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:

Also:

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, ]]> 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:

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

1. 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.
2. Become a marketing sleuth to locate areas where you can make money with your present skills

Also:

1. 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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For the next 24 hours only you can get the entire 129 page course at a steep discount off the already very reasonable launch price. With this 25% discount the “Niche Sleuth” method is just $27.75. No bonuses – just the book, but it’s a dandy method you’ll use again and again to save time and find profitable niches for yourself.

–> 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 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, ]]> 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.

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.

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”. ]]> 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.

“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 ]]> “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.

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.

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 ]]> 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):

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

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 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 ]]> 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

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.

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, ]]> 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

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.

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.

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 ]]> 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.

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.

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 ]]> 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 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.