Think & Grow Rich
This is one of those books that should be and is in many cases “required reading” for any entrepreneur. This is the book that is responsible for more millionaires than any other book. Simply awesome. If you haven’t ready this one for a while, pull it off the shelf again or get out the CDs and give it a go once again.
It helps remind us that not only is the mindset important, but that there is truth in the concept that “thoughts are things” and any success begins with our thoughts. I’ve used the example before that when you take a look at all of those that you would consider successful and look at what is different about them from those that aren’t as successful, you’ll find that there is no defining traditional education that makes any difference, no specific religious background, no heritage (necessarily), no country, no race or ethnic background, basically nothing that really separates the successful from the unsuccessful except for one thing: How They Think.
The question then becomes, “How do they think?”… If that’s the one key difference, then how should you think and what should you think about if you want to become rich?
The easy answer is that it’s all in the book… Napoleon Hill is going to explain this a lot better than I’ll be able to. If you haven’t already, you really need to read this book. This is a must for those of you who are internet business opportunity seekers. I believe what Thomas Edison said, (paraphrased…) but he said that ideas are in the air and if he didn’t think of theme, someone else would. These “million dollar” ideas are out there, but the successful people not only think of these ideas, but more importantly take massive action to accomplish their revenue goals.
Many of you have seen “The Secret” which I think starts to address some of the right mindset, but if you do nothing more than sit there imagining your Ferrari or mansion, you’ll never get there. It’s a start, but yes, you do actually have to “do” something.
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Direct Sales or “Top Tier” vs. Retail Sales
Let’s say that you have a product you’re looking at selling that makes you $20 per sale (we’ll call these yellow widgets). This can be an affiliate product, physical product, ebook, or whatever. Now, let’s compare that to a product that will make you $1000 per sale (call these green widgets - “green” for more cash).
If you do the keyword research on keywords related to each product, we’ll assume that the keyword research that you do each generate about 10-20 good, solid keywords that you can use for SEO or pay-per-click, etc. Each of these product keyword searches get about 500+ searches per day for both products. Let’s also assume that on the $20 yellow widgets get a conversion percent of about 5% because you have a good price, the page is relevant and you’re optimized for keywords that represent people being closer to making a purchase.
(note: we’re assuming you will make $20 on this product or $1000 on the green widgets, even though the price of these may be $40 and $2000 respectively).
We’ll make one other assumption for this example which is that even though there are 500 searches per day, you get about 100 of those to visit your site either through natural search engine rankings or through pay-per-click.
So, at a 5% conversion of 100 visitors would be 5 sales of the $20 product making you $100 per day.
Now, if you do the same amount of work (whether for SEO or pay-per-click), and because it is a higher dollar item, your conversion percentage may only be .5%, you’ll have 1 sale of $1000 every two days (or .5 sales every day for those 100 clicks per day). This means that you have 5x the revenue at 10x less conversion percentage.
So, I guess the question is which makes for a more profitable situation? (rhetorical)… As the answer is obviously the $1000 revenue product, the difference between being able to sell a $40 and a $2000 (assuming retail pricing) is in the mindset. If you have in your mind that $2000 is a lot of money, it becomes incredibly difficult to ask someone to pay $2000 for anything let alone a product that could make them 10x their original investment in a couple of months. You’ll find that you are trying to get someone to justify the expense and no matter how well you try to conceal this fact that you think $2000 is a lot of money, people will pick up on your subconscious vibes.
I used to sell high-end smoke detectors and heat detectors which for an average home needing about 10 detectors, the cost would be around $3000 or so… Of all the things to absolutely need and find value in, the lives of your family at stake if you don’t have a working smoke detector and you have a fire… Smoke detectors have an incredible value.
What I noticed was that those that did really well as salesmen for this company were those to whom $3000 was NOT a big deal. They didn’t transmit that they thought $3000 was a lot of money. They simply built the value into the product and assumed that anybody that didn’t buy them just didn’t get it… which was true (for the most part).
My point isn’t that $3000 is a lot of money or not… my point is that if you’re going to spend time building a website, doing work into SEO or pay-per-click or anything else for that matter, you should really be spending your time where you can maximize your revenue for each sale.
