Dan S. Kennedy's Blog, page 20

The “Missing Link” Principle

REVEALED: The “Missing Link” Principle that Controls the Flow,

Movement, and Attraction of Money.

In this video with GKIC’s Dave Dee and Dan Kennedy, you’ll discover why the science of Wealth Attraction REQUIRES a balanced, integrated approach that involves both mindset and practical steps in the real-world marketplace.  This is a part of the four episode series To Business Success and Advanced Wealth Attraction.  If you haven’t seen this free series, click here now, to get immediate access.

2015 Info-SUMMIT Speaker Russell Brunson

So what’s at Info-SUMMIT for you? Today, I want to share with you a young amigo who looks barely old enough to vote who wowed the crowd at last year’s Info-SUMMIT.

This video is but a sampling of what you can expect when you come to Info-SUMMIT 2015. Russell demonstrated his killer “niche” funnel he created that’s ringing up close to $18,000 a day. Now imagine how your life would change for the better if you could pull in a much more realistic $500 a day doing the same thing.

If you’re looking to generate leads, acquire customers, build traffic, increase sales or practically anything else online – Russell Brunson is THE man… and the good news is Russell will once again be at Info-SUMMIT this year.

Prices will go up after July 31st, so act immediately. Click here right now to register for Info-SUMMIT 2015.

The demise of direct mail – strictly a grand illusion

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Mark Twain

Mark Twain was addressing his critics who were spreading rumors that he had passed away. In fact, Twain was very much alive and his popularity with readers was peaking.

Twain also could have been talking about direct mail marketing, that tried-and-true form of advertising that’s been around for over 100 years and still going strong.

The fact is direct mail is hardly dead. It is still being used aggressively and regularly by all kinds of savvy marketers. It’s a critical part of their overall marketing mix, especially when it comes to prospecting for new customers.

It’s been called many things, including junk mail. But in reality the new junk mail is actually all the messages you receive in your digital mailbox every day.

How many emails do you delete without even bothering to open? Maybe half of them, probably a whole lot more. It’s not unusual for someone to delete as much as 90% of emails received without ever opening them. The average person now receives 20, 30 or more emails each day soliciting everything from weight loss to travel deals, from miracle drugs to the latest ramblings of so-called experts.

Yes, email marketing is an extremely effective medium for communicating and selling customers. And it is certainly more convenient and much less expensive when compared to direct mail.

However, if you’re looking for new customers, direct mail wins hands down. On the back-end, direct mail is cheaper when figuring out the cost-per-sale.

When it comes to crafting a multimedia campaign, your best bet is to use a combination of different messaging platforms which could include email, direct mail, free standing inserts, print ads and more.

Let’s take a look at how the old way of doing things (direct mail) stacks up favorably when compared to the relatively new kid on the block (email):

Ten advantages of direct mail versus email marketing

• Direct mail is more reliable, trustworthy – According to an Epsilon study, 50% of consumers prefer direct mail to email, 67% think direct mail is more personal, 70% preferred direct mail to email when it comes to unsolicited information from unfamiliar companies and 25% perceived direct mail offers to be more trustworthy than email.

• Direct mail can be three-dimensional, unique – You can touch and feel it, and in some cases like scratch ‘n’ sniff even smell it. It has texture, visual impact, a sense of realism and validity. Email is strictly one-dimensional, a message appearing on your computer or smart phone screen. There is little differentiation from one email to another.

• Direct mail projects a personality – The creative execution options are virtually unlimited, from different shapes and sizes to snap packs to scratch and reveal to windows, die cuts and intricate folds. Direct mail enters a home through a mailbox. Emails can be released into Never Never Land with a simple click of a button.

• Direct mail has longevity – A direct mail package can remain on a coffee table or desk for days, even weeks for future reference. When it comes to emails they are very disposable, they are rarely kept or referred back to. Emails tend to be a one-time, extremely brief, quick shot at gaining the attention of a prospect.

• Direct mail has a higher perceived value – When it comes to email prospecting campaigns, 95%+ of all emails are never opened. Direct mail will at least capture a glance. Prospects may not read every word, but there is a level of brand and offer awareness that doesn’t exist with emails.

• Direct mail has a much higher delivery rate – About 95% compared to less than 50% for most email lists. Plus more and more ISPs like Yahoo, AOL and Gmail are taking steps to block unsolicited emails, and this trend is expected to continue.

