All Posts by Julia

The Art of Business

Here’s something slightly different from me today and perhaps for the next few days: thoughts about business and entrepreneurship on a different level that I learned from my spiritual teacher years ago.

Business done well is an art.  The art of business is the ability to see the future and its needs.  The needs of the future present themselves as energy resources.  Energy resources can be in the form of natural energy or services, and products.  Energy resources can be physical or mental.  Examples of physical energy resources would include massage, yoga, a catered meal, or any service that provides something that is physical.

Mental energy resources are the basis and foundation of all business.  Literature is the form or language of mental energy resources.  All ideas are organized through forms of literature, which prepare the idea for verbal presentation.

It takes a creative mind to perceive the future from a business perspective.  Creativity is the ability to communicate and express ideas as complete images of thought.  In order to be a successful creative mind in expression on a business level, the ideas must be integrated and organized.  This means that the most successful creative business minds are advanced literary minds who have an organized understanding of the material world and its capabilities.

It is the spirit which is creative and gets in touch with ideas from being able to concentrate on thought frequencies to see the idea clearly, yet to materialize the idea there must be an understanding of the material world.  The material world is very crowded.  For this reason one must learn to avoid the crowded places in climbing to the top of the pyramid of the business world .

Does this post leave you confused or are you connecting to a deeper level of understanding?  Can you see the principles of the Law of Attraction in this post?

Are you climbing the business pyramid?  Do you have a clear picture of where you are in the different areas of your life and business?  It might be time for a reality check so you can “uncrowd” those areas of your life and business where you need to make changes.  If are subscribed to my blog, then you already have Julia Neiman’s 2 Step Reality Check to Discover and Overcome the Hurdles That Stand Between You and Your Dreams.  If you don’t have a copy of the Reality Check, simply enter your name and email in the box at the top right side of the page and it will be on it’s way to your inbox in seconds.

 

Learning to Say “No”

I’ve had a long career in social services; services being the keyword here.  I’m used to providing services for people with little or no money and receiving a barely adequate salary for doing so.  I’ve been so conditioned to say yes; to make things happen for people, that when I decided to become an entrepreneur, I had a very difficult time saying no or asking for payment.  In fact, I am still working on asking for money and I am a long way from feeling comfortable saying no, however, I now do both whether I like it or not.

What I came to realize was that if I wanted to be successful in my business, I had to transition from a “yes” mindset to a “no” mindset.  That might seem counterintuitive to some, however, it’s the difference between success and failure for me.  People are always asking me for free advice, or to do this thing or that for them with no expectation of having to pay for my time and services.  If I didn’t take responsibility for transforming that expectation, I would not be able to support myself.

This was brought home to me recently by Adam Urbanski.  I attended his recent Overnight Authority Webinar and he talked about the importance of making this transition to saying no.  He had us figure out how much an hour of our time was worth (my rate used to be $200 an hour for training) then break it down to what that is worth per minute ($3.33).  So you call me and ask me if I can give you 20 minutes of my time to help you with something in your business.  If I do, I have now invested $66.66 in your business and you’ve invested nothing in mine.  You have what you needed, and I have 20 less minutes to invest in my own business.  How is this a formula for success?

That was a huge turning point in my approach to considering what to say yes to and when to say no.  Just this week someone asked me to help co-host an ongoing series of teleseminars about how we can bring transformation to the world to create a more positive situation.  It’s a topic close to my heart and I was tempted to say yes.  However, she intends this to be a “giving” situation with no opportunity for promotion by any of the co-hosts.  Rather than accept right away, which I wanted to do, I asked her for time to consider her request.  I weighed the time commitment required for those calls against what I need to do to in my business right now.  Using my old training rate of $200, I would be investing  between $300 and $400 worth of time into her program each month.  Additionally, this topic was not relevant with my business at this time which is empowering teens and young adults to develop economic self sufficiency by starting their own business.  I could not see any justification for accepting her request, even though it would get my name out to some new people who may or may not take the time to visit my website.  I had to tell her “no.”