This is one the primary reasons I love internet business opportunities so much. It’s because with an internet business opportunity (assuming we’re talking “top-tier” / direct sales and a residual commission type compensation plan), we have the opportunity to make that $1000 revenue on each product, but the value of each sale goes far beyond the $1000 one-time payout. We have an override on every sale that our recruits make as well. So, in the instance of the $1000 product assuming it is sold to another person by one of our recruits, we’ll make an override of $400. So the revenue from that sale then becomes $1400 and another $400 on any other sale made by our recruits.
With the system I’m a part of now (CarbonCopy Pro & Wealth Masters International) we have a commission structure and a compensation plan that is just what I’ve described… only there are two other product levels to work with. The second level product is a $9000 product of which you’ll make $3000 to $4000 and an override of $2000 to $3000 as the sponsoring consultant. Now, the numbers for the system are that about 30% of the level one purchase upgrade to the level 2 product. So, take that same $1000 and ad to that an extra $3000 for every third sale which means that the revenue then for that same $1000 initial sale has an extra $1000 attached to it ($3000 for every 3 sales or $1000 per level two sale averaged out over 3 sales).
So, with only your sales alone (not including residual) you’ll make on average $2000 per sale.
But wait… there’s more… Yes you have a level three product as well. This level 3 product costs $13000 and pays out a commission of $5000 to $7500. Let’s assume the $5000 commission at this early stage. So, for what I’m talking about here, you have 30% of all those that upgraded to the second level product now upgrade to the level three product. So, take that $5000 which will be spread out over about 10 sales which gives you on average a $500 additional value built into every level 1 sale (assuming you’re averaging this out over all of your sales). So the $2000 becomes $2500 on average.
The best part is that we haven’t even scratched the surface of residual for the work that your recruits do where you will make an override off of the sales that are generated by your recruits.
Now, you may be wondering what’s the “catch”… here it is: In order to make the commission on a level two product you must be positioned at that level 2 having purchased that level 2 product yourself. This is the only way that you can earn that commission on those products. If you’re not positioned at that level, the commission passes you up and goes to your sponsoring consultant.
It is in your best interest to join at the highest level you can. The higher you can come in initially, the more likely it is that you’ll reach a $250K+/year revenue. Now, keep in mind that you’ll either have some serious time to dedicate to SEO or other methods of generating traffic or the money to buy your clicks… Either of these work, but I usually recommend a budget of around $1000 for marketing. Take that into consideration as well.
Now, for all the details and more instructions on how to get started, visit www.sixfigurepros.com, opt-in, review the marketing system and submit your application today!
Brian
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The Benefits of a Call Center
One thing that may prevent people from succeeding at an internet business opportunity is the need to actually interact and “sell” product to other people. By nature, most people aren’t “closers” and needing to be “closers” is one of the prerequisites of many internet business opportunities.
One of the best things about CarbonCopy Pro is the “call center” that we use to contact the applicants. This call center is staffed by individuals who volunteer their time to help answer questions for prospects and work with them directly on advancing those applicants closer to making a purchase. Long way of saying that the call center helps “close” your applicants.
Now… those that make these calls are usually people who have already experienced significant success at promoting Wealth Masters International through CarbonCopy Pro and are in an excellent position of authority to teach and instruct and “close”.
One thing that you’ll learn about CarbonCopy Pro and Wealth Masters Intl is that the “closing” process isn’t really a closing process in the sense that most sales organizations consider “closing”. For most people that become business owners, the phone calls that are made to applicants are more of an introduction call from a very postured perspective. This “attracts” people so much more than the desperate callers who haven’t made a sale in a month and rent is due…
Your phone calls to your applicants is one to introduce yourself and I personally like to start with the question, “What do really want to get out of a system like CarbonCopy Pro?” which is an open-ended question that starts the conversation off pretty well. I mix it up and depending on the personality type on the other end of the phone will do a little of the talking or a lot of the talking.
Don’t be afraid of the silence, especially if it is just after you asked a thought-provoking question. The other thing that will play an important part in this call back process is to focus on really listening and then repeating back in a conversational, non-annoying way what they just finished saying to you. This lets them know that you are listening and that you care. Sounds cheesy I know, but it works and it will make the follow up that much easier.
