If you were given one wish you could make for anything, what would it be?

97% of the population respond to this question by simply asking for more money. But at the end of your days, what will you want, more money, or… more time?

That’s right, more time.

You’ve heard the old cliche that time is money.  But that’s not true at all.

Time is time.

Money is money.

And you know what, the truly successful people, the real leaders, 3% leaders we like to call them,  making things happen realize that their most precious commodity is not money but time, and they know exactly what to do to  carve out more time for their lives.

Do you?

Well you will in a minute, as I’m going to share with you a profound concept that may go against the grain a bit, but trust me if you apply it, you will start to free up more time and start living a more fun and productive life.

So how am I going to be able to help YOU get more time?  Well, here it is…

Focus on the Worthy

Yep, you got it. In order to carve more time out for your lifestyle, you need neglect those that are unnecessary and only focus on the worthy.

This goes for the people you deal with.

The tasks you work on.

Apply your time to one object at a time, and you will succeed. There is tremendous power in focus, and it’s your ticket to more time, and a much happier life. Think about it.

Here’s a first example… regarding who  you focus on.

You’re building your business, you have hundreds or thousands of team members, but only a handful of true leaders who are making things happen. Who should you spend the majority of your time with? You got it, the leaders. Spend at least 80% of your time with the people proving that they are worthy for your time.

Help the rest in group settings.

Two things will happen. Your leaders will become better leaders and better friends, and you won’t have your energy sapped by unproductive whiney slugs who happen to be on your team, but can’t figure out how to open an email to follow directions to get their website setup. You will enjoy your working time much more by simple only allowing those that are worthy of your time to get any.

Another example… regarding what you focus on.

If your goal is to create a lifestyle that truly inspires you, you need to spend the vast majority of your time on income producing activities. What are some income producing activities?

• taking orders
• placing ads online
• promotions to your list
• coaching leaders

What are some time wasters you should avoid?

• answering email
• answering the phone
• instant messaging
• working with non productive distributors
• goofing off on facebook

I can hear  you saying, “But wait Dave, don’t I have to answer email and the phone, I’m in business after all?”

Save these tasks and do them once or twice day. When you are “focused” on income producing activities, allow no other distractions. The email can wait, and most phone calls are from non productive distributors or prospects and can wait until you’re ready, and instant messaging can be a huge distraction.

And regarding facebook, twitter, etc. There’s a good place for this in your marketing mix, but I know for a fact that facebook can draw you in and eat up too much time just socializing. I see my wife Nancy do it all the time, but she’s not a marketer.

As a marketer your time on facebook , twitter, and youtube should have a focused goal in mind, and limited to less than an hour a day.

So to recap, if you have a really big goal,  and I hope you do, develop the discipline to get tunnel vision, and let those things that are not necessary remain undone. I know it may be a challenge at first, but be at peace in the knowing that the people and things that really matter for your big goal are getting the attention they deserve.

If you are marketing a high value and presumably high profit product or service, a muli tiered direct sales funnel may have strong benefits for you and your bottom line.

A multi-tiered sales funnel is a strategic marketing model that guides customers through a series of upsells that culminate in your ultimate high value product.

First recognize that selling a several thousand dollar product online is something that happens every day, but very rarely is it done directly. I know because I do it all the time with the use of a multi-tiered direct sales model.

It’s a simple fact that making a sale to an existing customer is many times easier than making that same sale to a new prospect, especially if the new product is related to the one the customer already purchased.

What isn’t so obvious is that in the mind of the customer making another purchase, an upsell on your part, that is in the same price world, is a manageable hurdle; a price point somewhere around 2x to 10x of the previous product seems to work well.

So combining these two observations, we can migrate customers from a $50 entry level product to a $400 mid level product to a $2,000 product with relative ease, since at each step, we’ve provided exceptional value, and kept the next “step” in the same price world as the previous… this multi-tiered sales funnel is easily expanded to even higher priced products.  I’ve personally used it to sell $20,000 training programs with ease, just by adding a $9,000 step up from the $2,000 product.

So, why do it this way?

A couple of reasons. The first we’ve already hit on a little, and it’s because making repeat sales is so much easier to do than making the first sale, as long as you’ve provided real value and treated your customers well.