I didn’t like telling her no, but I have to say, I was proud of myself for making the best decision for my business, at least at this time.  It’s all part of the transition from the mindset of a salaried social services worker to an entrepreneurial mindset.  I’m not about making money, however, money is an essential part of life and there are many things I can make happen in the world if I have money available.   With that in mind, this year is my year to get my program out into the world and bring money into my business.

What things should you say “no” to?

Do you need help figuring out what you need to say no to?  Do you have a clear picture of where you are in the different areas of your life and business?  It might be time for a reality check so you can identify where you need to make changes.  If are subscribed to my blog, then you already have Julia Neiman’s 2 Step Reality Check to Discover and Overcome the Hurdles That Stand Between You and Your Dreams.  If you don’t have a copy of the Reality Check, simply enter your name and email in the box at the top right side of the page and it will be on it’s way to your inbox in seconds.

 

Sheath Your Claws!

Last night at dinner I told one of my friends that if I could certify 100 coaches this year, I could gross $350,000 and that I made that one of my business goals.  His immediate response was to make a negative comment about how hard that would be and just about impossible.

My first inclination was to tell him he was wrong, that it’s not impossible and to launch into a lecture about the Law of Attraction and global training via teleseminar or webinar.  I ended up not doing that because I realized that would open the door to a back and forth disagreement and I didn’t want to give him any power in the situation.  When you give someone else power in any situation, you take away from you own power.  I give away a lot, but my own power is not a freebie.

What I did end up saying was that it might be impossible for him, however, I’ve made a decision to be fearless from now on and believe that it is entirely possible for me.   Whether I reach that goal or not isn’t as important as the fact that this is what I aspire to and am going for.

So what could he say to that?  I didn’t make him wrong, I didn’t start an argument, I didn’t insult him really.  It just ended that conversation and we moved on to something else.

This exchange made me wonder if it’s a good idea to share goals with others.  I’ve aIways believed it was a good idea to share goals, that it makes them more real and other people can spur you on toward your goal.  I still believe that.

My take away from this experience is that if you are going to share your goals, you should be prepared to counter any negative comments with something that is neutral and will not cause a back and forth disagreement.  It’s always best to be able to neutralize a negative energy rather than have to do battle with it so sheath your claws and neutralize the negativity.

Holy Twilight Zone Batman

So, the very first day of the new year I crossed over into the Twilight Zone. I thought I was being so good uploading a new freebie at my site and sending out an email announcing that the old give away was being taken down at midnight.

I sent myself a test email for each announcement, they looked good and the links worked just fine.  I doubled checked at Aweber to make sure the broadcast times were correct and it appeared to be all systems go.  Yay!

Here’s where it gets strange.  I received in my inbox a previous email that I sent months ago.  I did not schedule this email to be sent.  I received it at both of my email addresses that are registered with Aweber.  I went back into Aweber and saw no indication that the old email was sent.  Hmm, I’m scratching my head about now.  And no, I wasn’t drinking to celebrate New Year’s Eve.

Okay, midnight is approaching, they are getting ready to drop the ball in Times Square and all is well with the world.  I waited until midnight to take down the old freebie and connect the new one.  The correct email went out and all seemed well, I even retested the link.  This was at my Outlook email.  Later I checked the inbox on AOL and the email was there.  For some reason, I tested the same link in the same email blast at AOL and it didn’t work.  Uh oh.  Now what?

I could not figure this out.  Before I knew it, it was 3 am.  I decided to check my email one more time and found a friend awake who was online.  I connected via chat and asked that she check the link in my email that came to her.  She was on her cell phone and said the link did not work.  The link on her phone and at my AOL showed a corrupted link.  She booted her laptop and checked her email and lo and behold, the link works just fine, thank you.

After finally getting some sleep, I start the day checking the email to see if anything else was amiss.  I have only two emails about the broadcast I sent out.

One of the emails was an unsubscribe notice from someone who left an angry sounding comment that the old give away was gone before midnight even though I said it would be available until midnight, and the other link didn’t work so they were unsubscribing.

To say I was hesitant to open the other email is an understatement.  Thankfully it was a friendly email letting me know of the problem.  After several emails back and forth, it appears that it might be an issue on Firefox rather than AOL.

