You may not be able to focus 100% on your target when you are planning on building a home business. There may be many reasons for this. Many other things constantly demand your attention and interrupt you repeatedly. That said, part of learning to focus is keeping your eye trained on the target no matter what else happens during the day.
You may have a stressful day job, a rough commute and family concerns which are all important and need to be dealt with first. You may really have to change some things so that you find time for your home business project and somehow squeeze this extra activity into your busy schedule.
It sounds like your home business will have the lowest priority, but as long as you at least see it as more important than watching TV or hanging out with friends, your business will have a chance to get off the ground. It doesn’t have to be today, but every day you wait is costing you valuable experience and progress toward the life you are truly dreaming of.
Take care of all your pressing priorities so that they will be out of the way and then you can better focus on what you need to do to develop your business. To begin with, there will be research and planning. The business you choose will be determined by your interests, but dependent on your skills and other resources you may have or need to acquire going forward.
It is always a good idea to analyze and then plan your actions. Start with why you want to start a business. Focus on this, because you will need to stay motivated throughout the process. Sometimes just a little self-talk will remind you there is something else to do before it is time to relax. Sometimes that is all it takes to trigger a nice jolt of energy to go the extra mile needed to make a business breakthrough, or just get the job done.
Take control of your future right now and push yourself to reach your target goal of financial independence today. Focus on your target of building a home business with every spare minute you have; and while it may not be your first priority, it has to be one of the top priorities if you want it to become successful. There is no better time than the present to get started, so roll up your sleeves, get to work and continue forward on your journey of building a successful business from home!
In today’s training I’m going to dig into the topic, the concern, the issue of trying to choose a niche if you’re just getting started. I think for most of you, it’s trying to choose an angle within your niche. We could call that a sub-niche, we could call that an angle, or a deeper angle within your niche. The reason that I’m doing this is … I frequently get the question “How do you choose a profitable niche?”, “How do you choose a profitable angle?”, “How do you choose a profitable part?” of the internet.
I’ve always avoided teaching on this because I don’t believe that there’s any one-size-fits-all answer. It varies per person. It varies depending on the type of niche that you’re going to go into. And, it varies over time. And, so, when I do a training like this, I like it to be evergreen. I want it to be something that folks can use. I don’t want to create something that’s good for three weeks. I like to create something that is long term. And, yet, I get these questions a lot.
So, what I’ve done is I’ve put some thought into exactly how I can position this so that it’s something that everyone can use, and that offers you the various options. Almost like branches on a tree. Gives you different options. If this won’t necessarily work, you can do this. I’ll present it to you in such a way that you’ll be able to see the thought behind it. Because the truth of the matter is, even though it’s very, very difficult, I’m going to try and do that today.
It’s very, very difficult to give you, it’s certainly not a one-size-fits-all, but even a tree solution, where there’s 3 or 4 solutions, but there may still be a 5th or 6th solution. The truth of the matter is, if someone comes to me, and I do a private call with them, and I dig in, and I ask them a few questions, I can almost always, no matter what the niche is, I can almost always direct someone to a profitable corner of their niche.
Really, just by asking a handful of questions and digging in. They’re going to be different for each person. But, really being able to dig in, I’m able to come up with that.
And, so the more I think about it, I say well, if I can come up with it, and if I give you enough information, then you should have a starting point to be able to come up with it for yourself.
Without further ado, let’s kind of dig into it.
There are two different starting points when you choose a niche. You may be looking for a niche or a sub-niche, or an angle in your niche, because you already have an interest in something. You have an interest, you know that that interest is something, well, it interests you. But, you don’t know what part of the business might be profitable. You don’t know what part of the business people are looking for information. One of the things it’s important for us to remember in this industry is, we can have the best information in the whole world, but if nobody is looking for that information, you’ll never sell any of it.
I want you to just imagine that you’ve created a brand new recipe, for a new salad. But, it’s absolutely disgusting, and nobody would ever want to eat it, nobody would want to serve it. You could make that recipe, and you could put it online. You could make pictures of it. You could put a price on it. It may be a phenomenal recipe. But, nobody wants it. Because it tastes bad. Nobody is going to be looking for it online. So, you won’t have any buyers.
When you’re in a position where you say, I have a particular interest. I want to be able to help people. I know there’s people out there who need help, but I don’t know exactly what they need help with. That’s what we’re kind of talking about right here. You have an interest, and you want to dig deeper.
There’s another branch here. That is, you may be in this boat as you’re listening, you’ve got this idea that you want to get involved online, and all you want to do is make money. You don’t care what niche that you get involved in. All you want to do is make money.
I would submit to you, that until you develop an interest. You’ll probably never make money.
