But there’s one major area that needs to be included in my plan – and in your plan – before we do that: list building. By list building, I mean adding people to your email list so they get an email notification each time you post an entry to your blog, as well as occasional announcements and promotions. That’s how I communicate with my list. You might send an e-zine to your list instead.

While list building is not a stream of income itself, it is a project that deserves the same level of attention as any stream of income. As more interested people join your list, it becomes much easier for you to fill your events with participants and make more money selling products.

For example, if 3% of your list typically responds to an offer and your list has 100 people on it, you’ll get 3 customers for a particular offer. However, if your list has 1,000 people on it and you have the same response rate, you’ll get 30 customers. And if your list has 10,000 people on it, well…

Now we’re talking!

All your streams of income will have a much better chance of getting larger as your list grows larger. Remember, these are people who have chosen to receive information from you, so they’re likely to be good prospects for the services and products you offer.

The large internet marketers understand this concept all too well and are constantly working on growing their lists. For those of us who aren’t so flush (yet!), it’s tempting to focus solely on what will bring in money now. I know I’ve frequently fallen into this short term thinking.

It’s a big mistake.

Of course, we need to make enough to pay our current bills, but if we don’t put some energy into building our lists, we’ll be stuck on the rung we’re on now forever! The way to leverage our time and make more money with every service and product we offer is to get more customers for each offer. And, as we’ve seen above, this becomes easier as our list gets bigger.

For those of you who’ve been doing business online for a while, you’re familiar with the mantra, “Build your list.” You hear it everywhere online. What’s not always so clear is exactly how to do that. We’ll get to that, but for now, let’s just agree that building our lists is going to get equal footing with each of our other income streams. That means when we drill down to create more detailed plans, list building will be a major area we want to focus on every single week.

How much attention do you give to growing your list? What’s the best way you’ve found to add people to your list? Leave a comment and share what works for you.

I’m sure you received many emails at the beginning of the year, as I did, expounding on the virtues of establishing goals for your business this year. I, as usual, chose not to go through the exercise at that time. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in setting goals. I just don’t think we should reserve the process for January 1st.

And it’s that word – process – that we need to focus on. It’s not just about setting goals, but about following up with more details about how we plan to accomplish them. It’s this lack of additional planning that causes New Year’s Resolutions and other goal-setting exercises to fail.

For the last few months, my business, my mindset, and my finances have been changing. And I’ve spent time in denial, distracting myself, confused, paralyzed, as well as working very hard. In my own way, I was processing the changes. (I wouldn’t mind finding a more efficient way to do this!) I finally found my way out of the fog last week and starting some serious business planning.

First, I clarified how much income I wanted each month. Then, I decided what streams of income I would continue, create, or enhance to achieve that income. I used a few guidelines here. First, I couldn’t have too many streams. It just becomes unmanageable to split my time and attention between too many “departments”. I chose five streams for now since several of them are new and will require a lot of attention to get going. As these streams become more established, I can choose to add new streams if I wish.

Each stream of income needed to involve a product or service that I knew I would enjoy providing. There’s nothing harder than trying to start up a line of business when you just hate what you’re doing. Why try to force it? There are so many ways you can earn money, and this is how you’re going to spend a great deal of your time, so make it something you enjoy.

The next guideline was to be realistic about how much I could really make with a stream within the next few months. I didn’t want to start with totally unrealistic estimates for these streams of income because if I did, I would certainly fail in making the income I needed each month. That would mess up my finances, but even more importantly, it would doom me to failure right from the start. This is a key problem we often have with goal-setting. When we make our goals too lofty, we’re almost guaranteed to fail and of course, that’s pretty discouraging. We might decide that setting goals is pointless and we lose our motivation to keep moving forward. As I execute my plan and the income from each stream meets my goals, I can always adjust my target income for a stream upward.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Duh. I know to do this. Is this the first time Peggy has ever done this?” The answer is “No.” I do know this and have done it many times over the years. I’m going over it again now for two reasons,

First, I want to emphasize that we need to do this over and over again through the years of our businesses. And not necessarily just at the beginning of the year. If we’re working a plan and getting the results we want, great. But if we’re feeling at all off course, going back to this exercise can help us refocus on where we want to being spending our time and energy. And even if we are getting the results we want, we will want to readjust our plan – raising income targets, adding additional streams – periodically.