Like any good business person who wants to provide exemplary customer service, I sent an apology letter to the person who unsubscribed and provided both of the give aways.  I have not had any comment back.  I also sent another email broadcast to my subscribers just to be sure.  Here’s where I experienced firsthand a key lesson in marketing – make sure your subject headings have a great title.

The email I sent announcing the new freebie had an ordinary title with the name of the PDF.  The open rate was nothing to write home about.  After I discovered that I had taken a trip through the Twilight Zone, I sent out another broadcast with the title, “Holy Twilight Zone Batman.”   The open rate tripled, how cool is that?

I have two take aways from this experience:

  • Always have a catchy title, not necessarily the name of your product.  What good is the most fantastic program if people don’t open your email?  Get them to open it, then you tell them what it’s about
  • Hire an email, campaign manager and don’t do this myself, anymore, ever again.

I know this has been a long story, sorry.  But anyone who knows me will tell you -I’m really wordy and can talk for hours.

Happy New Year.  And in case you haven’t picked up your copy of Julia Neiman’s 2 Step Reality Check to Discover and Overcome the Hurdles That Stand Between You and Your Dreams, you just have to enter your name and email in the box at the top right hand side of this page.  Unless, of course, you are already a subscriber, then you already received the download link in an email yesterday.  Otherwise, take your chances of crossing over into the Twilight Zone with me.

I told you I was wordy.

 

Day One of My Third Blog Challenge

Happy New Year bloggers.  I am so happy to be participating with all of you in my third Ultimate Blog Challenge.  For those of you who are new to this challenge, I’d like to congratulate you on your decision to accept the challenge.  To everyone that I blogged with in the previous challenges, I’m happy to be blogging with you again.

Here are some things I accomplished during the first two challenges:

The first challenge:

•  posted 31 new blog posts

•  doubled the amount of comments at my blog

•  established several great relationships, personal and professional

•  enrolled in Michele Scism’s 30 Days to Create a Product (and did create the product)

•  wrote my first book using the blog posts and was promoted by Michele Scism

•  got raving reviews of my book from fellow bloggers

During the second challenge:

•  posted another 31 new blogs

•  learned about/how to use google analytics

•  more than tripled the comments on my blog posts

•  learned more about blogging than I knew there was to know

•  was asked to be a guest poster and invited several guest posters

•  wrote my second book which I am currently editing

•  developed even more relationships

Now I am participating in my third challenge; I think you can understand why. This one will be easier for me because I’m not using this challenge to write a book so I’ll be freer to be more spontaneous in what I write about and my guest posters can also be freer with their topics.

I’m looking forward to connecting with you and reading as many blogs as I can.  Please be patient with me if I don’t get to your blog on a regular basis.  I am starting a new year long course, launching my new program certifying coaches to empower teens and young adults to become entrepreneurs, I’ll be promoting my two books, developing a teleseminar, planning a live conference and keeping up my own blog, among other things.

Thank you Michelle and Michele for hosting this blog challenge again.  What a great way to start the new year.

Please take advantage of the free gift I have for you – Julia Neiman’s 2 Step Reality Check to Discover and Overcome the Hurdles That Stand Between You and Your Dreams.  This two step process that will guide you through self assessment designed to help you identify areas that might be out of balance as well as the hurdles you need to overcome in order to be in integrity and alignment on your path moving forward.  Simply enter your name and email in the subscription form at the top right side of the page to obtain your free gift.

So You Want To Go Online With a Business

Today’s article is by guest blogger:

Kaye Dennan of Home Business Success Ideas

If you are an internet surfer you go online and within minutes you find answers to your search. The first ten listings for your search term come on the front page of Google (although I appreciate there are other search engines you may use) and the sites on the first page are not necessarily the best, but they are the best ones recognized by the search engines. If you look at the top of the Google page you will see that there can literally be millions of pages covering the search term that you have used.

So what you have to do to get your site recognized is find keywords (search terms your customers will use) that are not so common so that your site will be easily found on the web.

Let me assure you that there are plenty of clients out there for everybody and if you try to get page ranking with the more popular keywords it will be years before you get to the front page. But if you use the less common search terms you will be found by more than enough customers to keep you busy.

In saying that, you will have to be patient. The internet has billions of written, videos and graphic items being posted every single day so it may take up to 3 months before you will get to the front page for your chosen keyword.

