Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye » business models

How To Quintuple Your Income (Not Easy, But Tested and Proven To Work)

Loren Woirhaye — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:29:37 +0000

How To Quintuple Your Income (Not Easy, But Tested and Proven To Work) is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes

Good News… that sounds like bad news…

(this post was updated July 25, 2010)

If you haven’t started your internet business yet, you may be too late… if you’re an average person.

Average people would like to be rich and successful – but they won’t take the kind of rigorous action getting what they want requires. 95% of people are pretty average in terms of how ambitious they are, which means they don’t have the fire in the belly entrepreneurial success requires. Most of the people you know are average in this way – and thus are poor role models for the budding entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs and business owners pay themselves, on average, about 500% what they would make with their same skills as employees. Thus a $100,000 a year skill becomes a $500,000 a year skill. Most people surveyed would like to own their own businesses, yet most lack the aggressiveness to do so and remain employees for life.

Factoid
The word “employee” incidentally, has the same Scottish root as the words “ploy” and “exploit”. That should tell you something.

But If YOU Are Tired Of Working For Average Rewards And Want To Boost Your Income By 500% Here’s Some Advice To Help You Get There…

you cannot do it thinking like an employee. You have to shift your mindset to become an instigator. An instigator is one who sets events in motion. Creating that motion is what being and entrepreneur/marketer. No entrepreneur is not a marketer because entrepreneurs must always sell their ideas to the marketplace and sometimes to investors.

How To Get Money In The New Economy

The internet start-up marketplace is very, very crowded. It is like a gold rush. Only the most aggressive and fast-moving will get the big rewards. For feeble competitors there will be scant rewards. Tons of people have blogs and sites that could make them full-time incomes… yet only a tiny, tiny portion of those people make more than a few bucks a month. These folks, whatever their virtues, are feeble competitors in the new economy.

Even if you have already “started” your internet business, have you really got started ?

There’s a huge difference between putting up a blog or website and creating a business. The first thing is easy. I set up sites in under an hour. Setting up a real business is a different matter.

There is good news however. Innovation is not needed of you. Successful marketing is not a matter of innovation alone, as Emerson thought when he penned this fallacy:

“If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”

Emerson may have been a fine writer, but he was a dope about marketing. He seems to have believed that innovation or quality alone would insure success.

In Emerson’s time it was not true, and it is not true today.

Innovation can be a powerful advantage, but if you are bootstrapping your own business, trying to innovate is likely tilting at windmills. Inventing something new and unproven can be slow, costly and draining. All too often the inventor emerges with little clue how to market the innovation.

The good news here is that imitating what is working for other businesses, and improving it where you can, is the surest route to profitability and, if you make appropriate choices, wealth.

Producing a quality product or service alone will not bring you money. Money from your internet, or any other kind of business, will only come as a result of salesmanship. There is an unprecedented quantity of quality information about how to start and market a business today. The internet puts so much useful information at your fingertips ignorance can be no excuse.

Therein lies the problem. The problem you may be having is not in knowing what to do, but it how to do it.

It is likely nobody ever taught you the job of marketing your business, especially online with all the tricks and twists and technology that comes into play. Sure, you can read up on how to “do SEO” or “article marketing” or “build a list” but unless you’re actually getting your hands dirty you aren’t learning how to do the job of marketing.

Of course, we marketing bloggers do our best to try to explain how to promote, but without action – and smart action too – you won’t get far trying to make money online. Internet marketing is a craft and it is intricate. If nobody has told you this before I tell you now.

Because marketing is intricate it is hard and it requires perseverance to succeed. As you persevere you learn and grow from experience and, gradually, you can become a skilled practitioner. Mentoring or coaching can speed the process in many cases. This is because chief among the decisions you must make is to decide what extraordinary value you will bring, yourself, to the marketplace in exchange for the money you desire.

This level of focus does not come easily to most people. Even many in the elite 5% have to work hard and struggle with their own doubts and self-limiting behavior for many years before they achieve that crystalline focus. Again, many books talk about how to do it – Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” is good to read, or read again if you have read it before. There is no substitute for single-minded determination in the getting of money, especially if you want to get a lot of it. And without focus that determination cannot take shape.

