Build on what you have learned from taking that step. Every time you act, reality changes. If you pay attention, you learn something from taking a smart step. More often than not, it gets you close to what you want. (“I should be able to afford something just outside of downtown.”) Sometimes what you want changes.

In other words, when facing the unknown, act your way into the future that you desire; don’t think your way into it. Thinking does not change reality, nor does it necessarily lead to any learning. You can think all day about starting your businesst, but thinking alone is not going to get you any closer to having one.

Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future by Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer

Make a list of the real benefits or advantages that you already offer a client or employer. Then list the benefits and advantages your competition offers them that you don’t. Now list the ways you could improve upon your competitors’ unique advantages. List any niche advantages you already possess. For instance, the ease of application of your product or service. Or your location. Now make a list of your most important or favorite suppliers, vendors, retailers, and businesses in your professional life. Focus on the one biggest reason why you like or prefer dealing with each of these entities over their competition. Reduce that main reason or benefit down to one sentence or less. Then see if you can adopt that same benefit or advantage to your business or career.



One of the biggest “competitive-edge” advantages you’ll ever gain is to always make it easier for the client to say yes than it is for them to say no. You do it by taking away the financial, psychological, or emotional risk factors that are always attached (stated or unstated) to virtually any decision-making proposition you ever ask a client to make. When you remove the risk for anyone deciding to do business with you, it results in a powerful advantage in your business and financial success.



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

In order to stand above the crowded marketplace, you or your company must offer your prospect or client a unique and distinctive benefit or advantage above and beyond that of your competitor. If you don’t, people have no motivation to do business with you instead of your competition. You must identify and understand what it is you or your company do or can start doing for your clients that provides them with a result or an advantage superior to the competition’s. This is called the unique selling proposition (USP). Your unique selling proposition is that distinct, appealing idea that sets your business apart from every other “me too” competitor.

How do you pick a USP? You must first identify which needs are going unfulfilled within your industry, such as: 1. A broad selection 2. Big discounts 3. Advice and assistance 4. Convenience (i.e., location, fully stocked shelves, immediate delivery) 5. Top-of-the-line products or services 6. Speedy service 7. Services above and beyond the basics 8. A longer and more comprehensive warranty or guarantee than the norm 9. Any other distinct advantage, tangible or intangible benefits, or valuable advantages you can give that the competition doesn’t. The point is to focus on the one niche, need, or gap that is most sorely lacking—provided you can keep the promise you make. You can even create hybrid USPs—combinations that integrate one marketing gap with another. Before you decide on a USP, be sure you can always deliver that USP through your whole organization. You and/or your staff must consistently maintain high levels of quality or service.

The USP is the nucleus around which you build your success, fame, and wealth. So you’d better be able to state it. If you can’t state it, your prospects won’t see it. Whenever a client needs the type of product or service you sell, your USP should bring you or your company immediately to mind. Clearly conveying the USP through your marketing and business performance will make business success inevitable. But you must boil down your USP to its bare essence. Try it. Write a one-paragraph statement of your new USP. At first, you will have trouble expressing it tightly and specifically. It may take two or three paragraphs or more. That’s okay. Ruthlessly edit away the generalities, and focus on a crisp, clear statement that promises the most you could possibly offer. Hack away excess verbiage until you have a clearly defined unique selling proposition that a client or prospect can immediately seize upon.

Let’s say you run display ads, and your USP offers a greater selection than any other competitor. There are several ways to integrate this into your ads. 

State the USP in the ad headline:

We Always Have 168 Different Widgets In No Less Than Twelve Different Sizes And Ten Desirable Colors In Price Ranges from $6 to $600

(Or)

Five Times the Selection, Four Times the Color Choice, Three Times the Number of Convenient Locations, Two Times the Warranty, And Half the Markup of Any Other Dealer

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

Acquiring clients at a breakeven or a slight loss and making substantial profits on back-end repurchasing is one of the most overlooked and underutilized methods of client growth and generation available to you. But it can’t work for you until you first recognize a very important fact. If your business or practice is one that has a high probability of clients coming back, again and again, to repurchase from you the same or different products or services, you owe it to that business or practice to do everything within your power to get clients into the buying stream as quickly and easily as you possibly can. 

