing in excess of £1m according to Daniel Hannan and Nigel Farage. The expenses system appears to be a scandal in waiting.
The top rate of tax for EU officials is around 16% only so they are not contributing fully themselves to the system that they have created.
Corporate Fraud
There are thousands of lobbyists in the EU that ensure that big business can influence the EU bureaucrats to make laws and regulations that favour them. This means that they can squeeze out smaller competitors and competitors from outside the EU.
Who pays the cost of this? It is quite clear that the consumer is paying the price in terms of higher prices for goods. Professor Minford of Cardiff University has calculated that consumer prices could drop 8% immediately on leaving the EU if we moved to a system of free world trade. (We do not need a trade deal with the EU, they need one with us if their manufacturers and farmers are to continue to protect their trade in over-priced goods!)
This is why big business is so insistent that we should remain in the EU – it is a racket that they currently control and we are all paying the price.
Who knows what fraud is taking place to influence decisions taken by EU officials? Jobs, contracts, deals, bribes, subsidies, quotas, regulations – I bet the total figure is huge!
The Economic Argument
Professor Minford has calculated that we would be far better off outside the EU as we currently absorb the following costs:
Net UK contribution to the EU = 0.5% of our GDP
Costs of CAP and EU protection of manufacturing = 4% of our GDP
Cost of over-regulation = 6% plus of our GDP (-this would probably rise substantially)
Bail-out transfers = 2.9% of GDP
Effect of EU regulations on our growth = 0.5% p.a.
Effect of joining the Euro = would double our volatility
As members of the EU we are shackled to a trading zone that is at best stagnant. We would be much better off trading with faster growing countries outside the EU including with our Commonwealth partners.
Lack of Control
Whilst one argument for staying in the EU is that we will be sitting at the table when the rules are made and can influence the decisions. The UK has voted against 72 EU proposals and have been defeated on every occasion. The truth is that we have little or no influence on decision-making.
Decisions are really made by the unelected members of the commission who are largely influenced by what the Germans want to happen. The Germans hold the real power in the EU and they control the finances from Frankfurt. The Euro benefits them as their currency is at least 20% weaker than it would be if they didn’t have all the lame ducks within the Euro. This enables the Germans to expand their exports and manufacturing base and the UK is their biggest export market!
We have effectively given up our sovereignty and democracy to unelected officials in the EU where the decision-making is remote and opaque.
The EU is also very slow to respond to problems as demonstrated by their incompetent response to the immigration crisis. The elections in Austria and France have demonstrated that far right organisations are now gaining a foothold in many countries and will continue to do so until control is established.
Over-Regulation
So much regulation is flowing out of the EU that it is impossible for our politicians and businesses to keep abreast of what is happening – much less to influence what is happening. Some of these regulations are highly damaging to UK businesses.
There are 600 plus regulations relating to coffee alone and every aspect of our daily life is impacted by EU regulations which we have not been able to influence or shape.
For example, the imposition of VAT on digital purchases with no threshold is an administrative nightmare for small businesses like myself.
There is a lot of new regulation ready to be implemented if we vote to remain in EU – this has been held back until after 23rd June for fear that it could influence the way we vote. If this regulation was truly to our benefit, why would they hold back?
There are taking an arrogant elitist view about the citizens of the EU i.e. that they know what is best for us.
We are the little people who must shut-up, follow their instructions and pay the cost!
Immigration
Lack of control over our borders has meant that millions of people have emigrated to the UK from both inside and outside the EU. This is impacting all public services to the detriment of the standard of living for the indigenous population.
Schools, roads, housing, health, policing, prisons etc – all are showing huge strain and it is quite clear that there is insufficient funding to keep pace with the sheer scale of immigration.
The possible entry of Turkey into the EU – another large country with a much poorer average quality of life and a largely Muslim population – is reason enough to want to get out of the EU.
I was personally against allowing the Bulgarians and Romanians into the EU for the same reason. We have seen a huge rise in crimes like theft and pick-pocketing in recent years, as we took in people from these poorer countries.
