Are you looking to start and/or grow your online business this year? If so, this post is for you!
Back when I started my internet marketing business, one of the primary reasons that I was having such a problem getting it off of the ground was that I basically didn’t have a strategy in place.
In today’s video, I’m going to give you a six-step action plan that will help you get your online business off of the ground this year.
Now, before we get into the meat of the actual action plan. There’s a point that we must cover in order for this action plan, to help you. That point is that a plan is only as valuable as the follow-through behind it.
Most people don’t make anything happen in this industry for one reason.
They simply never take action!
They never follow through and do anything with the endless amounts of life-changing information that they are given on a daily basis and for the first year or so after coming online, I was exactly the same way.
I’d buy a product of the product and learn strategy after strategy. Always seeking more information without ever really getting off my ass to make things happen. It’s one of the worst feelings you can possibly experience in your entrepreneurial journey. The feeling of being bogged down and paralyzed by too many options without ever acting upon any of them.
It’s a situation that a vast majority of online, entrepreneurs, give themselves in to, and many never get out.
According to an article that I read about six months ago. 85% of everyone trying to start an online business at some point or another experiences either information overload or analysis paralysis, and many never break free from their devastating questions.
Don’t let that happen to you.
Take action based on everything in today’s post and begin to build confidence in your own abilities, to execute.
And here’s a mini-lesson: Confidence isn’t something that you just wake up one day with. It’s like anything else. It’s built through consistently taking action through expanding your comfort zones and through becoming an individual who feels confident in their abilities based upon past experiences.
All right. Now, for the action plan…
Step 1 – Start budgeting every month for paid advertising.
Paid advertising is what’s going to allow you to build your business at the fastest rate humanly possible.
Traffic is the lifeblood for your online business. And with paid advertising, you can have floods of it sent to any capture page you want within minutes.
Start small, cut out, the Starbucks and dinners out and start building up a paid advertising budget. Even if it first is only $100 a month, begin the process and get in the game.
Step 2 – Use your advertising budget to build your list.
Your email list is the single most valuable asset in your online business. Imagine being able to get your sales message in front of 1,000, 10,000 or even 100,000 people by simply hitting, “send” in your autoresponder back office.
That’s completely possible when you consistently focus on building your email list, every dime you spend on paid advertising should be going towards building your number one asset – Your email list.
When it comes to traffic generation, you must choose one form of traffic generation that appeals to you and dedicate yourself to mastering it.
Expect to waste some money. There will be a learning curve, but when it’s all said and done, you know will know how to drive floods of traffic anywhere you want on complete demand and the investment will have been well worth it.
Setting up your own paper lead program is, in my opinion, the most risk-free way for you to start generating leads and making sales on autopilot while you learn to effectively drive traffic through other mediums.
Step 3 – Leverage a Done-For-You offer to begin promoting.
Most people get this one wrong. But let’s talk about it for a second anyway.
If you are new to marketing, don’t try and do everything yourself from the very beginning. There are offers that you can promote for comissions that have been created by eight-figure earners.
Now, ask yourself, Do you think that their sales copies sales videos and sales webinars convert better than yours?
Probably?
Right?
So don’t try and reinvent the wheel. Creating your own products will come later. But until you’re building your list, consistently making sales, and implementing number four of today’s action plan. It’s probably a good idea to leverage a Done-for-you offer.
Step 4 – Learn Do and Teach simultaneously.
It’s widely understood that being the leader and authority in your marketplace makes everything easier. As the leader and authority, your levels of influence rise, significantly and sales become incredibly simple. People will buy anything you offer because they look at you as the solution for their problems. As an authority, you will be seen as an individual of value.
No one will doubt your products or service quality and low sales volume will become a thing of the past.
But here’s the deal. The only way to become a person of value or leader and authority is to constantly add value to the marketplace.
This is where the LEARN-DO-TEACH methodology comes into play.
As you begin to learn new skills, implement them and take more and more action, you need to simultaneously teach people what you’re learning and doing.
Set up a blog, or a Youtube channel, and for every action that you take, teach people what you did and what the end result was with a blog post. Even if it was a failure, showing people what not to do can be just as powerful and valuable and showing people what to do. Then go ahead and send the blog posts out to your email list that you’re building.