If you’re focused primarily on what you’re going to say next, you don’t hear a thing they just said. Master this technique and all your calls will go just fine.
Most of the first calls that I have are about developing a relationship and making sure to follow up with a call to action whether this is to watch the DVD or review the online videos and ask your prospect if they would like you to follow up with them. This puts the pressure off of you and ends the second-guessing you’ll inevitably do wondering whether it has been too many or too few days since your last phone call.
Do one of two things… either ask them if and when they’d like you to follow up… usually they’ll say something like, “if you haven’t heard from me by ________, then call me”. So call them on that follow up date. If you don’t get the follow up, leave the ball in their court by letting them know that you look forward to hearing back and to call or email if they have any questions… Remember that the system is still sending emails every day or every few days and will act as that little reminder for them to take action.
The call center will do most of the “heavy lifting” assuming they can get in contact with your leads. Many times the calls that the call center does are during business hours which means that they leave messages. If you see that the call center has been leaving mostly messages during the day, try your follow up calls at night.
This system is one that does a LOT for you and the cost of this system pales in comparison to its value. If you’d like to experience this system first hand, visit www.sixfigurepros.com and opt-in and go through the application process. You won’t regret it!
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Let the Autoresponder Work for You
An autoresponder is an email system that automatically emails your prospects and invites them to take action that will generate you more money (and them assuming they’re following your lead).
If you were required to manually follow up with every lead that comes through your system by email or phone, you’d have an 80+ hour workweek with no free time. Because our target is the “4 Hour Workweek”, we need to leverage a system as much as we possibly can. Enter: The Autoresponder.
For most people that start an internet business from scratch, the autoresponder is an excellent tool that can follow up with your leads / prospects automatically with specific calls to action and more information that works with people to “convince” them to join you. The problem is that most people don’t have copywriting skills. We’ve all consumed a ton of advertising messages since we were little children and still do, but without conscious thought and analysis of these ads, we don’t understand why the ads are saying what they do. They speak to us sub-consciously.
After all, marketing is nothing more than applied psychology. In our case, instead of just “noticing” or subconsciously ingesting the ads, we should become students of the game and start analyzing why the ads say what they do…
Here’s a perfect example: Notice how many times ads tell you to buy something “because you DESERVE it!”?
Now that I’ve mentioned this, you’ll start hearing it and it will now stick out whereas before, it probably didn’t register. This is one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book… justification for some purchase because we “deserve” this… It works because it speaks to our inner self that wants a reason and justification for why we should be owners of whatever product is being advertised.
My wife and I laugh every time we hear that on the radio or TV now that we are listening for it… We kinda look at each other and think “suckers”… for all those poor saps who actually believe they need a 2 karat diamond ring because “they deserve it”.
Anyway, I’m off track here, but with the auto-responder, assuming you’re just getting started with becoming a student of the game and are relatively new to internet marketing and internet business you probably don’t have nearly the kind of expertise to be able to create a series of emails that will effectively sell your product, no matter how passionate you are about it.
I’d encourage you to not let this lack of expertise stop you. The auto-responder for most people will be a continual work in progress. As long as you’re observing exactly what it is that works and when you get an email that produces significant results, you need to ask yourself why and analyze as best you can why it is that that email worked where others didn’t produce those good results.
Emulate as best you can what you believe worked and why and then test. There are several really good books on the subject including Dan Kennedy’s “The Ultimate Sales Letter” and anything by Yanik Silver on copy writing. This is a skill that if you can develop and perfect will make you money advertising just about anything.
For a case study in how the autoresponder works, you can subscribe to mine online at www.sixfigurepros.com. This is my site that I use to promote a product by Wealth Masters International. In the case of CarbonCopy Pro which is the system I use, the autoresponders are already a part of the system and can be tweaked, but even stand-alone are very good at converting the leads into sales. I use the default system and the best part about it is that the people I recruit can jump into the exact same system without having to fork out hundreds of dollars on copy-writing courses or multiple months of training and testing.
