Skip to main content
Select Language:

Category Archives: marketing

Older posts

Effective Business Systems: Create Wealth With Less Struggle

Posted on by 3

Effective business systems are key to making your company a success. Stop yourself from becoming too bogged down and overwhelmed with these three strategies.

Establish Effective Business Systems With These 3 Categories

What’s the point of starting a business? To make more money, yes or yes? And what’s the point of that? So you can do more of whatever you want, whenever you want.

If you haven’t experienced this for yourself, though, then you might have heard: that’s often not what happens, at least not at first. People get caught up in their business. A lot of the time, they work harder. They do so out of necessity to make sure that it’s running, thriving and growing. Other times, they do so out of fear or over-reacting panic that without their presence, the business will collapse.

In other words, the business—for one reason or another—takes them over. And that’s not unusual especially at the beginning stages. However, if you find yourself in that same “supervisory” position after years and years, then I’d say you made things harder on yourself than you had to. That’s because the freedom of accumulating wealth through business is directly related to how well you structure your business’ foundation.

What happens if you try to build a house on a weak foundation? It eventually cracks, caves in, or turns into the leaning Tower of Pisa. The business equivalent of building a solid foundation is creating a system. You need repeatable methods and procedures that produce profit. The idea is to systematize your business so that you can effectively and efficiently sell and support your product or service in bigger numbers as you grow.

So how do you create an effective business system?

Keep it simple. When it comes down to it, an effective business system should consist of only 3 categories:

  1. Marketing: getting people to know about what you have to offer
  2. Production: getting the products and/or services made, distributed, or performed
  3. Administration: accounts payable/receivable, human resources, finance, assistants, etc.

Each part requires specific processes so they run smoothly. Aim for flawlessness, but be prepared to settle for “almost automatically”. The idea is to create a well-oiled machine—a money machine. And what do machines do best? They repeat the same functions over and over. Your system must be a repeatable process that can work without you!

Why does your business need effective systems?

If you want to gain wealth, you can’t have a ceiling on your income. Your earnings must be unlimited. If you have to be physically present for your business to work, it can only grow to the extent that you can personally handle. It doesn’t matter how brilliant and energetic you are, you still only have but so much time in a day! You have to eat, sleep, relax, talk, think, meditate, spend time with family and friends …

In other words, all the things you’d rather be doing instead of stressing.

 

What good is creating wealth if you’re killing yourself in the process?

Work on the business, not in the business. Creating a system is what gives you freedom to do just that. With a strong system in place, you’ll two have options:

 

You’ll have the flexibility to hand it over to competent managers and have an excellent source of passive income
You can sell the business and become an instant millionaire.

The more solid your business foundation, the quicker it can happen. In both cases, because you created a system, you win. An effective system that works, instead of you working, is an absolute must in order to enjoy the ride.

Exercise: Share Your Effective Business Systems

1. Have you had successes with growing your business in ways it can thrive even when you are not around? If so, share your tips and strategies here.

2. If you have not gotten to this point (yet!) share your struggles and challenges—you might be surprised with the support and feedback from the others in our community.

Make sure to leave a comment below and share your insights on effective business systems with all of us.

This article has been updated for relevancy and accuracy. It’s original publish date was 02/25/10.

Effective Marketing Strategies You Should Implement Today

Posted on by 2

Effective marketing strategies are key to the growth of your business. I want to share 3 proven strategies that you can apply today that will push the needle in your favor. Keep reading for three marketing strategies that are sure to help you establish your brand.

Apply These 3 Effective Marketing Strategies To Your Business

A few months ago I blogged on the importance of marketing in order to nurture and grow a profitable business. Without effective marketing, how will enough people get to know you, your business or your product in order to buy from you in the first place? It’s basic, but like I said before, there’s never a shortage of examples of bad marketing.

Here’s part of the reason why. Think about a time when you were in a conversation with someone and it seemed to just go on and on. You want to be polite, but you’re losing interest.

You find yourself drifting and daydreaming. Eventually, you’re just looking for a way out!