Here’s the thing, we hear a success story. You hear them on the radio, or the TV, an infomercial success story, every so often. Somebody will say, “Oh, all I wanted to do was to make money. And, I found a friend who was making money in a particular niche. And I just copied what he did, and oh, I’m making money too.”
The problem is, that’s a rare occurrence. Like, maybe one in a million, or one in two million.
The question is, you’re building your business right now. Do you want to take a one in a million shot? That you MIGHT be able to do something that will make you a full-time income. That might do really, really well. Or, do you want to be a part of a one in two shot, or one in three shot that you can build something solid?
The thing is, if you’re going into the business just for the sake and the purpose of making money. With NO outside interest at all. That’s exactly what I believe you have. You’ve got a one in a million, or one in two million shot.
Unless you’re willing to stake your family’s future, the other 999,999 slots on FAILURE. I think a lot of times when people hear odds like that, they’re like “Hey, one person did it! So, I can do it”. Hey, you’re right, you can do it.
But, if 999,999 other people failed, in order for that ONE person to succeed. What we’re really talking about is a 99.9999% failure rate.
Is that what you want?
My guess is, it’s not.
In order for you to choose a niche where you’re going to make money … I believe … you’ve got to start with some interests.
Throw the money aside … forget about the money … find places online where people have needs, real needs. Then work on filling those needs. As you’re filling those needs, you can then look for pockets of needs where people are willing to pay money.
Because if people are willing to pay money, and there’s a lot of people that have that need, then you can make good money selling in that particular arena.
But, if you just start from a position of making money, the odds are very, very slim.
In either case, whether you’re looking for a niche, or a sub-niche. Looking for that best angle. Or, if, unfortunately, you’re in the place where, hey, I just want to make money, I’ve got 1 or 2 ideas of things I might be interested in. What I’m getting ready to share with you will give you kind of the road map to making that happen.
The first thing that we have to do. We have to find out what are interests and needs that need to be met. We can brainstorm this, and by the way, rather than just giving you four different ways that you can do this. I want you to understand the why behind it. Because if you happen to be in a niche, or an interest, where the 3 or 4 ways I give you won’t work. If I give you the background for WHY you would use these, then you can find something that will work for you.
The bottom line is, what you’ve got to do is find out 2 things. Number 1, are there people in your interest area that have needs that are being unmet? And then 2, are the people who have needs that are unmet, are they willing to invest money with you?
You’ve got to find out both of those things.
Folks have talked about in the past, and it’s a fallacy, that you can just go online, do some quick research, find out how many people have needs, find out how much money they’re willing to spend, and well, voila, you have your answer. I don’t know that it EVER worked, but, if it ever worked, it doesn’t work anymore.
One of the old methods, and I think at one point I even taught an iteration of this, one of the old methods, when the internet was young. You would go online, and you would look for something that had lots of searches online, and it didn’t have too many advertisers. But, it had some. The theory was, if there were some advertisers, well some people must be making money. People don’t pay for advertising if it’s not working in the long run. You might start out advertising, but after a few weeks, or a few months of not making money, they tend to quit. It just works that way.
We could look at some old formulas, and we could say, hey, if people are advertising, and lots of people are asking the question, well then, somebody is making some money, so maybe there’s room for one more entrant.
Let’s look at the root issue here.
The root issue is, we need people that have needs, and we need people who are willing to spend money. The easiest way for us to look at this. In fact, I want to give you an offline example:
I want you to imagine that you’re thinking about opening up a restaurant in your town. The first place that you would go to find out if maybe you needed a new restaurant in your town is to look and see what’s happening with the restaurant scene. Are people filling up the seats in at least some of the restaurants downtown? Now, if some of the restaurants are empty, and some of them are full, that doesn’t tell you that there’s no more hungry people. If some of the restaurants are full, it tells you the food’s probably bad in those empty restaurants. But, if there’s a number of restaurants that are full, it probably indicates that there’s a demand for good food in your town.
That’s the first step.
Okay, some restaurants are full, so there must be a demand. There are hungry people. You sit outside with the binoculars and you watch how many people are coming around. You sit outside, you’re downtown, you set up 100 yards away, 50 yards away, you set up your binoculars, or telescope, and you watch in 10 restaurants, and you just count how many people go into each restaurant. At the end of an hour you know 970 people have gone into those combined 10 restaurants. There are 970 hungry people on Friday night between 6 and 7. This is a fact! We know this now. We know that there’s that many hungry people, and there’s 10 restaurants.
If you open a restaurant, and yours is as good as everybody else’s, you’ve got a shot at generating 1/11th of all of that business. You know this.
Next you go granular. You say, ok, we know we’ve got 10 restaurants. 970 people. What if we sit somebody outside the door of every one of these restaurants. We hire 10 people to work maybe an hour. We just tick it off, how many people entered this door, how many people entered that door. And if you find that there’s a 97 person average on Friday night, some restaurants have maybe 300 people, some restaurants have only 5. What does this allow you to do?