The second reason for discussing these goals is to move on to what comes next. Far too often, I’ve set these goals but not continued the planning far enough or detailed enough for the level of successful results I wanted and could have had. I’ve resolved (“resolved,” get it? ) to do better this time, which means drilling down into each stream and creating plans that make it simple for me to know what I need to do each week and each day to achieve my goals.

So in the weeks to come, I’m going to share more about my planning process, hoping to inspire you to make yours as effective as possible. You’ll also be hearing more about the new products and services I’m going to be offering, so stay tuned!

Do you have a business plan for this year? How do you stay on track? I’d love to hear what works for you, so share what’s working – or not – in a comment below.

First, let’s look at who can benefit from offering a teleclass.

Who Should Offer Teleclasses?

Teachers and Trainers: Reach a much wider audience without the hassles of managing a live event.

Consultants: Establish yourself as an expert with people you otherwise might not meet.

Service Professionals: Get paid to promote your services and create a lower price point for those who can’t afford you one on one.

Information Marketers: Learn how to easily create new products whenever you wish – with less work than you ever dreamed!

Small Business Owners: If you sell products, teach people why they need them and how to use them to maximize your product sales.

Hobbyists: If you are passionate about something, whether it’s fishing or stamp collecting, you can share your expertise – or that of others – and get paid for it!

You probably saw yourself somewhere on that list. But specifically, what’s in it for you to offer teleclasses?

What Results Can You Expect From Offering Teleclasses?

• You’ll know how to make money quickly anytime you want to.
• You’ll have one or more completed products. This is a terrific way to write that book!
• You’ll create more sales for your other products/services.
• You’ll have a larger list.
• You’ll gain recognition as an expert in your field.

That sounds pretty good!

Remember that teleclass program I mentioned earlier? It’s called the Success With Teleclasses Live Program and it starts Tuesday at noon Eastern, so this is your last chance to join us and add teleclass income – current and future – to your revenue stream. Register here!

If you haven’t decided to offer teleclasses, why not? Maybe for one of these reasons:

“I don’t see how teleclasses fit into my business.”
If you want to build your list, make money quickly, add a mid-priced product to your portfolio, create a product easily, OR be seen as an expert in your field, then you want to offer teleclasses. They will help you achieve every one of these results.

“I don’t have a big enough list to market teleclasses to.”

Good news! Several marketing techniques make use of OTHER peoples’ lists, so you can succeed with teleclasses without your own list.

“I don’t believe I can attract enough people to register.”

I know at least 12 different ways to attract registrants to your teleseminar program, so you CAN fill a class.

“I don’t have any content to offer.”

Well, I’m not sure I believe that, but there’s a simple way to offer teleclasses where you don’t have to know anything at all about the content.

“I don’t have time to set everything up and create products at the end.”

Well, here’s a big one for many people. Setting up your class can be so simple that it won’t take any time at all. And, if you wish, you can inexpensively hire someone else (like me!) to set up the registration process for you. Once you’ve completed your first teleclass program, all the hard work for creating the products is already done.

“I don’t think I can lead teleclasses well.”

Perhaps you’re concerned about the “performance” aspect of leading your own teleclasses. Don’t be! There are numerous formats for teleclasses and some of them have other people providing nearly all the content and doing most of the talking.

“It’s too technically difficult for me.”

Very little of the process of offering your own teleclasses and creating products from them is technical. An obvious solution for the small bit of technical that is required is to hire me to help you set up your registrations and put together your product packages at the end. The rest of the process is well within your abilities.