This is a system that I recommend to all those that are serious about success and want to leverage a tool that will help them achieve their goals of running a successful internet business. If you’re serious about being a part of a successful internet business opportunity, you owe it to yourself to review this system further… www.sixfigurepros.com
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Cold Calling Sucks… Find a Better Way
One of the reasons that many people choose to purse the internet business opportunity vs. a more traditional business opportunity is to get away from things like “cold calling”. I’m not necessarily averse to the concept of cold calling because it definitely has it’s place. But… what I’m more interested is leveraging a tool like the internet to do most of this qualifying for me.
I use a system called CarbonCopy Pro which does most of the lead qualification for me with something called a “funded proposal”. If you haven’t heard this concept before or simply don’t recognize this concept by that name, a funded proposal is a system of offering a product for sale at a price point of right around $40-50. This is something that is relatively affordable for just about anybody and for those that you’re really trying to recruit into your business opportunity, this is the perfect way to qualify your leads.
With CarbonCopy Pro, the funded proposal or offer for the funded proposal is in the form of an “application” fee. The application fee costs $50 and with that you get a copy of a DVD video presentation done by two of the industries top performers: Jay Kubassek & Mike Dillard. Even competitors of CarbonCopy Pro admit that this product is worth the $50 alone…
So, the actual calls you’ll make as a member of the CarbonCopy Pro system are to those individuals who are serious enough to “apply” to work with you. Now, don’t get overly caught up in the application process, but do know that this is one way to not only offset some of the marketing expense, but will be a great tool to save you loads of time.
Assuming you get about 100 leads per day, the old school mentality would have you calling all 100 with probably about 95% of them not really wanting to do anything with you. Enter the “application” or funded proposal of any kind (such as Mike Dillard’s “Magnetic Sponsoring” or “Building on a Budget” which are also funded proposals for lead generation). With this funded proposal, the same 2-5% of the applications that are actually interested are likely to pay the $50 application fee and the process will take care of eliminating the “lookie-lous” and the “tire-kickers” for you and leave you with “warm leads” that have specifically applied to work with you.
If you can see how good this is, then you’re starting to understand that this marketing concept is how most of the really successful internet entrepreneurs leverage the internet and time. You’ll always be trading time for money… pretty much no way around that no matter what you do. However, if you can do work one time and have that one project or period of time generate you revenue over and over again, your dollar per hour of work goes up exponentially.
CarbonCopy Pro has this built into it’s system and it works. Review the system first hand by visiting www.sixfigurepros.com.
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Building a Website
If you have a degree or even experience in coding, html, web design, dreamweaver, photoshop, or even knowing how to install wordpress and arrange web hosting, this blog post is probably not for you.
I coach students who want to learn how to start an internet business. These students typically have very little experience or know-how when it comes to building a website. I can coach some of them on eBay and Amazon because there is no real website creation required. Amazon does have astores and web stores, but it’s mostly point and click with little to no design. Others will use blogging platforms like wordpress or blogger to actually run their website. These are fantastic options as their relatively easy to get going.
Even with these easier methods of getting started using blogging platforms or sites like Amazon, there is still a turn-around time to get everything configured and get it “just right” in order to be able to start making sales. Assuming it takes about 4 weeks with a minimum of about 3-4 hours per day Mon thru Friday, we’re talking about 15-20 hours per week or about 60-80 hours total.
There’s nothing wrong with this, but consider a few options above and beyond the 60-80 hours I mentioned here because I believe that 60-80 hours is a bit conservative. In my experience, most students that I coach on this take a lot longer to get a fully functional website up and running before they’re really ready to start driving traffic to that website.
The alternatives are purchasing an existing website that is ready to go which has a cost associated with it. Depending on where you look, you can find ready made websites for as little as $20 and as much as $20,000 depending on what you’re buying.
Many webmasters will buy a site at $100 - $200, build it up, improve it over a couple of months, increase page rage, traffic, etc and turn around and sell it for $1000 - $2000 (a 10x return). This seems to be more of an advanced strategy and requires not only experience, but also a relatively savvy internet marketer.
