Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye » advanced skills

The Simple Mind “Hack” That Can Earn You Millions

Loren Woirhaye — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:22:57 +0000

The Simple Mind “Hack” That Can Earn You Millions is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

Selling something is the only way to make moolah in the marketing game. Duh, right?

I’d like to take a couple minutes (well, maybe 3) of your time to give you a few tips – stuff that took me years to figure out, distilled to a drinkable, yet buzz-inducing brew.

Here’s how you can:

Adapt the mindset of the best salespeople to your own personal quirks and interests.

Discover how to stop wasting energy marketing what you want to sell and start selling what people want to buy. There’s a subtle, but meaningful difference.
Become a marketing sleuth to locate areas where you can make money with your present skills

Also:

The simple daily way I grow my writing skills, market my services, and blunder into good ideas – all simultaneously – and easily expand them into articles and sellable information products.

Sound good?

Let’s start then.

Writing Is The Core Skill

Marketing is a writer’s game. Even if you market by cold-calling, you still work from a script. All writing is just expression of clear thinking, and effective writing wins the dollars in marketing.

Mindset

I prefer to write mostly about the nuts-and-bolts marketing stuff I know best, but I do believe your beliefs and mindset have a lot to do with the results you get in business.

Nowhere is the quality of your mindset more apparent then when you try to sell something, like your services, in person or on the phone. If your price is cheap enough you can shuffle your feet, look at the ground and do the “awww shucks” routine” and you’ll still make sales because you’re giving away your product.

However – When you want to command market-parity prices or prices higher than the competition, salesmanship matters.

Salesmanship skill is complex. There is no simple secret to winning at sales. But be diligent about refining your game, and persistent about working the market and you’ll always win.

The correct mindset is “never quit”.

Some people think that “never quit” means you should be stubborn and always follow your own internal counsel, as if success in business is a matter of a mentoring dialog between you and yourself.

I don’t agree with this at all. Often to succeed at selling you’ll need to get real about the marketplace. That means selling what people want to buy. Finding out what people want to buy can be a trial and error process that costs you a lot of time and money, or it can be a methodical, research-oriented process.

Both methods have merit. With trial and error you may blunder into ideal opportunities where your interests and skills intersect with market demands. You can find some real sweet spots this way so always be on the lookout for good ideas.

I get a lot of ideas for good stuff to sell by browsing and commenting in online forums. The WarriorForum is my favorite for marketing info. If somebody likes something I wrote and thanks me for it I often copy and paste my own forum comment and expand it into an article or blog post. String a few articles together and you’ve got the beginning of an ebook product you can sell – and this sort of thing evolves in a gradual and fun way.

The thing about the serendipity approach I enjoy most is the thinking and writing happens naturally (it’s unforced) and often my own ideas are nicely expressed. Clear writing beats rambling volume in today’s marketplace, so when my own rambling habits go well, I hold onto those ideas and try to expand on them.

The other approach to finding profitable niches and ideas for your own products is niche research. I have to confess I don’t like the keyword research part of internet marketing at all. I find it tedious, finicky, boring – a necessary evil.

If you’re at all like I am, you’ll want a system to make the time you invest in market research as effective as possible.

That’s why I’ve put together a comprehensive course on niche market research.

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–> To get the discount:

1. Just go to http://zerodollarmarketer.com/nichesleuth

2. Read the letter to make sure it’s the right product for your needs, then click on the order button.

3. Enter your email on the order page, click through and enter this coupon code on the next page: NICHE

4. Click on the “Update form” button and the price will go down from $37 to $27.75.

That’s it! You’ll get instant download of the whole 116 page course. It’s breezy reading, yet rich in detail so you’ll find it very useful. If you don’t, there’s a 60 day money-back guarantee so you’ve got nothing to lose.

Cheers,

_Loren Woirhaye

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

The Ultimate Formula For Creating An Instantly Memorable Business Name and How To Create The Most Effective Slogan For Powerful Advertising Results

Loren Woirhaye — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:54:58 +0000

The Ultimate Formula For Creating An Instantly Memorable Business Name and How To Create The Most Effective Slogan For Powerful Advertising Results is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 7 – 12 minutes

I’m going to tell you how to do something that is not always easy. If you do use this information however you will be building enormous wealth creating potential into your business.