It allows you to realize those restaurants have better food, or food that people like. Maybe there’s a Chinese restaurant, and Indian restaurant, American restaurant, French restaurant, Italian restaurant. You may say, well, the Italian restaurant is getting more customers. The Chinese restaurant is not getting as many customers. Then maybe you have to go sample the food. Is it good food, or is it bad food?
Do you see where I’m going with this?
The only way that you’re going to be able to get information about whether or not your niche is going to be profitable, and whether there’s needs, without actually selling in the niche is to do some research – some searching. In your niche. I gave you this illustration because offline is the illustration that we can all really relate to – this idea of how we determine if there’s room for one more restaurant. You realize, offline, that you need to do the work. It’s the same online.
Okay, here are a few articles on how you can do that work online, now that you understand how important it is!
One of the lies online is how easy it is to build a new business. People believe that. They read sales letters and even watch late-night infomercials about how many new niches, new opportunities there are.
That data is made up for the purpose of the infomercials and the sales pages. This “data” is everywhere and says you can figure all of this out, with no “boots on the ground”, in other words, with no work and without fully understanding what’s going on.
I say this because so often when someone reads something about choosing a niche, or how to find out what your marketplace needs, you are looking for an easy formula.
The truth of the matter is: there… is… no… easy… formula!
Building a Business in Real Life
Think about this example: there is no easy formula to figure out if you need a new restaurant in town. Let’s say you want to open up an Indonesian restaurant. And there are no Indonesian restaurants in your town. The only way that you’ll actually know if that restaurant will work would be to open one.
Yes, it will cost you money.
Yes, it will cost you time commitment.
But, the only way! That you’ll ever know, is if you physically open up shop.
The only way is if you invest whatever it is. $100k for kitchen equipment, you hire a chef, you paint the front door, and you open the doors. Once the doors are open, you can start counting heads. You can look at all the business that everybody else is doing, but you’ll never know what your brand new Indonesian restaurant is going to do, until you open it.
One more idea here: could you open up a road-side stand, with some Indonesian food, and park it in front of the empty building where you want to put your Indonesian restaurant, and try it out for a week or two? Just see how much interest there is.
Yes.
It’s still not going to prove your idea, even if you sell 1k plates from that roadside stand. It’s still not going to prove that the restaurant will do well. Hey, maybe people like eating Indonesian food out of road-side carts, but they don’t want to sit down and eat it. I don’t know.
You Have to Get Out There and Do It
The key here is, you won’t know until you actually do it.
Same thing online.
You’ll never know exactly how much need there is, and how many sales you’ll make, until you actually open up shop.
But – here’s the beautiful thing about opening up shop online. All you really need is a domain name, a website – you don’t even need to create a product initially, but in order to sell, you’ll create a product, put a merchant payment button on it, and start inviting people in that particular niche, and you’re able to see what happens.
It’s very, very low entry price to get started online, to test something.
Theoretically, you could test something every month, for the next 24 months, until you found the one that worked.
Offline, you can’t do that. You can’t go be a plumber for a month and then decide if you want to do it. You can’t then go be an electrician for a month, and then be a chef for a month, then be a mechanic for a month. Takes you a couple of years to learn how to be a plumber. Takes you a couple of years to learn how to be an electrician. You’ve got to put that time, energy and effort into it.
Same thing with opening a restaurant, there’s an investment in opening that restaurant. The beautiful thing about online is, you really could try a new niche every single month for 24 months. Until you found one that works. The 7 month period of time. The 7th month, you tried the 7th idea, and it simply worked for you.
But, we don’t want to leave you in the dark here. We’ve talked about the fact that we don’t have any fully accurate information that’s just going to point you in the right direction and say, this will work for you. Just like you can look at the 10 restaurants in your downtown area, and see that some are making money, and some are not, you can do the same thing online.
You can get clues and signals. You can do research. But in the end, you need to buy the domain name, create the products, and start testing. That’s how you’ll find the winners. That’s how you’ll build a business that makes real money.
What are some ways to determine what areas online people are interested in?
One way would be to simply go online and go somewhere that there’s a lot of advertising. So, maybe, any of the news websites. A lot of the news websites have classified ads on them. You look at those classified ads, and you look at the topics of those classified ads. You could even take a screenshot of the classified ads today and then a month from now, take another screenshot and see if the same people are advertising.
Watch for Consistent Ads
In the advertising world many people advertise once. But, if it fails, they don’t advertise again. The only way to know if advertising works is to buy the advertising. I’ve done it before. I’ve bought advertising before that didn’t work. I only bought it one time. But if I buy it again, and again, and again, and again, you can assume I’m doing one of two things. I’m either trying to throw the competition off, and just trying to get them to all buy the same advertising, so they’ll fall off the cliff. Or, I’m genuinely making money.
