For providing my name and email address, I receive valuable content. That’s more than worth it.4/15/2013
Though metrics vary wildly, consider Internet marketing standards:
• Marketing response rates hover around 2%. As an example, for every 1 million impressions, approximately 20,000 visits are generated. • Of the 20,000 visits, 11.5% opt-in to join a mailing list or receive a free product. • In addition, 3.5% convert to paying customers within three months. Therefore, for every 20,000 visitors or 1 million impressions: • 700 customers are secured. • 2,300 potential clients are added to one’s database. As indicated, assuming a median cost of $2.52/CPM, a typical expenditure will be $2,520 for one million impressions. Based on the above metrics, the lifetime value of a single customer must be $3.60 to break even ($2,520 per 700 customers). This is certainly a viable proposition if $24.95 books, $97 workshops, and other items are being sold with reasonable profit margins. However, if the ultimate goal is to sell high-end coaching services (e.g. $300/hour with a 3 hour minimum) or multi-session workshops (e.g. $10,000 for six weeks of training) the metrics look pretty darn appealing. That said, conversion is a byproduct of multiple tangible and intangible factors and there’s no guarantee things will happen as planned. Further, many Internet marketers simply cannot afford pay-for-placement/performance marketing and must pursue other options. If this is the case, low-cost or free traffic must be generated to sustain one’s operation if online sales are the primary component of revenue. Providing free, high-value products and driving traffic through synergistic partnerships leads directly to the second step of the equation, bypassing the upfront investment required in step one. Given no out-of-pocket expense, this equates to an immeasurable ROI as each opt-in costs nothing to secure. Even if less than 1% of the 11.5% of visitors who opt-in become paying customers, the metrics are phenomenal. Best of all, the customer views the relationship as a favorable exchange of value: “For providing my name and email address, I receive valuable content. That’s more than worth it.” Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher Often the greatest obstacle to our pursuit of mastery comes from the emotional drain we experience in dealing with the resistance and manipulations of the people around us. If we are not careful, our minds become absorbed in endless political intrigues and battles.
The principal problem we face in the social arena is our naïve tendency to project onto people our emotional needs and desires of the moment. We misread their intentions and react in ways that cause confusion or conflict. Social intelligence is the ability to see people in the most realistic light possible. By moving past our usual self-absorption, we can learn to focus deeply on others, reading their behavior in the moment, seeing what motivates them, and discerning any possible manipulative tendencies. Navigating smoothly the social environment, we have more time and energy to focus on learning and acquiring skills. Success attained without this intelligence is not true mastery, and will not last. Mastery by Robert Greene No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.”
Or, as Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” You have to find a way to survive that adjustment period of shock and help others get through it. You have to find a way to limit denial. The place to start is with the opposite of denial: acceptance. If you have the imagination to accept that aliens are invading or that the dead are walking, then you’ll have the imagination to accept that this earthquake is indeed the Big One. The more you can accept that things have changed, the less time you’ll waste on denial and “milling” (disaster-speak for checking in with other people and doing nothing) and the sooner you will take action. If the shit really hits the fan, I’ll take a semi-decent plan right now over a good plan in ten minutes or a perfect plan later. The faster you can accept that everything has changed, that everything you’ve worked for all your life is now gone, the better off you’ll be during the apocalypse. I’m not talking about actually redefining reality; I’m talking about adopting an attitude—“What’s right in front of me?” It’s about looking at what you see without preconceptions. If you start limiting your emergency plans to only what you think is likely, then you’re screwed. The Disaster Diaries: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse by Sam Sheridan Do one thing, do it better than anyone else, and get paid extraordinarily well for your talent.4/4/2013
Do one thing, do it better than anyone else, and get paid extraordinarily well for your talent.
Choose a niche (e.g., 1960’s Mustangs) and then create a simple site and post related products and services. The easiest way to do this is to contact existing sellers (e.g., car dealers, parts manufacturers/distributors, etc.), negotiate a percentage of each sale consummated to be paid to you as a commission, and utilize their existing content. The riches are in the niches. Do one thing, do it better than anyone else, and get paid extraordinarily well for your specific talent. Test the waters to determine if there’s a market for a particular idea. Offer a meaningful discount or perk to generate initial interest (in this case, a free report). Wait until you have an order. Create the product. Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher What is my unique selling proposition or USP? (Why do my clients buy from me—what is it about my product and/or service that distinguishes me from my competition? Do I have more than one USP for different product/service lines or segments of my business?)
Is my USP a consistent theme in all of my marketing and sales efforts? If yes, how, and if no, why not? Briefly describe my marketing program or marketing mix (all the different types of marketing I use and how they interrelate—i.e., sales letters, direct mail, direct sales, personal networking inside, outside my company, industry, marketplace, Yellow Pages, spot advertisements, etc.). What do my clients really want (be specific, don’t just answer “a quality product or service”)? How do I know? Do clients buy from me exclusively or do they also patronize my competitors? What steps can I take to get the main portion of their business (preempt and dominate)? What’s my market potential (universe) and my current share of that market? 30. What does it cost me to get a new client? (If I ran an advertisement that cost $1,000 and I obtained two new clients, my cost would be $500.) Translate this to whatever your acquisition cost is. What is my biggest and best source of new business, and am I doing everything possible to secure this business? What has been my biggest marketing success to date (defined as a specific promotion, advertising campaign, sales letter, etc.)? 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 6 Rules of Thumb for Doing Great Business
Nothing's Changed But My Change Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. 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 The best mentors are often those who have wide knowledge and experience, and are not overly specialized in their field—they can train you to think on a higher level, and to make connections between different forms of knowledge.
The paradigm for this is the Aristotle–Alexander the Great relationship. Philip II, Alexander’s father and king of Macedonia, chose Aristotle to mentor his thirteen-year-old son because the philosopher had learned and mastered so many different fields. He could thus impart to Alexander an overall love of learning, and teach him how to think and reason in any kind of situation—the greatest skill of all. This ended up working to perfection. Alexander was able to effectively apply the reasoning skills he had gained from Aristotle to politics and warfare. To the end of his life he maintained an intense curiosity for any field of knowledge, and would always gather about him experts he could learn from. Aristotle had imparted a form of wisdom that played a key role in Alexander’s success. Mastery by Robert Greene |
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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.” |