Vote Leave
It seems to me that supporters of the Remain campaign largely fall into the following Groups:
the young who have been brain-washed by the education system to accept the new order, little understanding that they are being enslaved. They have been sold a vision of integration and freedom of travel and movement but without understanding the cost that this will entail.
the politicians, the establishment and bureaucrats who benefit greatly from the employment opportunities afforded by the EU and their regulations. If I was a politician hoping to get a job in the EU after I had left office, clearly I would have a vested interest in remaining inside the EU – turkeys do not vote for Christmas!
big business – as discussed above they have stitched up the system to their benefit through the lobby system and they also benefit greatly from the cheap flow of immigrant labour which holds down wages and working conditions for the general population. Over-supply of labour effectively keeps the work-force under their thumb.
I have yet to hear a good case being made for remaining inside the EU as far as the general population is concerned.
The Remain strategy is to scare the pants off these people by threatening loss of jobs, lower house prices, higher interest rates and so on. Norway says that when they decided to remain outside the EU the same threats were made to them but the opposite turned out to be true for them.
I am fairly certain in my mind that we will find that we will be much better off outside the EU. In fact it would be truly liberating.
Let’s give them a wake-up call on 23rd June and tell them to stuff the EU where ‘the sun don’t shine’! I for one would love to show them that we will be much better off by going it alone and deliver a shock to their complacent and arrogant attitudes.
These are just a few reasons why I want to leave the EU on 23rd June 2016.
The Secret EU Agenda
If the people knew the real, secret EU agenda, and we are only part of the way through it at the moment, then, apart from the elite who benefit from the EU, no one would vote to stay in.
That is how extreme, how extraordinary and how fundamentally tyrannical the EU agenda is.
From its own documents and from the statements of its advocates right from the start it can be clearly shown that where we are now is where it was planned for us to be from day 1.
Also, where we are now is where we are now, not where the EU is meant to finish up.
So when they started out there had been a war in Europe to stop the Nazis from creating their version of what’s become the EU – a pan European centralised tyranny dictating to everyone in every country.
If that had been suggested at that time after the war then, of course, people who had just fought, lost loved ones and been maimed for life by fighting the Nazis to stop, in effect, that plan – a European control system coming into place – their response to the suggestion ‘let us do it’ would have sparked outrage.
So instead of that, they have used psychological manipulation – it’s about programming how people perceive situations so that you get people to respond to situations to suit your agenda.
Don’t tell people where you are going but tell them what they will accept.
Europe was at first a free trade zone called the Common Market. We were told before Britain went in by Ted Heath, PM, ‘it’s just a free trade area and it’s good for jobs’. But from the start, that was not the game at all – that was the foot in the door. The idea was then to pick-off more and more power to the centre until eventually there was a fully-fledged centralised dictatorship with no democratic checks and balances. We are seeing that unfold.
So what did we see over the years? We saw a ‘totalitarian tiptoe’ – more and more power taken by the centre and yielded up by sovereign states to the centre. Today 55% or 60% of the rules and regulations that affect the fine detail of lives in this country do not come up for debate in Westminster – it actually comes from bureaucrats in Brussels, beginning the process of imposing their will on the entire European population.
This has many devastating effects on people’s freedom, fairness and justice and even on the political system itself, which is perceived as one person/one vote – the foundation of democracy. This system is being subverted by the EU.
The Agenda of the Corporate Giants
What has happened is that the EU’s very existence and bureaucratic control system has given trans-national corporations something they could barely have dreamed of (although having said that, those who controlled those corporations planned to do it so, in that sense, it was not a ‘dream’ but a calculated ‘plan’).
What it means for these corporations is this:
Before, if they were to get laws passed in a country that were beneficial for those corporations, they had to set about wheeling and dealing and lobbying in each of the countries they operated in and that took a lot of time, money and effort.
Once the EU bureaucracy was in place, the giant corporations had a one-stop shop. Now all they had to do was persuade the bureaucrats in Brussels to enact the laws and regulations that the corporations want and they were then imposed upon every country throughout the European Union.
This is fully explained in The Brussels Business video which is about how the large corporations control the EU bureaucrats and why there is an explosion of offices in Brussels of lobbying organisations working on behalf of giant corporations. There are now 30,000 lobbyists working in Brussels on behalf of large corporations.
TTIP is a Bum-Deal!
