Hustle matters. Grit matters.
I know, you love ideas, and you are great at them. You have several millionndollar ideas. You are a machine. Listen. Ideas are cheap pieces of head lint. Ideas do not make anyone rich. Ideas are merely daydreams when you do nothing to make them happen. They are nothing more tan wishes without action. You will have a million ideas, and the ideas that you will have will pop in your head constantly, and most of those ideas you won't notice or you will ignore. Some of your ideas will be so good that you will get excited, and you won't tell anyone that way no one will steal your idea. Do yourself a favor and tell someone. Get some new thoughts on your idea, some fresh eyes. More importantly, take action on your idea. get others to believe in your idea, and get hem to take action. Ideas are constant and cheap. Ideas are not the key to success. The only thing that matters is what you take action on and the results you get. What you do matters, not what you think. Take action. Do something. Anything. I do not listen to what people say, I watch what they do. What they say only tells you who they want to be or who they think they are, but what they do tells you who they are. As you start to take action on your thoughts and ideas, and things start to happen, what you will find is thst other opportunities will come up, and other possibilities will come your way. Action creates success. Ideas equal wishes and work just as well. On life, only grit and hustle matter. D The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) Part 2 In turn, if the product or service is designed to solve a specific unsolved problem or meet a specific unmet need, and if the message is targeted well, so that you happen to be someone with that unsolved problem or unmet need, you will be happy to hear about the product or service. Good marketing, Seth Godin writes in Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, “start[s] with a problem you can solve for a customer (who realizes he has a problem!).”4 Good marketing, in other words, is not something you do after you create the product; the fact that most marketing is done this way is why we hate the word “marketing” so much. In his wonderful book No B.S. Direct Marketing: The Ultimate, No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take No Prisoners Direct Marketing for Non-Direct Marketing Businesses, which is in my view the single best introduction to direct-response available, Kennedy lists “Big Company’s Agenda for Advertising and Marketing,” which includes: 1. Please/appease its board of directors (most of whom know zip about advertising and marketing but have lots of opinions) 2. Please/appease its stockholders 3. Look good, look appropriate to Wall Street 4. Look good, appropriate to the media 5. Build brand identity 6. Win awards for advertising 7. Sell something He then lists “Your Agenda” for advertising and marketing, which includes, in its entirety: 1. Sell something. Now. There are several important reasons you should learn marketing, even if you work for a large corporation and aren’t planning a career in marketing. 1. Marketing is a mentality. It’s a worldview that puts customers’ emotional reality first, and inquires deeply about their needs, wants, and desires. 2. There’s no better way to rise up the ranks of your organization than bringing in new business, or coming up with ideas that bring in new business. 3. If you’ve noticed, your job may not seem so secure these days as it used to. Now is a good time to start thinking about what skills you’re bringing to the table if you find yourself looking for work in the future. “Understand that no matter what you’re doing, even if you want to be a ballplayer, a rapper, a movie star--nothing happens until something gets sold. Ever. The reason actors make so much money is because their face sells the fucking movie tickets. It’s not about their ability to act. The reason the musician gets rich is because he sells a lot of seats and records. Or his song gets used in a movie—it’s a license, a sale. The key to making money, and therefore living a life of less stress, is to cause someone to joyfully give you money in exchange for something that they perceive to be of greater value than the money they gave you. The key there is ‘joyfully.’ Most sales and marketing you study, you learn how to trick people into parting with their money, or badger them into doing it, or make them so miserable that they think you’re their only salvation. None of those situations involve the word ‘joyfully.’ I listened to some of Eben’s recordings and started reading some of Kennedy’s books, The crucial turning point for me was listening to a recording that was part of Eben’s “Guru Mastermind” home study marketing course. The recording was called “How to Write a Killer Sales Letter” and featured Eben’s main copywriter, Craig Clemens, who has generated over $50 million in sales through his copy. The key revelation from that recording, for me, was that when you’re communicating with a marketing message, you need to get inside the heads of your prospects, figure out what matters most to them in their lives, and talk to them about that, not about what you want to sell them. They don’t care about what you want to sell them. “If you aren’t talking to your prospect about their strongest and deepest wants, needs, and desires, you are doing them a disservice,” Craig