Getting to the front page is not just about using the right keywords but also marketing your site using that keyword.

 How Does This Affect You

It affects you in the way that when you build a website you need to be able to get your pages up into the first 10 search terms so that you will get the clicks from potential clients.

Without optimizing your website with keywords to take advantage of the search terms you are really wasting your time building a website in the first place. If page placement is not important to you then this exercise is not so critical.

So let me tell you how to make sure that your website or at least some of its pages are going to get front page ranking.

 Pretty Is Not Always Best

I know many people who have paid thousands of dollars to have the ‘prettiest’ website made by skilled technical people, but there has been no keyword research and these website owners are wondering why their website which they paid thousands of dollars for is not being found on the internet.

Google and other search engines do not care about ‘pretty’ they care about content.

The Very First Steps To Building A Successful Website

Whatever you do, don’t underestimate the importance of doing your keyword search first. It is absolutely critical to the success of your website and your business, even when deciding on your business name.

Keyword research will ensure that you find the best keywords for your business, not only for online marketing but offline as well.  These words should be the focus when you are deciding on a business name and also on a domain name (the name of your website, e.g. http://julianeiman.com   In Julia’s case she is well recognized in her industry so she can get away with using her own name for her website.

But if you do not personally have a well recognized name in the field that you wish to pursue then you need to choose a name which will find bring you clients when people use these search terms.

So How Do You Find Quality Keywords

One of the simplest ways is to go into the Google keyword tool.

Here is how to fill this form out:

    • Go to the ‘word or phrase’ box and type in the best word that describes your business
    • In the left-hand column tick the ‘broad match’ box
    • Make sure the locations box (in gray) says ‘All’
    • Then fill in the captcha word box.  (In the screen shot below I have already filled in the captcha word box and been taken through to the next step.)
    • Scroll down and you will see a list of keywords of which some of them will be suitable to use for your business.
    • You can download these keywords in a csv file to your computer.

At this point you are looking for keywords that have a quality score.

Find keywords that have a Global Monthly Search of 500+ preferably over 1000. Then go into Google search and see if the pages come up to under 30,000.

It is tempting to go for the higher number in search terms but if you do you have so much competition that you will find that your website just does not get ranked and your potential customers just do not find you.

Here is an example of two keywords. The first you might think of is “tomato blight” but when you do your searches you will come up with over 120,000 pages but if you use the keyword “tomato blight treatment”, which is a much more defined keyword you still have a good monthly search volume of 1,600 and only 30,800 competitive pages. So by defining your main keyword “tomato blight” even further you will get quicker and better rankings in the search engines.

So if you were going to have a website about tomato blight you could if it was available have tomatoblighttreatment.com (I don’t know if this is a domain name or not) with your the tag line saying “Stop Tomato Blight From Ruining Your Tomato Crop”

Another Consideration

One point that I have not brought up is the fact that you may only be interested in local contacts. Say for example, your business is to visit people in their homes and eradicate tomato blight then might use your local town, area or county as part of the name and this will definitely help in that instance.

Finally

Put the time into your keyword research as it is the most important part of a successful website. Don’t rush in to setting up your website or choosing your business name and domain name until you have done this keyword research because it is such an important part of your business success.

Make sure you follow the links on this page because it was not possible to cover all the information you need in this one article. Good luck.

Kaye Dennan is an author of many ebooks but her passion is helping people set up and market home businesses.  For this specific purpose Kaye has set up http://homebusinesssuccessideas.com and has shared tips for people wishing to start all types of home businesses and who want to market online and offline.

 

One very important skill or attribute of being an entrepreneur is the ability to get stuff done.  Not everyone is organized and some might require a system to help them figure out what needs to be done.  Whether you are an entrepreneur, a student or a homemaker, The Get Stuff Done Tool is that system to help you manage your time.

Time is the one thing that we all have the same amount of every day.  Time, when lost or wasted, can never be replaced.  Don’t waste your time or anyone else’s. The Get Stuff Done Tool is still available as a free download.  Leave your name and email address in the box with the red arrow at the top-right hand side of the page and get the free download now.