The truth of the matter is, 99% of the time, when you see advertisers advertising month after month after month. They’re doing it, not because they want to drive their competitors off the cliff, but because they’re making money.
Look at the ads on the big websites (like big news sites) If you take a screenshot today, take a screenshot a month from now, and they’re the same advertisers. You can probably guess, those people are making money.
Does that tell us there’s a big demand?
No.
It doesn’t tell us anything about demand.
What it does tell us is, there are some people making money.
Is There Room for More Competition in Your Niche?
There’s 2 ways to look at other people making money.
One way is, to look at it and say other people are making money, is there room for another entrant? My belief is, there’s always room for another entrant. If! You’re willing to optimize so that you can do things as well as (or better than) somebody else.
Some people like to enter markets where there’s very little competition. There’s only 2 or 3 people making money. Because then you can be a big fish in a small pond. The problem with that in today’s marketplace is if there’s only a couple of competitors, there’s probably not a whole lot of demand. That’s not across the board, but it’s a general rule of thumb.
There are a few ways to know if your competition is profitable, but many ways to imagine that they might be profitable.
For them to actually be profitable is one thing, and for you to figure it out is another.
Imagine going into your local pizza shop, and walking up to the proprietor and saying. “Hey, I’m thinking about opening a pizza shop across the street, how many pies are you selling on Friday night?” The guy might call the police and have you arrested for trespassing! He’s not going to give you that information! Well, it’s the same thing online.
If someone is genuinely making money in your area of interest they don’t want you, or anybody else, to know. Sometimes folks will do things that make it look like they’re not generating as much revenue as they really are. They don’t want the competition to know.
How to Win Even if You Have Strong Competition
Let’s say a particular company appears to have a market totally locked up, and they’ve got everything figured out. If that’s the case, there are probably unmet needs in that marketplace that the company (or that individual) is not meeting. And, if you can find out what those holes and unmet needs are, you can create a brand new niche all by itself.
How do you do that? A great first step is to collect subscribers in your niche – you can run advertising to attract interested prospects in that niche and collect their contact information. Then send an email out asking for their 2-3 biggest problems/questions in the niche.
You’ll get a lot of responses and see some overlap. People will also respond with a lot of detail and you can go back and forth with those people.
Use these ideas to create products and break into a niche, even a niche where the competition has a tight hold on things. Your market research can help you pinpoint where your market is hanging out online, so you know exactly where to find them and get them onto your list. Then you’re off and running!
You could take ALL of the things that I’m sharing with you, or another coach shares with you, and set up your own shop online, and find it doesn’t work. You could do none of this, and setup your own shop online, and find that whatever it is that you’re trying to sell works. I’m a big believer in just getting out there and doing it to find out what works for you!
If you have an interest in a topic, don’t spend the next 12 months trying to figure out if this is the best topic for you. Some people take 2 to 5 years trying to figure out their topic, and by the time they do they find that all the competition has beat them to the market.
Instead, get out there today, put up a website, start finding targeted visitors, and just see what happens. You’ll either be successful, or you won’t, and you’ll learn a lot in the process that will be useful in advancing your current business or starting a new one. Fail faster, and fail forward and you will steadily climb the mountain of online success!
You read a book and a week later you hardly remember a thing.
You watch a video and a day later it’s lost from your memory…
The fix? Always write down your three biggest takeaways from anything nonfiction that you read or watch.
Keep a notebook or file just for this purpose. Review it often. And put those three things to work in your life as soon as you possibly can.
The world’s wisdom and secrets is at your fingertips inside books old and new. Many of the world’s greatest teachers and successful people share their secrets and strategies inside the pages of a book.
When you read for learning, you are only moments away from discovering some new information that can change the course of your life in new and better directions.
But you must take action.
And you must REMEMBER the insights that really matter.
Read to learn and grow, and remember to write down your three biggest takeaways from each session, and then take action on what you are learning so that it becomes internalized wisdom.
Start doing this, and every day can be a better day as you absorb the knowledge of the happiest, healthiest and wealthiest people in the world, and incorporate it into your life so that you can be one of them too! Then write your own book for other people to remember! 🙂
In 1955, Jack Daniels wasn’t the best selling whiskey in the world. In fact, most people had never even heard of Jack Daniels. It was a small, regional brand selling just 150,000 cases annually of its black labeled Tennessee whiskey.
But by the end of 1956, sales had doubled and there was a Jack Daniels shortage. Demand in the U.S. for the whiskey steadily increased at such a high rate, the distillery wouldn’t have enough product to export to other countries for almost two decades.
So what changed? One tiny little sentence uttered onstage by just the right person – Frank Sinatra.