Is it because the other person doesn’t have anything of value to say? Not necessarily, because a good communicator can make almost anything sound interesting. Not only that, a really good communicator makes the other party want to hear or experience more. A lot of the time, we lose interest because the other person goes off on tangents. We’re really not sure of what they’re talking about. If we can’t identify what their point is, then how can we respond?

Here’s 3 effective marketing strategies to apply to your life:

  • A clean message
  • Articulate what you do
  • Create your sound bite

1. A Clean Message

Like an engaging conversation, having a clear message is the first crucial element of an effective marketing strategy. The difference is that in marketing you have even less time to capture your prospect’s interest. Get to the point! Otherwise—like a boring conversation—bad marketing makes people turn the channel, change the station, flip the page, or navigate to a different website.

2. Articulate What You Do

One of the most essential skills you can have is a way to articulate what you do in a powerful, clear, concise and attractive manner. Clarity is important because it leads to power, both yours and your customers.

It lets them understand exactly what it is you can do for them, and gives them the feeling of being empowered in making the choice to go with you because your message spoke to their needs.

3. Create Your Sound Bite

Your presentation doesn’t have to be award-winning. Think about that commercial for “HeadOn”. Remember that, the headache pain reliever? It would just say the same thing over and over … “HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead …” Most people found that commercial really annoying. Well, it was so effective, it made $6.5 million in sales in 2006, and as it turns out, the stuff hasn’t even been proven to really work!

What your business needs is a sound bite, a short message said over and over again throughout your marketing material and communications. It needs to be in your brochures, online promotions, sales presentations, media appearances, etc. Having a product that actually does what you say it’s going to do, obviously, would be better for your business.

Exercise: Take Action

Write a 30-second sound bite. Describe your business in these terms:

  1. Who you are
    • the name of your company
    • your position
    • your experience
    • what you do
    • what your company does
  2. Who you cater to
    • who’s your target market
  3. The problem you solve for people
    • how you benefit your customers directly
  4. What makes you unique
    • your product(s)
    • your edge against competition
    • the quality of your customer service

Let me know your thoughts here. How about your experiences with different marketing strategies? Success stories? Things that didn’t work so well? How has social media marketing changed the game for you? Let us know how effective marketing strategies worked for you so we can all learn.

This article has been updated for relevancy and accuracy. It’s original publish date was 03/05/10.

How To Be More Than Just Interesting With Your Marketing

Posted on by

Want to learn how to be more than just interesting with your marketing messages? Keep reading to learn four basic elements to highly effective marketing.

Creating Marketing Messages That Are More Than Just Interesting

 

As you might have noticed in recent blogs, I’ve been talking about some of the actual aspects of business rather than the mind of the millionaire side. The concepts of both the tactics of business and the psychological prerequisites can’t be summed up in a few pages of blogging. I thought I’d focus on marketing a little bit more—something that’s so easy to know is a necessary thing to get right, but not always so easy to execute effectively because it takes work to learn how to be more than just interesting.

Last week we looked at making clear, concise statements in a marketing message. There are four basic elements that make a message highly effective so you can build success:

  1. Attention
  2. Interest
  3. Desire
  4. Action

For now, let’s focus on interest because gaining a prospective customer’s interest will play a huge part in the other three elements. Interest has to come at the beginning of the message. If you don’t hook them immediately after you’ve got their attention, they’re gone.

So what gets people’s interest? That one’s easy enough: pleasure and pain. No matter what we’re doing in life, it has to do with either finding ways to increase pleasure or avoid pain. These are mind-based motivators with some emotional elements attached, as well.

 

A pleasure-based opening for a marketing message is actually very simple. You’re capturing interest based on a positive benefit. For example: “Get ripped fast!” The message: get in shape. The benefit: it can happen quickly.

You definitely want to point out benefits, but research shows that messages about how to avoid pain have a much more profound effect on sales than the pleasurable benefits of your product or service. Pain-based marketing can triple a business’s income. Pain-based messages identify a problem and then offer remedies. It’s the problem-solution opening.