Now you have no excuses for not creating your own teleclass program. If you’d like to learn a step-by-step method for designing, promoting, leading, and packaging your own teleclass program, check out my new Success With Teleclasses Live Program.

The early bird pricing goes away at the end of the day Tuesday, so don’t delay – register now!

During the last few months when the economy has been troubled and we’ve all been concerned about our finances, I’ve been thinking about what I can offer to help. I realized that for many people, teleclasses (also known as teleseminars) can be a great solution to make money now and later.

Why You Should Offer Teleclasses

1. A teleclass program is easy and fast to setup. The cost of hosting or participating in a teleseminar is extremely low compared to other methods of training or promoting a business. It can be very inexpensive to setup and record your program. And it’s not hard – even technophobes can do it!
2. Offering a paid teleclass program is a fast way to make money. You can go from initial concept to accepting registrations in a matter of days, or even hours!
3. It sets you up as expert. Whether you’re sharing your own knowledge, or leveraging that of others, people will see you as the person to go to for the type of information in your program.
4. You can easily create one or more passive products from your live event. Once you’ve prepared and offered your teleclass program, you’ll have what you need to quickly create a set of products you can market.
5. You can actually promote other products/services while getting paid. You can weave references to other products – yours or ones you’re affiliated with – into your classes. You can deliver a ton of valuable content and still subtly point people to other products you want them to buy.
6. Offering teleclasses leverages your time. If you compare how much you can make with a client one on one versus how much you can make per hour during a teleclass, you’ll be amazed.
7. You don’t need your own list to be successful. It can be tough to make money online if you don’t have a large list of your own. But there are lots of ways to promote your teleclass, and several of them leverage others’ lists.
8. Teleseminars are available for anyone in the world to take. Unlike workshops or speaking engagements, teleclasses are not constrained by geography. Anyone anywhere with access to a phone can attend your program.
9. There’s no travel, room rental, or dressing up as for live events. The convenience of attending a program over the phone or internet can’t be beat, both for you and your participants. I’m usually in sweats and a T-shirt when I’m on a call, as a leader or a participant. (Don’t tell anyone!)

When I remembered how terrific teleclasses can be for quick as well as long-term income, I decided to create my own teleclass program – on offering teleclasses! If you’d like to learn more about offering teleclasses yourself, check out my program at www.successwithteleclasses.com. Even if you’ve offered teleclasses in the past, I’ll bet you’ll discover ways to make more money than you have before.

I’m not planning to offer this material in a live program again, and it starts in just a few weeks, so if you’re at all intrigued, I encourage you to learn more about how you can make money with teleclasses at www.successwithteleclasses.com.

I almost forgot! There’s an early bird special good until March 31st, so make sure you register by then.

This concern is amplified by the increasing number of tools available to create alternate versions of your articles so the same one won’t be posted everywhere.

The Truth

The truth is, though, that you won’t be penalized for having identical articles around the web. The “duplicate content penalty” refers to duplicate content within your site. Even then, you’re unlikely to have a problem unless you’re trying to game the search spiders. Search engine penalties are reserved for sites trying to trick the search engines and very few average sites ever experience such a penalty.

What will be the effect on your Google search results if you have the same article posted to 30 different articles directories? Well, all the sites may not show up in the search results.

Remember what Google’s goal is: to return to searchers as many of the most relevant sites related to the search term they entered as it can. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to return 30 pages with the exact same article! So Google will filter out some of the duplicate pages from the search results.

Should You Be Concerned?

But that’s OK! As long as one of your article pages shows up fairly high in the rankings for the search term, the searcher may well see it and click to your article. And in many cases, there will be multiple links to versions of your articles.

Remember too, that even the sites with your article that get filtered from showing up in the search engine results are still contributing to the list of links pointing back to your site. You still get credit for that with the search engines even if they choose not to display that site in the search engine results.

And, of course, humans who browse or search directly at these sites can still find and read your article and click through to your site.