This has now taken us to a point where we have a secret negotiation going on, which cannot be revealed to the public, even by EU parliament members. We have this TTIP deal which is being negotiated between the EU (i.e. the bureaucrats) and the bureaucratic equivalent in the US, the corporations and the lobbyists which, if they get what they want, will bring about a situation whereby if a corporation considers that a decision or the implementation of a new law or regulation by a so-called sovereign government could affect their future profits, they will be able to take that government to a corporate court that will allow that court to impose enormous fines on governments i.e. the population of that country, even though all they have done is pass laws for the benefit of the people or the environment or whatever.
For example:
If you look at something like the NHS – this is systematically being run down to prepare public opinion, and to weaken public resistance to, having it privatised – so that people will say ‘I never wanted it privatised but it can’t be worse than it is now’. (If we weren’t a member of the EU we wouldn’t be affected by TTIP.) But if you are a giant global healthcare corporations, you could go to this court and say the state-owned NHS is affecting our potential profits and it is not a level playing field because the NHS is subsidised by the government.
We are having a situation, on behalf of the global pharma cartel, which generates billions and billions from the ill health and suffering of others, which is seeking to destroy all competition – all alternative methods of healing that it doesn’t control and own i.e. the entire complementary alternative medicines industry. This is a war on alternative health, which already gets a lot of hassle from the authorities.
If we come out of the EU, we do not continue to be subject to the laws that will destroy the alternative healthcare industry. (To underline this point, it was interesting to see a representative from the pharma industry speaking out against Nigel Farage in a recent televised debate!)
EU Tyranny
To see the political elite standing shoulder-to-shoulder asking the people to remain within such a tyranny, is absolutely grotesque.
However, many people are starting to disconnect from politicians and their opinions and are starting to come to their own conclusions by carrying out their own research. Many of these people have also been affected by the tidal wave of regulation that is pouring out of Brussels – they are saying we want to come out because of our own bad experience.
We are now seeing the Leave campaign moving ahead – we are seeing a disconnection between what the people think and what the political class are telling them they should do and how they should vote.
Countries Will Be Turned Into EU Regions
It is also planned that we will have a Europe of ‘regions’, not sovereign states. There will be no nation states.
The preparation for that is the mass migration of people into Europe to break down identification with our nation state. The massive point of resistance is those people who self-identify with their culture i.e. nations. There is a major block to breaking up nations because people don’t want it. What they are doing is diluting our sense of nationhood and culture by allowing vast numbers of people from other cultures to come in from both from outside and within Europe.
The people in the country, and those coming into the country, are both pawns in the same game and are being played off against each other.
Germany has the most sense of national cultural identity so Germany has been particularly targeted by opening the doors to millions of immigrants, many of whom are not genuine refugees. The German people are in shock because it makes no sense to them as they do not know the underlying plan.
There are more countries e.g. Turkey, Albania etc scheduled to come into Europe and the open borders policy will remain in place to dilute national identity so that the resistance in every country to regionalisation is gone because there will be no identifiable culture.
This agenda would have been unthinkable even 5 or 10 years ago, let alone many years ago at the outset of the European project.
Get Informed And Vote Leave
We have seen the step by step attrition of our rights and freedom.
It is critical that people get informed and make their OWN judgment rather than listen to the politicians. Do your own research online and make your own mind up.
Most politicians don’t understand what is going on and are ignorant of where the EU is going or they are being influenced by vested interests. It’s a case of the blind leading the blind!
We can easily sleep-walk into staying in the EU simply through ignorance. Go onto YouTube and do the necessary research and look at the background and documented evidence that the EU is indeed a tyranny.
Ted Heath knew this and even admitted he knew that political union in the EU was the eventual plan. He knew that the regions of the EU will specialise in certain areas – in the UK we are zoned for finance (with London at the centre) financial services and to be a service economy. Other areas of the UK economy were to be systematically run down e.g. fishing, mining, manufacturing etc. It is clear that Germany is zoned to be the manufacturing centre of the EU.
If you don’t know what the plan is – the centralisation of power in Europe and specialisation by regions to make one ‘country’ of Europe – it is difficult to make sense of what is going on.