said on the recording. Good marketing, in turn, speaks to the prospect about their deepest emotional realities, their innermost desires, and about helping them achieve what they want in those realms. Thus, the best marketing is all about human connection, on a genuine level. If you can truly help your prospect achieve their deepest wants and desires in the area your product or service addresses (and if you can’t, you shouldn’t be marketing it in the first place), then you are actually doing your prospects a great service by communicating with them about their problems or issues, because few people ever meet us on that level, even in our personal lives. The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) A QUICK-AND-EASY GUIDE TO TEACHING YOURSELF MARKETING IN TWO MONTHS Step 1. Create an e-mail address that is not your main e-mail address and does not go to your main inbox. I’m going to be asking you to sign up for a lot of different free e-mail newsletters, and they will flood your e-mail account, so make sure it’s not your main account or inbox! Step 2. Go to the following websites. Not only should you read everything you can get your hands on in the archives of these sites, but you should also sign up for the free e-mail newsletter available on each site, with the e-mail address you created in Step 1. You should sign up for these newsletters because all of the people I’m going to recommend are master copywriters. You can get an entire education in marketing and copywriting just by comparing and contrasting the different styles of these marketers. Once you begin diving into some of the resources I mention above, you’ll see that there is no “one” way to market, no “one” tone you need to adopt. There are so many different tones and styles here, from Dan Kennedy’s over-the-top hard sell, to the wickedly funny copy of Marie Forleo and exercise guru Matt Furey, to Jonathan Fields’s super-sweet soft sell, and everything in between. If you are offended by a particular style, or it’s just not for you, then find a marketer you vibe with more and learn from him or her instead. (All of these newsletters include links at the bottom, which allow you to remove yourself from them if you no longer wish to receive them.) Once you’ve exposed yourself to lots of different styles (to see the range of what’s out there), you’ll probably find one or two teachers or sites whose values and sensibilities match your own. Start focusing your energy on learning from them—while never fully losing awareness of what others are doing out there as well, for diverse ideas and perspectives. (If you know how to do such things in your e-mail program, set up filters or rules so that each marketer’s e-mails go to a different mailbox or folder—it’s just easier to manage that way.) Note: Many of the people I recommend here, including Eben, Marie Forleo, and Jonathan Fields, are personal friends. In no case am I receiving any commission, payment, or other benefit for recommending you to anyone here. Be aware, most of the people on these lists will eventually send you to landing pages, where they sell their products and services. Learn as much as you can from these landing pages, as they’re often masterful examples of marketing. But obviously, do your own due diligence before deciding to buy anything. By the way, all of the people I mention below graduated from college, unless I mention otherwise. But hey, we won’t hold that against them. The biggest lesson I had to learn was how to fail faster. That was the biggest one because every day, I’d take three sales calls, take three rejections......... The more I increased my failure rate, the more success I had at Xerox.” Success is its own skill. There’s the skill of the craft. Then there’s the skill of success. It’s an independent education. My experience is, it takes about the same amount of effort to learn the skill of success as it does to learn the skill of the craft itself. So, it might take years to really learn what you need to learn to become a great engineer, or an attorney, or a musician, or a manager. In my experience, the skill of success breaks down into three things. The skill of marketing. The skill of sales. And the skill of leadership. First, marketing. Throw away everything you think marketing is because most of the marketing you’ve been exposed to, which makes you sick to your stomach, is crappy marketing that doesn’t work anyway. Fortunately, you don’t have to learn that. You just have to learn effective marketing, and effective marketing is really simple. It’s the ability to get people who don’t know about you to know about you. That’s it. If you can get people who don’t know about you, or your service or your company, to become aware of you, then you’re successful in marketing. The second skill of success is sales. For some people sales is worse than marketing, and for others marketing is worse than sales. Either way, we have this belief in our culture that these two things are icky. That sense of ickiness is one of the things that perpetuates the lie that if you just get better at your craft, you’ll be fine—you can just do what you do, without focusing on marketing or selling what you do, because marketing and sales are icky and low-integrity. It’s just not true. You have to be good at these things in order to be successful. If you think sales is sleazy, manipulative, or disgusting, it’s because