Many companies increase their clients and profits merely by shifting their focus from trying to make a huge profit on the acquisition of a new client to making their real profit on all the repeat purchases that result from those new clients.

Knowing how much a client will spend with you over a period of years tells you how much you can spend on the process of acquiring a client. The most profitable thing you’ll ever do for your business or career is to understand and ethically exploit the marginal net worth of a client.

What is the current lifetime value of one of your clients? It’s the total profit of an average client over the lifetime of his or her patronage—including all residual sales—less all advertising, marketing, and incremental product or service-fulfillment expenses. 

If you haven’t calculated your clients’ marginal net worth yet, here’s how to do it: 

1. Compute your average sale and your profit per sale. 
2. Compute how much additional profit a client is worth to you by determining how many times he or she comes back. 
3. Compute precisely what a client costs by dividing the marketing budget by the number of clients it produces. 
4. Compute the cost of a prospect the same way. 
5. Compute how many sales you get for so many prospects (the percentage of prospects who become clients). 
6. Compute the marginal net worth of a client by subtracting the cost to produce (or convert) the client from the profit you expect to earn from the client over the lifetime of his or her patronage.

Once you’ve calculated the lifetime value of a client, you have many ways to accomplish your break-even objective. Remember, the goal isn’t just to cut the price of the first purchase. The goal is to make that first purchase so much more appealing that people find it harder to say no than yes . . . please! 

While reducing the price of your product or service is the most common and obvious way to get the first sale, there are other powerful ways to obtain first-time buyers. For example, you can calculate your allowable marketing or selling cost, which is how much money you’re willing to either spend or forgo receiving (by reducing the selling price), in order to make that very first purchase more appealing to a prospective client. 

Let’s say your product or service sells for $200 and your cost is $100. Also assume your average client repurchases several times a year for several years and you will realize a good long-term profit. Obviously you can reduce your price by $100 on the first sale to reach a break-even point and gain a new client. But you could put that $100 to a number of other uses. You could keep the price at $200 and use the $100 as “spiff” or extra selling incentives to your salespeople. Giving salespeople greater financial incentive to bring in new, first-time clients can produce tremendous results in the right situation. You could also use that same $100 to buy more of your product or service. So you still charge the full $200, but you give prospects twice the quantity on the first purchase.

Or you could take the $100 and use it to buy other complementary products or services (at wholesale) to package and add to your product or service without raising the $200 price—so the value of your offer becomes far greater and thus more attractive. Or you could use that $100 to invest in advertising, sales letters, additional salespeople, free seminars, or any other marketing and selling programs. Or you could rent promotional space in someone’s store or trade-show booth and pay them the $100 for every new client you gain through their facility. The only limitation you have on how to use your allowable marketing or selling cost to help you strategically break even on the initial sale is that it must be ethical and legal. And after testing it out it must be economically viable in the long term.

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

As you work to free up your mind and give it the power to alter its perspective, remember the following: the emotions we experience at any time have an inordinate influence on how we perceive the world. 

If we feel afraid, we tend to see more of the potential dangers in some action. If we feel particularly bold, we tend to ignore the potential risks. What you must do then is not only alter your mental perspective, but reverse your emotional one as well. For instance, if you are experiencing a lot of resistance and setbacks in your work, try to see this as in fact something that is quite positive and productive. These difficulties will make you tougher and more aware of the flaws you need to correct. In physical exercise, resistance is a way to make the body stronger, and it is the same with the mind. Play a similar reversal on good fortune—seeing the potential dangers of becoming soft, addicted to attention, and so forth. These reversals will free up the imagination to see more possibilities, which will affect what you do. If you see setbacks as opportunities, you are more likely to make that a reality.

Mastery by Robert Greene

A producer is someone who creates value and shares knowledge with others. In the process, a producer helps improve lives and earns continuous active and passive income.

Step one is committing to becoming a producer. 