• Direct mail provides more details vs. short email content – The life span of an email is literally seconds. A direct mail package can actually hold the attention of a prospect for a much longer period of time, especially if there is an interest factor.

• There’s less competition in the mailbox compared to an email inbox – Since more and more marketers are choosing to flood email inboxes, the competition in the mailbox has been reduced. A direct mail package has a much better chance of being opened, read and retained compared to an email message.

• People are more receptive to direct mail – When it comes to prospecting for new customers, direct mail will consistently beat email, usually by a significant margin. According to a DMA (Direct Marketing Association) study, direct mail is 10-30 times more effective than email when it comes to generating new customers.

• Direct mail can rely on emotion to illicit a response vs. the cold, hard facts of an email – An emotional tug can help marketers sell products and services. It’s much easier to touch upon someone’s feelings with direct mail when compared to the one-dimensional, fact-based content of most email campaigns.

Can direct mail and email team up to bolster a marketing campaign?

It’s been proven time and again that direct mail improves email response rates. Here’s a way to combine the power of these two mediums to optimize impact. About 7-10 days before a scheduled email blast, send all recipients a postcard talking about an upcoming special email offer that will soon be arriving in their inbox.

This approach has been known to boost open and click-through rates. The email recipient is much more likely to keep an eye open for the soon-to-arrive email and much more likely to open and read the email, increasing the possibility for a sale.

This weekend’s web deal is How To Create Personality In Copy. It’s loaded with ideas, strategies and methods that can make a big difference in your bottom line – whether you apply it to traditional offline or online marketing. Order it this weekend and you’ll also get a special bonus: Copywriting Seminar In-A-Box – an excellent complimentary program that will pump up sales. But you must act now – this special offer will come to an end at midnight Monday, August 3rd.

The REAL Secret to Success

“Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like others won’t, so you can live the rest of your life like others can’t.” – Anon

Some of the worst advice that I’ve heard is “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”  This is usually taught by someone who hates their job.

The problem is not the phrase itself, but the presupposition that, if you do what you love, you’ll be successful. 

Sorry, that just ain’t true.

The good news is that the opposite is often true.  If you are successful, you can do what you love.

I’m at the track several times a week racing my horses.  I can only do that because I’m successful. 

I refuse to fly anything but private.  I can do that because I’m successful.

I work from home, making others come to see me instead of schlepping myself all over the country.  I think you get the point.  

The thing is, success isn’t simple and it doesn’t happen overnight, but ‘success leaves clues’ and those clues are readily available for those actually astute enough to look for them.

GKIC’s 2012 Marketer of the Year, Walter Bergeron, knows this.  He attended a GKIC Fast Implementation Bootcamp and in 90 days added over $1,000,000 of revenue to his business.  You can hear him tell his story of exactly how he did this below.

The end of the story (not on the video because it hadn’t happened yet) is even more remarkable.  

What you’ll never hear Walter say though is “that was easy.”  Nope, making a million bucks isn’t easy, but it’s not hard either…if you’re willing to pick up the clues AND put in the time.

So if you’re ready to do the things others won’t, to live the life that others can’t, then take the same first step that Walter did and come to a Fast Implementation Bootcamp (Free for Insider’s Circle Members.)

 Click here to reserve your spot at the next GKIC Fast Implementation Bootcamp.

NOTE: If you’re not already a GKIC Insider’s Circle Member and want to attend bootcamp for free, get 60 days of Insider’s Circle access and then register for bootcamp for free by clicking here.  You won’t regret it!

 

 

It’s All About the SALE

When it comes to the task of selling, many miss the mark on what’s truly job #1.

To do this is to court disaster.

A key foundational element is absolute clarity on what your job is if you are engaged in selling. Most people are not really clear about what that job is. Here are some examples of the ways in which they’re not clear about the ultimate goal of selling.

FIRST: Having Moral Ambiguity About Selling

Some sales people feel that their right to sell and to close is limited. Somehow they are morally limited, and they should only push this person so far and not push as far as they might be able to push. They have ambiguity about how much they deserve to make from selling, and how far they can push.

I actually had a salesman who worked for me years ago and he had it in his head that he was a $48,000 a year guy. That’s what was in his head. His dad had never made more than $48,000. And a ceiling of $48,000 was in his head, too. He was a $48,000 a year guy. Period.