what you’ve been exposed to is bad salesmanship. Any time we’re exposed to people who are totally incompetent at their job, it feels like crap. If you’re being “sold at,” and they’re not connecting with you at all, and they have no idea what you want or need, and they’re just “blah blah blahing” on about their product or service, they actually don’t know the first thing about sales, and their incompetence is what feels like crap to you. When sales is done well, it’s a really simple discovery conversation. The conversation basically follows the following contours: “Hey, what do you really want? What matters to you? Well, this is my ability to provide that. Does that seem like a match to you?” It’s just that simple. The third skill of success is leadership. Leadership boils down to the ability to change the hearts and minds of people. Not controlling people; it’s a myth that the leader has control. Your leadership consists precisely in your ability to define a future you don’t have control over. The leader doesn’t have control over what the employees do; she has to influence the employees to do what she thinks is best. The more you understand that you have no control at all, and you’re dealing with a bunch of people with free will who are going to do what they want anyway, the more you realize that the skill of leadership really boils down to the skill of influence. If you’re taking on a role of leading others, people don’t do what you say just because you say it; they only do what you say if they’re inspired. Which means, you have to study “What influences people? What works then? It’s simple. While we normally think of salespeople as fast-talking slicksters, it turns out that the more the prospect talks—about their problems, their fears, their frustrations related to the needs your product or service addresses—the more likely they will want to do business with you. Which means, effective sales isn’t about spewing off a slick pitch. It’s about asking a lot of questions. The right questions. And then listening. What are the right questions? Any question that gets the prospect deeply connected with their frustrations, fears, and desires around the problem that your product or service addresses. If you try to sell a solution before you’ve mutually agreed on the problem you’re trying to solve—which is what most salespeople do—people mostly aren’t interested.” What I learned from Victor, and from reading SPIN Selling, is this: if you’re talking with someone about their innermost needs and desires, the last thing you want to do is throw a bunch of manipulative pressure on them. After Victor’s demonstration, both Jena and I bought SPIN Selling and read and absorbed every word. This single book obliterates the need for any more sleazy, pushy, aggressive, annoying sales tactics on the planet. And sales becomes—breathe a sigh of relief—an honest conversation between two authentic human beings. Victor says: “The most useful class I took in college was public speaking. I use it a surprising amount. The second most useful class I took in college was how to be a listener—I took a peer counselor class for suicide prevention, which was all about how to listen without judgments. Thus, the most useful classes I took in college were not part of the main academic experience. “Read about it, study it, and frankly, just do it. A lot of it is trial and error. All experience comes from mistakes. Either making them yourself, or learning from someone else who has. It all counts. But unfortunately, experience is not something you get in college. Mastery comes from doing. Either do it yourself, or learn it from someone who did.” Look for the Book Spin Selling. If you have the will and the drive to better yourself, you usually can, no matter how much (or little) formal education you have. Learn how to sell by creating trusting relationships, and everything else falls into place. The tools are readily available to you. All you need is the will. The duo focused on two things: creating a great product and selling it well. “You don’t want to be in the order business. You want to be in the reorder business. Big difference. My goal was not to sell something to somebody. My goal was to sell something that was so good, they want to reorder it again. " (Michael’s note to readers: Quentin’s Friends, http://www.quentinsfriends.com, is one of the best personal and professional networking resources I know of. I’ve been an avid member since 2003. I am not personally involved with Business Network International, http://www.bni.com, but it also has an excellent reputation, with chapters worldwide. These are two examples of the many low-cost ways now available to increase your business network. High-quality business networking is no longer only for graduates of expensive alma maters.) “Being consumers wasn’t our focus, it was being creators.” The goal is to always spend your time creating, not consuming. Bootstrapping is a concept central to the themes in this book....... it’s a strategy that involves getting to the point of profitability as quickly as possible—even if the profits are small—and then continually reinvesting profits to fuel growth. Make small, incremental investments in your human capital and earning power. The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: by Ewen Chia - Notes Part 17/31/2012