To attract customers, and partner with affiliates who’ll help promote your products, follow these principles:

• Have a solid understanding of your customers’ needs. When you identify your target audience’s biggest problems, you’ll be able to create products that solve them. Once you do so, you’ll have customers for life.
  

• Be clear about what your customers are willing to spend. You can’t expect meaningful rates of conversion if you develop champagne products for beer budgets. Test, poll, research similar products, and interact with potential customers to discover what they’re willing, or even able, to spend on your product.
  

• Deliver your product in the expected format. Trying to sell a magazine to someone who wants to see a movie is an effort in futility. A videocassette won’t sell to someone who has only a DVD player. Learn how your target customer wants to receive your content and then deliver it via the appropriate medium. 

Higher prices lead to greater affiliate participation. Whether your product costs $10 or $10,000, it’ll require roughly the same amount of effort for an affiliate to promote it. As a result, most affiliates will choose to invest their time into selling high-priced products that provide substantial returns. Printed books and ebooks, while often providing wonderful content, are ill suited for commission-driven relationships as are most other products that sell for under $500. Today’s successful partnerships involve the promotion of products priced between $500 and $4,995. Products above and below these price points continue to be sold, but they represent the two ends of the bell curve. Successful Internet marketers offer products at the center of the curve—and right now that sweet spot is roughly $2,500.  

Higher commissions mean happy affiliates. Selling a highpriced product isn’t the whole story. You must also be generous on commissions paid. Today, 40%-50% commission rates are commonplace, as is the payment of an additional 10% for second-tier affiliates. Second-tier affiliates, also known as brokers, help recruit affiliates for a product launch. When a product is sold, a second-tier affiliate typically receives 10% of the purchase price. Naturally, this cuts into your net profits. However, industry leaders understand that 40%-50% is a price worth paying for instant massive exposure, immediate income, and adding thousands of hopefully satisfied customers to their sales funnel. 


Continuity programs create long-term relationships. While instant cash is always nice, long-term passive income is even better. Whether they consist of bi-weekly one-on-one coaching, monthly product shipments, quarterly VIP programs, or annual membership dues, continuity programs provide ongoing benefits for both you and your affiliates.   

Developing products from scratch is hard. But even more difficult is creating products that fulfill audience needs, provide immense value, are of superior quality, and convert prospects to paying customers. Success requires satisfying all four criteria.

Today, he who has the list controls the game. 

Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher

You need to recognize the impact you have on people’s lives in the business you are conducting. What you render, and the way you render it, has changed their lives. It has helped enrich them. It has helped their security.

Change the way you think about, deal with, and speak to your clients. Greet them on the phone and in person with the same joy, sincerity, and enthusiasm that you’d show any other valued friend. Respect the importance of their time, their sense of security, and their comfort. Don’t make them wait too long on hold or in your waiting room or at their home. Provide for their comfort. That may mean coffee and beverages and a comfortable, clean setting complete with fresh, interesting reading material. It may mean a pleasing shopping environment and enough help on hand for a client to get the most out of their buying experience with you.

A successful business starts not with just a great idea or product. Rather, it starts with the desire to provide a solution to another’s problem. In doing so you enrich your own life and the lives of those around you, your family and employees or employers, by enriching the lives of your clients. You need to understand that you have a higher purpose for being in business than simply making money. Your purpose must be understanding what you can do to help solve the problems of others, help maximize the options, and finding ways to do it. And unless you understand that higher purpose, you can’t begin to take advantage of your potential.

You must first identify what your client really needs, even if your client doesn’t recognize what it is he or she needs. The client may think that a particular item is what he or she is searching for, but if you probe a bit you might see that an entirely different solution will solve your client’s problem, maybe even a less expensive solution. Now you have become more than a salesperson. You’ve become an adviser. You’ve begun the process of winning trust and, ultimately, additional business from your client.


