New Consequential Strangers

September 7th, 2009

A Few Years Ago
Many years ago, maybe more, a few years after I was in college anyways, I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in about 5 years. I had met him when I was in high school, knew who he was but never got to know personally till my summer before college started. I remember that it was right around the time I had read the book called Psycho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz.

Cybernetics
This 1960’s classic had at the time, a large impact on my life and even before college started I was earning some pretty good money, well more than I’ve ever had up to that time. It gave me perspective and at the time I was able to easily convey and teach some of the principals in the book. This individual didn’t know I had learned most of this from a book but I did talk about the concepts in it and after five years after I spent time with him, he told me how what I talked about had changed his life. He said he changed his life around, got focused, got rid of some of the demons that held him back, things were going good, and now had a chance to thank me. There was one problem…. Ah… what did I tell him five years ago? Even as I write I’m not sure. But I’m sure it was along the lines of that there are always going to be things that no matter how much influence you might have you have, you really have no control over.

Letting Go
Now this certainly sounds defeating, but what he then told me is that once he knew he had no control he learned to let it go. He learned to control his stress. He didn’t get mad at things. He made a conscience decision to ENJOY life, and at the time he was happy, optimistic about his future, and looked forward to tackling anything that got in his way. I eventually fell into back into the trap of the 40-40 plan (40 hours a week for 40 years), and commenced to go to college. I was re-conditioned to what we are taught where getting a good education, then job, would make us happy. I later found I would like to learn the lesson back from him but I haven’t seen him in 30 years. I suspect he took what he had learned from me and took action. If I only would have…

Today
Fast forward to today, now even though he was just one person I knew those many years ago, we had made differences in each others lives. His experience with me at the time, to me, was inconsequential. He was just another person I met, spent a little time with, and we then went our own ways. I really have no idea whatever became of him, nor me to him. Back in those days we where limited by the number of people we could meet. Of course this is much more in a larger city than a rural city but you were limited by the physical ability to personally meet. Enter the age of the internet. We are going to have the possibility of not only meeting people from our own local locations but globally as well. You have the ability to meet new people who you can influence with your knowledge and experience and likewise with theirs.

Questions
So the only questions are how many new people are you going to meet online? How many are you going to influence? How many are going to influence you? Are you going to share something life changing with them? Who’s the next consequential meeting going to be with? What is the message you want to share?

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Your List Is Your Ticket

July 26th, 2009

There’s a saying that the list is the ticket. The ticket to freedom. The ability to fire the boss, freedom from debt, freedom from worry, freedom to move to wherever you want in the world. There is a dynamic involved with the the generation of prospects via list creation that is different depending on the style of marketing. It is the typical quality vs quantity paradigm. There are those that try and get any name on the list and will aggressively market to that list. As fast as people get on that list they will leave.

However, the situation is different for those using attraction principals to build their lists. They are providing value to the list and because of this they not bailing at nearly the rate of the others. Why? I may sound like a broken record here but people do not want to get sold to! If you are aggressively selling to your list before they know who you are or know what motivates you or other personal characteristics you are just simply another salesmen to them. Even if they do not leave the list they will be extremely wary of anything you have to offer. The ones that are following the attraction marketers are learning and getting educated each and every email. They are actually looking forward to their next email. They may not be ready to enter any of your opportunities but as long as they continue to get value they will stay on the list and eventually after they learn more about you and your opportunity or product, and how to market, they will buy.

Needless to say, one list will not be quite as large as the other, but will have a much higher quality. One will not have had to use aggressive sales, or as I heard in a webinar this week, any selling at all. If you’ve done it right, and have brought people into your business based on attraction principals, if for some reason that business went south, you will have willing new partners in any new business that you choose to enter. Not so with the other. Now that’s the ticket I want.

Photo Credit
Hryck

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It’s About People Not Products

July 3rd, 2009

So someone wants to start a business? An online business at that? Where 95 plus percent of people don’t ever make one thin dime? How are they going to do that? Those are the questions we certainly hear from our self talk and from others that share their ideas with when they first start. Not everyone is geared to be an online marketer. Most people are not even prepared. Most will start by finding a product on a click bank type affiliate site and start figuring out where they can advertise. They start using Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace and anything else they can lay one of their affiliate links down. They justify it by saying it’s advertising. In reality it’s spam. If someone or anything reminds people of someone selling to them what will they do? Run for the hills, Some simply think if they have a page with their product with all the features and a button that says ‘buy me’ on it, people will start purchasing. After all, it’s a great product and it should sell itself. The product may be good but they haven’t grasped the idea that they may be only 1 of 25000 people selling that product. How do they get traffic to their site? Even then, why would they buy from them? What differentiates that person from the other 24,999?