Have you obtained your copy of 31 Powerful Lessons: Empowering Teens and Young Adults to Develop an Entrepreneur Mindset?  Click here and get your copy now.

 

Building Brands for the Connected World

Today’s post is based on a report – Building Brands For The Connected World, A Social Business Blueprint by Facebook based on a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting, February 2012.  This is just a summary of the 16 page PDF I downloaded and stored in my resource folder.  You can find this PDF here http://fbrep.com/wp/building_brands.pdf.

In a previous post I talked about product funnels.  Today I’m going to tell you that the funnel is an outdated model that inaccurately reflects the reality of today’s consumer journey in three significant ways:

1.  Most importantly, the journey must be described from the consumer’s point of view, not the marketer’s.

2.  The journey to customer loyalty is not linear, but rather is a continuous process of exploration and interaction.

3.  The journey is not isolated to just one person at a time — the entire connected world influences it.

The new process looks like a circular motion (see the graphic above) of learning, investigating, purchasing, and interacting.  The product funnel can still be useful for planning products and services, however, it is no longer relevant as a marketing plan.

The process is completely influenced by social media.  Consumers hear about new brands and investigate via social media.  When it comes time to buy something, consumers increasingly consult their friends via social media. Then, they expect to be able to interact with the brands through social media after the purchase.

What this study concludes is that in order “to succeed in the connected world, marketers must create connected brands:

Brands that continuously engage with people when they want, where they want, and how they want — particularly through social media.  To do so, they must first reconcile the gap between modern consumer behavior and outmoded marketing tactics. Then they will take the six steps outlined in this report to incorporate social marketing into their brand-building strategies.”

To win in the connected world, marketers must:

1.  Articulate the brand’s social identity so the brand communicates with a unique, compelling, and authentic voice.

2.  Connect with your best and most likely customers by giving them a reason to like or follow the brand in social channels.

3.  Engage people by making brand communications more participative and personally relevant.

4.   Influence people by inspiring and enabling people to share messages about your brand with their networks.

5.   Integrate social into the brand and product experience to make it more cohesive and useful.

6.   Rejuvenate the brand by using insights from social channels to monitor the brand’s health and improve the brand experience.

To begin building a connected brand you must have a vision for what it means to become a connected brand.  Ultimately, you must ask how you can gain a competitive advantage by becoming a connected brand.  It will also require you to reassess how your company allocates resources, develops strategy, and formulates budgets.  To jump-start your journey, use the questions below, provided by Forrester in the study for Facebook to identify opportunities to build a connected brand.

Answer the follow questions to identify the gaps that need to be filled in all six steps in order to build a connected brand:

Articulate:

•  What about your brand is inherently social?

•  Why do people engage with your brand and talk about it with friends in the real world?

•  How could social media help you fulfill your brand promise?

Connect:

•  Have you created a hub for your social identity that expresses your unique brand personality?

•  Where are you currently reaching people that could be leveraged to form a connection (i.e., your website, email newsletters, mobile experience, in-store experience, etc.)?

•  What are you doing to motivate people to connect and how are you offering them a better experience once they connect?

Engage:

•  Are you creating content and communications that are highly relevant to your audience and aligned with your brand?

•  Do you build content and communications that encourage participation and sharing?

•  Do you respond to and communicate with your community?

Influence:

•  Do you motivate people to participate in content and generate stories about their experience with your brand?

•  Do you encourage people to share their stories with friends through actions, recommendations and reviews throughout the customer life cycle?

•  Do you use paid media to ensure that content gets distributed to the friends of your connections?

Integrate:

•  How could you leverage the information people share with you in social channels about their preferences and friends to create more personal, relevant, valuable and engaging product and marketing experiences for your customers?

•  Are you building programs and experiences across the customer life cycle to be social from the beginning, rather than adding social on at the end?

•  Are you using social to create a more cohesive experience for your customers that can plug into your CRM and customer service programs?

Rejuvenate:

•  Do you have a process for surfacing and sharing the consumer insights and learning from social channels back through your organization?

•  Do you use social media to monitor brand health and customer satisfaction?

•  Do you use social media to identify new product or marketing opportunities?

