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Posts Tagged ‘Success’
My beautiful wife and I are currently in Georgetown, Malaysia on a vacation from our already 6 month vacation, hehe. We decided to stay in an area known as “Little India” and have been awesomely fascinated with the diverse and yet rich culture here. It is certainly very different from what we know from back home in Canada, and is quite different from what we had gotten used to in our last 6 months Krabi, Thailand, but we are both fairly adventurous and have no problem adapting to different cultures, traditions, and to the people in it. Just last night we were looking for a restaurant to have a quiet sit-down supper. We were walking down a couple of streets checking out different shops as we walked by, and one gentleman – like many shop owners – stood in front of his small video store and – unlike all other owners – asked us to have a look at some Bollywood movies inside. Now, my wife has been telling me “we have to check out a Bollywood movie while we are here” but last night was not the time for it. We were both tired from our 8 hour trip in to Malaysia and were both only interested in getting something to eat and then be off to bed. So I kindly declined and said “no thank you. We’re …”. He interrupted and said “You looking for a good restaurant?” and out of no where he pulled out a pamphlet and recommended a fairly nice restaurant a few streets down. Surprised and amazed at his ability to read my determined “must have food” mind, I thanked him and we were about to be on our way when he offered to have us driven there – free of charge – in one of those bicycle chariots (rickshaw). I was even more blown away by this guy. “For free? You sure?” but he insisted he’d take care of it. Well, I really DO want to take a ride in one of those while we are here, but it somehow did not feel right to take advantage of him like that, so I told him “we need to stretch our legs some more so maybe next time. Thank you for offering, that is very kind of you!” He insisted it was not a problem and he’d be happy to help anytime. As we walked away, I turned to my wife and said “he is a genuinely-cool guy!” and she agreed with me. Somehow he left an impression on me and I had to think about that incident a few times since. For him it might have been a routine thing but to me – and I am sure many others – he became known as a cool individual. In fact, if I were to need anything movies related, I’d be willing to walk across town to get it from him. I had to think of how I could apply his being “Mr Cool & Helpful” business strategy in my SEO business. To somehow give, give, and give again, without expecting anything in return. After all, giving is better then receiving… and to take that a step further: it is by genuinely giving that we also (hopefully) genuinely receive! To somehow stop doing things for the precious $, and instead just genuinely help people. This is a little easier when one makes plenty of money to cover all bills and expenses each month, but even then it is so easy to be overcome by unnecessary greed. As Bob Proctor would say: greed comes from thinking there is limited wealth and we need to get as much of it as possible. Our thinking needs to shift to one of abundance where there is plenty for everyone. Any thoughts?
I am not a perfectionist for the most part, but every time I launch a product, I get this deep down feeling that it isn’t quite up to my standards. Yes, it works great and yes, it delivers immense value for the price point I am selling it at. I just can’t help but notice all the little things I could have and perhaps should have done differently or better. Someone reminded me recently “If Microsoft released their software only once perfect, you and the rest of the world would have never heard of them!” There is a certain truth to that. Products do not have to be perfect right off the bat. You can always release updates later on that bring about the desired improvements. This is especially true if the product is a software. Even if it is as close to perfect as you can get it (with your own testing and trouble shooting), someone else will find flaws in it. And that is not at all a bad thing. The most problematic software launch I ever did (aside from dozens of software glitches, I screwed up just about everything in the launching sequence as well), was also my biggest overnight rags to riches launch I have done to date. Though I did practically everything wrong along the way, I did one thing right that made the big difference: I took feedback and bug reports to heart and fed it straight to my programmer the minute I got it. As a result, every few days or so (after the launch) there was an update available for the software. It was a painful process but you know what? The end result left me with a nice chunk of cash in my wallet AND a highly sought after piece of software that customers brag about to this day. I have gone on to do various other launches since. Some were software products, while others were information products. None of them were perfect, but that did not keep me from launching them, making money off of them, and building my list at the same time. Again though, I took all feedback I could get and updated the products often the first few days. Sure there is going to be the odd unhappy customer but reality is, it does not matter how perfect your product is, you WILL have unhappy customers. For the most part I found that customers I interacted with were almost proud to be part of the products’ “perfecting” process – which (I guess) gave them a sense of “ownership” as well. Getting back on track: it’s been over a year since I launched my first major software product and just the other day I went over it again and realized that “it truly turned out to be a solid product!” So I went over it again and decided that I will update it one more time this year and will add a few more bells and whistles to it while I am at it. I want to take it from being a “great” product to being a “mind-blowingly awesome” product. And the best part? When I relaunch it, I will double the price for it as well… and it will be worth every penny of the