Secondly, and equally important, it is much easier to optimize the early stages of the sales funnel since the first step into becoming our customer is a product for less than $50.  You can start making a little bit of money while developing your customer base.  And then move on to optimizing the creatives in the next tier of the funnel and so on.  This fact alone enables a much more methodical and strategic optimization plan, that will allow you to profit while getting to the point of making the high end sale.

Of course the upsells will not be 100%, but if you do a good job of writing your sales copy, it’s straight forward to upsell at least a third of your customers over time to each next stage in the product pipeline.  And since you’re making money, improving each stage is much easier and fun to do!

A multi tiered sales funnel is a powerful marketing concept that can dramatically improve your chances of optimizing your sales and marketing creative pieces, improve your conversion rates, and return on investment and ultimately selling more high value high profit products.

So what is it exactly?

It’s a marketing model that integrates a series of upsells to move your existing customers from some entry level product that sells for a very comfortable level usually less than $50, to your ultimate high value product, that usually sells for several thousand dollars, in a methodical, scientific manner.

Say for example, you are marketing a product that retails for $10,000.

How in the world are you going to set up and optimize your sales letter and get enough visitors to your creative so you can start to see some return on investment?  Is it even possible to make sales online for products that cost several thousand dollars?  Well the answer is yes, it’s possible, and in fact it’s happening every day, just not directly.

Let me explain.

Most entrepreneurs realize it’s much easier to sell a related product to an existing customer than to sell to a stranger.  That’s why the infomercial guys are willing to “lose” money on their front end product since they know, statistically, that a certain percentage will order some of their other products.

You can do the exact same thing online.

Another observation that most successful marketers recognize is that in the mind of the customer, once they’ve purchased a product, their thermostat has been raised and any other product in the range of 2x to 10x in price is often times still in their financial comfort zone.

This is an emotional response, but it’s very real.

For example, if you paid $50 for a dvd course, or ebook, or online resource, and liked it, an expanded course for $400 feels like it’s still in your range, right?

But how about going from $50 to $2,000?

I don’t think so.  It’s too big of a step.  A much smaller percentage of people will  be willing to make that jump. The upsell conversion will be too low to gain sales momentum.

To make the $2,000 sale, I would structure so that the first product is around $50, the second related product is around $400, and then upsell to the $2,000 product. As long as you optimize the sales letters, it’s reasonable to expect at least a third of your customers for a product will upgrade to the next in the funnel.

Repeat this process as many times as it takes to get to the product you’re trying to sell.

Can you start lower?

Certainly, but I would be sure to test it.  I know a lot of marketers like to start with a product around $7, basically adding a stage before the $50.  I think it will depend on what the price point is of your high end product.  I think it’s best to keep the number of stages to five or under…

Internet marketing allows for fast testing, tracking and tweaking of your advertising. And no system demonstrates that better than Google Adwords.

It works so good it’s addictive (more on that in a another post…)

The first goal of course is to find a small set of keywords that very precisely target your ideal customer, and that get decent traffic.

Group these keywords in an adgroup.

Now it’s time to craft the perfect Ad.

The first thing to realize is that you won’t find a winner your first draft. There are some excellent copyrighting resources to get you in the game, but suffice it to say you should follow the AIDA principle to start with.

A(ttention) – I(nterest) – D(esire) – A(ction)

The goal of the headline is to grab the visitors attention, and pique their interest. It works best if you use the keyword in the headline for this, if possible.

The other two lines of the ad should serve to provide clear benefits to the visitor increase their interest and desire, and in certain circumstances to further qualify them.

Here’s an example of an add that has performed well on Google:

• I Quit MLM
• Now I Make $7800/week
• Free Report Shows How

Can you pick out the components of marketing 101 (AIDA)?

In all PPC, in Adwords or Yahoo Search or even Bing, you should always be testing two ads against each other, and constantly improving your bottom line.

When a clear winner is determined (this usually takes at least 30 clicks) nuke the loser and craft another ad to take the winner.

Continue this process until you retire

Many people make poor decisions on ads because they choose the winner before it’s statistically significant.  Here’s free tool to help you to determine if a winner is found:

http://www.splittestaccelerator.com/freetool.php

Very helpful for making a sound statistical judgment; don’t settle for anything less than 95% confidence.

Creating winning ads is a fun sport, and highly profitable if you do it right. Invest the time in learning some good copyrighting, but more importantly constantly be testing, tracking and tweaking — and make statistical significant decisions.