Frank brought a glass onstage and uttered this line: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jack Daniel’s, and it’s the nectar of the gods.”
Here’s what we know:
One endorsement from the right person and your product can potentially take off. The above example was long before the days of social media, so imagine what can happen today.
Caution: This was also before endorsements and brand ambassadors became a thing. Now if someone well-known endorses your product, people might think this person is getting paid, even if he’s not.
Jack Daniels didn’t even know Frank liked their product until this business changing moment. But once they heard what happened, they made sure Frank’s glass was never empty again. Wherever Frank performed, there was a case of Jack Daniels waiting for him in his dressing room.
And here’s how we can use this information:
Make a product so terrific, people will endorse it even when they’re not a paid spokesperson. With social media today, even an unknown person can become an ambassador for your brand if they love what you do.
When someone endorses your product, thank them and never stop. The free products you give this person will be dwarfed by the profits you earn from their efforts to get your brand seen and used.
Get your product in front of as many well-known people in your niche as you possibly can. Jack Daniels got lucky, but you can make your own luck by giving away sample products to bloggers and social media mavens.
Anytime you hint that you have information that’s not readily available to the public, or that most people don’t know, you’ll make people curious enough to find out more.
Use words like secret, shocking, surprising, little known, finally revealed and so forth to communicate that you’ve got something interesting to share.
Examples:
Aphids Eating Your Plants? Surprising Home Remedy Kills Aphids Dead without Poisoning Your Harvest
Is Your Dog’s Behavior Driving You Crazy? Little known Training Trick Makes Dogs Listen to Your Every Command
Can’t Afford College? The Secret to Getting PAID to Go to University
5: The [New Product or Method] that [Somebody] Now Loves
If your audience is skeptical of your product, or if your product is brand new and no one’s heard of it, this can be a great headline.
Examples:
The New Weight Loss Method that Medical Doctors Recommend to Their Patients
The Strange Home Remedy that Psoriasis Sufferers Love
The So-Called ‘Scam’ Investment System that Insiders are Secretly Using to Make Fortunes
6: [Authority Figure] [New Information]
For the ‘authority figure’ you can use a celebrity, an authority in your niche, a particular organization or whatever.
Examples:
Brad Pitt Reveals His #1 Strategy for Getting Over a Failed Relationship
The Exact System Warren Buffet Uses to Double His Money Daily
3 out of 4 World Chess Champions Use This Program to Improve Their Game
7: [Problem] [Solution]
This one is straight forward and easy to use.
Examples:
Investors Are Losing Everything in This Volatile Market: How to Safeguard Your Money While Earning 10-16% Interest
Over 50 and Tired all the time? How to Have More Energy than a 20 Year Old.
Can’t Get Dates Because You’re Not Skinny? How to Have Men Begging to Go Out with You Regardless of Your Weight
And there you have it – 7 headline formulas you can use for subject lines, book titles and of course headlines.
Would you like to write a great blog post or email in half the time without losing quality – and perhaps even make your content better in the process?
Here’s how you can start writing better, faster and more:
1: Create an outline. Your outline is your plan, and it’s going to make your entire task easier for 3 reasons:
Having a plan diffuses procrastination. When we look at a project our mind tells us it’s big – too big. This causes stress, which makes us want to avoid the whole thing. By having a plan, we can break the writing down into manageable, stress free steps.
Having a plan keeps you from wandering off topic. If you have a simple outline to follow, it’s just a matter of filling out each section of the outline. But without a plan, you could waste a great deal of time writing about things that in the end don’t even pertain to your main topic.
It makes research super easy. Once you have an outline, researching can be as simple as Googling each item on your outline. Without a plan, your research can lead you into never-ending time-wasting circles.
2: Once you’ve got your outline, set it aside for an hour or a day and let it bake in your brain.
By setting it aside, you can let your mind focus on something else. Meanwhile, your subconscious is still working on that outline. You’ll be surprised by what your subconscious gives you. All of a sudden you’ll realize you left out the most important part, or you’ve found a much better way to illustrate your main point.
3: Write every day. Writing, just like anything else, is a skill. The more you do it, the better and faster you will get.
Write even when you don’t ‘feel’ like it. As Stephen King has said, “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work.”
Or as another writer stated, “I wait for inspiration to strike. Fortunately for me, it strikes every day at 9 am.”
Even if you absolutely, positively do NOT want to write, tell yourself you’re going to write for just 15 minutes. Then start writing. You can write anything – anything at all – but you must write. Pretty soon you’ll be working on your project and wondering why you were feeling such resistance to something you actually enjoy.
4: Use deadlines in your favor. Without a deadline, there is no stress. With no stress, your brain puts off the task of writing for later. After all, writing takes brain power, effort, thinking and decision making – things your brain would rather put off until later. Or never.