To start, your business name is very important. If you have an existing business or website, you may be restricted in how you can rename or rebrand it, but if you are thinking of launching a new business the following is must-know information for you.

What’s In A Name?

Coming up with a name for your business can be a challenge—especially when you need to match the name-branding to a domain you can get. If you’re promoting a website and trying to do any kind of branding you should not consider using anything other than a .COM.

The problem with domain types other than dot-coms is that, in general, people are going to go to the dot-com first. They won’t remember that you’re the other “Flowers To Go” —they’ll just go to your competitor’s website. Basically, if you don’t get the dot-com you’ll be driving traffic to your competitor on your dime.

You might want to call your flower store “Flowers To Go” but if you tried to get the dot-com you’d be paying through the nose for it if it were even for sale.

Ugh.

What’s the SOLUTION then?

Well, you need to be a little creative to get an available .COM nobody else is squatting on and only willing to sell for a fortune. You’ll have to find a way to make an available .COM memorable.

The store name doesn’t have to be identical to the URL but there should be a memorable and sense-making connection between them. If you think in terms of how you can connect the two at the beginning you’ll be much better off in the end.

Don’t Get Cute

In terms of coming up with a name for the business, going cute is usually a dumb idea. Lots of pet grooming businesses, nail salons, and hair studios have stupid-cute names, but I challenge you to find any business with a cutesy name that’s really grown. ‘Nuff said.

HOT TIP
1st Criteria: Telling What Your Business Is In The Name
A lot of business names gratify the ego of the founder/owner. That’s fine if that person’s name on the business is an asset because he or she is already well-known, but in most cases the public won’t know or care who you are or what your personal name is. They only want to know, “what’s in it for me (to pay any attention at all to you)?”
That’s right! Not a single one of your prospects or customers gives a rat’s rump about you! They only care what you will do for them!
This classic rule of advertising (the WIIFM rule or “what’s in it for me?”) is even more important today. Due to copious media exposure and sensory stimulation, people have learned to instantly seek ways to categorize and pigeon-hole new resources. If they can’t easily figure out where your business fits in their lives, they’ll delete it from their memories. Thus the business name you choose should ideally tell what your business does. This is not the only approach to naming a business but probably the best. The more instantly graspable what your business does for customers from its name is the better.
Examples of of business names that tell what we need to know
Toy’r'Us
International Business Machines (IMB)
Dunkin’ Donuts
Burger King

The Mind-Control Trick That Makes Your Business Instantly Memorable

Madison Avenue agencies know a thing or two about mind control. They don’t always do it well, but the most inspired and effective advertising in the world usually has mind control working in it.

Mind control in marketing is actually not voodoo and I wouldn’t even call it unethical, it’s merely a way of making your advertising more effective and memorable.

One of the most powerful ways to brand your business is with a strapline. A strapline is more than a slogan. Ideally it contains a customer-benefit oriented statement specific to your brand. When the strapline is powerfully memorable, conveys a strong benefit to the customer, and has the business name, URL, or phone number completely integrated, it functions as a powerful competitive advantage for your business.

This was done well by the 1-800-flowers people. I don’t even know if it qualifies as a proper strapline but it delivers a powerful marketing message: that all you have to do it pick up the phone and dial this toll-free, easy to remember number and you can get flowers over the phone. I don’t even remember the proper strapline, if there was one, but I know the number because that’s all I need to remember. Killer.

Don’t Make This Dumb Mistake and Subsidize Your Competitors’ Advertising—At Your Expense!

The strapline was botched by the “Say it With Flowers” people because they failed to tie the memorable phrase to their brand (FTD). Effectively this slogan advertised the whole flower/flower delivery industry. That would be fine if every company in the industry footed a share of the bill.

“Say it With Flowers” is a brand-advertising fail as an audible slogan because effectively they were advertising for their competition by promoting the idea of buying flowers, not the idea of buying from FTD. Whether it works better in print I don’t know. I do know I had to look it up to remember what company uses that slogan and I’ve heard and seen the ads hundreds of times.

How To Tell The Difference Between Slogan and A Mnenonic Strapline That Also Meets the 1st Criteria

Here’s a bunch of straplines, some of which contain mnenonics. Look through them and notice how many fail to embed the actual name (or URL) in the strapline. Some of the straplines still worked due to massive ad-spend and cleverness, but imagine how much better some of them would have been if the specific name of the business was embedded in the strapline.