A Strategy to Consider…

There is one strategy you may wish to adopt if you publish your articles on your own site as well as elsewhere on the web. You may wish to publish on your site first and wait just a bit to publish to the other sites. The search engines will give some extra priority to the site that they believe is the original site for the content, and that site is more likely to show up in search engine results.

So, if the search engine spider finds the content on your site and later finds it elsewhere, your site will be considered the originator of the content and will likely get more weight in the search engine results than those sites with the content it found afterward.

While it may be slightly preferable to publish to your site first so it’s more likely to not get filtered out of search engine results, it’s not the end of the world if your site doesn’t show up. As long as other sites with your article are listed, searchers can read one of those instances and still click through to your site from your author’s box.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that you can feel comfortable publishing identical versions of articles both on your site and to article directories and ezine publishers. If you want to take extra care, publish to your site long enough before publishing elsewhere to allow the spider to find your instance first.

The most important point is to publish your articles in as many high quality places as you can! The good it will do your business in terms of visibility, perception of expertise, new people clicking through to your site, and incoming links for the search engine spiders greatly outweighs any downsides.

No, I’m talking about the risk of complete lack of action due to information overload. Between the constant flood of email messages with valuable information, as well as those offering to sell you the latest marketing technique you absolutely must know about, it’s enough to keep you surfing the web seeking to learn more and more for the rest of your days.

Of course, the huge problem with this is that you’ll have lots of useful information that you never have time to use because you’re off looking for the next nuggets of knowledge. So, you spend time – and probably money – attaining all this know-how and what I want to know is, “When are you planning on using it to make some money of your own?!”

Now before I get too preachy about this, please know that I am as bad an offender in this area as anyone reading this. I don’t even want to count how many programs are in my office, many of them unread (or listened to or watched).

If you’ve been learning about internet marketing for any time at all, I’ll bet you have a long list of ebooks on your computer right now that you’ve paid for and never read. Nevermind the expensive multi-media programs on your shelf. Be honest now!

Rich Schefren calls this getting information “just in case”. He believes that many of us in online marketing already have plenty of information to make our businesses more successful and shouldn’t be so worried about missing something. He’d rather we got our information “just in time” rather than “just in case”.

I have to agree with him. The marketers out there selling this information make it sound like we’ll be losing out on a one-time opportunity if we don’t buy their current product. That’s the power of a persuasive email campaign, joint venture partners, and good web copy.

But think about it… Have you ever seen online marketing information offered that wasn’t available, often in a new, “better”, revised version sometime later? After all, these guys aren’t going to let “important” content be sold once only to languish forever unsold in the future.

Yes, I know there are huge packages that have been offered for great prices recently by John Reese, Mike Filsaime, Frank Kern, Andy Jenkins, Jeff Walker, Rich Schefren, and seemingly every other big name internet marketer out there. And I’ve bought some of them. But these guys aren’t going anywhere. And the information they’re offering will continue to be offered – if not by them, then by others who’ve often learned it from them.

So what I suggest is that you stop reading every marketing email you receive. Unsubscribe from most of them. I promise they’ll be more than happy to welcome you back later.

Also, don’t buy every great marketing package that comes along. If you really want to learn more, pick one marketer whose business model and style of teaching resonates with you and focus just on his material for awhile. Try to pick material you can implement right now in your business. When you feel like you’ve gleaned – AND PUT INTO PRACTICE – his material, then and only then might you want to find your next guru.

I love learning and never want to miss out on anything, so I’m a terrific prospect for the talented internet marketers. However, we all need to find the right balance between learning more and accomplishing more.

One of the reasons I’m writing this is in the hope that if I’m persuasive enough to convince you, I might follow my own advice.

With that in mind, I resolve to focus on one program at a time and schedule an hour a day to work through it. That’ll allow me to digest the information and implement it in my business as I go. And please Lord, don’t let me run across sales letters for any more “must have” marketing products for awhile! Neither my schedule nor my bank account can afford any more “help”.