The report says that 51% of consumers are more likely to buy a product or brand after liking them on Facebook.  How active are you for your business on Facebook and other social media?  After seeing this report and considering the questions above, have you identified any gaps that you can fill to better build a connected brand?

The Get Stuff Done Tool is still available as a free download.  Leave your name and email address in the box with the red arrow at the top-right hand side of the page and get the free download now.

Have you obtained your copy of 31 Powerful Lessons: Empowering Teens and Young Adults to Develop an Entrepreneur Mindset?  Click here and get your copy now.

The Six Phases of Business Development

There is a normal progression of six stages that businesses go through while under development.  Understanding these six stages will allow you to be okay with where you are at any given moment.  It can also help you move through potential meltdowns because you’ll know where you are and where you have come from and what is normal in the phase where you are.  Further, it can help you develop the patience required to achieve success.

The six stages are:

Phase 1:  Strategizing.  This is the planning stage.  In this phase you begin to develop a clear vision of what you want your business to be, what your goals are and what you are committed to.  You are creating your business plan and a schedule; you are identifying the actions that you will need to take and creating routines to follow.   This is the phase in which you want to find your mentors and have help that you trust.

Phase 2:  Implementation.  Phase 2 is a busy time.  It’s the phase where you roll up your sleeves, put your head down, shut out the diversions and get to work.  Your focus needs to be on putting your plan into action and working on your goals by following your schedule.

Implementation is where you put it all into action – creating and launching your products, building your list of leads, improving your website and putting your systems and technology into place, mastering social media, networking, joint venture partnerships and so on.

This phase takes an enormous amount of commitment.  It is the phase where you are doing the most work and not earning much, if any income.  This is where you demonstrate how consistent you can be and how committed you are to your dream.  It requires faith in yourself and your business plan and also accountability.  Use those mentors to help you stay on track.

Phase 3:  Momentum.  Momentum is where you are moving forward as a direct result of all your hard work in the previous two phases.  This is a great stage because you start seeing a surge of results with less effort.  By this phase you have customers who are buying your products and services.  You may be getting noticed by your competition and have an opportunity to turn them into allies by joint venturing with them.  Your audience or customer base is growing and you are finally seeing money come into your business.

Phase 4:  Stabilization.  The key to your long-term success is your ability to stabilize your momentum.  In order to hand the pace of your business without breaking down you need the following:

•  Systems

•  Automation

•  Delegation

•  Accountability

In this phase you have effective systems (autoresponder, shopping cart, affiliate program, sales page, etc.) in place for every facet of your business.  You now have paid help to maintain your systems and you can take a breath and review all your plans – business, action, marketing, product creation, etc.

It is not a good idea to try to make major changes during this phase of your business.  This is the time to just let your systems work and make money for you.  You can hurt yourself in this phase if you get bored and try to make changes that aren’t needed.

Reaching this phase can take a year and a half to two years.  Don’t try to rush it to happen faster and you don’t want to push it once you’ve reached it.

Phase 5:  Breakthrough.   This is a very exciting phase to be in.  This is where your business has really taken off and you see the quality and number of your customers increase and they are spending more money with you and buying your high ticket products and services.  This is a busy time and you need to master time management.   You must be very careful when you reach this stage that you maintain your integrity, it’s essential and helped you get here.

It is important to note that you will probably move back to phase 4, stabilization, after you reach breakthrough because it will be necessary to stabilize this new level.  That doesn’t mean you have slipped backwards, it means you have to repeat phase 4 at this new level.  This cycle will continually repeat itself for the life of your business.

Phase 6:  Mastery.  What started out as simply “your passion” can lead to a successful business that has a life of its own and is no longer dependent on you to be around all the time.   The majority of your business is being handled by others.  You have learned to delegate and be a good manager, empowering others to run things for you.   You become the visionary who oversees the operation, offering guidance when necessary, free to create the next thing, to just work those parts of the business you love most, or simply have more time for the lifestyle you want to lead.

It’s important to understand these six phases of business development so that you can know where you are during the progression of your business.

The Get Stuff Done Tool is still available as a free download.  Leave your name and email address in the box with the red arrow at the top-right hand side of the page and get the free download now.