And if it was the 31st of the month and he hadn’t sold anything to make $4,000 by midnight on the last day of the month, he would manage to sell just enough to make that $4,000.

If he sold something on the first day of the month and made $4,000, what happened in his life in the ensuing 29 or 30 days to prevent him from making another sale was unimaginable. Car problems. Family issues. Acts of God. You name it.

So there’s a lot of that kind of stuff going on in people’s heads. If you want to succeed and move on to the next level, you must get past this kind of negative thinking.

SECOND: Having Mixed Agendas About Selling

Willie Loman was the main character in “Death of Salesman.” The Curse of Willie Loman describes people who have mixed agendas when they’re in a selling situation. And this mixed agenda gets in the way of making sales.

Some sales people want to be liked and they are afraid of doing things that will cause others to dislike them – like pushing them hard to buy.

Some carry a sense of entitlement, as in “I shouldn’t have to sell – it should sell itself.”

Some even hold false beliefs about customers. “I’ll present all the information and you should have a right to make a decision about whether or not you’re going to buy.”

The REAL Number #1 Job Of Selling

These people don’t understand what the job of selling is. The #1 job of selling is to MAKE A SALE. That’s what the job of selling is. Period. End of story. No disclaimers required.

The main purpose of any media deployed is to make a sale. A sales media can be anything from a television spot to a website to a billboard to a sandwich board. Its job is to make a sale.

Its job is not to respect the customer’s right to make their own opinion. That’s not in the job description. And you can’t cash a check for that.

So you cannot march into your sales manager’s office and say, “I didn’t sell anything this week. But I was really respectful of everybody’s right to analyze information and come to their own conclusions about whether or not they should buy. So write me out a check.”

That’s not how sales people get paid. Sales people get paid for one thing and one thing only – making a sale. That’s our job, however we’re doing it, and in whatever environment we’re doing it. Ethically. Honestly. All that of course. But MAKE THE SALE.

One of the things I heard very early in my life was a quote by Zig Ziglar. This goes back to when he was a hardcore sales trainer. He was in the pots and pans business, going house to house selling $800 sets of pots and pans in the 1960s. (By the way there were $800 vacuum cleaners in the 1960s, as well as $800 sets of encyclopedias.)

So Zig’s quote was, “I’ve got their pots out in my car. They have my money in their kitchen drawer and I ain’t leaving until I make the exchange.”

Zig was very clear about this. That’s clarity about the #1 job of selling. Make the SALE. Period.

Whenever you’re in a sales situation you need to have this attitude: “That’s MY money in YOUR pocket. The minute the sales event started, however it started, I came into your room, you came into my room, you came to my television show, you came on my call – at that moment, your money became my money. Now it’s my job not to let you steal it from me by not buying.”

That’s where you need to be at because the absolute number one job of selling is about doing this.

SPECIAL NOTE: This weekend’s web deal is Sales And Persuasion Strategies. It includes all of the proven sales and persuasion techniques I’ve personally developed over 40+ years in the business trenches. I continue to use all of these with outstanding results – so you can start engineering automatic sales and enjoy much higher profits with much less stress.

If you act by this weekend you also get 19 Secrets Of Exceptional Selling, a $597 value, which contains inside information that leads to ultra-successful selling. I retired this from the GKIC catalog, so it cannot be purchased anywhere at any price. But it’s yours this weekend FREE if you invest in Sales And Persuasion Strategies.

Add This Income Stream To Your Business In The Next 90 Days

Interested in adding info-marketing to your business?

Click the button below now to join us at this years Info-SUMMIT.

 

 

 

The Art Of The Sale Is An Emotional Experience.

What is it a potential customer wants from the products or services you offer?

They are looking for a transformation – something that will cause an improvement or makes their life a little easier.

What you need to do is build the ultimate offer to attract attention. You have to know what that ultimate offer is and then build everything backwards to support that.

Before we identify what the ultimate offer may be for your business, let’s first start off by identifying and classifying who your target audience, or customer, really is.

There are three ways to categorize your customer. The first is demographics. Does your customer fall within a certain age range? How about gender? Does your product or service appeal to mostly men, or mostly women? Is there a location bias? Do your customers come from nearby or a particular area? Does your business have international appeal? What about income level? Are your customers affluent? Do they earn a minimum amount of money?