What’s your plan to balance learning with action? Post a comment and share what works – or you hope will work – for you.

Maybe you want to get in on this, too? Setting up a membership can be a terrific way to create a stream of income often greater than what you’d receive from a single sale of the complete set of information.

But many are intimidated by the idea of offering a membership, fearing it’s too complicated to set up and run.

Here are three easy ways to structure a membership:

1. Set up a Fixed Term Membership using an autoresponder system

I learned this method from Jimmy Brown’s Membernaire program and am actually implementing a membership like this myself. (Stay tuned for details in the very near future!)

This is the simplest method of all. Basically, you create an autoresponder series where a message is sent to customers once a week and each message points to a web page that has a link to a PDF file (or audio or video) with the contents of that week’s lesson. The membership is of fixed length – 3, 6, 9, or 12 months for example – and you may offer additional bonus lessons along the way.

The easiest way to take payment is with PayPal or Clickbank. You’ll also need an autoresponder system that customers opt into after they’ve signed up so they can receive your weekly messages. Clickbank offers the additional benefit of an affiliate program for your membership.

Alternatively, if you already have a 1shoppingcart.com (or private label) account, you can use its autoresponders and recurring billing to implement your membership. In this case, the customer wouldn’t need do the extra step of opting into an autoresponder since you can have that happen automatically within the cart system.

So, to offer this type of membership, you need to create content, link to each bit from a separate web page, and create an autoresponder series with a weekly message pointing to the next web page. Of course, there are tips and tricks around how to create the membership, attract customers, and keep them subscribed that Jimmy covers in detail in his membership. Check it out Jimmy’s Membernaire program.

2. Set up a membership site using Amember and PayPal

Amember is fairly simple and inexpensive membership software that is installed on your web server. It can tie easily to PayPal for subscription payments and creates a separate, passworded account for each subscriber. Only users who have a current subscription to a product can login and access its content.

Both within Amember itself and by using the many plug-ins available for it, it’s possible to set up many types of protected content, from simple web pages to Wordpress sites, Joomla sites, and sites with incremental content available over time, similar to the Fixed Term Membership described above.

Amember includes support for autoresponders and an affiliate program for your memberships. Learn more about Amember.

3. Set up a membership site using Amember and 1shoppingcart.com

By buying a plug-in for Amember, you can use 1shoppingcart.com or one of its private labels to implement your membership. In this case, you’d use recurring billing within the cart to automatically charge your customers.

If you don’t already have a cart account, this may not be the best solution for you since using Amember with PayPal will give you much the same functionality. I think the autoresponder system within the cart is a bit more user friendly, and the cart’s affiliate program has some additional features, but neither of these is reason enough to spend the extra money for the shopping cart.

However, if you already use the cart for other products you sell, you may want to use it for your membership, too. You’d be able to keep your customer list, autoresponders, and affiliates all in one system rather than split between Amember and your cart. This can make your life much easier as you grow your business.

You can learn more about this shopping cart and sign up for a free 30 day trial by looking under e-Commerce at the Practice Pay Solutions site.

Want More Help?

These are three of the easiest ways to get your membership going. Setting one up may still sound daunting to you. But you have friends here at Success With Ease who are experienced with all these methods and systems and would be glad to help you get your membership ready to take orders and deliver content in less time than you’d believe. Contact us for a free conversation about offering your own membership!

Jack was addressing a question about the Law of Attraction. The questioner said that it worked for her in small areas, but she hadn’t achieved the results she wanted in larger areas.

Jack talked about going on a rafting trip that might be 10 miles long, with vans at the end to bring you back to your car. What if you decided that, instead of putting your raft in at the starting spot, you’d get a ride down to about 50 yards from the ending point and put your raft in there? After all, you’d then achieve the result much sooner.

Of course, you’re saying, “Yeah, but I’d miss the whole rafting trip!” In this example, it’s obvious that the trip itself is what we really want to experience.