How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: The Complete Insider's Guide to Making Millions with Your Internet Business by Ewen Chia
This is one of those books, like Fastlane Millionaire, that has a name that seems at first to be a little like a scam, but once you dig into the book, it is well written, well thought out, and pretty interesting. Not being a internet marketer, I do not how much is real and valid, but my gift in life is finding good advice in any text. It was interesting. The important thing to understand is that Internet-based marketing is driven by information. The visual interface makes us sometimes forget that it is all data, numbers are what matters, and numbers can be measured. There are more than a few different models for Internet business. However, there are only two core models in the transaction of online business itself: 1) Direct proprietor, also known as the merchant or product owner 2) Third-party proprietor, otherwise known as an affiliate marketer I knew, for instance, that I needed to target a viable market. I knew I needed to deliver solutions to that market. I understood that I needed to drive market traffic to my offer and that I had to have a lead-capture and follow-up system in place. I started focusing much more on building my opt-in lists and on forging a solid relationship with my list subscribers. It was through their feedback that I learned just how important it is to provide value and information. I came to understand that people are looking for solutions, not just products. The secret was in first understanding the fundamentals of marketing: • You must find a target market. • You must offer a solution to that market. • You must drive market traffic to your offer. • You must capture leads onto an opt-in list in order to follow up on your offer. The overall system relied on driving targeted traffic to an opt-in page where people could download the mini e-book, consume the information, and then click-through the affiliate links contained within it. Whether you want to be an affiliate marketer, a product owner, or both, there are five core components that undergird every successful Internet business, and you must master them above all else if you want to make your first million on the Internet. These five components are as follows: 1) Market 2) Offer 3) Traffic 4) Backend 5) Duplication Every successful Internet marketing system comes down to five components: Market + Offer + Traffic + Backend + Duplication You want to choose a market that satisfies the following criteria: • Hungry for a solution • Willing to spend disposable income on solutions • Easy to reach Every market represents a niche, but not every niche represents a viable and profitable market. Make sure the market has money. Product targeting is really secondary to market targeting. Pay attention to your market above all, and the rest will follow. You must target the market first, determine its needs, and then either create or locate a product to address those needs. Product targeting is really secondary to market targeting. Pay attention to your market above all, and the rest will follow. There is nothing wrong with brainstorming ideas, but market selection should be governed by real research and hard data. You will be years ahead if you memorize this one concept: people do not buy products—they buy solutions. Shift your focus away from the details and features of your product. Look instead for the problems it can solve. The solution is your offer. No matter which market you go into, you must position your product as a solution, and you must market it as a solution The core of your revenue is going to come from the targeted prospects you’ve collected onto an opt-in mailing list and converted into repeat customers. The backend refers to the offers you make as follow-ups after an initial sale. The majority of your income is going to be generated by backend offers. However, these front-end sales are not where you’ll earn the bulk of your income. The majority of your income is going to be generated by backend offers. I hope it is clear now why you cannot rely on front-end (or I should say “one-time”) sales alone. A successful business model requires that you maximize the lifetime value of every customer by including a solid backend follow-up series in your sales funnel. Otherwise you’re just leaving money on the table. Duplication has been one of the major factors in my ability to build wealth. Duplication allows you to explode your overall profits by creating multiple streams of income. Having more than one income stream is crucial for a variety of reasons. If you want to earn your first million online, you must become an information provider. The demand for information exceeds that of any other item you could sell. For an affiliate marketer, especially, the following four tools are required: 1. A Web site with your own domain name 2. An autoresponder 3. Link-tracking software 4. Link-cloaking software How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: The Complete Insider's Guide to Making Millions with Your Internet Business It all comes down to freedom and control. Your site is the engine that will power all of your marketing strategies. You need to know where your Web traffic comes from. You need to know which advertisements perform and which ones are duds. Link cloaking involves the manipulation of a URL from its original form into a different URL while still permitting both to lead to the same destination. I wouldn’t recommend relying on third-party services like TinyURL to cloak your links, because you have no control over how long your link redirect will last. Instead, invest in software that will do the job reliably and for however long you need it to. An excellent product is the Affiliate Cloner, which you can check out at http://www.EwenChia.com/clone. Why bother with cloaking links at all? Think about affiliate links for a moment. Often these links are very long and ugly, kind of like this: http://www.abcsite.com/shopping/cart.asp?