The process of creating problem-solving, value-driven content and then consistently sharing it with your list. will allow you to build a relationship with your list.
This month, my personal business. I had three high-ticket sales of over 2K.
And guess what? I’ve talked to each of those individuals on the phone and they each said, pretty much the same thing. Something along the lines of I’ve been following you for a while through emails and blog posts, and I’m finally ready to get started and you just seemed like the right person to join now.
Ask yourself. Why on Earth would I just seemed like the right person to join?
It’s because I’ve been the person consistently solving their problems through blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts shows, Etc, and putting in the work to build a relationship. If you consistently do this, sooner or later your prospect will be ready to join.
The question is whether or not you’re the person that they’ll seek out, and when they’re ready.
Step 5 – Get comfortable with investing heavily in yourself.
The most successful people in our or any industry realize one thing – That their intellectual capital is their number one most valuable asset.
So, I guess that your email list is actually number two…
And by intellectual capital. I mean, what you know, your skill sets.
Getting comfortable with spending money on products, attending events, and getting the necessary coaching that adds to your intellectual capital will be one of the things that makes or breaks your business success. I’m sure you’ve heard the term – “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
Well by investing in yourself and taking your education seriously throughout this year, you will drastically increase what you do know, thus, empowering yourself with the knowledge necessary to accomplish your goals.
The important thing to realize is that investing in yourself is a skill to be learned like anything else you can start small with $10 ebooks and slowly scale and you’ll soon, find yourself, spending thousands of dollars a month on your marketing education without hesitation.
Nowadays. I’m expanding my comfort zone and will without hesitation buy pretty much everything that I see that could possibly help me up to about the five thousand dollar mark.
That’s about where my current comfort zone maxes out and one of my New Year’s resolutions. It’s to smash that comfort zone and invest more in myself than ever before.
Step 6 – Stay consistent.
I’m going to keep this step brief because I feel it should be obvious.
Look, if you take the action plan that I’ve given you today and run with it. You will see results. But only if you stay consistent in implementation,
Realize that you’re running a business and running a business takes having operating hours where you consistently sit down and get shit done.
Commit to six months of action. You’ll be shocked at what will happen for you and your business.
And that my friend, is it?
So starting today,
Start budgeting every month for paid advertising to build your advertising budget.
Always build your list
Leverage a done-for-you offer to begin promoting.
Learn, Do and Teach Simultaneously.
Get comfortable with investing heavily in yourself and…
Stay consistent.
Follow this simple 6 step action plan and this year will surely be the best year of your business life.
If you’d like, more help with making this the year that you achieve success in your online business, click here to get access to the system that I use to generate 5 figure months.
With that said, if you found value in this article, go ahead and let me know what your biggest takeaway is in the comment section below and don’t forget to subscribe and share so that you are notified when I create more content just like this.
Do you have an Attractive Character that draws people to either buy your products or join your business opportunity? If not, then now is the perfect time to learn what an attractive character is and how to use the attractive character to market your business.
Several years ago, when I first got started in online marketing and network marketing, I found this guy online who had achieved a degree of success on the internet that I aspired to. Now what really drew me to him was not simply the degree of success that he had achieved, but that he had come from a background that was similar to my own and had faced some of the same challenges that I had faced. In fact, the first time that I saw him on a Google hangout telling his story, I thought…
This guy and I come from very similar backgrounds
I like this guy
We have similar experiences and have suffered some of the same pitfalls…
I trust what he is telling me, and
If he could achieve this level of success, so could I!
Now I wouldn’t call him a guru, but what I would say is that he had learned how to develop what is called an “Attractive Character” to help him market his network marketing business opportunity
What is an Attractive Character
So what is an attractive character? Do you remember Jared of Subway or how about Flo from Progressive Insurance, or the guy who used to say “Do You Hear Me Now” from Verizon. Each of these was an attractive character developed by the companies that they represented to help them sell their products and services. They were basically normal everyday people that you could possibly meet as you were walking down the street.
How to Develop an Attractive Character
How are you framing your brand’s Attractive Character?
Locking this down will make the content creation process infinitely easier.
I learned about The Attractive Character concept directly from Russell Brunson’sDot Com Secrets book. (If you haven’t read Dot Com Secrets yet or you don’t know who Russell Brunson is, stop everything you’re doing and google him and order your free copy).