But isn’t that just as true in our business and personal lives? Do we really want to find the perfect mate and then leap ahead to dying within months of each other at age 90? Of course not! It’s the life lived together, with its inevitable ups and downs, that we value.

It might seem more attractive within the business environment to start a business, for instance, and immediately jump ahead to making heaps of money. I suggest that this isn’t as attractive in reality as it sounds. (Not that I haven’t enjoyed this fantasy more than once myself!)

Let’s look at a slightly different example. Most big-money lottery winners do not fare all that well. They just aren’t prepared for what life throws at you when you suddenly have a huge amount of money – especially when everyone knows it.

I watched an Oprah show several months ago that addessed this very issue and was struck by the fact that Oprah, while very rich, accumulated her wealth over time as her career and business became more and more successful. She was able to learn over time how to deal with the new circumstances that her growing fame and wealth created. Whereas her lottery winner guests received sudden windfalls and found they didn’t make very good choices for quite a while. They hadn’t had any learning curve, just a huge leap.

In the business arena, most very successful people have had to work for years for their success. Even when it seems sudden to us, they’ve often worked without much reward for a long time before their “overnight success”.

I believe the lessons we learn on the journey are important to have when we do achieve success. Even more than that, the journey itself is often more valuable than the result.

So the next time you feel as though you’re not attracting what you want in your life, make sure you’re

• very clear on what you want;
• focused on what you want rather than what you don’t want;
• putting your attention on what makes you feel good to help quiet the monkeys in your head that tell you you can’t have the results you want;
• are taking action that will move you in the right direction.

And remember to appreciate the journey. Sometimes it’s the best part!

A young woman went to her mother and told her about her life and how things were so hard for her. She did not know how she was going to make it and wanted to give up. She was tired of fighting and struggling. It seemed as one problem was solved, a new one arose.

Her mother took her to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire. Soon the pots came to boil. In the first she placed carrots, in the second she placed eggs, and in the last she placed ground coffee beans. She let them sit and boil without saying a word.

After about twenty minutes, she turned off the burners. She fished the carrots out and placed them in a bowl. She pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl.

Then she ladled the coffee out and placed it in a bowl.  Turning to her daughter, she said, “Tell me what you see.”

“Carrots, eggs, and coffee,” her daughter replied.

Her mother brought her closer and asked her to feel the carrots. She did and noted that they were soft. The mother then asked the daughter to take an egg and break it. After pulling off the shell, she observed the hard boiled egg.

Finally, the mother asked the daughter to sip the coffee. The daughter smiled as she tasted inhaled its rich aroma and tasted its full flavor. The daughter then asked, “What does it mean, Mother?”

Her mother explained that each of these objects had faced the same adversity: boiling water. Each reacted differently.

The carrot went in strong, hard, and unrelenting. However, after being subjected to the boiling water, it softened and became weak.

The egg had been fragile. Its thin outer shell had protected its liquid interior, but after sitting through the boiling water, its inside became hardened.

The ground coffee beans were unique, however.  While in the boiling water, they had changed the water.

“Which are you?” she asked her daughter. “When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a carrot, an egg, or a coffee bean?

Think of this: Which am I? Am I the carrot that seems strong, but with pain and adversity do I wilt and become soft and lose my strength?

Am I the egg that starts with a malleable heart, but changes with the heat? Did I have a fluid spirit, but after a death, a breakup, a financial hardship or some other trial, have I become hardened and stiff?  Does my shell look the same, but on the inside am I bitter and tough with a stiff spirit and hardened heart?

Or am I like the coffee bean? The bean actually changes the hot water, the very circumstance that brings the pain. When the water gets hot, it releases the fragrance and flavor. If you are like the bean, when things are at their worst, you get better and change the situation around you.  When the hour is the darkest and trials are their greatest, do you elevate yourself to another level? How do you handle adversity? Are you a carrot, an egg, or a coffee bean?

The happiest of people don’t necessarily have the best of everything; they just make the most of everything that comes along their way.

May we all be coffee.