The public are still being hoodwinked even now by Messrs Cameron and Osbourne who are also being manipulated by the vested interests. They have over-cooked the case for Remaining in the EU – so much so that they are losing credibility with the people.
Hopefully, the Referendum vote will not be rigged.
We Will Be Punished (Remain or Leave) – Prepare To Suck It Up
If we vote to Leave the EU, it will not be the end – it will just be the start!
If you look at the countries and referendums that have voted against the EU e.g. Ireland. The EU waits a bit, make things difficult for the country in question, does more manipulation and has another referendum to overturn the first one.
If we vote to come out, the political classes in the UK and Europe, will be doing everything they can to frighten people into reversing that decision. Getting out of the EU is not a sprint but a marathon, so be prepared for further intimidation tactics. We should not be surprised if they make it as difficult as they can in order that we beg to be re-admitted to Europe.
The referendum is possibly our last chance to throw off the tyranny of Europe and we must be strong.
They are holding back some crucial legislation, such as a European Army, until after the referendum. If we vote to stay in, they will no doubt punish the British people for demanding a referendum and voting in such large numbers to come out.
Once we are ‘in’ again, and we have no other chance to come out, there will be no checks and balances on what the bureaucrats will do then.
The reason why they are now using fear to frighten people to stay in is because there is no credible positive reason to stay in – there is no positive outcome for the people of this country, apart from the elite, to stay in. That is why there is no positive campaigning to stay in.
If this is the case now, what will the situation be in future?
Vote For Freedom
We have an opportunity now to put two fingers up to the bureaucrats in Europe and assert ourselves i.e. this referendum is about FREEDOM above all else.
Why am I writing this political statement on my blog which is mainly about internet marketing?
I can see that if we remain inside the EU it is very possible that they could enact legislation at any time that could put me out of business and there would be nothing that I could do about it because the legislators are unaccountable bureaucrats. Indeed, the introduction of VAT on digital purchases by the EU with no threshold is a case in point which put many small businesses into the position of not trading or having to trade through larger platforms that take a commission to handle their transactions.
This affects every person and business in this country and our freedom from EU tyranny is worth fighting for. This is what is at stake in my opinion.
(This is an email that I received from Sean Mize entitled ‘Act Like Who You Are’ – I am copying it to my blog because this is a great strategy.)
There’s a fallacy floating around in the im space that says you have to be a “marketer” and learn to “market” and “sell” and “write copy”
But what if there’s a better way . . . .
just act like who you are
You see, if you are a karate coach and you teach karate . . .what if you did this:
Each day, do a 5 minute video of some move and how to do it and post it on youtube and embed it on your site, and send it to your list and post it on facebook and anywhere else you hang out or have followers
(no marketing, just doing what you do)
at the end of one year you have 365 posts on your site with 365 videos in them and you have 365 videos on youtube
how many of your competitors have 365 videos?
no marketing, just doing what you do
So you ask, how do I “make money” then
what if you were to simply offer a live 3 week class on some sub-topic of karate and charge a fair price?
no marketing, just tell them what it is, like this:
Next week I am starting a 3 week live class where I will teach you:
–> how to break boards (or whatever other things karate teachers teach)
–> how to be centered
–> an easy way to defend yourself
the price is ________
You can sign up here if you want to: (link to pay)
Notice that’s all in an email!
You don’t even need a sales letter, nor any “marketing” words or anything like that!
Just tell them what it is.
Now maybe the following week you decide to record a new set of videos on a different topic. Additional to your youtube daily 5 min videos.
Maybe you do 6 videos on an advanced topic.
You add a membership category or custom post type on your website, and make it a membership.
The 6 videos are preloaded, and you promise to add 2 new videos each month, and live streamed karate demonstration.
That’s really easy to do, only takes a few hours a month.
That is your membership.
You send a non-marketing email out that says:
I am starting a brand new membership where you will get:
–> 6 videos on the ______ advanced topic
–> Each month I’ll be adding 2 new cutting edge videos each month
–> Each month I’ll do 1-2 live streamed karate demonstration and you can ask questions and I’ll answer them for you.
If you want to sign up: (payment link)
Notice, once again, no marketing, no marketing words – just telling them what you are doing.
Period.