There are three types of problem-solution openings:

  1. You-based
  2. Me-based
  3. Them- or People-based problem

You-Based Opening Marketing Message

An example of the You-based opening: Do you have [fill in the blank] problems? What you’re implying in just a few words is that if the prospective customer had been looking, they’d have already found a solution by now. Your solution could be just that more appealing.

Me-Based Opening Marketing Message

The Me-Based opening tells your own story or that of your client’s. Telling the story of how I went from one failed business to another, then becoming a millionaire adds credibility—“I’ve been where you are.”

Them-Based Opening Marketing Message

The them-based problem-solution creates an instant line of connection whereby you ask the prospective customer a question. They can identify with it immediately, kind of like Seinfeld doing a stand-up about common things that everybody can identify with yet may not think about too often. For example: “You know how so many people today are stressed about their retirement savings? Well there’s an amazing informational product out there that’s helping thousands of people right now…”

Exercise: Working On Your Marketing Message Skills

As an exercise for learning how to be more than just interesting, write five openings for a marketing message.

  • Pleasure-based
  • Pain-avoidance-based
  • You-based
  • Me-based story
  • Their problem (“You know how …?”).

One great place to start is with your headlines. If you can get your reader to notice you via your headline, your success rate of capturing their attention to actually read your message skyrockets. Anyone can come up with dozens of these messages, but your challenge is to be more than just interesting. Be absolutely convincing. Be creative, effective, productive, and then be rich!

Here’s a great resource to help you become a master at crafting headlines: http://www.copyblogger.com/magnetic-headlines/

Tell me your thoughts in the comments section. Have you had great success learning how to be more than just interesting when crafting marketing messages that work? Let us all know your strategies. Have you struggled in this area? Share your challenges here, and let our online community support you and give you ideas to move you in the right direction.

This article has been updated for relevancy and accuracy. It’s original publish date was 03/12/10.

The “Big Kahuna” – The #1 Most Effective Way To Create Life Balance & Be Rich

Posted on by
stacked river rocks in formation

In normal conversations when we use the word “balance,” we tend to think of balance being an even distribution. And in many cases, this is correct.

But when it comes to your life or your business or career, this couldn’t be farther from the truth.

I want you to say this phrase out loud: “Balance means equal attention given to both or to all…” Then I want you to say it again and REMOVE the word “equal” because having equal attention in ALL things cannot and DOES NOT work in anyone’s life… including yours.

So if balance doesn’t work in equal proportions, then how does it work?

Well, last week in our lesson we talked a lot about the 80/20 rule or the Pareto principle. It says 20% of your activities will create 80% of your results. Which means that 80% of what you do is wasted as far as the results you want are concerned. Watch this video to learn more about it.

So what do you do?

The first thing you must do is prioritize. You have to say, “What do I do that is productive, makes money and gives me joy?” The reality is most of our time is usually spent on frivolous, crappy stuff that doesn’t create real results.

Sometimes if I’m not careful, I can be on my emails for four hours because I’m curious and think, “What does this financial letter say? What does this other guy say? What’s all of that about? What does he want over here?” I then catch myself and notice four hours have gone by when I could have finished the emails I needed to do in 20 minutes.

That’s life. You have to discipline yourself to be productive.

So how do you do this effectively? I want you to think about dividing a piece of paper into two sides, a left side and a right side.

Most of our students are involved in business, work, career, or something where money or business is involved, so we’re going to put money/business on the left-hand side of the paper. On the right side, we’re going to put the rest of life. You might be thinking that that’s unbalanced, but it’s not.

Let’s take the money and business side. I’m going to give you a big secret right now that not too many people know. I call it “The Big Kahuna.” The big kahuna means the “big thing.”


“The Big Kahuna” Creates Greatness In Your Life

In your money and your business, what is the one big thing you can do that will have the most impactful effect and will create the biggest results?