Have you obtained your copy of 31 Powerful Lessons: Empowering Teens and Young Adults to Develop an Entrepreneur Mindset?  Click here and get your copy now.

 

Create Your Product Funnel: Building Relationships with Your Clients/Customers

A product funnel is essential for monetizing your clients and customers.  It’s a process whereby you attract people to your webpage and build relationships.  If they like and trust you, they will come back and pay for your more expensive products.

It works like this:

You create something they can get at your webpage for free, also known as a “freemium.”  You promote whatever that is on social media, on other people’s blogs, and anywhere else you can find to mention it.  People who want to get that free product come to your site, enter their name and email in your registration box and receive the free product via the autoresponder you set up as one of your business systems (we’ll get to this in a future article).

Your freemium can be a report, a checklist, a survey, a video, an audio, an ebook, you can even give away someone else’s work that you have rights to or ask them to participate in a poll.  Be creative and make it relative to your business because you are trying to create a buzz about yourself and capture people’s names and email addresses.

You may want to create a second free product as an introduction to a new product or low priced program you are preparing to release.  That could be a report, a PDF tool that relates to your new product, a teleseminar or webinar.

When you have prospects in your funnel, you need to find ways to give them more valuable content at increasingly higher prices as they go through the funnel.

Once you’ve sent them some really great content they’ll trust that you do in fact know what you’re talking about, and if you have related products that you are selling, you can make an offer to them.  If they buy… great!  Send them onto another list that is for buyers and start promoting more products that will further enhance their lives.  If they are not buyers, simply continue to offer free information and improve their lives regardless.  The ultimate goal is simply to ensure that you are enriching the lives of those people who have trusted you with their name and email address.

The first product you ask people to pay for should be a low priced item such as an ebook, an audio book, a teleseminar or webinar.  The price range should be between $10 – $50.

The second product or program you create should be within the $50 – $200 price range.  Again, it can be a webinar, teleseminar, telesummit, home study program or anything else that fits your business and addresses your customers’/clients’ issues and needs.

By this time, your community has come to trust you or they wouldn’t still be around.  The fourth level price range should be $200 – $500.  You might offer a boot camp for $347, and the fifth level might offer your one-on-one services for $500.

Get the picture?  By the way, when you offer your products and services at different price points, you are lowering the financial and emotional risk for your prospects. You are essentially making it impossible for them not to buy from you!

What’s in your  product funnel?

The Get Stuff Done Tool is still available as a free download.  Leave your name and email address in the box with the red arrow at the top-right hand side of the page and get the free download now.

Have you obtained your copy of 31 Powerful Lessons: Empowering Teens and Young Adults to Develop an Entrepreneur Mindset?  Click here and get your copy now.

 

 

There’s a Traffic Jam on the Internet Super Highway!

Now that you have researched your competition, you are probably feeling like everyone and their brother has jumped on the online highway and there is no room left for you.  Well, the truth is that everyone and their brother has jumped on this highway and you need to find a way to be the lead heading on down that road.

My personal business coach, Rich German of Epic Coach Academy, has an answer for getting around this traffic jam – “create, don’t compete.”

Depending on your niche, you may have a lot of competition and the way to stay ahead of the crowd is to create new and useful products.  Rich tells his clients that the facts, at least the way he sees them are:

•   Most people will quit before the payoff (meaning they’ll quit too soon).

•   Most people lack the patience and consistency required to succeed.

•   You have a unique gift and it is your duty to put it out there, and

•   No one can do it as good as you are going to do it.

He also says this, “Even though we’ve been programmed for mediocrity, we clearly have the option to rise above it.  When you establish yourself a true expert in your passion—through time, patience, consistency, dedication, and devotion—you will rise to the top.  You will monetize, you will make a serious impact, you will be happy, and it will be fun.”

The fact of the matter is Rich is right!

In our next article, we’ll talk about a sales funnel and the various levels of products you can create to put you at the head of crowd in your field.

The Get Stuff Done Tool is still available as a free download.  Leave your name and email address in the box with the red arrow at the top-right hand side of the page and get the free download now.

Have you obtained your copy of 31 Powerful Lessons: Empowering Teens and Young Adults to Develop an Entrepreneur Mindset?  Click here and get your copy now.

 

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