Now, could you add a “sales page” – sure, but it doesn’t special “marketing words” – just tell them what it is.
And can you send followup emails after the first one that answers questions, tells them more about it, tells them it’s the last day to sign up before it starts, and so on?
Sure.
But notice how natural all of this is . . .very natural.
You just act like who you are.
‘
A karate teacher.
A scrapbooking teacher.
A blog builder teacher
A list building teacher
A “how to write” teacher.
A “how to record a daily video” teacher (yes, I believe there is a HUGE demand for someone to teach that like I teach “write a daily email”)
A crocheting teacher
A woodworking teacher
A Bible teacher (angle: learn to teach the Bible in an exciting way that people really want to learn from, you could have a daily blog post, a membership with new lessons each month, and a weekly q and a session)
A “how to stay healthy when you get older” teacher
Get the idea.
Whatever you are . . just teach that.
You can do it.’
By the way, if I really wanted to demonstrate that you could do it in any niche like the example I gave in karate, I could copy and paste and switch “karate” into “scrapbooking” or “crocheting” or “Bible Study teaching” or “daily video teaching”
In order to create an irresistible offer you first have to understand the true value of what you are offering.
It’s NOT the e-book, audio video or even coaching or any of the products or services that you have to offer!
The core value is how what you offer will change the life of your customer i.e. what transformations in their life can they expect from investing in your product or service?
Realising your core value may arise from experience of how you have already changed someone’s life or, if you are still awaiting for success, think about what you can do to change the life of your ideal client.
Alternatively, use yourself as an avatar – what have you learnt from your journey so far that would provide a massive short-cut for someone else like you?
With this in mind, answer the following 3 questions:
What pressing PROBLEMs did/can they hire you to solve?
What RESULTs did/can they get from working with you? (Aim for a long list so go deep with this including how it affected their wider life.)
What would the COST be to them if they did not work with you? (This is a key area so don’t ignore this aspect of your offer!)
You really need to go deep on these questions so that you have a full perspective on why it is an incredible opportunity for them to invest in what you are offering.
At the end of this exercise you should have one core problem that you will solve and then a whole load of results or cost savings that will flow from resolving that problem.
Try to be specific about the outcomes they get – if you could be with them for a day how would it change their life in very specific ways? Would they be eager to turn on the computer to see their sales stats? Would they look have a systemised way of working? Would they be ultra productive and focused? Could they systematically grow their revenues?
If you want to understand their problems, you could look at the opposite scenarios
they are not monitoring their stats at all?
They are not working a system but are working randomly.
They are unproductive and easily distracted.
They have no method for consistently growing revenues.
etc etc
When you have completed this exercise, you need to step back and ask yourself if your market will invest heavily to solve the core problem you have identified that you can solve?
Our basic core needs usually relate to money, health and relationships, so hopefully your core offer will relate to one of these areas.
You need to make a bold claim to help someone with a problem in one of these areas.
Once you have identified the core area that you can help your customers with, run it through this 4 point test:
Is there a clear perfect client? Is there a clear person or avatar in mind that this is for?
Is there a clear problem that needs urgently addressing?
How important will those people, that you’re supporting, rank solving this problem? On a scale of 1-10, how important is it to them?
Do the people within your niche have a history of investing in products and services of a similar nature?
Hot topic areas within the wealth or make money online niche:
Women or men entrepreneurs who want to increase their income and achieve more success. e.g. older people who want to boost their retirement income.
Newbies who want to increase their income and achieve more success.
Information, training and sales skills within a specific industry like, say, accountants or chiropractors.
Help those who want to leave their job to live their passion and make the transition from employed to solo business owner.
How to create a successful business in 20-30 hours / week (work part time & experience success)
Sell information products and books online.
How to get targeted traffic to your offers.
How to convert traffic into leads and sales.
How to create a passive income
How to create a big, responsive email list or a list of buyers.
In the UK, in my lifetime, I perceive that there has been a significant general deterioration in job conditions:
There is a lot more competition for jobs due to high immigration.
There are lot more part-time jobs with zero-hour contract-type conditions which means that many people have a portfolio of low-paid jobs in order to make ends meet.
Employers have diluted many work conditions like pay rates, pensions and benefits.