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

The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

If an MVP fails, teams are liable to give up hope and abandon the project altogether. But this is a solvable problem. The solution to this dilemma is a commitment to iteration. You have to commit to a locked-in agreement—ahead of time—that no matter what comes of testing the MVP, you will not give up hope. Successful entrepreneurs do not give up at the first sign of trouble, nor do they persevere the plane right into the ground. Instead, they possess a unique combination of perseverance and flexibility. The MVP is just the first step on a journey of learning. Down that road—after many iterations—you may learn that some element of your product or strategy is flawed and decide it is time to make a change, which I call a pivot, to a different method for achieving your vision.

At the beginning, a startup is little more than a model on a piece of paper. The financials in the business plan include projections of how many customers the company expects to attract, how much it will spend, and how much revenue and profit that will lead to. It’s an ideal that’s usually far from where the startup is in its early days.

A startup’s job is to (1) rigorously measure where it is right now, confronting the hard truths that assessment reveals, and then (2) devise experiments to learn how to move the real numbers closer to the ideal reflected in the business plan.

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

Paul Erdos (1913–1996) Erdos was one of the most brilliant and prolific mathematicians of the twentieth century. He was also, as Paul Hoffman documents in his book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a true eccentric—a “mathematical monk” who lived out of a pair of suitcases, dressed in tattered suits, and gave away almost all the money he earned, keeping just enough to sustain his meager lifestyle; a hopeless bachelor who was extremely (perhaps abnormally) devoted to his mother and never learned to cook or even boil his own water for tea; and a fanatic workaholic who routinely put in nineteen-hour days, sleeping only a few hours a night. 

Erdos liked to work in short, intense collaborations with other mathematicians, and he crisscrossed the globe seeking fresh talent, often camping out in colleagues’ homes while they worked on a problem together. One such colleague remembered an Erdos visit from the 1970s:  … he only needed three hours of sleep. He’d get up early and write letters, mathematical letters. He’d sleep downstairs. The first time he stayed, the clock was set wrong. It said 7:00, but it was really 4:30 A.M. He thought we should be up working, so he turned on the TV full blast. Later, when he knew me better, he’d come up at some early hour and tap on the bedroom door. “Ralph, do you exist?” The pace was grueling. He’d want to work from 8:00 A.M. until 1:30 A.M. Sure we’d break for short meals but we’d write on napkins and talk math the whole time. He’d stay a week or two and you’d collapse at the end. 

Erdos owed his phenomenal stamina to amphetamines—he took ten to twenty milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin daily. Worried about his drug use, a friend once bet Erdoos that he wouldn’t be able to give up amphetamines for a month. Erdos took the bet and succeeded in going cold turkey for thirty days. When he came to collect his money, he told his friend, “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.” After the bet, Erdos promptly resumed his amphetamine habit, which he supplemented with shots of strong espresso and caffeine tablets. “A mathematician,” he liked to say, “is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

Fact is, most people greatly prefer to transact business with those they know and like.

The successful often reject proposals where there is a lack of alignment on core business practices or moral differences. Life is too short to compromise. A vital component for achieving success is to establish a Circle of Four that not only encourages you to reach your full potential, but also accurately reflects who you want to become.

Your Circle of Four is made up of the four people you consider cornerstones. It includes both those you admire—such as a mentor whom you seldom see but have access to—and those dearest to you, such as your best friend or closest family member.

The sum of these four people directly reflects your life. For example, the median net worth of your Circle of Four is likely to be very close to yours. If two in your Circle are broke and two have just enough to scrape by, odds are good you’re concerned about where your next meal is coming from. Conversely, if your Circle of Four includes three people who are living their WHAT and one who is on an amazing trajectory, it’s likely you want to continually evolve and are consistently working to attain your objectives.

Be wary of those whose goals do not closely mirror or exceed yours. While it may be comfortable to surround yourself with familiar faces, they must emphatically support your mission or their weight is going to drag you down. Take a few moments to review your current Circle. Be honest about what you see. To flourish, you need accountability partners who both inspire and encourage you. Be conscious of the power your Circle holds. With the right people in your Circle, anything can happen. With the wrong people, little to nothing is more likely. Choose wisely.

The successful first seek to understand and then be understood. This is the polar opposite of how most choose to operate. A core strategy for serving first is to gather ample information to assess how immediate benefit can be provided to one’s partner.

Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher