Millionaire Mind Intensive Archives - Page 5 of 6

Posted on November 30, 2012 - 8:45 pm by 61

You’ve probably seen this painting periodically throughout your life called American Gothic by the artist Grant Wood. It shows an older man and woman, farmers presumably, standing stoically in front of a farmhouse, the man holding a pitchfork.

Art is subjective—what you see may not be what someone else sees—but even the casual viewer of this painting will see two people devoid of any emotion that would make the viewer stoked about the idea of ‘hard work.’

The painting, so the myth goes at least, points toward the idea that hard work is a rewarding virtue in itself. It’s implied as if the reward of hard work is something that just naturally happens as a result of our having ‘paid dues.’

Please understand I’m not ragging on farming or anything that requires hard, physical labor. I am, however, ragging on the idea that hard work is a ‘virtue’ that we should be carrying into our retirement years.

Unfortunately, these myths we grow up with impact our psychology more than we sometimes give credit. So many people judge success on superficial factors—like the prideful vanity of using a line like “I work hard” to bludgeon other people with—but also on the wrong metrics of measuring success to begin with. The number of hours worked and tasks completed may produce more money per paycheck, but it’ll also mean you’ll end up with those long, tight faces like in American Gothic.

Do years of hard work and little enjoyment of life, yet having a ‘comfortable’ retirement, equate to success? Maybe, but you could just as easily look at it as poor time management and a waste of personal strengths and skills—doing stuff that (often) makes us miserable for a little bit more money and for vanity’s sake—“I’m a hard worker.”

If we’re honest with ourselves, the only realistic goal of playing the money game while being truly happy and fulfilled is to play for eventual freedom from work—way sooner than retirement. Don’t misunderstand me here: the most valuable things in life aren’t going to come easy and they’re often not going to come without some pain and effort.

If you’re going to work hard, you might as well be working hard at working less.

The real measure of success is how free you are—financially, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—to live life the way you want to live it.

Now it’s your turn, I want to hear from you! How are you going to practice working hard at working less right now? Or better yet, what specifically in the financial, mental, emotional and spiritual areas of your life will you practice this principle? Share your comments here, your feedback is valuable!

There’s No Freedom in Waiting to be Rich

Posted on October 30, 2012 - 11:40 pm by 76

It’s one of the most basic questions ever: What do you and 99% of the population want most?

Most people will say “More money.” Specifically, we want to be rich. Who wouldn’t? If you’re rich, you really don’t have much to worry about, except maybe what to do with all that money, or maybe what to do with that “distant cousin” you never knew, who all of a sudden shows up when they find out you’ve got some money. Still, that’s a problem most people will gladly accept.

More money means material comforts, and doing what you want when you want without having to answer to anybody. No bosses, no deadlines, no evaluations—being in charge of your own life. Since this is so apparent … why are we even talking about it?

Because sometimes, the obvious is so obvious that we miss the bigger picture. When we talk about wanting to be rich, what are we really talking about; money, or freedom?

There’s a pretty big difference between the two, no? Does having more money absolutely mean having more freedom, or security, or even peace of mind? Not necessarily. Being rich certainly provides material convenience, but you and I know there are plenty of rich people out there who are completely miserable. Sometimes they miss the whole point of being rich—i.e. freedom and happiness. Instead, they work even more than some middle class people, who struggle just as hard, because some rich folks think they have to work harder in order to stay rich and “free.” Can you believe that?!

So in the end, what are we really after? What do we really want?

What we’re really seeking is a feeling that we associate with being rich. The house we want can give us a sense of comfort. The car we want can heighten a feeling of importance. Travel and toys can bring excitement and stave off boredom. But you don’t have to wait to be rich in order to have these things or experience the feelings of freedom and happiness.

The goal isn’t to get rich in order to be free. Let’s turn that around! Get freedom first, and then being rich becomes icing on the cake.

How do we get free now? Financially speaking, you do this by creating passive income vehicles—some to build, some to buy—letting those streams gather momentum over a few years, reaping the rewards, then doing more of this with other passive income structures. This way, you get the material wealth that gives you tangible freedom from having to worry about working—one of the basic goals of our desire to be rich—and if you really know what it is you really want, you get the happiness part of it as well.

Freedom is only as good as the results of your true intentions. In other words, keep the endgame in mind. We’re not getting rich to be free. We want to be free and then enjoy the benefits of being rich. This is not something we have to wait for to arrive in the future. There’s no freedom in waiting. Freedom starts now.

Working Richer, Not Harder

Posted on October 1, 2012 - 5:56 am by 111

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

Posted on July 2, 2012 - 11:31 pm by 24

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!

Posted on May 31, 2012 - 2:46 am by 26

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

Older posts

Newer posts