new price! I will be doing the same thing with all the other products I have launched to date. For the software products, For the ebooks and pdf guides, I will go through all of them and update them. Yes they are all still great and the information in them is still applicable today, but I have learned a lot since I first wrote them so it is only fair that I raise the bar on them too – after which I will of course raise the price for them as well. What I am getting at is this: It takes time to build something phenomenal. This is something I have been learning more and more about in the last few weeks. I see top marketers in the Internet Marketing niche who’s products easily sell for $997 to $2497 each. These are oftentimes information products! The question I ask myself is “who in the right mind would pay that much for a product?” but truth is, they have people buying their stuff – right, left, and center – every single day. My next question is “how in the world can they pack enough value in to a product that people will pay so much money for and be happy with it?” and that is when it hit me: They have been selling these exact same products for years and yes, there often times was a point where they sold the product for no more than $37 when they originally launched it. The difference in price between then and now is a direct result of ongoing polishing and tweaking. In fact, this is also how trustworthy brands are built. The question we need to ask ourselves is: do we want to continue making low price-point products and sell them to the masses or do we want to create few – but mind-blowingly awesome products and make significantly more (up to 100 times more) every time we sell one copy? I myself am trying to get away from creating new products every month. I’d rather focus that energy on perfecting what I have (that did well) than fall in to the trap so many marketers fall in to of having to create new products every single month just to pay the bills. Some people prefer things that way, but in my opinion, we got to evolve. Our time, energy, as well as our products, need to increase in value the longer we are online. And as we all know, more value should equal more cash in our pockets. This poses another question though: who do we want to cater to? Those who never have money or those for whom money is not an issue? There really is no “right” or “wrong” answer to these questions, but I think they are important questions we as product creators need to ask ourselves. What are your thoughts? Do you prefer creating many low-price products or few high-priced products? If you are not a product creator, which ones would you buy rather: a decent low priced one or a perfected, high-end, high priced one?
So what I decided to do was write down what I want to achieve and then break this down further into steps that can be easily accomplished. Then I created a daily log sheet and listed up to six things I need to do each day to improve my business. I find it extremely helpful to write this down and at the end of my sheet I have a section where I can write myself notes. Plus I can carry over what I didn’t get accomplished. I am not beating myself up if all six items aren’t done. At first I was listing way too much in each section! So I broke everything down into more manageable steps. For example today I have on my list, this post to do! Then proof read a PLR pack I want to giveaway as a freebie. Another item is to help a client set up a blog, on this one I set a time limit and stick to it! I also took the time to write out monthly and yearly goals. Just the process of writing everything down was a great education. I know I can do this and just need to keep working and producing new content for my site along with building my list! So if you haven’t sat down and made a business plan of some sort, maybe it is time you did? Feel free to share your goals or even your daily activities below. I look forward to reading them!
After looking through the Page One Syndication program, I figured I should perhaps write a short review about it. In fact, I went as far as creating a quick little video for you: I have quite a bit of experience when it comes to SEO and at the end of the day, I know what works and what doesn’t work. Though I often say “I have seen it all” I have say that I picked up some golden nuggets from this course. As we all know: one golden nugget of information can make all the difference in the world. Making one small change in the way we do things can have a HUGE impact on the longterm outcome of our endeavor. It’s pretty amazing how that works! So what am I trying to say? Even if you consider yourself to be an expert in SEO, GET THIS WSO… unless you already got all the top 10 rankings you want. And here is the kicker: IMPLEMENT the system. If you go through the entire course and it contains absolutely no new information for you, don’t complain about it. Results come from implementing systems that have proven to work, not from knowing everything. It is said “Success leaves footprints. If you do what successful people do, you too will be successful!” I believe this to be one of the best SEO “systems” I have seen in a long time and I know first hand that if you implement and follow through with everything the PageOneSyndication creators teach, you will get results. In fact, if after implementing the entire system you do not get top 10 Google ranking within 45 days, ask for your money back… and the refund will be honored! Truth is, with the Page One Syndication system, you have absolutely nothing to lose. Which is another reason why I recommend you see if it is for you! If you are looking for a magic “done for me” pushbutton system, don’t buy this. This does require some work on your part – everything worthwhile does! Sowing comes before reaping, so unless you are ready to plow the field, sow the seed, get rid of the weeds, and scare off the birds, you will never have a harvest. In conclusion: Read their sales page. It tells you everything it is and is not. Also watch the video above to get a glimpse of what the members area looks like. If it sounds appealing to you, get it. If not, do not get it! It is that simple really!