You’ll notice as you browse through those slogans that not many of them actually contain the brand name in the strapline itself. By far the best way to create your strapline is to have your brand or domain name actually attached to it in an integrated way, so the strapline doesn’t sound right without your business or domain name in it.

How To Create Your Most Powerful Strapline

One of the most powerful ways to brand your business is with a mnemonic strapline. This is more than a slogan. A mnemonic is usually a verbal twist, a little poem or catchy turn of phrase that makes the whole phrase more memorable. Musical mnemonics are what make songs so memorable. A musical mnemonic strapline is impractical unless you have the budget to run TV and radio ads, but even without music a mnemonic makes a strapline instantly more memorable.

Remember the Roto-Rooter jingle?

“Call Roto-Rooter, that’s the name, and away go troubles down the drain.”

The jingle is annoying, but brilliant and memorable because the name of the business is locked into the jingle in such a way that it would be impossible to not remember the name correctly. The Roto-Rooter jingle contains multiple mnemonic devices. First, the business name itself is an alliterative mnemonic. That means each word starts with the same sound. The tune itself is memorable, plus “down” and “drain” are alliterative. The jingle also has a sneaky embedded command to “call” and at the end the jingle tells what result the customer will get: “troubles down the drain.”

Is that powerful or what?

The best strapline may contain alliteration, rhyming, or perhaps a clever mental image that locks the strapline to your business name. The mnemonic is the device that makes the strapline memorable. The entire strapline may not be a mnemonic device, but if it is not the name, URL, or phone number When the person remembers the strapline, they remember your business name, phone number, or URL.

Furthermore, it’s best if you can build one or more powerful memes into the strapline which function to make it more memorable and effective. Memes are a fascinating concept and can be used powerfully in advertising and in fact many advertising writers use them without knowing it. Using memes intentionally to lock advertising into the public mind is very advanced advertising stuff and there are not many sources which tell how to do it well, but your most useful tools are your own brain and your skill at using it to invent ideas.

Today I won’t write about memes, because it’s a deep topic I’ll write about later. For now I’ve given you some good material to work with in naming and promoting your business. Go put this new knowledge to work right away while it’s fresh in your mind.

Perhaps you’d like to join in a discussion by commenting below or asking questions. Please do.

“Think And Grow Rich” – The Mastermind And The Spirit Of Total Harmony

Loren Woirhaye — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:41:33 +0000

“Think And Grow Rich” – The Mastermind And The Spirit Of Total Harmony is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 6 – 9 minutes

I’ve read “Think and Grow Rich” several times. The first time I thought it was kind of old-fashioned and, well, kind of goofy.

On subsequent readings I’ve softened my opinion and now it’s a book I keep by my desk and thumb through often.

How To Get “Think and Grow Rich” For Free

First off – if you’ve never read it, and you want to know what this is all about, you probably should. You can download a public domain edition here

I recommend you procure yourself a printed copy because a book is easy to carry around and read anytime, and mark on and dogear too.

Considering how many copies of the book are said to have sold, I would expect to run across used copies more often than I do (I am an old book freak). My favorite is the 2005 Penguin/Tarcher edition revised by Arthur Pell. Dr. Pell added more than he took away in the edition, including stories which illustrate the principles featuring currently famous luminaries such as Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey.

The update also eliminates or at least tones-down the racist and sexist undertones I see in the old editions, which, after all, dates from 1937 and was written by a white dude. Actually Hill may have been a bit more progressive in his views of gender and racial equality than the average white guy of his time, but the bias is still there I think and it’s softened in the later edition.

What’s So Great About “Think and Grow Rich”

Well, for one, it’s something of a standard in personal development literature. We can all get our hands on a copy easily enough, and enough derivative works have been written to make it a certifiable classic. There are other, more contemporary books I could write about with more enthusiasm, but for what I want to do here “Think and Grow Rich” is ideal.

The book covers a lot of territory and if you open yourself up to it you’ll find material that inspires you no matter where you are in your development. That’s part of what makes it a classic. Even people who’ve attained a lot of wealth still re-read “Think and Grow Rich” to inspire their hearts and clarify their goals.