$lang=true$affid=76394 A good rule of thumb to follow is: when in doubt, cloak it. To summarize, then, these four tools really are the engine behind the majority of communication that will take place between you and your customers: 1) A Web site with your own domain name 2) An autoresponder 3) Link-tracking software 4) Link-cloaking software They are the key technical components of your sales What you need to look for is a niche market. You must target your products and services toward a well-defined group of consumers. However, it is not specific enough to say that you intend to target “guitar players” or “investors.” The question becomes: which segment of the guitar-player or investor market are you going to target? There are markets/niches within the categories above. You simply must not attempt to launch a marketing campaign until you determine what your market wants and how badly they want it! 1) Need/Demand 2) Profitability 3) Competition A niche business consists of a business idea that is centered around a highly targeted market group. When you zero in on a niche, what you’re really doing is zeroing in on the following: 1) The audience or target market you would like to serve 2) The core mission and unique selling proposition of your business 3) The core product line of your business 4) The realities of the market—which guide every aspect of how you structure your business, how you advertise and promote your business, and how you manage the long-range growth of your business So, first things first—do research and brainstorming via other sources, and get your markets of interest (your affinity markets) nailed down to start. Are you starting totally from scratch? If you are, then pay close attention to what follows next. I’m going to give you a crash course on how to perceive the landscape of salable products the way a businessperson perceives it. So, let’s say you are starting totally from scratch ... The first thing you need to be aware of is that your mind is habituated to seeing the world from a consumer’s point of view. There is nothing wrong with this. You should keep this ability intact, because it’s going to help you relate to your customers. However, this way of thinking (when done without awareness) can also blind you to the profit opportunities staring you in the face. The average person thinks in terms of products that already exist. The niche marketer thinks in terms of both existing products as well as products that haven’t been introduced to the market yet. How does the niche marketer see opportunities where others don’t? It’s simple: • He pays attention to what people are already buying. • He pays attention to trends and the latest hot industries. • He keeps up with national and world news. • He is a voracious reader. Now, how do you apply this so that you can come up with your own list of potential target markets to research? Ask yourself the following questions: 1) What products am I already consuming? 2) What issues have been in the news lately that might connect to a need for a particular product or type of information? 3) What have I read about in books or magazines lately that might point to a potential market? Now, write down everything that comes to mind. Examine your answers and pull out anything that looks like the simplest one- or two-word description of a broad niche. Now, pick out a couple that really grab you, and get ready to do some serious reading and research. You’ll want to start out just surfing the Web for sites related to the broad keywords you’ve selected. See what you can find in terms of existing products, services, and content (e.g., articles, message boards, etc.) related to your niche topic. The questions you want to answer during this process are as follows: 1) How many visible submarkets does my market break into? 2) What are the products and services being sold? 3) What range of prices are people charging? 4) How are these products and services being delivered? 5) What information is the market seeking out? 6) What topics are currently hot items of discussion? 7) What is the market’s “inside vocabulary”? Market profitability is based on two factors: 1) The market has plenty of disposable income. 2) The market is known to buy. In other words, the market is willing to spend a fair share of disposable income on products or services that address needs. However, you cannot guess at the profit potential of an average market simply by looking at the average income of your target market, as this is hard to determine except in all but the most exclusive cases. You would be surprised at how much money people will spend on their hobbies, even when they nearly go broke in doing so. So, the profitability of any given market comes down not to how much one type of individual is willing to spend, but to the following factors: 1) Are there preexisting products or services in the market that sell well? 2) What is the average price of these products and services? 