Things went well until one day the drug-lord noticed a huge chunk of his money had gone missing. He had the accountant brought before him and started questioning him, but the accountant pretended to not understand what the drug-lord was saying. The drug-lord figured he’d give him a chance, so he brought in a translator who was going to be translating between the two using sign-language. The lord once again asked the accountant where the missing money went, and the accountant again played innocent and told the translator “I don’t know what he is talking about”. This went back and forth until the drug-lord got so fed up that he pulled his pistol and held it to the accountants head and told the translator “Tell him I will blow his head off, if he doesn’t tell me where my money is!” The translator signs to the accountant exactly what the drug-lord had said and he signs back “Okay okay, I hid the money under my bed. It’s all there, I promise. Just go and get it!” The drug-lord is getting impatient and asks the translator what the accountant had said and the translator, seeing his opportunity, says “He said, he doesn’t think you have the guts to pull the trigger!” Brutal story, I know, but still a great example of what it means to be ready when opportunity strikes. Maybe one more example of something a little more applicable to the internet marketing niche: has any of you seen the youtube video that recently went viral about a dad who shot his daughters laptop to teach her a lesson? I remember watching it the first time when it had about half a million views and I was thinking to myself “he should monetize that video… that way he would get at least some money from this little video of his.” A week after he uploaded it, he had over 24,000,000 views on that video and guess what? Still not monetized!
I don’t care much for Adsense and as such I am not a heavy earner with them but I do make a few bucks off of my monetized videos every month and just taking my average Adsense earnings (from my videos) and spreading the formula over 24 million views, I would be conservative if I said he should have easily earned at LEAST $50,000 in Adsense revenues alone (just in week one). Now of course, there are different ways of monetizing a video (like links to relevant products-for-sale in the description box, etc.) but he wasn’t doing ANY monetizing at all. I think it is safe to say that he missed out on roughly $100,000 USD just by not seizing the opportunity that he was presented with. MOMENT OF TRUTH: We are all presented with “once in a lifetime” opportunities and the more we are open to them, the more often such opportunities will cross our paths. The trick is to be ready when opportunity strikes and to embrace it like you have waited for it all your life.
These last few months I have been giving my whole online business some thought and concluded that I needed to get rid of a lot of things that keEP me “busy” but are not helping me get to where I want to be 1 year from now – or even 6 months from now. One prime example is the search engine marketing services I used to provide to website owners. It was a great service – customers loved it – and I had great success with it. In fact, providing these SEO services is what allowed me to quit my offline business and start working full-time online. I had systematized the entire service to a point where I had a virtual assistant manage the entire system for me with about 1 hour worth of work a day. And that included customer service (responding to emails, etc). It was going pretty solid – with my highest month being around $6,000 in profit – JUST from selling the SEO services. It doesn’t really matter where you live in the world, $6,000 per month is a decent income, especially if – like in my case – it came in month after month without me really having to do anything. In fact, if I had walked away from it, it would have continued to bring me in a half decent income for months and years to come. Not bad eh? Not bad at all! But getting back to what I was saying earlier: It was nothing more than a distraction to me – keeping me from what I wanted to be doing online. Sure the money was alright, but providing generic SEO services is not something I wanted to continue doing – even if it meant minimal work on my part. Also, Google was starting to make some major changes to it’s ranking algorithm and my once overnight miracle service wasn’t quit as powerful as it used to be. The service was still great, but I just did not want to continue providing it if I didn’t full-heartedly believe in it myself anymore. So at the beginning of this year (January 2012) I got rid of the generic SEO service completely. I cancelled all subscriptions of incoming payments and shut down the entire system – retiring it for good. I still do a lot of SEO and probably forever will be known as “the SEO guy” but I mainly do it now for my own sites and a select few clients who have bigger budgets to work with. It would take a few posts to explain in detail why I stopped providing SEO services, but the short version is: as long as I have customers, I will put their sites as top priority (before mine). Now that I have less than 5 client sites to work with, I have plenty of time, energy and resources to focus on my own sites. Was letting go of a medium-range 4-figure a month income stream really a wise decision on my part? I think so and here is why: If I keep pushing my own sites like I have been these last two months, I should be in the 5-figures a month range before the end of the year – and that from just a handful of my many sites. Oh and get this: it would be without staff (or some of the other expenses that came with running the SEO services for customers) – which means more cash stays in my wallet. So here is my challenge for you: is what you are working on today getting you to where you want to be a year from now? Are you holding on to an ultimate distraction just because it gives you a sense of security for the time being? Maybe it’s time to cut lose the safety boat you are dragging to conserve your energy, time, and resources, and bring the big boat to the shore.