The Harmonious Mastermind

Today I want to talk about the Mastermind concept. Basically Hill says that in order to accomplish a big goal, like accumulating a lot of money in business, you cannot do it on your own. You need other people’s ideas and input. You need a council of adviser. These might be partners, consultants, mentors, friends, or people who are working towards similar goals in their own lives.

The key thing is that big success is a team effort. You need others conspiring for your success. They will, mostly, only do so if there are rewards to be earned for themselves as well. While I won’t go so far as to sing the praises of Ayn Rand, I do think that most people act most of the time out of self interest and altruistic motives are over-rated. While somebody might help you out to make themselves feel good and just want that, most people who assist you in accumulating wealth will be most motivated by monetary compensation.

Compensation and Incentive

Compensation is an important in getting most people to do their parts in the work that needs to be done to get your riches. More important, in my view, is that all work together in the spirit of total harmony.

I don’t mean you have to finance everything out of your own pocket. After all, the idea of “Think and Grow Rich” is to acquire riches. Thus the financial rewards to your mastermind team may be counted in other ways. You might, for example, form a mastermind group of people who possess different but complimentary skills. Then you can trade time and skills among yourselves.

Building The Team

This means that people who are unpleasant to work with and won’t get along with the others on your team should be ejected. Of course an occasional disagreement is a good thing, but if a mastermind team member is persistently troublesome, that person will drag down the whole project and may even lead to it’s failure. Thus such a person, if he or she cannot be persuaded to correct his or her conduct, should be replaced, no matter how skillful the person is.

Hill’s thesis regarding total harmony is unforgiving here. Skilled people may always be replaced, but the person who has the virtue of a pleasing personality is much more valuable to your team, provided he or she brings value to the table in terms of skills, insight, or specialized knowledge. Furthermore, it does you no good to work with people who are not passionate and committed to the project.

When To Kick Your Brother Off The Team

In my experience it’s just much easier to get the creative juices flowing is a group when everybody is enthusiastic and wants to progress. You may have to “fire” your brother or sister or best friend from the team if this person is a negative influence undermining teh shared goals of the other participants.

This can be a hard decision, but getting rid of dead weight early on is the best way to do it. Some people have latent talents or are late bloomers. Do not confuse silence or a lack or contribution to the team effort as an inability to contribute. As a leader, it is your responsibility to assess the people working with you both accurately and compassionately, so don’t rush into kicking people who have potential off the team.

Money Getting and Creativity

Money-getting often falls along entrepreneurial lines, and entrepreneurial activity is fundamentally creative. The word “entrepreneur” literally means a person who moves resources from where they have lesser value to where they have more value. In the new economony that translates not to running silk and spices from Asia to Europe on ships, but in developing ideas into valuable products and services which can be offered to the market through the mechanism of advertising and thus turned into money and wealth.

Today lots of great ideas and information are available for free on the internet. The secret sauce in the recipe is harnessing, re-arranging, and packaging ideas to make them salable.

This process of taking ideas and turning them into salable products is made easy today in many ways with the internet… but there is also competition to think about. It doesn’t matter if you had the idea for free video sharing first, YouTube beat you to it and your opportunity is gone now. There is a need for timely, speedy implementation. When you have a team you can rely on fast and thorough implementation will be much easier for you.

Your mastermind, when assembled, will help you to generate more ideas, faster, develop them further and faster, and implement those ideas to turn them into money and wealth faster and better than you could on your own.

Feeling The Spirit Of Harmony

I think you will “feel” it when it is there, when you are on the same “frequency” as the others with whom you are conspiring for success. This group may come together quickly for you or it may take awhile. The important thing is to make up your mind to assemble such a group, even if very loosely at first, and plant the seeds of desire in the combined imaginations of those people in the group.

Real Success Factors For Making Money In Internet Marketing

Loren Woirhaye — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 20:36:38 +0000

Real Success Factors For Making Money In Internet Marketing is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

There’s a lot of nonsense out there. Especially about making money online. Other stuff too.

The number 1 Big Lie: the “Average People” lie.

This lie is meant to give you the idea that you can make a lot of money and get rich without working to develop a level of competence and skill commensurate with what we expect of entrepreneurs.

The truth: You can make a lot of money in this industry lying to “average joes” about how they can continue to be unskilled yet get rich.

The reality – to get rich ethically so you have longevity and a good reputation you need a skill people value.

That’s it, really.