Your Attractive Character is the person that your audience connects with. Think of Gary Vaynerchuck from VaynerMedia, Oprah, or ( for better or worse ) Jared from Subway.
Your Attractive Character is the person that will prove to your audience that their goals and dreams are not only possible but attainable for them. So how can you build an Attractive Character for your brand?
It starts by locking in these key elements:
1. Story
What challenges did you overcome to achieve the results that you have today?
Your backstory is what humanizes you. It’s what gives your audience a reason to follow you. It’s what shows them that you started right where they are, and how you’re where they want to be. Your story is what gives your audience hope that they can achieve their goals (which should ideally be aligned with what you’re selling them).
2. Parables
What actionable lessons have you learned from your journey? How can you frame these into parables? This is where a significant amount of your content will come from. These lessons are what will provide actual value to your audience. How can you take what you learned to make their journey easier and help them reach their goals faster?
3. Character Flaws
It’s important to avoid trying to frame yourself as some kind of perfect person who doesn’t make mistakes. People are drawn to people who are similar them; warts and all. They are drawn to vulnerability. Show your audience that you’re human and you make mistakes too. This only gives them more hope that they can achieve their goals, because they’re just like you.
4. Polarizing
Don’t be a people pleaser. In order to really connect with your audience, you need to show them that you’re not for everyone. Certain people won’t follow you or like you, and that’s just fine Some people like classical music and others like jazz… Your job is to find the people who like you and serve them. The people who DO follow you will be extremely loyal (and will likely buy all of your products).
Identity
Once you understand how to tie your four key elements together, you need to to form your identity.
This can be broken into four elements. Pick the one that best suits you.
The Leader — Are you the type of person that will take charge, be a thought leader, and call the shots?
The Adventurer/Crusader — Are you the type of person to try new things in your industry, test out new strategies, and come up with creative ways to succeed?
The Reporter/Evangelist — this one is an easy place to start. Just interview other thought leaders in your industry via podcast or blog. You will be given high-value by association with them.
The Reluctant Hero — Maybe you never wanted to be in the spotlight, but you had to because it’s for the greater good. This positions you as someone who truly has value to give. You’re only in this position because you KNOW that people need your product.
Story Lines
Finally, you will need to frame storylines that draw your audience in and teach them how to achieve their goals. People learn better from stories than any other form of information delivery. Your storylines are how you will tie together your four key elements and your identity.
The Story Line options are:
Loss & Redemption — think of Dave Ramsey going from totally broke at age 28 and then going on to become a Financial Coach (and selling his course).
Us vs. Them — Russell Brunson makes content specifically for non-funded or Non-Venture-Capital backed entrepreneurs. He refers to them as the “Real Entrepreneurs” that have to get creative with their marketing because they don’t have an endless pool of money.
Before & After — think about Jared from Subway and his transformation.
Amazing Discovery — this is why diet products and hair loss products always sell so well. These brands use an attractive character with a new discovery that solves a major pain point for the audience.
Secret Telling — Secret telling positions the attractive character as an authority figure and thought leader.
3rd Person Testimonial — Nothing is more powerful than social proof. If other people are praising you or your brand as a thought leader and someone who others can trust, it will go a very long way.
As a marketer, you have to develop your own attractive character and be able to find interesting ways to introduce that persona to your audience.
In most cases, YOU will be your attractive character. In fact, one of the key principles of attraction marketing is that you should brand and market YOU, not your business opportunity, and developing your attractive character is part of building your brand. As you expose your business opportunity to others, you might find it beneficial at some point to develop other attractive characters as well. For instance, you might want to promote the attractive character of one of your team members who have achieved success by following your coaching?
When developing your attractive character you have to ask yourself, “How attractive is my character?” “How interesting am I to watch.” If I were on a television show ( or youtube video), why would anyone watch me?”
In the next article, I will reveal to you what makes up an attractive character and the things that you need to consider when developing your own attractive character to help you market your MLM business opportunity or promote your affiliate offers.
Years ago, when I first started venturing into the business world, One of the first business models that I tried was network marketing.
Now, I still believe that network marketing is a viable business model, but most people don’t make any money in it and I believe that the reason that so many people fail to build a viable business with that model is that most of the people who get into network marketing just don’t understand the “marketing” part of the business.