The second way to categorize your customer is by psychographic information. Is your customer liberal or conservative? Are they free spirited and open minded, or rigid and orderly in their thinking.

The third way to categorize is to identify emotional information. Try to figure out what are their hopes, their dreams, and their fears. You may have to make some assumptions here, but go ahead because you will probably be fairly accurate.

Now that you’ve categorized and identified your customer, it’s time to focus on what their key problem is, the solution they are seeking to this problem and the transformation they desire.

If your customers were to verbalize their feelings, they would be saying “If I could just …”

For instance:

“If I could just be able to pay my bills each month …”

“If I could just trim a few strokes off my golf score …”

“If I could just drop 15-20 pounds …”

“If I could just put away some money now so I could retire down the road …”

Knowing how your customer finishes that sentence is a key insight into their thought process and it allows you to construct an offer that is almost irresistible to them.

Once your customer finishes the sentence “If I could just …” the next step is to identify associated challenges related to it.

For instance if they said, “If I could just be able to pay my bills each month …” some of the associated challenges would be:

“I don’t make enough money.”

“I have too many bills and my credit card minimum payments are too much.”

“There always seems to be an unexpected bill or emergency to take care of.”

“After I pay all the bills there’s nothing left.”

Based on this information, the next step is to identify the ultimate transformation they want to achieve, for example:

“My credit cards are paid off. My savings account is growing each month. Taking care of the monthly bills is no longer a problem. I sleep better now knowing that my financial situation is under control.”

This ultimate transformation involves emotions. The customer is now feeling satisfaction, relief, confidence, optimism, joy.

To convert a prospect to a customer involves emotion. Selling is actually a transfer of emotion. Your customer needs to see, feel, hear, taste and experience the transformation that your product or service is going to give them.

When you apply emotion into the selling process you are gaining a tremendous advantage when it comes to attracting customers and ultimately turning them into regular patrons.

This weekend’s web deal is the Ultimate Marketing Machine. It jam-packed with ideas, templates, strategies and materials you can use right away to generate quality leads and convert those leads into customers, clients or patients.

Order the Ultimate Marketing Machine now and you will also pick up two great bonuses. Get 12 months of “Done For You” Client Newsletters (worth $497). Just add a few details about your business and send them out. You’ll also receive three Content Review Certificates (worth $1,491). Send us your marketing material and our copywriters will provide feedback to make sure your messaging is on target.

Act now to take advantage of this offer because it expires at midnight Monday, July 20th.

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Selling Anything…10 Sales Strategies That Actually Work

“Adults sell for today. Professionals sell for life.” – James Altucher

Below are 10 sales strategies that I happen to like from a person you’ve probably never heard of, James Altucher.

(To be fair, he probably hasn’t heard of you either.)

What’s very telling is, if you look at James extensive bio, or check him out in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, The Huffington Post, etc…you’ll NEVER hear him described as a salesman but as James says, he’s been doing nothing BUT selling for the last 25 years.

While I didn’t expect to like this list of 10 strategies, I found most are quite accurate, so I thought I’d share them with you.

If you like these, you owe it to yourself to check out something James IS known for.  His book “The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth” but more on that later.  For now keep reading.

I’ve never read a book on sales. They seemed corny. Like many people, I always looked down on the concept of “selling.” It seemed like something lower than me.

To some extent, selling appears manipulative. You have a product where you give the perception it has more value than it has in reality. So you need to manipulate people to buy it. This seems sad, as in “Death of a Salesman” sort of sad.

I was a salesman snob.

I was wrong. And for the past 25 years all I have been doing is selling. Selling products, selling services, selling businesses, selling myself.

Sometimes I have been manipulative. And sometimes I’ve sold things I’ve had such passion for I sold it cheap just because I wanted the message out about what I was selling.

And often, it was very much in the middle: I needed to sell something because I had to pay my bills. Maybe I was a little desperate, a little hopeful, a little scared, and I wanted to make sure my family got fed.

We live in a hard world where our basic needs cost money, and as we get older we become responsible for the basic needs of others. We become adults.

Adults sell for today. Professionals sell for life.

So here are the rules of this cheat sheet: None of this comes from a book. All of this is from my own experience. Which means it might not work for you. Which means it might go counter to the basic rules of salesmanship. I have no idea.

I downloaded a book by Og Mandino and by Zig Ziglar but I didn’t read them. Maybe I should.