A lot of people get lied-to about “average people making extraordinary incomes” – not lied-to exactly, but led to believe that making a lot of money requires no more than a few basic, easy to learn skills – sending an email, copy and paste, and so on. This is hogwash – if you want to get rich you have to get skillful. End of story.

Are you an “average” person who wants to get rich? The first thing you need to do is stop thinking of yourself as “average” and start thinking of yourself who is going to develop and learn an exceptional level of skill at getting the money…

…then you go and start taking action to get the skill. The money will come with certainty if you do.

I want to dispel thought you might have about what average means. You probably are thinking “this guy makes success too hard, I’ll just go eat a pizza because I’m not smart enough” – the real truth is that success and getting rich has far less to do with native talent of IQ than you think it does.

Average doesn’t cut it in the world of getting rich as an an entrepreneur. If it were then half your friends would be rich entrepreneurs.

Are they?

I think I am a pretty bright guy and it took me a long time to figure out how money-getting works. I know a lot of people who are probably as smart or smarter than I am and they haven’t got a clue about getting money.

The point is that getting money is a skill, and you can learn it. What matters more than how smart you are is your willingness to learn how to do it.

There are many, many millionaires who are no doubt geniuses – and there are also a many, many millionaires who just studied how other people got money and did the same things and got it themselves.

They were not particularly innovative about getting their money, and they mostly did not get lucky – they went to extraordinary lengths to discover the mechanisms of getting wealthy and they did the work to apply those mechanisms to get money for themselves.

You don’t have to be super-smart or clever to make a lot of money – but you do need to have qualities inside yourself that even most people who are smarter than you don’t have.

…after all, how many smart people do you know?

How many of them are rich?

How many of them are goof-offs with no real ability to get money?

Here are the qualities that produce success, regardless of how smart or clever you are.

Here’s what leads to success (distilled from Richard St. John’s work on success):

Do something to make money you can have a passion for.
Work consistently and try to have fun doing it.
Be good at what you do – develop your skill.
Focus on one thing at a time.
Push yourself harder than the people who fail.
Serve people – serve their needs.
Generate ideas and implement them – it’s not hard to get ideas when you know how.
Persist until you learn what works and what doesn’t, then persist some more.

How Your Big Fat Ego Is Sabotaging Your Ability To Make Money

Loren Woirhaye — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:51:31 +0000

How Your Big Fat Ego Is Sabotaging Your Ability To Make Money is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

Your ego’s job is self-preservation and advancing your personal dominance over your environment. In the old days when the law of the land was based on physical domination of others and competition for scarce resources, perhaps letting the ego run the show was a good path to becoming a successful warlord or local king.

Times have changed. These days the path to success in business falls along the lines of getting people to voluntarily agree to buy stuff from you. Largely gone are the days when you could have a local market cornered.

Today’s consumers have a mind-spazzing array of shopping options – through the internet, catalogs, and local retail. Unless you have some sort of true exclusivity (such as a groundbreaking patent) you are competing for customers in your marketplace. In order for those customers to prefer to buy from you, they need to see demonstrable evidence that you offer superior service, lower prices, more convenience, or exclusivity of product your competitors do not offer.

Nobody (except your mother) will buy anything from you unless they feel they are getting value for their money. In today’s marketing environment, which is very competitive, to get more than middling sales results your customers need to actually feel they are getting substantially more value from your product/service than they are paying for it.

Selling on value isn’t the same as selling on low price. While price-slashing is a workable and proven short-term method for making sales, the practice of discounting also trains consumers to never pay full retail. If you train your customers to buy from you only when you are discounting, you’ll experience considerable problems in the long term.

You shouldn’t be selling at rock-bottom prices unless you are in the close-out business. If the only tactic you can use effectively to make sales is low prices, you won’t make much profit and when you are forced to raise your prices or go broke, you’ll lose most of your customers, too. The rather obvious reason is that when people shop on a low-price criteria, they are perceiving what they are buying as an undifferentiated commodity supplied by many vendors.

Because of the way our brains manage and sort information, consumers want to put their perceptions of your business into a “slot” in their brains. if you do your marketing smartly they’ll put you in a slot in their brains that makes them think of buying only from you when their need arises in the category they have your business pigeon-holed into.