This is, in my opinion, the number one reason why people fail in their online marketing efforts.
They believe that they can just spam their links on Facebook and Twitter and that people will just click their links and they will get rich overnight. I know, because, that’s exactly what I was doing.
In fact, just the other day, I saw a leader of a network marketing group tell their “students” to post something about their opportunity and
tag everyone they knew.
This is not marketing. This is just spamming…
According to The American Marketing Association marketing is…
“the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
In short, marketing is…
Communicating offerings that have VALUE for customers, clients..etc.
If your product service does not provide value to your prospective customers, clients, and business partners, You will not be able to sell anything.
Remember, your job as a marketer is to serve others by helping them solve their problem.
In fact, if you have a product, service, or solution that helps people solve their problems, you have a moral obligation to help them by exposing them to your solution.. If you focus on just “making money” you probably won’t make much money.
People can sense your intention and your desperation will bleed through in your communications.
So get the dollars out of your eyes and focus on helping as many people as you can.
If you approach your business from this perspective, you will make more sales.
So, when you get started in the morning, ask yourself the following questions…
“How many people can I help/serve?”
“How, can I help more people today? “
“How can I provide more service to my current customers and business partners?”
Pay it forward!
One way that you can get new customers is to provide to your prospective customers and partners is to lead with value!
Start serving them by providing them with service BEFORE they pay you a dime.
Doing this helps your business in multiple ways…
If you start by providing value, and you do it well, your they will come back to you to see if perhaps you can serve them at a higher level.
It puts them in your debt. I believe that most people believe in reciprocity. By providing high-quality service for free, most people will feel that they owe you..
You get them in your funnel. Now if you haven’t heard of a sales funnel, basically, it’s the process where you get people who didn’t know about you or your business to become paying customers.
If you do this right, you get to communicate with your customers, and over time, build and nurture a relationship with them and turn them into paying customers and fans of your brand.
Another reason that many businesses fail is that they just don’t have enough people “coming through their doors”. As an online marketer, you need to have people coming to your website every day (traffic) and then you need a way to convert that traffic into leads.
Setting up an Authority Website in order to bring business into your business is an essential step in establishing yourself as an expert that people should listen to. If you pay attention to advertisements on television or in magazines, you will notice that, alongside the bullet-point information in the ads, there is almost invariably a URL for their website. The Internet is a serious business tool for the biggest companies, and the smaller companies use it too as it is often cheaper and more effective than going ahead with simple old fashioned business practices. Advertising, for one thing, costs a lot more in print and in public than it does online.
A good Authority website, then, can be the difference between your business sinking and swimming. There are certain things that can turn a potential customer off a company just from a short view of a website. These are simple things, but they can cost you big money if you allow them to.
7 Things That Will Destroy The Effectiveness of Your Authority Website
1. Duplicate Content
Never copy and paste the content from other websites or sources. One of the ways that you should use to drive traffic to your authority website is by creating unique content that answers the questions of your target audience. If you copy and paste material directly from another website, then the master of the google-verse will punish you. Also, be ready to face legal actions from the actual owners.
2. Lack of a Clear Consistent Message Throughout Your Authority Website
You should always have a clear message for your site visitors. Explain what your site is about and how your visitors can benefit from your information, products and services. Every article or video that you post should have a purpose!
3. Poor Writing/Bad Content
You should always create content that is relevant to your audience. Your content should answer some of the pressing questions and issues that your target audience has and it should be well written and grammatically correct.
4. Broken Links and Improper Linking
Make Sure that you have no broken links and that your links take your readers to pages that are pertinent to the subject at hand.
5. Keyword stuffing.
Back in the day, one way to get the search engines to rank your site was by “stuffing” your content with keywords… Or having a keyword that you want to rank for “stuffed” into your content multiple times. The search engines have gotten smarter and these days, this will cause your site to be penalized.
6. Long chunks of text.
The attention spans of the average internet surfers is very very short! So, to keep the attention of your readers, break your content into short, meaningful paragraphs and use proper headlines and sub-headlines.
7. No Calls to Action
What is the purpose of your site? Is it Lead generation? Direct Sales? Regardless of the purpose of your site and your content, make sure that you drive your site visitors to the next action by placing appropriate Calls to Action buttons and phrases. People need to be told what to do next… So make sure that you tell them by having good calls to action throughout your site and content.
