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Working Richer, Not Harder

planet sprouting from money

The idea of multiple streams of income sounds great, yes? If you lose one stream, you have others flowing in still. The problem is—especially with a lot of entrepreneurial-types—people don’t think about the kind of income they want to create.

You can have multiple sources of income and still play the role of worker-bee. Anybody who has had two or three jobs at a time knows that. Multiple incomes won’t mean much to your freedom if you still have to work like a dog for it. The difference is between linear and residual income.

Linear means you work once, you get paid once. That’s a job. Residual means you work once, and you get paid hundreds or thousands of times.

How do you know if you’re earning residual income? When you woke up this morning, were you richer than when you went to bed last night? If the money flows in while you sleep, this is a good thing. Duh! That’s always been the goal, yes?

It may sound like another one of those classic no-brainers, but frankly most people don’t get this concept. They end up working for years and years, trying to figure out how to make some money, but don’t ask the question, ‘Is it residual income?’ If it’s not residual income then don’t do it, because it takes you too slavery, not to freedom.

If you’re going to starve in order to do something—to create some kind freedom for yourself—then only do things that will take you to the kind of freedom you want. Most people end up starving doing linear income, so they have to keep going back to work. And every time they go back to work, they’ve got to get their daily fix of distraction after spending all their time making little money for themselves while the people who own the company they work for take the lion’s share. They don’t have any time left over when they get home to create any kind of streams of income that can last while they’re sleeping.

Here’s another problem people have—fear and uncertainty. You’re not going to know how to do what you want to do before you do it, and most people are waiting to know enough to be able to take action and go do it, which will never come.

You didn’t learn to drive a car by watching a video, did you? You got in the car, sputtered between the brake and the gas—driving your parent somewhere between frightened and resigned—but then you finally got pretty good at it. The things you want to do you have to do!

Everybody wants to be a millionaire, but only a few people will do whatever it takes.

Most people are stuck into these little straight-jackets about what’s right and what’s reasonable

A lot of people say, ‘Well, that idea I had to start a business was just a thought.’

Someone else once said, “No thought can reside in your brain rent free.” Every thought has a consequence. Some of those thoughts are very expensive!

And they cost our time, our enjoyment of life. A simple twist in how we look at the income game. How do you maximize your time and energy? How do you take what is already available to you right now to the next level?

Share your ideas or insights. We want to hear from you!

 

Leaning on the Back-End

When people are at your website, you’ve gotten through the creation of interest, credibility, and rapport. They believe in you. They’re ready to order from you, trusting enough to give up serious information. You’re not some guy in boxer shorts in some basement stealing credit cards. They don’t know who you are. You’re a webpage, but you’ve satisfied that most important question to the casual web surfer—what’s in it for me?


Now you have to convince them to buy something. Make an incredible, compelling offer, and then get them to fill out an order form or checkout or whatever. You have to ease understandable objections but having a secured site (Whatever the costs do it! You don’t want to be the site that was hacked or broken into for credit card info. It’s hard to recoup from that if you’re not one of the giants).

Once they’re convinced, you want them to fill out the whole order form that’s user-friendly, simple, yet detailed. What did they order? Is it a product that is used consistently? If so, about when would you expect this customer to be most open to buying this product again, and maybe something else, something that costs even more?

Here’s where the backend marketing starts. Great customer service and reliable producers and movers are musts, but your marketing costs are absolutely zero in terms of your ability to follow with hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people (depending on the product/service). By having a system in place that captures key information, that database becomes your genie for when you are most likely to make your next sales. You can literally predict about how much money you’ll make at intervals you determine.

Let’s say you have a repetitive product like vitamins.  You sell a bottle of Vitamin C to one customer that amounts to a 45-day supply. Guess what they’re going to get 30 days later? On your order form you’ve captured name, email, product, date, all the key data you can manipulate any way you like to automatically kick a personalized email to that customer when they’re most likely to by that again. Throw in a 10 percent discount. Make them an offer hard to refuse.

Now think about the up-sell, and the limitless people you can reach on the web. And what did that cost? Zero. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. No time at all. It’s done automatically. If 10,000 people order today, 10,000 people are going to get an email 30 days from now to remind them of that.

Think you’re going to get any extra business from that? And even if you don’t, so what? It’s free! It didn’t cost anything to do it. If it didn’t work, just fix the content of the email, go back and do it again. It’s so easy and simple, the power of Net. That’s backend marketing.

Once you have that email address, it’s free to market to them forever. Backend marketing is the key to online business. The old way of backend marketing meant sales aggressive sales calls or mailing catalogues, both expensive. By email, you can reach as many people as you can bear and do it free all the time.

And this doesn’t just apply to strictly online businesses. Next month we’ll look at how a few extra seconds of effort with your in-store customers means the beginnings of a database and more sales!