But when you have a deadline, you have stress to get the job done. The closer the deadline, the more stress. To relieve the stress, you’ve got to get busy. Now your brain is telling you to, “Write now!”
If self-imposed deadlines work for you, then you know what to do. If not, you’ll have to find a way to get others to hold you accountable for your deadlines. For example, telling your blog readers that your next post goes live on Tuesday at 10 am PST should work nicely.
No blog readers yet? Have a friend hold you accountable. If you don’t make your deadline, you owe them dinner.
5: Focus on the “feel goods.” Back when I had a regular job, I loved my days off. I especially loved them when I knew well in advance that they were coming.
But if I found out that morning that I wasn’t working, then half the joy of having time off was gone. There was no anticipation. No looking forward to that day off. Frankly, I felt ripped off if I didn’t know I wasn’t working until that same morning.
You can use this knowledge to self-motivate yourself. Think about how great it will feel to hit publish or send. Think about closing the file and doing something you love as a reward. Think about the accolades you’ll receive for finishing the project, or the money you’ll earn, or whatever it is that motivates you to keep working until you’re done.
6: Turn off the internet. Some folks, me included, tend to get distracted by the internet. We think we’re going to ‘sneak off’ for 5 minutes to check Reddit, and an hour later we still haven’t gotten back to work.
So whenever possible, just disconnect your wifi. Turn off your cell phone. Remove anything else that tends to distract you. And then go to work.
7: Speed up your typing. If you’re not able to type at least 50 words per minute, maybe it’s time you improved your typing skills.
It’s difficult when your thoughts are coming faster than your fingers can tap them out. But you have options:
Type faster. There are plenty of free and paid courses online that will teach you how to touch type faster.
Use a voice to text program such as Dragon Naturally.
Record yourself and have it transcribed.
Writing by itself isn’t hard. It’s all the baggage we attach to it that makes it difficult.
But if you can think of writing as simply assembling the pieces to a puzzle, you’ll do it much better and faster.
Bad information keeps many people from making money online.
People give a half-hearted effort to one form of marketing, get disappointed that it didn’t work, and then cry out to the world that it no longer works…
How many times have you seen one of these headlines:
“Email Marketing Is Dead!”
“SEO No Longer Works Thanks to Google…”
“Content Marketing Has Lost Its Luster…”
Or the big one:
“Affiliate Marketing Is for Scammers!”
When something is proclaimed dead or not working any longer, it’s probably because someone was gaming the system and the system owners plugged the hole.
Ethical marketing always works in the long run.
That’s why Affiliate Marketing has worked for decades and will continue to work for the non-scammers of the world.
But the headlines persist, and the myths and misconceptions flourish.
Let’s talk about the top 5 myths about affiliate marketing today…
1) Affiliate Marketing is easy…
There’s a misconception out there that the newbie online marketer can grab an affiliate link, put it on their Facebook page, and the money will start rolling in.
Not so fast…
Affiliate marketing like any other business model IS a business.
And it should be treated like a business.
While affiliate marketing may be the exact business model you need as a new entrepreneur, it’s important to understand and accept that it is NOT a get-rich-quick scheme.
As with any business, your primary job is to present a solution to a market with a desperate problem. The problem must be so severe that they are willing to pay for that solution quickly.
Is this beginning to sound like work yet? It should.
Affiliate marketing can be VERY rewarding, but it is not easy, especially if you have no business experience. But affiliate marketing can be the best way to learn how to build a business with very low-risk.
Your investment as an affiliate marketer is low because you don’t have any product or delivery costs. Your focus must be on building a market, knowing that market inside out, and learning how to sell.
These are essential skills for any business owner to master.
Driving traffic and measuring conversions to build your marketing list is the primary tool of every affiliate marketer.
2) Affiliate marketing doesn’t work any more…
The days of throwing a link up on the social marketing sites and making a million dollars overnight are gone…if they ever existed.
Social media has heightened the importance of building relationships with your target market, and that can be a slow process.
Your followers and email subscribers must feel a connection with you. If they don’t, they find someone else where that connection is real.
Affiliate marketing not only works with an audience that knows, likes and trusts you, but they will ask for your affiliate link for new products. Sometimes, they feel such a close relationship that they’ll pass around your affiliate link for you.
Affiliate marketing without real relationships (even if they’re automated) is hard, but can be done with a lot of effort.
But affiliate marketing with real connections with an audience that has been nurtured and embraced works like a charm because you’re genuinely looking out for their interests.
3) The competition is too steep in affiliate marketing…
First, let’s agree competition is good.
That means there’s a market for the product. If not, no one else would be trying to sell that product.
Competitors can also become your best traffic source. Using the right tools like iSpionage.com, you can target your competitors, and step in front of their traffic with better offers, Facebook ads, or other techniques.