That’s where marketing takes over. Marketing is not simply fancy advertising. Marketing consists of psychology, creating, communicating, fulfilling, exchanging, educating, writing, research, and plain hard work. Are you ready to learn all that? Even then, where are you going to learn all that? You’ll need trainers, mentors, books, video to start to grasp what is involved. Your best bet is to learn from someone who has gone through the same things your going to have to. Personal development is a given. You will need to read books and listen to audio to learn the correct mindsets you’ll need to ingrain upon your self. You’ll also need to develop networks of people that are based on attraction principals. The things you learn will be shared openly with this network. You will also learn from them. You will earn trust. You will start to cultivate relationships that will be based on you, not your products.

Boy those two paragraphs sounded a bit harsh didn’t they. There’s a bit of truth in there for me, but I’m also sure it’s true for most online marketers when they started. The good news is there is a lot of training out there now that is being provided. We don’t have to spend as much time learning from our own mistakes. Being able to hear and understand what others have gone through works just as well. Networking with the right group can save even more time. It has outright become a science. Getting involved with the right group can provide you the materials for success and the only thing that will be left to do is to implement what you learn. As contradictory as this sounds, online marketing is a people business. It’s about nurturing relationships. About helping and educating people that you’ve come to know. It’s about sharing your personalities and nuances with each other. It’s empathy and understanding. Selling is never about the product. It;s about relationships and the sooner anyone who wants to get into the 5% of people who make money, or the 3% that become vastly rich, learns this, the quicker it will happen.

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Historic Proportions

June 25th, 2009

Recently over at Facebook I had as a comment in the “What I was thinking today” section at the top the following, “Chris. W. Kilber is thinking that today is a day to make some history! What are you going to do today that you will remember for a long time?” I’m not sure what was in my coffee this morning or it must be the new vitamins I’ve been taking recently that has really fired me up and made me optimistic about a lot of things. Nicole Sundene then replied that it was empowering and a tall order. That may be, but was it the cost of success? Anyways, so then I happened to hear something on the radio dealing with the saying, “historic proportions”. It gave me an epiphany. I was thinking of something that could make a historical impact upon your online business, especially if you are just starting out or you started out following the wrong advice. Here is what I came up with.

There’s a lot of information written on online network marketing. There is so much in fact that it’s hard to separate the grain from the chaff. We as online marketers need to steer or coral potential business partners or customers into a position where we can educate and inform them to the services and offerings we have. How do we do that? We create a “marketing funnel” and attract people NOT by being a salesmen and touting the benefits of your product, but by building “YOU INC.”! I would bet that 98% of the products out there are being marketed by 1000’s of people. How can you be the one whom customers come? What you need to do is differentiate yourself from the others using attraction principals and move them into your funnel.

A successful entrepreneur will build their marketing strategies around processes and systems. They will build their own lists of prospects, customers, and partners by offering real world value. This may be in the form of information, how-to’s, time saving methods, insight, motivation, and other things that your list will value. As your list grows and they begin to gain your trust the potential products and services that you may market to them, which may be the same as others are offering, will have a better chance to be purchased from you. As time goes on you could even develop lists that number in the 10’s of thousands. By setting up your funnel properly and using an auto-responder you then have the ability to build your relationship with them with one simple email. As long as you continue to provide value, they will stay on your list.

It is imperative that you set up your marketing funnel as the basic marketing tool in your arsenal. Your possibilities are then endless once you know how to use this basic business building principles to grow your organization on the internet. By using “YOU INC.” as the attraction to your marketing funnel you will be able spin income streams with a variety of products and services. Once you understand this thoroughly and put it into place you will transform your profitability online. We all know that success begets success and imagine what you could do with 50-100 new opt-ins each and every day. How much would your business grow?

In closing, seek out what you need to learn, study it, implement it, and you will increase your online marketing success tremendously, maybe even to historic proportions. You can then thank Nicole for inspiring me to write this. What are you doing today that will be historical?