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.

Reality Check For Real-Estate Investors – How to Out-Market the Facebook and Twitter Mavens

Loren Woirhaye — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:45:50 +0000

Reality Check For Real-Estate Investors – How to Out-Market the Facebook and Twitter Mavens is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 7 – 12 minutes

I’ll start of bluntly. Social Networking is a huge time sucker… because it’s about making “friends” (who are not really your friends). In order to forge real relationships with social networking sites you’ll need to devote massive energy to it.

A lot of real estate investors are using Twitter and Facebook. They’ll want to be “friends” with you to try to recruit you into their deals. As an investor yourself you’ll get a lot of other investors “friending” you in hopes of getting your friends for themselves and recruiting them into their own deals.

Now the question is not whether this is fun. It clearly is fun because a lot of real estate investors do it. The also spend all day on their blackberries and Iphones following people on Twitter and Tweeting about what they just ate.

Facebook – it’s new, it’s entertaining… but is it effective, measurable marketing?
In my opinion it’s not. You don’t have to agree with me. You can test it for yourself. I recommend tracking your time investment.

Why Social Networking is a Awkward Marketing Solution for Real-Estate Investors:

The Fake Friends Factor. You’re sharing your lists or “friends” with everybody else basically, and everybody’s got an agenda to sell everybody else their deal.

Sales Noise There is a huge quantity of “sales noise” on social networking media… even Linked-in, which is one of the better ones. In fairness, sales noise is present in all marketing media these days.

Challenges In Establishing Thought Leadership. Even on Linked-in there’s a big laddder of thought leadership to climb to establish yourself as an authority figure. One way to do it on Linked-In is answer questions… but when you see how prolific and entrenched some of your competition is you’ll wonder if it’s worth the trouble to populate Linked-in with 100s or 1000s of posts showing your authority… and remember, they have to be good posts because the competition is very, very sharp and prolific.

Sharp Competition on social networking sites is a big problem for all marketers. You have to be highly committed not only to making “friends” but also to following up with them with personal contact, which can be extremely time consuming. Basically, you’ll be competing with other “real estate investors” who spend their whole day on Facebook and Twitter.

Have You Got The Desire?
The real question is not whether you can enter the ranks of Facebook, Twitter, and Linked-in real estate mavens. The question is whether you have the time and the desire to do so.

Several months back – after a year of testing – marketing guru and direct-response testing freak Johnn Reese blogged that he was closing his Facebook account because it was sucking up his time and it was too hard to determine if Facebook networking was growing his business at all. Social relationships on sites like Facebook are not quantifiable in terms of dollars you can make for the friends you have. That’s the problem. Social networking is not measurable marketing, which is why guys like Dan Kennedy don’t do it. Period.

What Reese and Kennedy and others who “get” direct marketing do is focus on measurable R.O.I. (return on investment). That means developing ads, squeeze pages, email campaigns, sales letters, and hard-to-resist offers that get people to take action. When you spend X amount of dollars putting an offer together and buying advertising to get traffic to it, then you can look at what you spent (in dollars – and you can track you time too and factor in your own hours for work you did if you like) and look at the revenue you generated.

That’s direct response marketing. It’s testable. It’s proven to work to get leads and grow businesses that use it. And it’s measurable…. unlike the dollar value of your Facebook “friends”, your Twitter “followers” and your Linked-In “connections”.

Now I know you’ve looked around at what other real estate people are doing with the internet and you probably figure that because they are doing this Facebook stuff you should be too. The thing is, most people are almost totally clueless about effective, measurable marketing. When you imitate the clueless people, you re-enforce cluelessness in yourself.

I am not saying you shouldn’t have a presence in social networking. You probably should, but building your marketing around such an unmeasurable method is a house of cards.

For real-estate investors you’ve got two major target groups you’ll be looking at attracting:

People who have money and want more of it
People who haven’t got any money and want to get some by selling their house quick and cheap
Additionally you’ll find people who’ve got hustle, but no money – they’re looking to put-together deals and recruit investors themselves. When you generate investor leads you’ll get some of these people just checking out your marketing, but with no interest in investing in your projects.