We are all of us, if we are in business for ourselves, in the business of serving customers. It’s useful to think of yourself as a servant, like a butler. A butler’s job is to anticipate the needs and desires of his or her clients and do what should be done to make the client happy and comfortable.

Unless you’ve been trained in servitude, being subservient may grate on your ego. It will until you realize that being of service is not the same as being an inferior person to your clients. In fact, being of sincere service is very much where the money is. The hospitality industry is the perfect example – the best hotels charge the highest prices because they treat the customers like royalty, which makes them feel good. You cannot put a price on “feeling good” like it is some sort of commodity, because being treated like royalty makes you feel good in a different, more exciting way than feeling good from eating a bar of chocolate.

There is an element to doing this that I can best describe in terms that verge on the spiritual. To really serve well you have to get outside yourself and see things from the other person’s point-of-view in a way that is loving and empathetic. If you aren’t sincere about wanting to help and serve your clients, you’ll be arrogant and egotistical about it.

It is certainly true that some arrogant and ego-driven people climb the ladder of success, but if you aren’t a type-A personality you may want a gentler approach. Non type-A people (like yours truly) don’t want to build our lives around aggression and relentless ambition; we want to be “in the flow”, and learning to serve in the way I’m describing here is an amazing way to cultivate that “in the flow” feeling.

Effective advertising is counter-intuitive because in order to create it you need to put yourself in another person’s shoes: your customer. From your customer’s point of view she wants to hold onto her money until she is persuaded by some factor that buying from you is in her best interest. If she isn’t convinced of her own advantage in buying from you, she’ll probably pass on the purchase because if she bought anyway she would have less money to spend on other things. While customers can and will spend much more than you would think if you market your business to them, in general each individual customer has a finite ability to spend money.

By offering what people really value – emotional factors like “feeling good” or “feeling safe” or “excitement” – you remove their ability to make your product/service a commodity in their minds. When your business is not perceived as a vendor of a commodity, but a unique and superior provided of exceptional experience of some sort, you can increase your transaction size, your frequency of transactions, and your referals too.

The Buddhist’s teach that in order to subjugate your ego (to attain real inner growth) you need to have a strong ego in the first place. Your ego could be a strong sense of your identity and life direction, which tends to manifest in the form of career ambition and dedication to excellence in your skills.

On the one hand a strong ego drives you to be really, really good at what you do, so you can prosper materially.

On the other hand, in order to really empathize with the way other people feel and understand what they really want, you need to learn to push your ego down and get “underneath” other people so your own selfish interests aren’t getting in the way of serving them and helping them get those good feelings they really want. Those feelings: feeling safe, feeling good, feeling excitement – they are like money in the bank when you develop the ability to deliver them consistently in your business.

The first step in going down this road, after you know what you want out of life, is to find a way to get outside your own needs and see how what you can do to make other people feel more special in their own lives.

Stop getting started – and Get STARTED!

Loren Woirhaye — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:15:31 +0000

Stop getting started – and Get STARTED! is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

Eric Louviere is smart about some online business stuff that really matters – so I’m re-publishing something of his here. Not because I’m too lazy to write something, but because Eric says it very well and you should take it to heart. I’m not some lone bug-eyed freedom-prophet – I get my insights from watching what works in business – and reading what other people who watch what works write. So read this:

If you’ve been a newbie for over a year, then you might be a redneck.

No seriously, if you are a newbie right now, then you need to stop being a newbie and start selling stuff. In fact, just get a squeeze page up and send traffic to it.

If you do that, then you’ll be further along than 95% of all newbies right away.

Send traffic to a squeeze page, and you’re in business. That’s it.

Want to make six figures per year? send enough traffic to a squeeze page that you build a list of 5,000 subscribers or more.

I’m now fully convinced that people dont make money because of the BARRIERS they put up that prevents them from making money.

BARRIERS = mindset, making things harder than what they are, self sabotage, fears, overwhelmed, buying too much, lost, analysis paralysis or whatever the heck that is, etc etc

If you just put up a squeeze page and sent traffic to it, you’d be in the game… instead of on the sidelines wondering what to do and how to do it.

dont know where to start?

traffic to a squeeze page. that’s it. start there.

focus 98% of your time on that, and nothing else and just watch what happens.

Look, the best way to learn anything is to do it. The best way to learn this business is to do this business.

Once you are sending traffic to a squeeze page, the rest is easy…just promote stuff via emails. dont overcomplicate things and if someone posts below in this thread complicating this, ignore them.