Bonus:
Below are just a few additional things that you should avoid when creating content on your Authority website.
Poor use of images – The wrong image, the wrong size, the wrong placement – these are just three things that can make a potential customer’s mind wander. And if you let their mind wander, it may just wander all the way over to one of your competitors.
Personal Twitter/Facebook Feed – Do Not show your personal social media feeds on your professional site.
All Caps Content – All Caps content is harder to read. All Caps content creates a rectangular form which is harder on both our eyes and brain. We tend to read words by shape, not by individual letters, and choosing all caps gives the appearance that you are shouting at your readers.
Remember, your authority website is one of the major tools in your marketing arsenal that help you to build your credibility in the marketplace, so do your best to avoid these pitfalls, and you will be on your way to building an Authority Website that attracts your target audience to you and will help you build your business.
Investing in personal development is one of the most important things that you can do to insure your success. Unfortunately many fail to make those investments and as a result continually fail to achieve the success that they are looking for.
Back when I was a young Karate student, I had the opportunity to travel to Romania to assist my Sensei (teacher) during a week long boot camp that he was giving to a group of students there. We drove from Wiesbaden Germany to Romania, a trip that took about 18 hours. As we drove we obviously had tons of time to talk, and my Sensei being the wise old man that he was had tons of wisdom to pass on. Somewhere along the road in Hungary, he began telling us that he taught Karate, not for the additional income that it generated for him, but for a sheer love of the art. But he went on to tell us that he had realized that he had to charge for his classes because people in general just don’t value what they receive for free. He explained that people would either not show up to class or not give the proper respect to the training hall if they were allowed to attend class without them having made some sort of sacrifice.
Now as an internet marketing coach and also as a Karate instructor, I realize the truth of what my Sensei passed on to me all those years ago. As a marketer, I constantly run into people who think that internet marketing/multi-level marketing is get rich quick – That they won’t have to make the necessary investment of time and money into their business. I’m here to tell you that you MUST learn to invest in yourself and your personal development if you truly want success.
5 Reasons why you must invest in your personal development
1. You will Increase Your Value in the Market Place
Every dollar and every minute that you invest in yourself will increase your value to the market. As you invest your time and money into training courses and coaching, You will increase your knowledge and therefore your value to those who have not yet made those same investments. Think of it this way, one of the reasons that doctors and lawyers command higher than average salaries is due to the fact that they have invested 100s of thousands of dollars and, in some cases, decades into their education. The more that you learn, the more that you have to offer those that you serve in your business and the more that you can earn for your products and services
.
2. You will Increase Your Self Confidence
Back when I was in high school, I was ( and still am ) a bit of a nerd. I did well academically. Well enough that I received a scholarship to the Naval Academy. But boy, when I got there, I found that I wasn’t as smart or educated as I had thought. Those kids were running circles around me. One of my best friends was, as a freshman in college, taking differential calculus while I was taking college algebra. I received my first F’s ever and was really not sure that I belonged there, however, after putting in the time and effort, I was able to bring my grades up and actually was able to get A’s in most of my classes. The experience of having put in the hours ( sacrifice ) and having gone from F’s to A’s definitely served to help me recover my confidence. As you increase your knowledge, your confidence will grow as well.
3. By Investing In Personal Development You Will Begin to See New Opportunities
The more that you expand your mind and increase your skill set, the more that you will begin to realize that there are many opportunities for creating income, happiness and abundance in your mind. Your mind is like a vessel that expands as you pour experience and knowledge into it. The more that you learn, the more that you can learn. By investing in personal development, you will expand your mind and as a result your capacity to see new possibilities and opportunities.
4. You will appreciate the value of the Investment
This goes back to what my Sensei was speaking of. If I were to give you a $3000 coaching session and only charged you $1 for it. You would value it as being only worth $1. And as a result, you would not put in the time and effort that is appropriate. However, if you had to pay $3000 for the coaching sessions, that $3000 actually represents a number of hours that you have already sacrificed, and as such you would have some “skin” in the game and would give the appropriate amount of attention and time that the coaching deserved. It has been said that many lottery winners go broke in just a few years after winning millions of dollars. This is partly due to the fact that they got something for nothing. They don’t value the money because they didn’t work for it – didn’t sacrifice for it. By investing in personal development you will give that investment the care and respect that it deserves because it actually represents a portion of your life that you have sacrificed for it.