But I can say that over the past 25 years I’ve sold hundreds of millions of dollars of stuff. That stuff being everything in Pandora’s box that I had to sell just to stay alive. When I think what worked for me, here’s what I come up with:

A) Friendship

Nobody is going to buy from someone they hate. The buyer has to like you and want to be your friend. People pay for friendship.

This sounds sort of whoreish, and it is. The times when I’ve hated myself the most were the times when I’ve prostituted myself to make money (this isn’t as sexual as it sounds but it might as well be).

One time when I was raising money for something, the buyer was going through a business catastrophe and was worried he would go out of business. I didn’t like him but I called him every day for three months at the same time to see if he “wanted to talk” and to offer my advice on how he should deal with his situation.

I eventually raised a lot of money from him even though the first time I met him he was honest with me and said, “it seems like you don’t know your industry very well.”

Which just goes to show: friendship outweighs almost every other factor in selling. One time I wanted to do a website for ABC.com. How did I do it? The main decision maker was involved with a school in Harlem for charity. I went up there for four weeks in a row and played 20 kids simultaneously in chess. Everyone had fun. I got the website job. My competitors were all bigger, better financed, and probably better.

Unfortunately, I didn’t like either of those people personally. And eventually, I lost the business.

The only good outcomes come when both sides like each other.

At one point I was so sick of my new “friendships” I went to see a therapist with the clichéd line, “I don’t even know who I am anymore because I hate all my friends and all my friends are customers so I’m their slave friend.”

Now I only do business with people I like. The fastest way to lose all your money, mutilate your heart, and then kill yourself is to work with people you don’t like. I will never do that again.

Nor do you have to, despite what you might think.

B) Saying No

If someone wants to do a big deal with you it’s hard to say “no.” But No is valuable for many reasons:

Opportunity cost. Instead of pursuing something you really don’t want to do, you could free up time and energy to find something more lucrative or something you would enjoy more. Opportunity cost is the one BIGGEST cost in all of our lives. We spend it like there’s no tomorrow.

And guess what? Eventually there’s no tomorrow.

Supply and demand. If you reduce the supply of you (through “No”) then the demand for you goes up and you make more money (and have more fun).

You’ll hate yourself. I see this every day, particularly in my own life. The reason I can write about this is not because I’m an expert. We don’t write about the things we KNOW. We right about the things that are deep down CHALLENGES for us right now. When I say “yes” to something I don’t want to do, I end up hating myself, hating the person I said “yes” to, doing a bad job, and disappointing everyone. I try try try not to do it anymore.

(from Palookaville, by Seth)

C) Over-Deliver

If someone pays $100 and you give them just $100 in value then you just failed. F.A.I.L.E.D.

You’ll never sell to that person again. That’s fine in some situations, but in most situations it’s no good. If someone pays $100, you need to give them $110 worth of value.

Think of that extra $10 as going into some sort of karmic bank account that pays interest (as opposed to a U.S. bank account). That money grows and compounds. Eventually, there’s real wealth there. And that wealth translates into wealth in the real world.

People are three-year-olds. They like to get presents.

People want to do business with people who give them presents. Over-delivering is a present. And it makes you feel good. Give and you will receive.

D) Never Take “No” For An Answer

This statement, which everyone knows, is usually applied incorrectly.

People think it means, keep pushing and trying new things until you get a “yes.” That’s not what it means. If you do that, you end up in the spam box. Then you end up in the coffin box. In other words, you end up dead to the person you are trying to sell to.

Instead, remember point A. Be a friend. However flimsy that connection of friendship is. Follow on Twitter, follow on Facebook. Say nice things about the person to other people. Never gossip.

Do the art of the “check in.”

Send updates after the “No” on how you are doing, on how the product or service or business or whatever is doing. Not every day. Maybe once a month. Maybe once a year. Who knows. Eventually you will find the “yes” with that person. It could be, and often is, up to 20 years later.

Who knows? You plant a seed and eventually the garden blooms.

E) Under-price (when it’s your passion so it’s easier to over-deliver)

I once wanted to do the website for Fine Line Films. I loved their movies. I met the guy running their site. He kept saying over and over again, “we can’t afford a lot” and I kept saying, “don’t worry about it” and would show him more and more of our work.