Now the people who have money and want more of it – and already trust the idea that real estate is a good investment, generally, which is a pretty common opinion. You won’t be swimming upstream to convince people investing in property is a good idea. Your challenge is to persuade them to invest their money with your instead of one of the 10s of 1000s of competitors trawling Facebook and Twitter for investors of the first category.

By the way – I believe a problem well stated is a problem half-solved, which is why I focus so much on what’s wrong with marketing with social media here. It’s not because I’m some jerk who naysays every new idea.

If you’re going to attract the people with the money, you’ll need to establish some kind of thought leadership in your field. The basic process I recommend is:

Build an email list. This keeps the cows in the corral since it’s a private channel of communication.
Run teleseminars
Sell your own info-products
Upgrade info-product buyers into investors.

To build that email list you’ll need to advertise… and actually Facebook advertising is worth looking at due to it’s geographic and demographic targetability. Myspace and Stumbleupon have similar targeted ad systems. These systems vary somewhat but the basic principle of how they work is the same.

You’ll want to run ads, get clicks, send those visitors to a “squeeze page” (not your main site), offer a “goodie” of some perceived real value, and get those names on that email list so you can offer them access to your free teleseminar. Then you sell ‘em stuff and get ‘em to invest with you because they like you, trust you, and believe you when you say “I know what I’m talking about”.

Of course there are other ways to attract people interested in making money as real estate investors. Viral software giveaways is one on the more interesting ones. Since I develop viral software so it’s a bit of a loose claim for me to say “oh, just make some software” – but truthfully a simple, useful software isn’t too costly to get made. Under $1000, easily. In some cases you could just get an existing software and re-brand it. I have resources in this area so ask me if you’d like to know more.

The cool thing about the software approach is your competition doesn’t even have it on their radar as a viable method, much less know how to create and promote it. Comparatively speaking, doing the stuff I’m talking about here is like bringing a firetruck to a water-balloon fight.

Yes, you are fighting your competitors – not just for customer dollars…

You’re locked in a battle for Attention. We are in the age of battling for”Mindshare”. It’s not enough to have a good offer, you need to capture imaginations and engage human emotions.

Now as far as the people looking to cash-out with a quickie sale of their houses, they won’t be looking for software. They’ll be looking for somebody they can trust not to screw them over. Assuming you’ll be doing most of your buy-deals locally to you to start, I’d focus on driving geographically targeted traffic to some sort of voice mail and/or squeeze page offering a free report on something like “How To Sell Your House Now For Fast Cash And Get Top Dollar”. You’ve got to offer the mouse some free cheese.

Again, I recommend issuing a free report – perhaps mailing it with a CD. This gives you the opportunity to follow-up by phone – and build trust. A script could go something like:

Simple Phone Script

“Mr. Jones?

Hi, I’m Mary. I’m calling for (your name) from (your business name). You requested our free mailing “How To Sell Your House Now For Fast Cash And Get Top Dollar”, and I wanted to (make sure we got your address right, see if you got that in the mail, see if you had any questions of feedback).

Oh, that’s great.

Would you mind if I asked you a few quick questions?”

… and so forth.

Then you establish some trust. You can invite these people to a teleseminar or even a local meeting about how to improve their situation with a quickie sale.

This game is all about winning trust. The mechanisms I’ve outlined here may seem a little elaborate, but the purpose is not only to bring in more revenue, it is also to create a barrier-to-entry to prevent your competition from rustling your cows.

It is my belief that the business you can reasonably get from social networking, blogging, and website tweaking will be disappointing compared with the results you can expect from developing the systems I have outlined here.

Cafepress – An Example How To Get Other People To Build A Business For You and Then Screw Them Over

Loren Woirhaye — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:26:16 +0000

Cafepress – An Example How To Get Other People To Build A Business For You and Then Screw Them Over is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

Here’s something interesting… and sad for the people affected by it.

When you choose to build a “business” around somebody else’s rules you put yourself in a vulnerable position.