It’s the ONE thing — not the ten things, five things, four, three or two things.

What is the ONE thing that you could do that would have the biggest effect on your money and your business or your career?

For my situation, since I’ve been fortunate enough to do enormously well on my book, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, that book brought me a lot of clients and business from all over the world. The book has sold over 2 million copies now in 43 languages.

So “The Big Kahuna” for me that would have the greatest impact would be writing another best-selling book, and that would be huge compared to everything else that I do on a day-to-day basis.

How much time would I spend on that?

50% percent of all of my business time would go into my Big Kahuna.

This may come as a shock to some of you reading this right now. But let me ask you this…

Do you want greatness or do you want mediocrity?

Do you want wealth or do you want to earn a living? If you want wealth, you have to work on the Big Kahuna and make it happen.

That’s what will create greatness in your life.

For the right side of the paper (the rest of your life), how long in a relationship does it take to have dinner with your family and have a nice sit-down dinner? It takes an hour a day. How long does it take to read a book to your kids and spend quality time with them? It can take an hour or less. How long does it take to work out? It takes half of an hour to an hour. You DO have time for everything else and that’s the bottom line.

Okay what’s an example of a big kahuna for someone else who is in business?

I can tell you right now that 99% of every business problem lies in marketing and sales.

If you are a great marketer, chances are you’ll make great money. If you’re a lousy marketer, chances are you’ll make lousy money.

I can tell you with absolute certainty that the most essential skill I have is the skill of marketing, and 99% of the time, that’s my big kahuna.

In my experience most people who are underachieving are not spending enough time on marketing. The reason is because they either don’t like it (very common) or they don’t know exactly what to do to make it work.

Which is why we created our web class, The 500 Million Dollar Secret, to teach you exactly how to become a master at marketing…

… To show you what common mistakes most people make and how you can avoid them.

… And to give you an opportunity to know exactly what I do in my own business to predict success.

Click here to reserve your seat.

Harv_Eker_Big_Kahuna

If marketing is not your big kahuna, then what is? How do you divide up your time to create success in your life and your business or career? Leave a comment below and share your story with us!

For Your Freedom,

The 80/20 Principle: The Secret To Achieving More (And Making More)

Posted on by 15
80/20_Principle_For_Success_Harv_Eker

When it comes to getting rich, most people pour their time, energy, and money into the wrong areas.

Instead of focusing on the actions that are most likely to help them become wealthy, they end up unfortunately wasting their time and energy – and chances are, if you haven’t been as successful as you want in life yet, you’ve done this too.

Maybe you’ve heard of the 80/20 rule before – it’s the principle that states that 80% of your success is determined by only 20% of your actions. If you think about most areas of your life, this is probably true – some things are just more impactful than others.

Watch the video below — a sneak peek of my free webinar — to learn:

  • 00:20 — How I used to believe all parts of my business were equal and that each part deserved equal amounts of time, money, and effort.
  • 00:41 — Why that belief left me constantly broke and struggling to make ends meet.
  • 00:53 — How there are only three major parts to any business and what they are.
  • 01:18 — The real secret to business success and how it will have the single biggest impact on your financial life, and…
  • 02:17 — Why you should focus most of your business time, energy, money and learning (80%) in this one particular area.

 

What you will discover in the video may sound counterintuitive. It’s not common knowledge or common sense — but it does work in the real world. I’ve seen it time and time again with my students.

And if you liked this video, join us for my free training, The 500 Million Dollar Secret, and you’ll learn how to approach this one area of business in a whole new way… and reach the success you’ve always dreamed of.

Most people don’t focus on this area of business and that’s why most people are working too hard AND earning too little. You may be one of them.

That can end quickly if you join Harv on his free web class where you’ll learn several reasons why this may be happening to you and how to turn it around so…

… You can actually work less but earn more!

Click here to register for the class and select a date and time that works best for you. See you there!

80_20_Principle_Harv_Eker

Where do you put the majority of your focus in your business or career? Leave a comment below.

For Your Freedom,

Older posts