Eventually we did the websites for every one of their movies. $1,000 per website. We made amazing websites for $1,000. Then, when Con Edison wanted to hire us, Nevin at Fine Line was a reference. Price for coned.com (a basic four-page website): $250,000. And that was the first of five websites we did for them plus monthly maintenance.

I write for a lot of places right now for free. Any medium I love, I am willing to write for. It’s like a dream come true for me. The benefits from doing that have been incalculable. Not always financial, but always real.

We are a combination of many constituencies inside of our bodies and minds. Financial is just one. But all of our constituencies need to work together to make us well-balanced and peaceful.

The art of selling, for me, is to have everything inside of me working together.

F) Be The Source

One time I wanted to buy a company. The details of how I would do that are sort of obscure and not important. The company is well-known in the financial media space.

At the critical moment, the owner called me and said, “what should I do? I have this other offer and I have your offer.” He described the other offer to me. I told him to take it.

I missed out on what could have been a lot of money to me. But there was a slight chance we would have all gone bust. Now he is thriving and eight years later he is a friend.

Will we ever do business together? I can’t predict the future. But I know I delivered value to another human being. That value is real and I can put it to use whenever I want.

Often the best way to make friends and customers for life is to direct them to a better service or product than yours.

Be the source of valuable information rather than the source of your “product-of-the-day.” Then they will know forever that you are a trusted source.

Trust is worth more than next month’s rent being paid. Trust builds a bridge that will never wear out. At some point in the distant future, when you are on the run in every other way, you may need to cross that bridge.

G) Sell Everything

Your offering is not your product. Your offering is product, services, your employees, your experiences, your ideas, your other customers, and even (as mentioned above) your competitors. Sell them all.

When you are good at what you do, the product or service you offer is just the way people build the first link to you. It’s the top of a huge pyramid.

But the base of the pyramid, the real service, is when they have access to you and you can provide advice and the full power of your network and experience. This is when you are over-delivering on steroids and how real wealth is built and not just a one-time fee for a service or product.

Many people say, “no! My product is high margin and I want to make money when I sleep.”

Stop going to BS entrepreneur, get-rich conferences. In the long run nobody cares about your product. In the long run, it is the entire holistic view of your offering, your service, you, that you are selling. Without that, you will build a mediocre business that may or may not pay the bills. With that, you will create wealth.

H) Sell The Dream

People can see what your product is right now. What they want to know is…the future. Will your product make them more money? Will it get them a promotion? Maybe even: will YOU hire them if they buy your product.

Everything is possible. When you get in the door, do not sell your product. People make a decision on your product in five seconds. Sell the dream. The dream has up to infinity in value. Build up images of the dream. Give a taste of what the dream is like. Let it linger. Let it weave itself. Let the imagination of the buyer take hold and run with it.

But then, you might ask, do I risk under-delivering.

Answer: Yes. Don’t do that. Be as good as the dream.

I) Fire Customers

This is similar to point B with the one difference that you have already made a sale.

If it’s not going well or if it’s leaving a bad taste somewhere inside of you, or if they have gone from friend to enemy for whatever reason and it seems like there is no repair, then fire your customer. The sooner the better.

This applies to not just customers but everyone in your life. EVERYONE.

If someone no longer has your best interest at heart, then in your own self-interest you need to back off. NOW.

A bad customer (a bad person) spreads like a disease inside you, your employees, your other customers, your competitors, your future customers, your family, etc.

“But what if it’s my biggest customer? How do I pay the bills?”

I don’t know. Figure it out. You have to or you will die.

When I tell people to build their “idea muscle” (by writing down 10 ideas, good or bad, every day) it’s not so they can come up with great business ideas (although they might).

It’s so they can come up with ideas in situations like this. This is where being an idea machine saves your life and saves everything around you.

But remember: bad customers will kill you and your family and your friends.

J) Welcome To The Pleasure Dome

Your best new customers are your old customers. If you need to make more money or build new business then go to your customers (who are now your friends) and ask them, “I need advice. What other service can I provide you or anyone you know.”

It might be something totally unrelated to your business. No problem. Do it. It might be your customer is looking for a new job. That’s great. Make it your business to find him a new job. Now you have a new customer.

It might be your customer needs a boyfriend. Ok, introduce her to all of your friends who might be good for her. If you’ve been following this approach to sales then your customers are now your friends, are now your family, are now the lifeblood of how you wake up in the morning.