If the company which controls the infrastructure you depend on to make your money changes the rules (usually to favor itself, not you) you could see your income drop by 50% or more.

This is apparently what has happened to “shopkeepers” at CafePress.com.

I’ve never paid much attention to Cafepress – so I had to go look at the website to jog my memory it’s about to have some context.

Cafepress has established a middleman-business, similar in some ways to what eBay does. It’s not an auction site though. What CafePress does is make prints, coffee mugs and T-shirts. Artists design these things according to their talents, set the designs up in CafePress, and split the proceeds with CafePress.

CafePress Helps Artists. Or Does It?

The benefits to the artist are many: lots of traffic because CafePress has a real marketing budget, little or no money tied-up in stock or storage space. Pretty cool deal for the talented artist/designer who doesn’t want the responsibilities of running a screen-printing operation or marketing his or her own products too much.

CafePress designs number in the 1000s. They are extremely “niched” and most I looked at were clever, funny, snarky, sarcastic, or provocative. There’s one with the Republican elephant humping the Democrat donkey, for example. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be pro-Republican or anti-right-wing. The humor is ambiguous.

In any case, there’s a clever T-shirt or coffee mug for just about everybody. Presumably racist hate speech and really offensive stuff is screened-out, but I saw a few T-shirt designs with the F-word on them, so it’s not really targeted at kids.

What’s cool about CafePress is the wide selection of cool gifts for all sorts of personalities. When you buy from it you get to support independent artists and humorists. That’s kind of cool.

Apparently for the last several years CafePress has been paying-out generous bonuses to “shopkeepers” who manage to do some good monthly volume. Nothing motivates people like more money, so shopkeepers who wanted bigger and bigger bonuses worked hard at coming up with catchy designs that sold well (great for both designer and CafePress) and also at promoting and driving traffic to their individual “shops” – sort of a CafePress boutique where each artist shows off his or her quirky vision.

As a result of rewarding the artists so nicely CafePress has built a stable of steady designers who make their full-time incomes designing for CafePress distribution and promoting their shops.

But…

A storm cloud was on the horizon.

CafePress now has a lot of clever designs that sell well and make a lot of money.

Now CafePress has decided, from what I’ve read, to pretty much whisk away a lucrative bonus structure some of their best designers were depending on for their incomes.

Cruel? or just business?

One CafePress watcher wrote on June 6th, 2009:

“Losing the volume bonus was just one example of Cafepress putting the squeeze on shopkeepers. As of June 1st 2009, the corporation just ripped 60-90% of the profits away from the very designers and artists who made them so big. There’s a mass exodus going on over there of people who have been with them for years all up and leaving. Either the corporate heads are amazingly stupid, or they are up to something devious with this short term cash grab. I speculate that they are looking to buy another company, or are about to be bought themselves. Can’t see why they’d be raiding the cash drawer in such plain view otherwise.”
SOURCE -

http://cafepressshopkeepers.blogspot.com

How To Sell Your Services As A Freelancer – And Earn Darn Good Money Doing It

Loren Woirhaye — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:26:06 +0000

How To Sell Your Services As A Freelancer – And Earn Darn Good Money Doing It is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 8 – 14 minutes

Selling your services as a freelance writer, graphic artist, web designer, programmer, or consultant is a great way to take control of your future. But one word of warning – you’ll never get anywhere near earning a professional-level income freelancing on the cheap – and on the internet, cheap is the price many clients want to pay.

I’d going to share key methods of growing any kind of consulting or freelancing business using the internet to promote your skills – and do it profitably.

Why “paying your dues” and “working your way up” by slaving away for tiny payouts is a load of horse manure – and why you should start saying NO! to the prospective clients who want to hire you for chicken feed.
How to make your name “Google-able”, and why this is important to prospering as a freelancer.
4 key marketing habits 90% of online freelancers don’t have which makes you visible as a provider of skilled services.
Why online freelancing “the obvious way” will trap you in just another version of the rat-race – and why it will mostly yield low-paying clients and dead-end projects.

In the last year and a half by business focus has shifted away from promoting “make money – anybody can do it” stuff to growing my copywriting and consulting skills and clientele. In the new economy of today making money online isn’t as easy as it used to be – there are a lot more buyers, but also a lot more sellers.