See you on stage!

Yesterday I had a great time watching my oldest son’s soccer team play.

Aaron plays soccer for a small college in Wisconsin.  My mind is always relating what’s happening around  me into the success I’ve had with my business  and those of my mentors.

It was a physical game, very evenly matched if you look at the statistics.  The opposing fans, however, were having a tizzy. I don’t know what game they were watching but they thought every foul called against their team  was BS, and of course let the ref know this.

It was almost comical.

Complaining to the ref can only have a negative effect on the outcome of the game as it is not unusual for the ref to actually yellow card the team for obnoxious fans.

They came close.

This reminded me of the latest kick in the shorts many people took this past August from Google.  Advertising on Adwords is one of the most targeted, highly scalable and  fastest ways to generate leads ANYWHERE.

I’m an expert at it and easily generate over 100 leads per day into my attraction marketing system, so it is a key component of my marketing.

But crying “foul” to Google is not going to get your ads running again if they whack you — and hundreds of home business and affiliate marketers got slapped in August.

You must be willing to adapt and overcome.

Study what IS working, what recipe they really want, today, and apply it, and  voila, you’re back in the game.

Those fans needed to stop focusing their energy on the ref, but rather encourage their boys to adapt to the way the game is being called, and play within that framework…

They didn’t.

We did.

And we won!

Cheers,

A great question was asked in one of the forums that I’m a member of:

Is there such a thing as an ideal network marketing company to join when using PPC (and social media marketing)? Are there some features that we should look for? e.g. High ticket items, etc. I am not asking about the normal things that we should look for but more the things that make it easier to market on the internet. Cheers! Calvin

Here was my response:

I’ve done a lot of PPC marketing, and what I’ve found is the key to success utilizing PPC is getting some cash flow on the front end regardless of whether your visitors join you or not.

If you don’t, you’ll run out of money.

There are several ways to accomplish this, I’ve used both a lateral approach with an attraction marketing system and a direct approach where I sell an informative DVD on the front end to qualify folks.

Both produce cash flow, and signups, although the direct approach the signups came faster for me.

Now don’t miss this critical point, you need to KNOW, or at least have a really good idea, how much a lead is going to be worth to you both in the short term and long term, so you can calculate your ROI (return on investment). The reason is you’ll be paying between $2 and $5 per lead (when you’re really good) depending on keyword, ad copy and everything we’re going to be learning here.

My experience with an attraction marketing system showed me that I was able to earn somewhere around $4 per lead on the front end for the sales funnel I had set up; my direct approach sales funnel produces a bit more.

In either case, once inside and a customer, you need to craft a unique selling proposition that stikes a chord with your customers (usually current network marketers) and can effortlessly move them along your sales funnel. If you get creative and can craft that USP, then most legitimate companies will work fine.

What are current network marketers having problems with, what are they looking for? Make sure you USP hits these hot buttons. Most current network marketers, quite honestly don’t really care about the product they promote (as long as it’s legal and ethical).

They want to work with someone who has a system that works (creates profits), and does a lot of the heavy lifting for them (YOU).

They want to work with someone that can show them how to generate leads without hassling friends and family (YOU).

HTH,

Dave

I had to change a battery yesterday for my son’s Sebring. He’s off to college, and decided not to take it with him so it sat around for a few weeks while we figured out what we want to do with it.

Tuesday I tried to start it and, as you guessed, deader than a door nail. Spent all day charging it, and it worked fine for a while, but yesterday, once again, dead.

Now when I went to take it out and bring it down to Sears for a new one, I’m struck with the stupidity of design that drives me crazy. As an engineer by trade, I might be a bit more critical than most, but this was stupid.

The way the battery is mounted in the car, there is a goofy contraption strapping it in that you need to take both bolts off… stupidity number 1.

But the real kicker was the bolts clamping on the battery posts were different sizes, and this just pisses me off. But it’s worse than that. One was an english unit nut and the other was metric.

What?

Yep, they mixed different size nuts with different units attached to the same battery.

Stupid!

This made me think of a common mistake a lot of people make while marketing on places like google and yahoo. You see that simple design hack job, causing me to first change the wrench, and also changing units on the wrench (lucky for me I had metric), disrupted my calm, and my attention.

The process was not congruent.

The same thing happens when you develop an ad on google, send them to a landing page that has a completely different tone, feel, wording than the ad, and even more common when the visitor moves past the landing page.

Your marketing should have the same look, feel, tone, and verbiage from the initial exposure (google, yahoo, where ever) through to the landing page, and on to the thank you page, and even in your email follow up messages.

One simple thing you can do to help that process is include a picture of you on your landing page, thank you page, and all the follow up messages you send. Other people include a video on the landing and thankyou pages, and a photo in emails. That simple step adds a thread in your funnel.

This is called “Congruency”, and it is extremely important in today’s market as any little bump along the sales funnel (like a different nut size on the battery) and you’ll lose the visitor to another search.

Realize it doesn’t stop with a photo, either. Do you have your Google ad text on your landing page near the top so the visitor sees the connection? Does it make sense to have it on your page? If not, then you might want to consider changing either your ad or your landing page so they are congruent.

Try it out, and see if your conversion rates don’t improve!

Dave

One of the interesting things about truly successful people – you know the guys that seem to have the lifestyle, time, money, peace and happiness all at the same time – they’re rare for sure. But I know quite a few, and they all have a common characteristic:

A Personal Mission

Now this is usually not a self serving mission, but rather usually a big goal that’s bigger than them. They generally need to engage other people to achieve the goal, and it usually will result in making the world a better place to live.

My partners and I have a unified, common mission that maybe you could leverage. You see what we want to do has never been done before. We want to help create at least …

100 Successful Online Entrepreneurs by 2012

And by successful, I don’t mean just making a full time income online. That’s easy. I’m talking about enabling, training and coaching 100 people who not only never have to worry about money ever again have zero debt of any kind, they also have the freedom to enjoy their wealth.

Can it be done?

Well I believe it can. We are well on are way, and since we’re using the internet to help us achieve this remarkable goal, the market is enormous at over 1.5Billion people world wide.

Creating a mission will help to drive you. Push you. Help you stretch beyond what you thought was possible. Give yourself a treat and spend a few minutes, dig deep, and see if you can’t come up with a personal mission. You can borrow ours if you like, but do it today!

Until next time…

David A. Hanson

I know it may sound strange, but I believe there is a limit to how much money you can make at any given time. I believe you will not earn more than what I call your financial thermostat.

If you’re used to making $100,000 per year, that’s pretty close to what your limit is based on your own financial thermostat. Yeah you can maybe push it up 5% or maybe 10% per year, but not much more than that. Unless…

You Increase Your Financial Thermostat

So if you’re at the $100,000 per year mark and you want to double it in the next year, you must reset the limit. How do you do that? Well we talked a bit about it in my post on leadership. One of the most important things you can do is to spend 15 minutes right away in the morning and right before you go to sleep visualizing your goal.

And I mean give that vision some feeling, depth, feeling, color, smell.

Do this twice daily, and you will be imprinting a new image on your sub conscience mind and you will be happily surprised that in short order your vision has been attracted to you seemingly by magic.

Give it a go for 30 days and see what happens for you.

One other thing that can increase your financial thermostat is hanging around and masterminding with people who are making the type of income you think you’d like. They will have a tendency to expand your mind, and give you ideas that can help to increase your setting.

Until next time…

David A. Hanson

One of my beefs with virtually every multi level marketing company out there (at least the ones I’ve been involved with) is that they all lack what is perhaps the most important skill for ANY business, and that is…

MARKETING

Most MLM company owners would rather you just learn how to talk to your friends and family about the business, and build it on word of mouth alone. The problem with this strategy is most people don’t have a big enough circle of influence to actually build a business with this very small market

What happens when they run out of people to talk to?

Well they are force to either quit, or maybe an enterprising upline will encourage them to buy some leads and start cold calling or “dialing for dollars”. In either case, the distributor is doomed for failure as they are not being taught good solid marketing fundamentals

It’s so sad, because there are literally over 1.5 Billion people on the internet right now and all you need to do is figure out how to segment that massive pool, and to market to them.

If you find yourself struggling, take some time for some honest introspection: am I being taught how to really market, or am I like a sheep being led to the slaughter?

Once you master how to market online, generating 100 unique, highly qualified prospects into your sales funnel is trivial… when was the last time you gave 100 presentations in a single day?

Until next time…

David A. Hanson