There is increased job churn so employees have reduced job securityi.e. the everage time ihn a job is 2 years or lower where it used to be measured in decades.
I therefore believe that entrepreneurship and the desire of people to take control of their life by starting and running their own micro-business is a mega-trend that is set to continue. This will fuel a huge demand for anyone that can solve the problems outlined above.
The Top 10 REAL Reasons Why People Buy:
1. To make money
2. Save money
3. Save time
4. Avoid effort
5. Get more comfort
6. Achieve greater cleanliness
7. Attain fuller health
8. Escape physical pain
9. Gain praise
10. Be popular
Here are 4 common problems that they want you to solve:
How to get started
The step-by-step path for achieving a result
How to get to the next level
How to perform a SPECIFIC skill
If you can address these types of problem then it will not be too difficult to create an irresistible offer for which you can demand a high fee in return!
In this article about how to build a buyers list, I want to show you how to build a buyers list by using other people’s product promotions.
Why should we want to build a buyers list rather than a list created by offering a free offer?
The simple answer is that a buyers list will generate more sales than a list consisting of freebie seekers.
Of course, the initial conversion rate will be lower if you are asking your visitors to buy something (i.e. more visitors to a freebie squeeze page will optin) but you will be building a higher quality list.
Of course, a buyers list is usually created by selling your own products but it is possible to create a buyers list from other people’s products.
Here are two possible strategies:
Strategy 1
In this strategy, you first find a product to promote – preferably one you already know about and like.
Usually, the promoter will be offering a discount so you need to take note of the key elements of the offer including the discount.
Next create related bonuses that you can offer to incentivise someone to buy the affiliate product through your affiliate link.
Using these elements, create an affiliate promo page and preferably post it somewhere that already has targeted traffic such as the classified ads on a niche specific forum site.
When the potential buyer clicks on the buy button on the promo offer page it takes the visitor through to a pre-checkout page which reaffirms the key points of the offer and tells the buyer to return to this page to input their email address and payment ID to claim their bonus.
The buy button on this page has your affiliate link through to the affiliate offer.
In short, this is the system:
Find a product to promote
Create or find your offer-related bonuses
Find a place to post the affiliate promo page
Create the affiliate promo page
Create the pre-checkout page
Set-up the web optin form and deliver the bonus with your first email or send to a download page with further affiliate offers on it.
Send further offers and valuable content to your buyers email list to maintain your relationship and garner further sales.
There is a purpose built wordpress theme for creating your affiliate promo page with a 3 step process for your buyers to follow – I own this theme and it is excellent for this strategy but you will still have to find a way of sending traffic to your promo page to make it work:
Strategy 2
Find new upcoming product launches using a site like Muncheye and contact the product vendor and offer his/her buyers a relavent free bonus within the download page or membership site.
The product vendor has more value to offer to buyers and you get their buyers on your list when they claim your free bonus. This is a win/win!
The system in short is:
Identify upcoming product launches
Create or find high-value related bonuses.
Approach the product vendor and say that you are willing to promote their product launch as an affiliate and could you also offer their buyers your free product-related bonus within their download area.
If the vendor agrees, send him the free offer copy and image to put his download area with a link to your optin page where his buyers can claim their bonus and then deliver the bonus after optin
Send further offers and valuable content to your buyers email list to maintain your relationship and garner further sales.
Conclusion
Both these strategies are simple, proven systems for creating buyers lists using other people’s product offers as the primary offer source.
Finding relevant bonuses to offer is not difficult if you either look around your hard disc or purchase a high-quality PLR product for a few dollars. Bonuses can be re-used with other promotions so the costs can be spread.
Hopefully, these two strategies show you how to build a buyers list through using simple strategies.
In this extract from a comment on Perry Marshall’s blog, he sets out the problem with the make money online niche:
I received an email from Tony Shepherd (one of my favourite marketers to follow) – it was entitled ‘The Entire Marketing Strategy’. What a great subject line – it is difficult not to open an email with that subject line. This is what he said:
I stumbled across this video review checklist and thought that I would post it to my blog because it may be useful to my readers.
This article covers why Brexit happened i.e. the UK voted to leave the European Union on 23rd June 2016.