5. By Investing In Personal Development You Will be Able to Get others to invest in you.
By investing in personal development and in your business, you will position yourself as a leader and others will be attracted to you and will invest their time and money to help you succeed in your business. There are tons of people out there waiting for you to show them the way, but you must have developed yourself to the point that you are 2-3 steps ahead of your prospective customers, clients and team members, before they will be willing to invest in you. By investing in your personal development, you become a lighthouse that people far and wide will flock to for guidance.
I personally invest in courses and coaching regularly and have had met people who currently earn millions each year, but still spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in their own personal development. If you want to “be like Mike” you’ve got to act like Mike. These people continually invest in themselves because they realize that it is the best investment that they will ever make. They consistently invest both their time and money in courses, classes, mentorships and coaching – Shouldn’t you be doing the same?
Applying the Law of Attraction to your MLM Home based business may sound mystical, magical or even spooky, but it is critical to your success. ?Many think that the law of Attraction is derived from Buddhism. ?Others think that it is related to Karma.?But the law of attraction is simply a way of thinking and living your life and in this case, a way to help you achieve your goals for your MLM Home Business.
The Law of Attraction says that what you visualize and feel with your emotions consistently will become your reality.By believing that you present in your feelings and thoughts, you attract the things that you desire by thinking about them and having emotionalizing them. ?When you are able to tap in to the law of attraction, you visualize yourself in the place that you want to be.
According to the law, you will attract?all that is?the necessary your strongly emotionalized desires?to manifest?themselves in your reality.?You will attract the things that you give your focus and energy.
So How can you apply the Law of Attraction in your MLM?business. ?Here are a few ideas.
?
Step 1. Decide what you want From Your MLM?Home Based?Business.
Deciding what you want is the first sttep that you you must take in applying the Law of Attraction. ?The thought is that you must be able to clearly communicate to the God/The Universe, what it is that you want.. You must be able to clearly visualize your desires and if you don’t know what they are you cannot express them in your mind. ?So start by being as clear as possible about what you want from your business.
Step 2. ?Visualize Success in Your MLM Home Based Business
Visualization is what creates your personal “vibration” as Napoleon Hill put it. ?The Law of Attraction responds to this vibration. ?So you should, on a daily basis, sit quietly and envision yourself as successful in your business. ?Be as specific and as detailed as you can possibly be. ?See yourself as you would like to be, in the clothing that in your mind represents success. ?See yourself taking phone calls, finding new clients, closing deals, selling product. ?Spend time every day with these thoughts in your mind. ?Imagine that you have already succeeded. ?Experience what it feels like to have achieved your business goals.
Step 3. Believe It’s Yours
You then have to take a leap of Faith and believe that it is already yours. ?That all that you want has already been rewarded you and that you are attracting them towards you daily. Like any belief you must overcome any doubt that you have and “Act as If”. ?If you want to sell more of your product or service, believe that it can happen and as you visualize more and more, move into trust. ?Accept that these achievements and business goals are yours already.
You must believe that you are worthy and deserving of the goals that you have set so you must cultivate a healthy sense of self and self worth.
4. Be Careful of Negative Thoughts
The law of attraction means you attract those things you focus on – so if you attract negative things, it is due to a negative vibration you sent out. The law of attraction applies to bad things as well, in other words. It is said that you should make sure to keep it positive so that you do not attract business failure or frustration.
Apply these principles daily. ?Create business rituals that re-inforce the thought habits that you are building. ?And enjoy the journey to your success!
My Friend Mentor, and?Multiple Six Figure Earner Diane Hochman Offers an monthly in-depth Mindset Mastermind Group that she has dubbed “The Deep Abyss” where we discuss creating the mindset that is necessary for success. ?Click the Link Below to Join the Dynamic Group Today!
placing appropriate Calls to Action buttons and phrases. People need to be told what to do next… So make sure that you tell them by having good calls to action throughout your site and content.
.?But the law of attraction is simply a way of thinking and living your life and in this case, a way to help you achieve your goals for your MLM Home Business.