I’d like to acknowledge what nobody promoting any how-to courses with names like “The Easy Way To A Six-Figure Freelance Writing Income” doesn’t usually mention in their promotions – that the freelancing market is competitive and clients will usually try to find freelancers who are cheap.

Here’s the truth, Bubba.

“You’ll never get anywhere near earning a 6-figure income freelancing on the cheap. You have to find clients who both have the desire for a skilled freelancer, who has his or her shit together, and the ability to pay you.” – Loren Woirhaye

The idea that somehow the marketplace will magically appreciate that you’ve paid your dues after working for chicken-feed for awhile is false. Perhaps if you worked in a J.O.B. and started in the mail-room you could work your way up, but in freelancing you’ll only ever get what you ask for and you have to learn to say “NO!” to work that just doesn’t pay well enough.

Clients who want the work done cheap will always tell you things like “there’s more work on the way and you’ll get it and the money will be better,” yet that work seldom materializes.

This article began to form in my brain when I read a blog post by well-known freelancer and author Bob Bly – who has some great ideas for more old-school methods of promoting yourself, like doing a lot of public speaking, publishing books, writing a regular newspaper column and so on. I’ll not debate that these are useful, but if you’re just getting your freelancing career going you probably aren’t anywhere near ready to crank out a book or two and maybe you just want to get some paying jobs, not become an instant guru-type by speaking at business luncheons.

“What if you’re just starting out and don’t have raving fans, well-known clients, an established newspaper column, books in print, and so on?”

Well, there’s good news, because while some of that old school stuff was really the most effective way to build a consulting business 20 years ago, these days web marketing can be done cheaply – and since a lot of your clients might expect you to know something about it, competent self-marketing online demonstrates your own skills while it wins you better clients too.

Unless your prospects are senior citizens (a good group to market to, incidentally, just not so much online) chances are they have at least a little internet savvy. Whether they’ve run across your name online or offline, if you have a website or claim to know a thing or two about business consulting or marketing your prospects are likely to “Google you” at some early stage.

In fact, your prospects may be Googling you before they even make you aware of their interests – so what they find when they “Google you” forms part of their early impressions of your skills and competence.

The old-school way of getting into print publications is likely to bring anemic Google results, you can puff-up your own “Google-ability” with easy online self-publishing.

Whether or not you “own” your own name as a “Google-able” phrase is a matter of luck to some extent. If you share a name with somebody who is famous or prominent you’ve got a problem… but if nobody else is making an effort to “own” the name online, you’ve got options. I write from experience because I completely “own” my own name online, owing to its uniqueness.

If you don’t have a unique name you may wish to add one or two middle initials and use these to differentiate yourself in terms of search engine visibility (”Google-ability”).

As far as content publishing you’ll want to publish under the name you will promote yourself as (your “Google-able” name”) – so if your name is “John Smith” (unfortunate) – you might want to promote yourself as “John J.J. Smith” in order to differentiate yourself from the teeming hordes of other John Smith’s.

How To Pump Up
Your “Google-ability”

Write a blog under your name – you can publish basically the same blog on different free blogging platforms: WordPress.com, Blogger.com, Weebly.com – just a few – but you should early on get a domain name and have your own unique “Dot Com” and a hosting account (about $10 a month) with which you can have your own personal blog.
Write articles and publish them to article directories like EzineArticles.com – your purpose is to “brand” your name in as many online resource-websites as possible, so don’t go overboard and submit 100 articles to one directory and ignore the 100s of other directories.
Comment relevantly on blog posts, linking back to your own website or blog, using your name as your “anchor text” when possible.
Use press releases. There are dozens of press release directories, so do spread your releases out on several of them. Most of them aren’t all that fabulous, but many are pretty good for name visibility in Google, and many yield decent quality backlinks.

