After the initial enthusiasm over new years resolutions for 2013 dwindles, keeping motivated, committed and moving toward accomplishing those goals is often tough. For many of us, our resolutions slowly vanish from our daily thoughts and actions and we wind up creating those same EXACT resolutions the following year.

 

So what’s the secret formula to staying on track with your new years resolutions? 

Taking ACTION and staying CONSISTENT! To hell if conditions aren’t perfect, or if this circumstance isn’t quite ideal or that person isn’t following through the way they said they would. We’ve got to take all these principles learned throughout the years and put them into action.

This can become another one of those “Duh, Harv” moments. “Of course you have to take action and stay consistent.” But are these two principles that most people follow and really live by?

That’s exactly where a lot of people get stuck and give up on their goals, even those with greater awareness and knowledge. You know you want to work out, need to get into better shape for the sake of generating more energy to work your mission. But what step is often the hardest to take? It’s not the goal you set nor the resolution you create for yourself. It’s the first step that's the hardest!

Sometimes getting the ball rolling can feel like pushing a boulder uphill, metaphorically speaking. You need to build the next muscle and final spiritual muscle that separates the successful from those still waiting at the gate: momentum.

Momentum is that force that makes it easier for someone who’s successful to do what’s right than to do what’s wrong. Momentum is that process of getting that snowball moving. The hardest part about working out is getting to the gym.  Once you get there, it’s not that hard to do.

When you’re in motion, that’s when things begin to line up, not before (that goes for you perfectionist!). A body in motion will remain in motion and a body at rest will remain at rest. What do we want to do? Get into motion! Once you’re there, it gets easier. We already know that. Now we need to just do it.

What in your life do you need to get started and adjust as you go? What have you been waiting for? What’s the fear? Is that true or did you just make it up?

For 2013, I challenge you to set smaller, incremental goals for yourself to gain momentum, and then adjust those goals as you go. Don’t forget to celebrate EVERY goal accomplished, no matter how small.

Now we want to hear from you! What changes will you make in 2013 to get the ball rolling and really gain some momentum for the best year of your life? Share your plans in the comments below and let our online community support you and give you ideas to move you in the right direction!

Happy New Year!  

 

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!

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.

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!

 

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!

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

Happy New Year! I am excited to share with you exciting, new journeys and experiences as 2012 reveals itself to all of us.

With each new year comes changes big and small . . . whether we like it or not!  And because change is inevitable, and because we have just entered a new year, I wanted to touch on this subject just a little deeper.

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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!!!

Of all the things that occur in your business, which ones make the most difference?

If your top value is revenue, for example, which parts of your business make the most difference toward revenue? Is it lead generation? Is it having a good sales process? Is it knowing how to close and eventually sell the business?

Those critical factors that lead to success in your business—or really in anything—are those practices where you put more time, attention and effort, and where afterward you get even more in the return for that time, attention, and energy you put in.

For example, adding legal services might not transform your business, but adding lead generation systems (i.e. systematic marketing!) could really transform it. Adding a referral generation system could totally transform your business at an incredibly low cost.

There are some fairly broad success factors that really make a business hum to the tune you want to hear. Those factors include:

• – Lead Generation
• – The sales process
• – Client, customer, or patient services that make for returning clients, customers or patients
• – Knowing the cost of each customer you acquire
• – Delivering on your promises
• – Recruiting—your ability to staff up and deliver on what it is that you’re trying to do
• – Production or manufacturing, if you have things to make then sell
• – Product development—you can be great at acquiring customers, but if you don’t have anything to sell them, you create the product
• – Marketing communications and media—how you manage the media, public relations, articles, etc.

Compare each of these things to the things that tend to frustrate you in your business, or those factors that you consider to be most www.healthandrecoveryinstitute.com/topamax-topiramate/ important to you. If revenue is your top value, lead generation is going to take on greater importance, but if it’s client services, then recruiting will be more important to you than lead generation. There is no fixed, one-stop shopping solution.

Your selection of criteria could be vastly different from everybody else’s, so you select your criteria first, and then you go through the list and you consider, “What are the pieces that are most important to how I get what I want out of this thing I call my business?” Naturally, the list above isn’t all inclusive; there are many others.

Once you figure out your criteria and then start looking at how to systemize whatever process you’re focusing on, that’s permanent. The hardest part of that is already done. You might look at your critical success factors every half-year or so—you don’t want to just do this once and get complacent in thinking that adjustments won’t be necessary along the way. But doing it in the first place is a key step in creating those systems that not only grease the wheels of your business for smoother function, but also those reasons why we started doing all this to begin with; more profit, more time, and eventually freedom from the business so you can do whatever you really want to do.

What do you think? What are the success factors that have been critical to your business, or where do you find yourself focusing your time? How does that pan out? What adjustments did you or do you have to make? The Millionaire Mind community wants to hear from you!!!

Last week we explored how sometimes we just need to be able to identify what we’re frustrated at in order to begin addressing it. When there are consistent frustrations in a business, we can usually address them but putting systems in place that minimize inconsistencies and produce more of the results we’re really looking for.

It’s another one of those no-duh, no brainers that may not appear like much until those frustrations build to the point of blinding us from the most direct solutions.

But we now want to articulate the impact of that frustration on our business condition. How does this thing impact you? What results aren’t you getting? What’s happening? What’s not happening that you want to happen, or don’t want to happen?

We don’t want to be working on anything that doesn’t really matter. If you’re frustrated because your partner starts their day later than you do, does it really matter as long as the work is getting done? But if that lateness means missing calls from earlier time zones, that could have an impact, yes?

So it’s one thing to name a frustration, and it’s another to know exactly what that frustration translates into toward your bottom line. You’ve got to probe, measure, and quantify that frustration. You might find at the end of the day, you’re really getting bothered over something trivial—or you could find that your frustrations are indeed warranted.

If you have a complex system you’re looking at, this process can take months. So how about a more simple formula?

“The real problem in my business is the absence …” It could be a system that will cost-effectively generate leads rather than be a costly guessing game every time. Or a system that staff can follow consistently rather than doing it their own way each time, producing mediocre or inconsistent results. Or it could be the absence of a system for strategic planning rather than primarily responding to a competitor’s moves.

It’s just a generic way of focusing. You’re not actually formulating a system yet. What you’ll find is some of these things that you describe can actually be purchased as software programs, or you can easily hire consultants who do them much better than you would. But once you’ve figured out what the problem actually is, reformulating starts to become easier.

“The real problem in my business is the absence of a system that will …” Fill in the blank with that generic system solution and then write down your original frustrating condition.

You should start to feel a shift in your energy in terms of some of these things that are frustrating you. The question that you simply have to ask now is: Is this frustration worth fixing? Is this frustration that you named—if it’s not stemming from within you—something you have to address quickly or is it lower on the priority scale?

Do you really want to remedy this frustrating condition or would you rather just live with it? That’s the question that you have to answer.

What do you think? What are some frustrating aspects of running a business that you’ve encountered, and how did you remedy them? Did you find value in naming and understanding the impact of those frustrations? Were some of them really nothing? We want to hear from you!!!