Sound a little cutthroat?
Nope, it’s just business. Once you become the Big Dog, everyone will target you too.
Your job is to offer better bonuses, better services, better support, and better experience to that market. And by doing that, you’re building a better relationship.
Find out how your competitors are building their audience (keyword research) and jump in there to grab that audience yourself.
Business is about competition, so if that bothers you, you probably need to get a job.
4) The more I promote my affiliate links the more money I’ll make…
Listen, this one is tricky.
In theory, this is true. But there are other considerations like…
Does your message match the right audience? This is where you’ve got to get good at knowing your market including their hopes, dreams and issues.
In the consulting world, they call these the FUDs – Fears, Uncertainties and Doubts.
What is your audience trying to do? And how can the solution you put in front of them solve that issue?
Promote to the right audience and you don’t have to “sell them” often because you become part of their go-to-problem-solver while you’re building a relationship.
Spamming your links to an audience never works.
But offering a solution to a problem always works.
5) Affiliate marketing is high risk and low ROI…
Ok. There is risk in any business endeavor. In affiliate marketing, you could make a lot of sales for a product only to have the product owner go out of business.
That’s always a risk.
And the return on investment could be very low, but only because you’re not making sales.
That usually means you don’t have the right message for the right target market. Conversions are much easier and ROI much higher when you convert prospects to customers.
Opponents of affiliate marketing will jump in here and declare you’d be better off building your own products, selling them online and keeping ALL the money.
Here’s the truth about that:
If you can’t sell someone else’s product and get a good ROI, what makes you think that you could invest a lot of money on your own product and sell THAT to the same target market.
Affiliate marketing is attractive because the risk is extremely low. You don’t have to create a massive infrastructure to support your products. You’re letting someone else take that risk on.
And the low ROI? Wrong.
The potential in affiliate marketing for those people who learn how to build an audience and convert that audience to paying customers is HUGE because it’s a pay-for-performance model!
The more you convert, the more you make and the higher your return.
Of course, like everything else, affiliate marketing only works if you know how to do it correctly.
If you have the right mindset, then everything else will work itself out. But if you have the wrong mindset, nothing else will work.
Here’s how to get your head on straight:
1: Trust your own ideas and strengths.
Stop comparing yourself, stop second guessing yourself and stand behind your own ideas and decisions.
2: Know your worth. Charge accordingly.
Dan Kennedy suggests that every business owner immediately raise their rates or prices.
You’ll get better customers and clients who appreciate you, fewer headaches and more revenue. So go ahead and give yourself a raise.
3: Realize you can’t do it alone.
Whatever ‘it’ is, you need help. Focus on the ideas, make the decisions, do the parts you’re good at and outsource everything else. You’ll stay sane and your business will prosper. Remember, teamwork makes the dream work. Start building your team today.
In my never ending search for ways to better appeal to my audience, I sometimes venture into the dark recesses of the human psyche so that I might better understand my customers and even myself.
I’m not picking on psychopaths here. Nor am I villainizing them. As I understand it, psychopaths are born the way they are – it’s not a choice.
A psychopath is generally someone who feels little or no real emotion, and instead has to fake it. They might lie a great deal. They have an inflated sense of self-worth. They use superficial charm and glibness to manipulate and con others. They lack remorse, guilt or empathy. And they constantly are in need of new stimulation.
About 1 out of 100 people are psychopaths. Odds are you know at least one, yet you might not realize it. Remember, most of them are not killers as the media might portray them.
But they can be incredibly charming and persuasive. Some psychopaths can find a person’s weak spot in minutes, manipulate that person using that knowledge, and actually make their target very happy and thankful to have been manipulated.
I’ve seen psychopaths at work. They fake emotions and use the techniques I’m about to cover to make people like them almost instantly.
Have you ever met someone and almost instantly thought you had a lot in common with them? Maybe you did – or maybe they were a psychopath adept at making you feel that way.
Now then, for those with active imaginations, I’m not recommending you turn into a psychopath when it comes to your marketing endeavors. And I’m certainly not suggesting you manipulate your prospects into becoming customers, either.
What I am suggesting is two-fold:
First, we can learn about influence from those who are skilled at it – and psychopaths tend to be especially adept at influencing others.
Second, forewarned is forearmed, which is to say once you are aware of these manipulation techniques, you will be better able to recognize them when they are being used on you or even against you.
Flattery: This isn’t just compliments and buttering you up, although that’s a part of it. Psychopaths can hone in on your insecurities and then provide you with the reassurance you crave to make you feel better. This makes you like them, trust them, and follow their suggestions.
As Marketers we do a variation of this in sales letters, agitating the problem and making the prospect feel the pain of the problem before we offer the feel good solution.
Favors and Gifts: The psychopath will do you a favor or give you a gift you might not even want. But still, now you feel obligated when s/he asks you to do something for them.