Don’t Sell – Help!

man with help above him

There are another three components that are critical to website success—besides avoiding the pitfall of focusing on product before knowing who your target market is and where they hang out.

The first is help, don’t sell. By helping you will sell. The second is build credibility and rapport through educating.

You’ll go to a sloppily put-together webpage and get these annoying boxes that come up asking if you want something you weren’t thinking about before but are certainly too annoyed by now to entertain considering.

When you’re marketing online, remember that people don’t shop online. People research online.

Most people go online for research on how to buy a new car, or increase their business, or to learn about raw foods, or whatever it may be. So your website has to be designed around helping, not selling. Informing, revealing, educating.

If you sell, you will fail. By helping you build credibility and rapport. People will believe in you, and because of that, you can show them the value in your product or service. And they will buy from you. It’s absolutely critical to what you do online.

Everything on your website—every button, every graphic, every word you put on the page has got to be built around helping, not selling. Make it most appealing to researchers, not to shoppers. Save the two-page sales letters and the paper. Whatever it is you’re the expert in, whatever you do, they want more information. They’ll call you, email you, or order right off the website.

The mindset of the online researcher-pre-shopper is, What’s in it for me? That’s the first question you want to answer on your website. If you can’t answer that question at the top of your webpage, change it or you’re going to fail. Why should anybody stay there? They’ve got hundreds of websites to go look.

Don’t have a mission statement at the top of your page talking about who you are, what you do, how great and fantastic you are, and how you have a Ph.D. Nobody cares about that.

They care about what you’re going to do for them. That doesn’t mean not making available credentials and testimonials, but it all goes back to writing headlines—something that will make them stay. Suck them in. Make them feel like they’re going to be learning something they didn’t know before.

Nearly the same marketing rules still apply. Walk a mile in your prospects’ shoes. Empathize with them in plain language. Pharmaceutical ads are written and spoken so that children understand them. Use simple and/or precise language (depending on the uniqueness of your market) as your keywords—the words prospects would be typing into Google or Bing to find you. If you’re selling cow juice but everyone calls it milk, you better call it milk too because people don’t search for cow juice, they search for “milk.” If you get stuck, there are writers at reasonable prices who can do it for you.

It’s not how well you know your product that is going to determine the level of your sales and your success; it’s how well you know your customer, so that you’re ready for them when they visit your web page.

Next month we’ll cover that last key to success in building an online business—having the best possible sales process you can have—one that costs you nothing and boosts your profits!

https://bit.ly/UltimateInternetBootcamp

A Different Kind of Blueprint

iStock_000011920937XSmall

By this point, we can talk for days about our money blueprint, yes?

It’s that program we created, or way of being that we’ve grown accustomed to, in relation to money—mostly without us being aware of it. Our money blueprint manifests our financial reality. Like the blueprint of a physical structure, it’s either going to be drawn up big or small—to accommodate a lot of money, or little.

That kind of blueprint is about the mental game of money, but let’s take a look at a different kind of blueprint—the one that encompasses the machine, the vehicle that will build your wealth—that is, your business.

A lot of people start their businesses without any blueprints. They say, “Well, I’ve got a couple of clients. Then I’ll figure out all the marketing stuff and get some more clients.”

That actually could work, but the downside of that kind of success—without a system in place that can handle the new volume—could lead to having so many customers that you literally don’t know what to do with them. You could end up losing as many potential repeat customers as you will the additional word-of-mouth customers those lost repeaters could have served up for you.

Designing a basic blueprint for your business allows you to get the lay of the land for your enterprise and understand how your business is organized. Maybe even more importantly, your business blueprint can show you those critical success factors that aren’t in your business. Enjoying the fruits of owning your business is much different when you can take a six-month vacation from it, yet it’s still running the way it should when you get back.

No matter what the business, there are four basic blocks that need to be included in the foundation of your business’ blueprint:

  • Leadership. This is the part that provides vision, inspiration and makes most of those key, highest-level decisions about how things should be run.
  • Business development. This is mostly marketing and sales. That’s where all the business comes from. These are the team members—and the processes in place—who find those prospects that want your product or service. Business development is where your promises are made and disseminated.
  • Delivery. Once those promises are made, somebody’s got to do the work, yes? In manufacturing, those are the people who create the product. In other businesses, it’ll be those people who provide the service. Those are the fulfillment people, those who deliver on the promises.
  • Administration. These are the often unheralded (don’t take them for granted, though!) people behind it all: accounting, legal, payroll, etc. It’s a separate yet very important group because that’s exactly where a lot of systems and processes often go awry.

Again, no matter what the business, every one of them is going to have these four essential components.

Similar to our psychological blueprints, what’s under the ground creates what’s above the ground. So many of the obstacles we come across in business can be tracked to structure and systems. As intensely as we work on the mind game of money, so to we need to pay special attention to the actual structure of our money making machine.

What do you think? We want to hear your comments and stories!!!