We spend years building a garden. We plant the seeds. We tend the soil. We water the plants.

But we are also the sun. The sun shines no matter what. It doesn’t care which flower blossoms. The sun is always there providing value every second of the day.

Be the sun and you will become abundance.

I don’t know the buzzwords to make a sale. I’m not very good at shaking hands. I don’t take people out to baseball games or do any of the things I see other people do.

But I’ve been selling for 25 years. And whenever I’ve been dead broke, depressed, and suicidal, I’ve picked myself up and sold again and again.

I am a salesman.

- James Altucher

NOTE:  While I read a lot of books… I rarely recommend books simply because they are not applicable or practical to most of our members…

…especially when they have nothing to do with marketing.

This book is different though, which is why you need to grab your copy now.

It’s called “The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth” and it’s written by my friend and best-selling author James Altucher.

I’m recommending it because it’s about more than just business -it’s about preparing yourself and your family for the future and the big new trends emerging that will have a huge impact on your life.

In James’ words: 

…”it’s essentially all about money: making it, growing it, keeping it, in America today. It’s about building wealth, investing, business, and finance. It’s about the new rules of retirement, entrepreneurship, investing, and preserving wealth.”

It’s a book that you can’t afford not to read.

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Winning Formula for Attracting Customers for Life

Attract more customers – that’s the number one reason I hear from business owners and entrepreneurs when I ask why they think they need to learn to write better.

A few might give a different answer such as “I want to attract more media attention,” but the majority want to know how to attract more customers, clients, patients, followers, donors, etc.

That is fine, and certainly a good motivation to learn how to write better. But it is also simplistic and won’t necessarily get you where you ultimately want to go. Many marketers trade away long-term customer and business-value by not really being focused with “the bait” they put into the marketplace.

For instance, it’s fairly easy to attract quantity, but value in each individual person is a whole other issue. Someone might be a very, very valuable customer for you might be of little or no value for me, or vice versa, even if we, in fact, sell basically the same things.

If we don’t deeply resonate with them, then their value to us over a period of time disintegrates. Retention plummets. Sales are lower. And so on. If you want your business to move to the top and create real success and wealth, you have to do more than just write to attract or even sell.

You have to create high levels of rapport, trust, and relationships. You have to sustain your customers’ interests on a continuing basis.

So by all means, get better at writing—but be very clear about your reasons for writing. Here are six things I believe all business owners interested in wealth and success should consider when writing:

Attraction – When you are writing to attract a customer, client, patient, etc. you want to give a great deal of thought about who you want to attract, not just attracting anybody and everybody in the greatest quantity that you can get. Be sure to measure your success by response percentages: how many of the right people you put together.

Connection – There is more to a transaction with a customer than money. Connection means that the person on the other end of all this communication has feelings about us as a result of the communication, and has a sense that we have feelings about them.

Acceptance of advocated position – We’re not just trying to get a customer. We’re not just trying to sell a product or a series of products. We’re trying to get ‘buy-in’ to our positions, to what we’re all about.

That can be all the way to the most micro-practical of those positions, for example, long copy is better than short copy, or trying to convince somebody that if you’re into the do-it-for-them newsletter business, that ugly is better than pretty.

You need to be able to influence your customers to buy-in to your position from the micro-philosophical stuff all the way to the macro-philosophical stuff that actually is more important in keeping customers.

Sales and purchases – We write to sell things. That is a given and maybe overly obvious. But to sell things we have to get people to interact and participate with us and be involved. And that is actually one of the hardest things to do.

Over the years I’ve done a lot of involvement pieces. We give members the chance to win big cash prizes, an all-expense paid weekend getaway getting advice from me for their business, etc. Despite it being free to enter, the number of people participating is not anywhere near what you’d think it’d be. I could give away a car and the percentage of people who actually participate would be painfully low.

But, involvement helps the person be satisfied with what they’re getting. It also, by the way, in many cases delivers value regardless of whether or not your product or service is as good as expected.

And whenever you get someone to participate, you move them to a much deeper level of commitment to you, and to your culture. So working on including these involvement pieces in your writing is critically important.

Retention – I’ve said it many times; it’s not just getting them, but keeping them. And how can you keep them for a month or longer, three months or longer, a year or longer and so on

This is one of the biggest issues of today. How can you write to keep them in the game and not go away a short time later?