For those people who are pursuing the internet business opportunity more than a more “traditional” internet business, consider something like a pre-built system that you can purchase and start using right away. The system that I use is a marketing system called CarbonCopy Pro. This is a marketing system used to promote an information product from Wealth Masters International.
The reason this is such a good option is that not only is the site built, but unlike a lot of other “cookie cutter” websites, CarbonCopy Pro has a lot of advanced capabilities for tracking (using analytics or other tracking software). One other huge benefit is that this system is tied into the main servers for all pages using this system, so the marketing experts at CarbonCopy Pro can actually test different landing pages, text, headlines, etc all with the intent of getting the most possible traffic and conversions for the system.
This is one of the easier ways to “plug into” an existing system that already has all of the landing pages created and optimized as well as the auto-responder that is also optional and can be configured to work with this system. What this allows you to do is “own” all of your leads. So, not only do you have the advantage of an optimized system that converts about 15-25% of all vistors into opt-ins, this system also allows you to keep your leads. The value of these leads over time will surpass the cost to acquire assuming you’re treating these leads right.
Look into this system for yourself by first going through as a “prospect” and my encouragement for you is to review this from a marketing perspective to see what type of possibilities this site may have assuming you decide this is for you.
You can visit the site by going to www.sixfigurepros.com. This will act as a demo for the system as well as be the gateway you can go through to see how you can become a part of CarbonCopy Pro.
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Finding a Product to Sell
One of the main things that new internet business opportunity seekers need to do is find a product to sell. I won’t pretend to have all the answers about what to sell as I’ve sold anything from car stereos on eBay to merchant account services to kiteboarding gear to mortgages to… well, you get the point. I’ve tried a ton of different things online to see what sticks.
The thing is, just about everything I’ve tried to various degrees of success are things that people out there right now are making a killing at. What I’ve found is that in order to succeed, the product isn’t nearly as important as the determination and desire to succeed.
Many would-be millionaires start projects and are incredibly gung-ho at first only to loose steam before the project has a chance to make it off the ground. There will always be some “better” projects that’s going to make you money faster than the thing you’re currently working on… (at least that’s what the promoters are telling you through their sales pages).
When I select a product, I try to focus on products that have a higher revenue point which allows additional room to experiment with things like pay-per-click. In the case of what I’m working on now and have been 100% dedicated to, I’m promoting an information product that costs $2000 of which I make about 50% commission. So, each sale for me generates a cool $1000.
What this means is that in order for me to “break even”, I only have to make 1 sale for every $1000 of ad spend. Now… nobody is in business to “break even”. But… what I do with this $2000 product is also make a commission override on anybody else that I recruit to sell this exact same product. Taking a page out of the network marketing book, I leverage the work other people do on this $2000 product sale and those I recruit make their $1000 and I’ll make an override from the company that supplies this $2000 information product.
So, I actually can break even on this initial sale and still make money long term… but it gets even better than that. There is a second tier product and even a third tier product that are tied to my revenue. About 25-30% of all those that purchase the $2000 product upgrade to the second level product which is a $9000 multi-day conference. Of this, I make about $3000 per sale. These upgrades happen most of the time without my direct involvement, so this is just “gravy” money.
And yes… there is a commission override of at least $1000 or more on those level 2 products that your recruits sell as well. This is probably starting to sound like a pitch more than anything else, but what I wanted to focus on primarily with this post is the fact that for those looking to find a product to sell, why not focus on products that have a minimum revenue of $1000 or more?
Look at real estate professionals, agents, mortgage brokers, etc… these guys typically make 2-5% of the value of the property being sold, so even on a $100,000 house, they’re making $3-$5K… How many sales per month would you need at this level to be able to quit your day job? 1? 3?
This is why I focus on this product from Wealth Masters International that I market using a system called “Carbon Copy Pro”. If this is something you’d like more information about, visit my site: http://www.sixfigurepros.com and you’ll be able to find details about this system and how you can get involved.
Ok, so, yeah, this blog post converted into pretty much a long advertisement for this… but for those of you not interested in this type of format, there are a lot of other products that fit this pricing structure and category, but in my opinion, none that have the same long term residual revenue potential.
If you’d like more information, visit my site, or contact me through this blog here at firstonethere.com
Brian
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