Since I’m new to writing for Konrad, a lot of you don’t know me except as “The Self-Help Gal,” Konrad’s new writer. If you knew me just a little better, had been on my list or read my personal development blog, you’d know I have bipolar disorder (which used to be called manic-depressive illness). I’m pretty open about my illness; I’ve never seen a point in keeping it a secret. I also find that any relationship, business or personal, goes a little more smoothly if people understand that sometimes I’m a little off. Which is why I brought this up, actually. Not to talk about my illness but to share something a friend said to me yesterday that could help anyone. I’ve had a few difficult months. There’s no need to go into why, but they’ve been some of the worst of my life, and I still feel like I’m trying to get back to being completely me. I was talking to my best friend about this yesterday and she said, “Maybe you should make a list of what you were doing when you were at your best, and see if you can find a connection to help you get back to that place.” I did make the list and I’m already feeling better. But here’s why I brought this up. Whether you feel stuck in your personal life or in your business life, you can try this technique. List all the things you were doing when you were “at your best,” and bring those things into your life now. I know this sounds too simple and easy to be true, but it’s the best piece of advice I’ve received in a very long time. While everyone was trying to figure out what was “wrong,” this one idea simply transplants what used to be right, into the now. Try this out and let me know how it works for you. I’ll do the same.
As a marketer, I’m intensely interested in personal development, and as a personal development author, I’m intensely interested in marketing. And in both of my roles (really in all of my roles in life), I look to the people I admire in that area, the people who are not only succeeding financially but succeeding in life, and I model them. You’ve probably heard the saying “success leaves clues.” I think Tony Robbins said it first, but I’ve heard it from several people. Another of my favorite sayings comes from a Twelve Step program—“If you want what they’ve got, you have to do what they did.” So lately I’ve been thinking about who I want to be, what I want to do, and what I want to have. This has nothing to do with New Year’s resolutions, for me, but it may for you. I’m thinking about what I want to accomplish in my business, what I want to write over the next few months, and who I really want to be when I turn 45 in 13 months. I’ve been studying the careers and the habits of other authors and other marketers, and I’ve found something interesting. The best marketers, and the best authors, spend a lot of time thinking about personal growth and working toward being the person they want to be. To me, that’s really cool, because I don’t have to become someone I don’t want to be, in order to be successful. In fact, in order to be as successful as I want to be, I have to work on productivity (time management, prioritizing, organizing), on personal growth (character, credibility, reliability, honesty), on success mindset (belief in myself, an abundant outlook, determination, focus). In other words, in order to be successful as a marketer of my personal development products, I have to do the work I teach in those products. That’s what my marketing and writing heroes did, and that’s what I have to do if I want to “get what they got.” How do you incorporate self growth into your life and your marketing, and how has it helped you move further toward your goals?
Every now and then I come across something that reminds me of the days when I started out as a fulltime internet marketer. This was one of those things: It was not the $42k that this guy made within a 30 day period that got my attention. No… it was the fact that this dude is offering to mentor every day folks to make their first small fortune online. I had to think: if only something like this had been available to me when I started out online 2 years ago. Watch me explain: (See the WSO here: http://www.empiremarketing.ca/42k) Two things:
One thing that I have learned over time is: there is no secret to success. But there is a formula and it goes like this: find someone that is successful at whatever you are wanting to do, copy everything they do and you are guaranteed to be successful as well! Something my mentor once told me is: success leaves footprints that you can follow! I don’t know how much you are in to this personal development stuff, so let me get to the point: If you are still struggling to make a comfortable living off of whatever it is you are pursuing, find a mentor who already has massive success in that area. In this case, if you are wanting to make a go at internet marketing, find someone who is already successful at it and get them to mentor you. Don’t be too stubborn to accept the fact that some people are better at some things than you. In other words… swallow your ego. It was one of the hardest lessons I ever had to learn when I started out: I don’t know everything… yet! Hard to believe, eh? I know All kidding aside, the more successful I get, the more I look for solid mentors that will take me to the next level. Mentors are not cheap, but a good mentor is worth his/her weight in gold. Experienced mentors like Steve are rare, and fact is that you will not find anyone else at his price point… not to mention with his “satisfaction money back” guarantee. Crazy eh? I hope you find my thoughts in this post and in the video somewhat inspiring and maybe even thought provoking. Why waste time re-inventing the wheel when you can learn from someone who perfected it? To YOUR Online Success, Konrad Braun
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A problem all perfectionist product creators share is that the product is never done. And even if done, there are a million things they want to continually improve on.
I will update all the coding to make sure they are all 100% up to date, and I will once again add a few features that they did not have before just to make them even more valuable.
This week I have been working on setting some goals for my business. It is easy to know exactly what you want but knowing how to get there is another problem entirely!
A story is told of a mute accountant who was hired by a major drug-lord. The drug-lord figured that since the accountant couldn’t speak, chances of him blowing his illegal operation wide open would be slim.
Have you ever felt like you were holding on to something that distracted you from doing what you really should and want to be doing? I am not at all talking about things like facebook, twitter, TV or other small things like that (though those can be).
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