3) How much demand for these products and services is being expressed? In other words, what you really want is a healthy amount of competition, and where there’s a wide variety of price points. Be wary of markets where it appears no one is selling anything. There’s often a good reason for it! Also be wary of markets in which there’s not much variation in product type or quality. The best type of market allows you to promote everything from entry-level, low-priced products to higher-ticket items. The surest and easiest way of getting the big-picture view of your market is to examine the advertising that’s already targeted to that market. Use the resources listed below to discover the markets people are already spending good money in: 1) http://www.eBay.com 2) http://www.YahooShopping.com 3) http://www.Amazon.com 4) http://www.Magazines.com 5) When you visit any one of these sites, you should look for the following indicators: • WHAT’S POPULAR • TOP LISTS • RELATED ITEMS • NICHE MARKET IDEAS How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: The Complete Insider's Guide to Making Millions with Your Internet Business PROFIT CHECK #2: ARE YOU TAPPING INTO CURRENT OR FUTURE HOT TRENDS? These sites can give you a sneak peek at growing trends in popular culture and society: 1) http://Pulse.eBay.com 2) http://50.Lycos.com 3) http://www.Trendwatching.com This is a good check to use against any affiliate products you’re considering, too. PROFIT CHECK #3: WHICH MARKETS ARE WRITTEN ABOUT? You can visit the following article directories and search for articles targeted to your market: 1) http://www.Ezinearticles.com 2) http://www.Goarticles.com 3) http://www.ArticleAlley.com 4) http://www.IdealMarketers.com 5) http://www.Searchwarp.com The reason for doing this is simple: popular subjects (and people) get other people talking! Any time people care enough to read, write, and relate around a common interest, you can be sure there is a need just waiting to be filled. There is, in other words, a demand for information. PROFIT CHECK #4: VALIDATE YOUR MARKET WITH FREE KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS To validate your market through keywords is to verify that your market is present on the Internet and hungry enough for information that they search for it online. This is crucial. When you run this type of search yourself, you’ll be able to get the actual numbers. Google does provide that information, but you have to download your keywords into a file in order to get to it. Other research tools, like Wordtracker, will display the search volume right next to your results. That said, here is a useful rule of thumb when it comes to evaluating search volume: Weigh your keyword(s) search volume against the number of indexed pages reported by Google as natural search results and by the number of sponsored advertisements being run by Google PPC advertisers. So, for example, if the bulk of your niche market’s keywords average five hundred searches per month, while Google reports that it has indexed over a million pages containing those keywords, you may have some market saturation on your hands. If you see some commercial Web sites in the natural results, but little to no sponsored advertising, you may have hit an untapped niche. However, if there are no commercial Web sites at all and zero sponsored advertising, you’re likely looking at a dead market. Weigh your keyword(s) search volume against the number of indexed pages reported by Google as natural search results and by the number of sponsored advertisements being run by Google PPC advertisers. Conversely, what if you find a niche with a lot of competing advertisers? Competition is good. It means the market is alive, and highly profitable for some people. It may or may not be profitable for you. In order to find out, you will have to look at what the existing advertisers are paying per click to run their ads. Market opportunity has to do, in a sense, with breadth. In other words, how many opportunities are there for you to capitalize on the market? This is in large part influenced by competition, or other players in the market. You want your market to have some established businesses already there serving it. Why? Because these businesses may give you a leg up with opportunities for partnerships and joint ventures. They’re also going to be big sources of additional traffic to your Web site. At this stage, what you’re really looking for is how many profitable offers you can target to your market. As an affiliate, you especially want to look for residual or passive income programs, programs with a variety of products (at all price points), as well as the breadth/depth of available products and solutions for your market How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: The Complete Insider's Guide to Making Millions with Your Internet Business I have been running a small set of tests by setting up and running to see how online stores can and do work, and also to test random ideas I get, or read, or just stumble on. Below is a list of notes I made from my trial and error.
To quote Nassim Taleb, " Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded." |
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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.” |