WHY DO SOME PEOPLE GAIN LEVELS OF SUCCESS SO MUCH higher than others’?
Frequently it’s due to the fact that they have a better philosophical strategy. They approach everyone they deal with in a totally different and more effective way than anyone else does. And while their competitors are usually unable to figure out this strategy, it is one anyone in business can successfully employ by simply changing his or her focus from “me” to “you.” This is true whether you own a business of your own or work for a corporation. This simple adjustment in your focus is the key to what I believe is the most powerful business (and life) strategy you can employ. I call it the Strategy of Preeminence. Once you begin to use it you will always—not just sometimes, but always—stand out in the minds, hearts, and checkbooks of your client, your employees, your employer, or your boss as the very best there is. The preeminent choice. The Strategy of Preeminence is quite simply the ability to put your clients’ needs always ahead of your own. When you master that your success will naturally follow. It’s amazing how many people and companies will say and do whatever it takes to make a one-time sale rather than taking the time to understand the clients’ desired outcome. And then having the courage and the concern to tell that client that what they really need is much less than what they told you they wanted. You may, when you take this approach, end up with a smaller initial sale, but you will have just made a new friend, someone who will remember you the next time. And who will, no doubt, tell his friends about you and your company. Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham A formal client-referral system will bring you an immediate increase in clients and profit3/29/2013
A formal client-referral system will bring you an immediate increase in clients and profit. And it doesn’t cost anything to implement it. A referral-generated client normally spends more money, buys more often, and is more profitable and loyal than most other categories of business you could go after. And referrals are easy to get. Referrals beget referrals. They are self-perpetuating. Every time clients deal with you in person, through your sales staff, by letter, E-mail, or on the phone, diplomatically ask them for client referrals. But you must first set the stage. Tell your clients that you enjoy doing business with them and that they probably associate with other people like themselves who mirror their values and quality. Since they obviously know the exact people you prefer working with, you’d like them to refer their valued friends and associates to you. If you acknowledge your clients’ value and importance to you, they’ll be eager to reciprocate. Then extend a totally risk-free, obligation-free offer. Willingly offer to advise, talk to, or meet with anyone important to that client. In other words, offer to consult their referral without expectation of purchase, so your clients see you as a valuable expert with whom they can put their friends or colleagues in touch. If you do this with every client you talk to, sell to, write, or visit—and you also get your key team members to do it as well—you can’t help but get dozens, even hundreds, of new clients. I have seen business literally triple in six months when people used an organized client-referral process.
Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham What’s the lesson in all this? You must constantly be on the lookout for new and better ways to dramatically improve your overall business performance by capitalizing on what everyone else sees as a limitation.
Whatever you’re doing, however you’re doing it, and wherever you’re doing it, you can and must find continually better ways to maximize your results. But maximizing and creating breakthroughs means more than simply getting the most profit, highest performance, and greatest productivity and effectiveness out of an action, opportunity, or investment. It also means achieving maximum results with a minimum of time, effort, expense, and risk—something few people practice or even think about. Think: highest and best use of your time, money, and effort. Highest and best. Always highest and best! In order to produce the maximum number of breakthroughs possible, you should focus your thinking on these fundamental objectives that your breakthrough ideas should be designed to achieve. It’s a success template that keeps your mind’s eye on the breakthrough ball at all times. • Always discover what the hidden opportunity is in every situation. • Try to uncover at least one cash windfall for your business or employer every three months. • Engineer maximum success into every action you take or decision you make. • Build a business breakthrough foundation based upon multiple streams of idea generation instead of a single idea source. • One of your breakthrough goals is to always make you, your business, or your product special, unique, and more advantageous in your client’s eyes. • The more value or wealth you can create for your client, the greater the power of that breakthrough. • A breakthrough’s purpose is to help you or your business maximize personal or organizational leverage in every commitment of action, investment, time, effort, opportunity, or energy you make. • Breakthroughs increase in direct proportion to the amount of networking, brainstorming, and masterminding you do with like-minded, success-driven people outside your industry. • Your goal in creating breakthroughs is to use ideas to create more value for others. • Breakthroughs fuel growth thinking. • Growth thinking seeds/breakthroughs . . . the two go hand in hand. • The best breakthroughs take away risk or resistance from the other side. So it’s easier to say yes than no. • Employ as many success practices of others outside your field or industry by adopting or adapting their philosophies and methods to your business situation. Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham Now, one of the techniques Google uses to filter out the ‘bad’ websites is to look at their backlinking pattern. In layman’s terms, backlinks are the quality and quantity of links that point to your website. So a link from CNN.com is way better than 100 from sites like bobsfriedchickenshack.com. Moreover, there is a ton of misinformation about backlinking. Many people recommend techniques like article spinning, forum profiles, link wheels, link pyramids, and social bookmarking. Once upon a time, these worked. But Google has cracked down on any site that uses these techniques. So bottom line... You need backlinks. Just make sure you’re focusing on quality over quantity.
Building Backlinks 101 Every backlink is different. Google places a strong emphasis on links from large, authority style sites. So it only makes sense to focus on these web properties. The best way to build a backlink is to create a unique piece of content, post it on a website, and then include a link back to your site. The trick here is to mix up the anchor text. These are the visible, clickable words in the hyperlink. You don’t want all the text to be the same. Instead you should include different phrases to make it more organic looking. Here are the percentages I recommend: --- 30% should be the target keyword for the web page --- 20% should be a related LSI keyword ---20% should be ‘naked hyperlink’ with no text --- 30% should be a random assortment of phrases like click here, check this out, this page, go here, etcetera. These percentages are important because they match how people normally link back to a website. It looks more ‘organic’ in the eyes of Google – So you’ll be less likely to get hit with any sort of penalty. That’s the essence of backlinking. Your First $1000 - How to Start an Online Business that Actually Makes Money by Steve Scott Write Benefit-Driven Content:
Get into the mind of the reader. Describe why they should buy the offer and how it will help them. The best way to write compelling text is to talk about the reader’s pain and frustrations. Identify with them about their daily experience with the niche topic. Then show how the affiliate offer alleviates a specific obstacle. You need to use basic copywriting to make this section stand out. This will turn your words into compelling text. You can learn the fundamentals of copywriting. You don’t have to create things like a headline or an opening hook. The most important action you can take is to emphasize the benefits over the features. Simply talk about how the reader will feel after using the product. Your First $1000 - How to Start an Online Business that Actually Makes Money by Steve Scott Advancing at a measured pace—step by step, from where you are to a little bit better—may seem the logical and safe way to proceed. But you can and should think in terms of skipping levels and making quantum leaps. You can move rapidly, easily, and surprisingly safely from your present level of accomplishment to a place that is several stages higher. You can do it instantly—and directly. And you can do it in virtually every aspect of your business or career activities. You can do it by not limiting yourself to following only those practices people in your industry follow.
Think about it logically. You can’t be a follower and expect to ever really become a leader in your field. It just doesn’t work that way in today’s fast-changing world. Instead, you need to see the overlooked opportunities that are all around you and act on the vast sums of untapped income and unclaimed success just waiting to be harnessed. You probably spend too little time studying the most successful, innovative, and profitable ideas people in other industries use to grow and prosper. Yet, if you start focusing on other industries’ success practices, you’ll be amazed at how easily you can adapt these ideas to your own business situation. Suddenly, you’ll see significantly better ways to produce significantly better results from the same time, manpower, effort, activity, and capital. Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham No process in history has done more to facilitate the exchange of information, skills, wisdom, and contacts than mentoring. Young men and women learned their trade by studying as apprentices under their respective craftsmen. Young artists developed their individual style only after years working under elder masters. New priests apprenticed for a decade or more with older priests to become wise religious men themselves. When finally these men and women embarked on their own, they had the knowledge and the connections to succeed in their chosen field. By studying the lives of those who know more than we do, we expand our horizons. As a child, I realized that many of the opportunities other kids had that would expose them to new things and new people, like summer camp or extra tutoring, were unavailable to me. I quickly learned that success in my life would require determination, exploration, self-reliance, and a strong will. I also learned to rely on other people who were available: my father and some of the more professional people he knew in our neighborhood. Dr. David McClelland of Harvard University researched the qualities and characteristics of high achievers in our society. What he found was that your choice of a “reference group,” the people you hang out with, was an important factor in determining your future success or failure. In other words, if you hang with connected people, you’re connected. If you hang with successful people, you’re more likely to become successful yourself. I remembered that my father and mother had told me to speak less in such situations; the less you say, the more you’ll likely hear. They were warning me, given my predisposition for dominating a conversation from an early age. That’s the way you learn from others, Dad said, and glean the small nuances that will help you engender a deeper relationship later on. There’s also no better way to signal your interest in becoming a mentee. People tacitly notice your respect and are flattered by the attention. That said, quiet for me isn’t exactly quiet. I asked tons of questions, suggested things that I saw from the summer, and conspired with these leaders of the firm on what was important to them—making the firm a success. Mentoring is a very deliberate activity that requires people to check their ego at the door, hold back from resenting other people’s success, and consciously strive to build beneficial relationships whenever the opportunity arises. There were two crucial components that makes any mentorship, for that matter—successful. He offered his guidance because, for one, I promised something in return. I worked nonstop in an effort to use the knowledge he was imparting to make him, and his firm, more successful. And two, we created a situation that went beyond utility. Pat liked me and became emotionally invested in my advancement. He cared about me. That’s the key to a successful mentorship. A successful mentoring relationship needs equal parts utility and emotion. You can’t simply ask somebody to be personally invested in you. There has to be some reciprocity involved—whether its hard work or loyalty that you give in return—that gets someone to invest in you in the first place. The best way to approach utility is to give help first, and not ask for it. If there is someone whose knowledge you need, find a way to be of use to that person. Consider their needs and how you can assist them. If you can’t help them specifically, perhaps you can contribute to their charity, company, or community. You have to be prepared to give back to your mentors and have them know that from the outset. Before Pat would consider having dinner with me three times a year, he had to know that I would be committed to his firm. That’s how I found myself so early on in a trusted position that later turned into a friendship. But as my father taught me, mentors are all around you. It’s not necessarily your boss or even someone in your business. Mentoring is a nonhierarchical activity that transcends careers and can cross all organizational levels. How many people can walk into our homes and just open up the fridge and help themselves? Not many. People need “refrigerator rights relationships,” the kind that are comfortable, informal, and intimate enough to let us walk into one another’s kitchens and rummage through the refrigerator without asking. It is close relationships like these that keep us well-adjusted, happy, and successful. Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time There are literally thousands of different ways to get recognition for your expertise.
Try moonlighting. See if you have the time to take on freelance projects that will bring you in touch with a whole new group of people. Or, within your own company, take on an extra project that might showcase your new skills. Teach a class or give a workshop at your own company. Sign up to be on panel discussions at a conference. Most important, remember that your circle of friends, colleagues, clients, and customers is the most powerful vehicle you’ve got to get the word out about what you do. What they say about you will ultimately determine the value of your brand. Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz In short, forget your job title and forget your job description (for the moment, at least).
Starting today, you’ve got to figure out what exceptional expertise you’re going to master that will provide real value to your network and your company. Here are ten tips on helping you on your way toward becoming an expert: 1. Get out in front and analyze the trends and opportunities on the cutting edge. Foresight gives you and your company the flexibility to adapt to change. Creativity allows you to take advantage of it. Identify the people in your industries who always seem to be out in front, and use all the relationship skills you’ve acquired to connect with them. 2. Ask seemingly stupid questions. If you ask questions that are like no other, you get results that are unlike any that the world has seen. How many people have the courage to ask those questions? The answer: all the people responsible for the greatest innovations. 3. Know yourself and your talents. I had no chance competing with the science geeks at ICI. In developing an expertise that highlighted my strengths, I was able to overcome my weaknesses. The trick is not to work obsessively on the skills and talents you lack, but to focus and cultivate your strengths so that your weaknesses matter less. I’d apply the 80/20 rule in that you should spend some time getting better at your weaknesses but really focus on building your strengths. 4. Always learn. You have to learn more to earn more. All content-creators are readers or at least deep questioners or conversationalists. They’re also sticklers when it comes to self-development. Your program of self-development should include reading books and magazines, listening to educational tapes, attending three to five conferences a year, taking a course or two, and developing relationships with the leaders in your field. 5. Stay healthy. Research has discovered that at midafternoon, due to sleep deprivation, the average corporate executive today has the alertness level of a seventy-year-old. You think that executive is being creative or connecting the dots? Not a chance. Sounds hokey, but you have to take care of yourself—your body, mind, and spirit—to be at your best. As hectic as my schedule can get, I never miss a workout (five times a week). I try to take a five-day vacation every other month (I do check e-mails and catch up on reading). 6. Expose yourself to unusual experiences. When management guru Peter Drucker was asked for one thing that would make a person better in business, he responded, “Learn to play the violin.” Different experiences give rise to different tools. Find out what your kids are interested in and why. Stimulate your creativity. Learn about things that are out of the mainstream. Travel to weird and exotic places. Knowing one’s own industry and one’s native markets is not enough to compete in the future. Take a deep and boundless curiosity about things outside your own profession and comfort zone. 7. Don’t get discouraged. My first e-mail to the CEO of ICI regarding TQM was never returned. To this day, I face rejection on a regular basis. If you’re going to be creative, cutting edge, out of the mainstream, you’d better get used to rockin’ the boat. And guess what—when you’re rockin’ the boat, there will always be people who will try and push you off. 8. Know the new technology. No industry moves quicker or places more emphasis on innovation. You don’t need to be a “techno geek,” but you do need to understand the impact of technology on your business and be able to leverage it to your benefit. Adopt a techno geek, or at least hire or sire one. 9. Develop a niche. Successful small businesses that gain renown establish themselves within a carefully selected market niche that they can realistically hope to dominate. Individuals can do the same thing. Think of several areas where your company underperforms and choose to focus on the one area that is least attended to. 10. Follow the money. Creativity is worthless if it can’t be applied. The bottom line for your content has to be: This will make us more money. The lifeblood of any company is sales and cash flow. All great ideas are meaningless in business until someone pays for it. Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz When you start to build your business online, knowing what to measure helps to tell you how to build and what elements matter and what doesn't. Too often people don't create a feedback loop to let themselves see how they are doing. These loops are important as you want to improve fast, and knowing what doesn't work to improve your key measureables is critical to success.
The following list is pretty straight forward, and pretty comprehensive.. Site traffic/ Email list
Sales
Income
To paraphrase Drucker, what gets measured, gets done. Make sure you are going the direction you think you are, and the direction you want. Measure things. D |
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Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” |