It really is that easy.

(you make it sound so easy Eric)

IT IS!

If you are not making any money, it is because you are not selling anything.

(but Eric, I have a squeeze page)

Are you sending traffic to it constantly?

(but Eric, I am using articles and twitter)

Neither have ever made me a dime. I’m not saying they dont work, but I cant speak for those methods. But, if you’ve been at those methods for more than a few weeks, then that’s a lot of time to spend for nothing.

I would never put my income on the line where it depends on Twitter or articles. That’s just me. Feel free to disagree. I dont care.

Paid traffic
Affiliates

That’s what has worked for me. Again, twitter may be great for traffic, I just would not focus my effort there. SEO works too, I’m just not good at it.

So, if you wonder why so many never make any money in this business, it’s because they cant get traffic… they never-ever get started anyway… they are never selling anything… they offer no services… they sell nothing… they buy everything… they never treat this like a business… they just read, post, buy, read, post, buy, disappear for a while, come back, buy, post, read… etc etc etc

…for years

and are still newbies.

Sell something!

Eric

You are your own worst enemy!

Loren Woirhaye — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:01:21 +0000

You are your own worst enemy! is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

You and me are own worst enemy.

… and it’s all in our minds!

…Especially when we let negative feelings put up walls to achieving our personal and professional goals.

We see this every day – person A begins talking enthusiastically about a new opportunity and immediately persons B and C shoot the idea down by focusing only on the negative outcomes that could potentially result.

I’m guilty of this – big time!

I’m a pessimist (learned from experience) about a lot of business stuff – since most businesses fail I think I’m justified – because it is far easier to get it wrong than get it right!

In the big-picture however, I am a relentless optimist. I know that each new plateau of success requires overcoming unwelcome challenges.

That’s life. Check your own experience to corroborate my opinion – it will probably match-up.

Case-in-point (non-business): I sucked at guitar when I started. With each new accomplishment in skill, dexterity, or comprehension of musical principles more finicky challenges presented themselves – and could only be overcome with dedicated practice and self-assessment.

And some days I just felt like I wasn’t making any progress at all… sometimes for weeks.

Then… Big Breakthrough – I would find myself looking back at my experience of playing guitar just a few weeks before and marvel at how much better I sounded with my new insights.

Sometimes this is called a “quantum leap” – and a certain school of thinking goes thus: we may practice skills and be frustrated at our apparent progress – but we are really laying the foundation for a quantum leap: a sudden upgrading of our “operating system” that enhances our results, and often grow our self-esteem by leaps and bounds.

You have to be careful. Be realistic about the W.O.R.K. success demands – and preserve your core positivity about getting what you want.

One Exercise I do often is to imagine where I want to be in 3 years, or a year, or ten years… visualizing the life I hope to have created my then.

This works… you probably won’t get exactly what you envisioned because life throws curve-balls at all of us, our goals change, and… well – this is my opinion – the details don’t matter so much as getting to a place where you FEEL you’ve accomplished what you’ve set out to do.

You might visualize yourself driving a hot red Ferrari with a beautiful blonde in the passenger seat in 3 years…. but when you get there you might find yourself married to a great person with little kids and you are driving a Volvo and not the Ferrari – because your priorities shifted.

That’s growth.

It’s a good thing.

Overall growth is something you can look forward to with unmitigated enthusiasm.

Weaving Optimism And Positive Thinking Into Success

Positive people tend to draw towards other optimistic people, and of course negative people cluster together like schools of fish.

The difference between the two groups is that the optimistic ones tend to progress through life with greater confidence; whatever challenges they encounter they are prepared to face and overcome.

Optimistic people never worried about encountering problems with anything. They understand that things happen, more importantly they also understand that there is a solution out there somewhere. Their goal is to simply resolve the issue as quickly and efficiently as possible, which they know they will be able to do some way, somehow.

It’s for this reason that those who think positively and optimistically are far more likely to be successful in both their business and personal lives. They can’t help but know that everything is going to work out the way they expected to, if not even better – they expect to encounter obstacles along the path however and it is the end-goal that matters…

…and as we know “getting there is half the fun”.

Since you can’t realistically skip the journey to success and become instantly wealthy and skillful, it makes sense to pursue the wealth and lifestyle you want with a patient attitude towards the process.