The stuff I’m explaining here is SEO (search engine optimization) for dummies. These are not tricks or ways to “game” the search engines. The above four methods should be habits you integrate into your daily and weekly marketing activity to build credibility around your name. The number of references to your name will build up over time – even if you are the only one writing about yourself – and pretty soon prospects will be Googling you and thinking you aren’t a total idiot… and they will call you and say “I Googled your name and you seem to know something about marketing yourself” – which is a compliment and an indicator of interest in doing business with you.

The WRONG Way To Get Paid Decently For Your Services

A lot of people decide they want to be freelancers these days – after all, corporate jobs are drying up and a lot of skilled people are out of work. The cost of getting started as a freelancer is generally pretty darned low – mostly you just have to declare your intentions and go looking for clients.

The most obvious place to get clients as a freelancer is on the freelance sites like elance.com and getafreelancer.com – these sites are great if you want to work really hard and get paid poorly. The bidding competition is fierce for any freelance project that pays more than perhaps $10 an hour, so if you’ve got a plan to be a $100/hour freelancer, you ain’t never gonna get it on those sites… unless you’ve got some extremely specialized skill like programming – but even if you are a highly skilled programmer I doubt you’ll land many jobs on those bid sites paying so well.

Most of the freelancers who work on those sites are working hand-to-mouth and trying to do a lot of work at cut-rates. Most people starting their own businesses don’t really understand the mathematics of profit. They don’t understand that to build a clientele who will help yopu grow, you need to offer something other than low prices.

In order to sell at higher prices you, the freelancer, need to take control of the selling conversation. The freelance bid sites are designed so the people looking for freelancers can make their selections based basically on lowball pricing. If you bid on such jobs you’ll probably only get a phone call and a real chance to sell your services and the value you bring to the table if your price was real low to start with.

Situations like this are toxic to building a legitimate business in my opinion, but the people using them to hire help like the arrangement because it gives them a lot of perceived power. The fact that when they pay cheap prices they generally get cheap work tends to escape many of them – just read some of the job listings and you’ll see entrepreneurs complaining that they haven’t been able to find a freelancer who can write a decent 50-100,000 word book for a $1000. I wonder why?

Get it? The freelancing sites are basically meat-markets. There are so many freelancers willing to underbid the work it gives the people doing the hiring warped ideas about the value of freelance services.

My opinion may be strong and you don’t have to agree with me. If you think you can build a freelancing business bidding against smart people in India who will work for $2 an hour, I’d be happy to hear of your success. I’m not saying it can’t be done, just that there are, in my opinion, easier ways to get ahead freelancing. All it takes is the attitude that you are a marketer, not an employee.

While bidding on those sites may seem like a good idea to build your portfolio and get referals I’ll argue that it’s probably not. People who hire you cheap will only refer you to their other cheap friends, so the value of the kind of referrals working at rock-bottom prices will get you is dubious.

The other problem is that people who hire cheap freelancers are often running “mickey mouse” business operations and are undercaptitalized. If you write good copy for them they may change it around themselves and mess it up. They may never promote their “mickey mouse” websites, and so forth.

While it is somewhat instructive to work to other people’s specifications, often the cheaper the client, the more clueless they are and the more likely their specification will lead in a moronic direction.

My bias here is as direct marketing copywriter – most people are pretty darned ignorant about how effective direct marketing works – the ones that “get it” are the good clients who will pay you what you’re worth. The ones who don’t “get it” are the ones who shop on price… because to them, writing or website design or graphic art is a commodity to be bought mostly on the lowest-price criteria.

Birthday video – how to make a bunch of money as an information publisher and also make sure your first products succeed.

Loren Woirhaye — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:06:24 +0000

Birthday video – how to make a bunch of money as an information publisher and also make sure your first products succeed. is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

Hi,

It’s my birthday today.

I’ve been a bit inactive for a while in terms of emailing all my friends and subscribers. That doesn’t mean I’m not doing stuff – I’ve just been laying low, and in fact, laying plans for the coming months and years.

Together, I believe, we can achieve great things. Great things in terms of building authentic businesses using the power of the internet media, and great things in terms of leading the way towards making the world a better place in the future.

I’m turning 38 today – and a lot of things that I’ve been knocking about in my head for the last couple of years are starting to gel. I’m working on a lot of projects – and one thing that really interests me is the idea of a sort of video show about how you can succeed in the “reality marketplace” of today and tomorrow.