We do this in marketing, don’t we? We give away things, and in turn folks feel obligated to take a good look at what we’re offering.
False Intimacy: They’ll pretend to be interested in everything about you – your hobbies and interests, the kinds of music you like, your job, your family and so forth. Then they’ll tell you fake secrets to create an even deeper intimacy, at which point you’ll reciprocate and tell secrets about yourself. This is how a psychopath can go from ‘stranger’ to ‘new best friend’ in one or two meetings.
Again, marketers use a variation of this in sales copy, by first showing how similar we are to the prospect. “I had the same problem you do, here’s my story with all my dark secrets, etc.”
False Expectations: Psychopaths pretend things are already happening the way they want them to happen, before others even have a chance to think. So instead of asking, “Do you want to go to dinner?” They’ll simply say, “Let’s have dinner tonight, I’ll meet you at Harvey’s Grill at 8pm.” You’re not thinking IF you want to go to dinner, but instead you’re already making plans to meet him there.
Marketers and sales people alike will often ‘assume the sale’ to get the prospect to simply go along, rather than feeling like they have to ‘decide.’
Silent Treatment: Psychopaths will give random and unexpected silent treatments to throw you off. You might wonder if you did something wrong, and even try to make up for it with gifts or overt kindness. If you do, then the psychopath knows s/he’s got you wrapped around their finger.
In marketing, going silent is seldom going to pay. Out of sight is very quickly out of mind.
Over Asking: This is crafty – the psychopath asks you for this BIG favor, knowing you’ll balk. But then you feel bad that you had to say no. So when they now ask you for a small favor, you readily agree. Of course, it was the second request that they really wanted all along.
If you’re not using this technique in marketing, you’re probably losing money. Let’s say you offer your live coaching class for $1,000. Obviously a lot of prospects won’t buy it, which is when you offer them a recorded version for a whole lot less money.
Or maybe you want a fairly big name marketer to do an interview with you. You’ve already started building a relationship with them, so you ask if they would like to co-author a product with you. When they say no, you then ask for what you really wanted – a 30 minute interview. (Sneaky, right? But done correctly it does work, but only if you’ve already got a relationship with them.)
False Equivalence: A psychopath uses a logical fallacy to imply that if you don’t do what they desire, then it means something else. For example, if you don’t do what they want, then you don’t love them, or you’re stupid, or you’re immature, etc.
I just want to note here that outside the realm of psychopaths, false equivalence generally means two things are given the same weight, even though they are radically unequal. For example, if you have a scientist backed with decades of research stating a fact, and a non-scientist sitting next to him denying the fact, it appears both have equal weight, when in fact the scientist is backed by 99% of his or her peers on the subject as well as thousands of scientific studies.
In marketing, we can certainly use tactics like these to manipulate our customers, but it’s shady at best. I do recommend you stay on the lookout for it.
You’ll see this tactic used continuously on television and the internet, with ads telling you that you’re not a man if you don’t drink a certain drink, smoke a certain cigarette, drive a certain car and so forth.
Or if you don’t own an iPhone, you’re not part of the ‘in’ crowd.
It would be like me telling you that if you don’t subscribe to my newsletter, then you’re a lousy marketer. That’s blatant manipulation and in my opinion it’s time marketers let this one go forever.
Fake Normal: They communicate that, “Everyone is doing this,” so that the person feels inclined to do it, too.
We use this one a lot in marketing. “Everyone is grabbing ABC product, you better get yours, too!”
Fill Emotional Needs: Psychopaths will find your insecurities and unhappiness, and then provide reassurance. They’re giving people what they want and saying what they want to hear.
If we’re honest, we have to admit that we do a version of this all the time in successful marketing campaigns.
It’s perhaps a little surprising how much marketing has in common with psychopathy. Then again, we’re all about persuading and to a certain degree, manipulating – hopefully towards the BENEFIT and not the detriment of our customers.
If you are manipulating your customer for their own good, that’s one thing. If you’re doing it just to make a sale, you probably won’t be in business for long.
But one thing I learned from studying psychopaths is this – there is still far more that we can learn about persuasion, and sometimes we’ll find the answers in the oddest of places.
You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
Whose content do you most consume on social media? If it’s whoever happens to come up in your news feed that day, you might want to rethink. After all, do you want to be somebody, or just anybody?
Choose 5 people to follow online based on what they have accomplished and what they can teach you.
Then read their posts, listen to their podcasts and consume everything they put online.
If you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and you’re spending your time with five highly successful people, what do you think will happen in your life? There is one secret you need to follow though… Be sure to ACT on the most important things you learn from these mentors.
Why the picture of dogs? Frankly, many of life’s greatest lessons can be learned from them… Wouldn’t you agree?