Ascension – You want to write so that you get people to move up. Meaning, you want your customers to move up actual ascension ladders, where they move up to the next rung and give you more money. At this level, it’s not just more money you are convincing them to give you, but you are bringing them up in emotional commitment to the entire process too.

Part of the game of writing is trying to touch on all the necessary bases every time you’re in front of a prospect or customer so that you’re consistent with the image and message you’re presenting.

Look at a piece of your writing – a newsletter, an ad, a course you put together. How many of these things can you find in an individual piece of your writing? If you want to get to the top and stay there, you need to learn how to weave these concepts into everything you write and communicate.

If you want to regularly engage you prospects, customers, clients or patients you should be using a newsletter. Don’t have the time, resources or talent to put one together? Invest in this weekend’s web deal: Newsletter Blueprints. Order by midnight July 13th and get an extra bonus: four months of “done for you” newsletters you can send out. Just add a few details about your business and it’s ready to go out. But you must act now – this special bonus offer ends Monday night.

Want to Increase Your Success Rate and Your Revenue? Take Time to Study Your Customers.

I know this may seem obvious. But I’m surprised how some small business owners just don’t do their homework and drop the ball on this one.

I’ve been in the marketing business for better than 40+ years now. And in my opinion getting to know your prospect is a critical part of success. I’d go so far as to say that it is the number one secret to creating, writing and executing a successful promotion.

Many years ago, when I was just getting started and struggling to make ends meet, I realized the importance of not only meeting and knowing people, but learning things about them and using this information to build my business.

I got in the habit of jotting notes on index cards for every contact, person or customer. I kept these index cards in alphabetical order in a metal file box. And whenever I had some kind of contact with that person, I would routinely go to the file box, pull out the card and “update” my information.

Here is an example of what I’m talking about:

MANNING, Rick

216-679-4655

Director of Marketing – McCann Plastics – Lakeview, OH

Met at Chamber of Commerce Dinner (February, 1975)

Married, lives in Shaker Heights, daughters attend St. Joseph Academy

Xavier University graduate (Business major)

Likes to play the horses, low handicap golfer, conservative political ideology, grew up in Akron, Browns fan, brother Jack is Columbus city councilman

Created b-to-b control package for McCann using stickers (Summer, 1975)

Created test packages to beat control (March, 1976)

McCann switched ad agencies (Summer, 1976) Relocated to bigger facility (Fall, 1976)

Sent him 4 tickets to Browns-Steelers game (1976) and Xavier basketball game (1977)

From this example you can see that I kept fairly detailed notes about the people I worked with and for. Because of this, I actually got to know the real Rick Manning, right on down to his political affiliations, where his kids went to school and his favorite pro team (Browns). He was a client and became a personal friend of mine who used my services for years, even after switching jobs a few times.

The same thing applies to your customers, clients or patients. When you know who you are selling to, you can create a specific marketing campaign that gets past your prospect’s natural resistance to selling. It allows you to match what you are selling to what they want.

You can increase sales and give your promotion an edge over competitors who don’t take the time to know and understand your prospect.

Plus, you’ll be able to connect with your prospects and customers on a deeper level – which means not only will you be able to sell to them, you’ll be able to turn them into loyal customers in the long-run.

The tricky part is that when you are selling online or through direct mail you can’t see who you are talking to. You can’t see their age or gender or what kind of car they are driving, like you would if you were selling to them face-to-face.

So what do you need to understand and look for? There are multiple layers to your prospect:

• This covers things such as your prospect’s age, gender, income, and education. For instance, you might uncover that your ideal prospect is male, aged 40-50 years old, earns $100,000, and has a 4-year college degree.

• This digs into where your prospects live such as the city, state, and country. This can be broken down even further to specific neighborhoods or types of areas, for instance rural vs. city.

• Here’s where you dig into your target market’s attitudes, values, beliefs, and lifestyles. What they desire and what keeps them up at night. What their religious, political and other beliefs are and so forth.

Learn all you can about the people you are selling to. Find out what makes them tick. Because if you want people to buy your products and services, you have to know what makes them motivated and what will make them take action.

Here’s another great way to increase your sales and generate a quick surge of revenue. Order this weekend’s web deal Growth Hacks. If you act by midnight Monday night you will receive a $100 discount off the retail price and we’ll also include two (2) LIVE Q&A calls with Dave Dee.