In most cases it’s the immaturity of wanting “INSTANT SUCCESS” that holding most people back from getting the results they want at all.

There is also the issue of what Napoleon Hill terms “ACCURATE THINKING” – because while positive attitude is essential, when you examine the patterns of behavior of successful people you will see that clearly all of them have an accurate notion of the WORK involved, and of the possibilities for failure.

I have failed many times in business myself. I’ve failed even more in my personal life – but I usually learned more from my failures than I did from my successes.

“Easy come, easy go,” they say.

Loren Woirhaye prefers to play gypsy music on guitar or accordion – but when he isn’t doing that he writes direct-response copy, consults with clients to help them make money with their websites, coaches people who want to fire their employers and blogs about success, life, his personal foibles, and online marketing at http://malibumentor.com

Goal getting – how to get what you want out of life without being a Napoleon or a Type-A

Loren Woirhaye — Fri, 01 May 2009 05:58:32 +0000

Goal getting – how to get what you want out of life without being a Napoleon or a Type-A is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

For a guy like me to write about goal-setting is a little strange – because I am more averse to setting goals than a lot of people – or perhaps I just do it in unconventional ways.

I’m gonna try to share some insight. Like most stuff, take what you can use and the stuff that feels stiff or unnatural to you… well, consider what foreign lessons have to offer but also follow your intuition. Getting to where you want to go and enjoying the journey are equally important in my book – which is why I’m averse to the kind of “type A” GET RESULTS goal-setting we sometimes see.

There are some sort of formulaic and common-sense stuff you should take to heart when deciding what your goals are going to be. Writing about it always seems kind of stiff and academic to me – because there is a big difference between saying you’re going to kick the ba1l past the goalie and actually getting on the field, getting knocked-around and persevering doggedly until you succeed.

Getting goals has a lot to do with stubborn determination in my experience. How you set them is less important than how committed you are to moving forward to achieve your end objective.

Personally I’m usually pretty flexible with how I proceed, because I view lifestyle design as sort of like shaping a lump of raw clay – a process of discovery.

Goal Setting – Theory And In Practice

Setting one or more goals seems to be a straightforward process: you establish a specific goal, one that’s measurable and has a defined timeframe for completion. You implement your plan, measure your progress towards reaching your goal and then evaluate the outcome objectively to refine your process.

On the surface of things, it reads well and sounds easy enough to do. Unfortunately, it rarely works out that way for numerous reasons; primarily because we often fail to establish realistic goals.

Additionally, we often casually set goals with only a hazy view towards how they’ll actually be accomplished. And while we’re typically motivated at the beginning of the process, it’s not at all unusual to lose our motivation somewhere along the way.

When preparing your own goals, it’s important to first understand that every goal you set must be realistic and readily achievable, given an appropriate amount of time and resources. For example, setting a goal to earn $25,000 per month within three months, when your present earnings are less than $1,000, is probably unrealistic. On the other hand, setting an ongoing goal to increase your earnings by 5% or 10% per month is not only realistic, but more likely to be achievable.

Once you’ve defined a goal you believe you can accomplish, the next step is to break it down into smaller, manageable tasks and scheduling them in sequence (assuming one task depends on the completion of another). Before defining the target date the overall goal must be completed, be certain that each task is given a reasonable amount of time for completion and allow the sum of the tasks to define the completion date, rather than arbitrarily selecting one.

Depending on how far into the future your goals are planned for, it’s helpful to schedule regular progress reviews, even if you’re the only one involved. For example, scheduling time every Friday afternoon to review your progress and make any necessary adjustments will keep your goals current. Don’t be surprised if something unexpected interferes with your scheduling from time-to-time. That’s normal and you will simply need to identify some way to compensate for it.

Another artificial barrier to actually meeting your goals is the process itself. Be careful to avoid implementing a goal management process that consumes more time than the goal itself.

Aside from actually working the process towards eventually realizing your goal, the final step is to take some time to evaluate the overall process and your performance at the end. This should be done objectively and embraced as a learning opportunity, one that will help you to improve your performance the next time.

With proper planning, setting realistic goals can only benefit you and your business in the long run, especially if you streamline the goal management process for yourself. If you think of it as an evolving process focused on continual performance improvement, over time you will see a measurable improvement in everything you do!