What that means is not holding back on the facts of life about the way business really works:

that competition is really breathing down your neck and will bury you if you don’t stay on your toes…or at the very least prevent you from really prospering.
that the quality of your marketing and your products are equally important, because people buy from companies and vendors who offer a cohesive and fulfilling experience.
…and that your success, really, is a matter of your commitment.

This last point dawned on me a while back when I was reflecting on the success of artists; the way certain artists work becomes valuable and collectible while other equally talented artists don’t make nearly the same commercial or cultural impact.

The core factor in your success in the new economy is your ability to stand-out- to differentiate your company, product, or service in such a startling way from the competition that you win the game most business owners ultimately lose – the battle to get and keep sufficient numbers of customers and earn enough profit from sales to actually build wealth.

One aspect of why you need to really commit and choose your path – the way you are going to make a success of yourself – is because there are so many distracting forces at play these days. It’s a discipline to say “I’m going to be an information publisher and serve customers with x, y, and z needs”.

That sounds a little stiff – but realistically you cannot expect customers and prospects to want to buy your stuff if you don’t show a consistency in your direction. That means not leaping from opportunity to opportunity as if success were equivalent to having a winning lottery ticket.

See, I’ve never been a gambler. Seriously. I never make bets. I’ve been to Vegas and walked by the slot machines and poker tables and never been so much as tempted to gamble.

…Which is an underlying philosophy of what I do and what I teach in building a business or moving towards any goal. I’m not saying you shouldn’t take risks, because all reward comes from taking risks. What I mean to say is that you should strive and work to educated yourself about the realities of marketing in the real world so you don’t go charging around wasting your money and time trying to sell stuff people don’t really want.

The good news is there is lots of room for you to be selling stuff they DO want… and I sincerely hope this new video serves to illuminate you in some way.

Do please leave comments and feedback. I know what I don’t like about the video – things I wish I’d explained better and I would have preferred better lighting. What I would really like to know from you is what you learned, what you have further questions about.

In short, let me know how I can help you be better at what you do, and that will help me become better at what I do.

Just click on the (COMMENTS) link at the lower right and leave some feedback. Thank you.

The Good, the Bad, and the Just Plain UGLY Truth About Network Marketing

Loren Woirhaye — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:06:41 +0000

The Good, the Bad, and the Just Plain UGLY Truth About Network Marketing is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

Would you like to finally bust-out and start doing the right stuff to make money with network marketing, combining old-school methods with the new online technology?

I’ll bet you would.

You are probably skeptical and you have every right to be.

Because I am sure you get buried in emails from self-centered promoters practically begging you to join their MLM.

Even if you see the profit-potential of MLM I bet you are more than a little concerned you’ll pick the wrong opportunity, the wrong leader, or won’t be able to get this marketing stuff figured out.

Those are valid concerns – and because you have them you can know that you are the sort of discerning person who can actually create phenomenal results in a business when you finish gathering data and make up your mind to move forward and start making money with your home business.

I believe in you.

You ARE capable of WINNING in the marketing game – getting the freedom and fun, the lifestyle that most working stiffs would love to have.

I’ve got a new goodie for you.

It’s a report that will help you make the right decision and get the right kind of business model working for you – because getting started on the right track is what really determines your long-term success and income.

After all, I bet you’ve been on the wrong track before. I bet you’ve tried some MLMs and some affiliate programs and I bet you never really got the results you were hoping for.

There is a reason.

It’s because times change. The marketplace changes – and making the wrong decision could mean months or years of work building a business that won’t last.

The chips are down, Friend – time to show the world you hand – show ‘em you’re a smart one and you are going to get ahead and stay ahead for the rest of the race.

That’s what I’m talking about – Winning.

You can get the hot new report in the FREE control position member area – costs you nothing but guaranteed to open your eyes to the way things really work.

Get in here:
http://controlposition.com/login

If you are a member already you can login with your password at the link above too.

Peace,

Loren Woirhaye

P.S. more rockin’ stuff on the way. Stay tuned.