Shorties but Goodies | Especially if Are Still at Home
Stay Home… for me?
Because I don’t want to lose you, please keep in mind that the end of the stay-at-home orders doesn’t mean the pandemic is over.
It means they currently have room for you in the ICU.
So, stay home and work on your business.
How to Build a Real Business Right Now
This is for everyone who has procrastinated on building an at home business and suddenly finds they have the time and the inclination to do it…
…but the thought of creating products, building funnels and recruiting affiliates is just too much.
Step 1: Pick a small, hot niche. Weight loss for women is too big.
Weight loss for women over 50 who work from home and hate dieting and workouts might be good.
Step 2: Write your compelling story. This is YOUR story of why YOU are in this niche.
For example, when you were 55 you were diagnosed with diabetes and the doctor said you were going to die in 5 years if you didn’t change your ways. Because you were working from home and had NO motivation to workout or eat right, this stuff was HARD, but here’s what you did… and now look how far you’ve come!
Your story can also be someone else’s story – your parent, partner, sibling, best friend, whatever. But you need a compelling story of why you are spending your time in this niche. It will connect you to readers in a way nothing else can.
Step 3: Create great content to give away for FREE. In fact, give away ALL of your content. Use it to get subscribers, to engage people on social media, to get them on your blog and other people’s blogs and so forth. Give it all away. This way you have ZERO pressure to create products and funnels but you are still perceived as being the expert.
Step 4: Sell affiliate programs. Find the programs that deliver excellent value and perfectly suit your readers. These are the programs you can recommend 1000% percent to your list because you know they do what they way they do. Then use the ‘know, like and trust’ you’ve been building with your audience to promote these programs.
Step 5: Have fun with what you’re doing. If it isn’t fun then you’re not doing it right.
I don’t mean ‘Friday night get drunk’ fun, I mean the exhilarating satisfaction of putting out another piece of content that gets raves, helps someone and so forth. Find your reasons to keep doing this and review those reasons often to stay motivated and keep your content interesting and exciting.
Step 6: Optional
– create your own courses, coaching and so forth. Do this if and when you want to. If things are going well, I venture that in 6 to 12 months you will be itching to make your own product. By then you will have enough experience in your niche to know what people want, what can sell and how you will sell it. You could also purchase PLR courses which you can change and modify, and make your own, prior to creating your own course. (This method will also give you lots of ideas.)
Painting an Awesome Product Picture
The next time you’re describing your product or service to your customer, remember this example of how to paint a pretty picture of what your customer is getting:
When you store something online, where is it? In the cloud, of course. Cloud storage, cloud computing, cloud everything.
Clouds. How wonderful! And how untrue.
There is no storage place high in the fluffy white and blue sky.
It’s actually a bunch of old computer racks in a dusty warehouse in a back alley of some rundown industrial area in a country far, far away. Now that doesn’t paint a pretty picture at all, does it?
But the clouds? Now THAT you can charge money for.
Gaining the Invisible Edge
Some online marketers just naturally do far better than others. Why is that?
They get heard, they are remembered from one week to the next, they are followed socially online and they sell stuff. A LOT of stuff.
So the question is, how do they stand out from everyone else in their niche? How do they keep from looking like everyone else, and thus becoming nearly invisible like everyone else? I’ve been watching, and here are three things I’ve noticed that they all have in common and how to apply them in your own marketing.
To stand out…
1: Say something no one else is saying, but then again, don’t be a contrarian just for the sake of being a contrarian.
What is every other marketer doing or saying? And what is the opposite of that? See if you can legitimately take a firm stand in the other direction from everyone else. Make your case with studies, data, experience and anything else you have on hand. Guaranteed you’ll get noticed.
2: Differentiate your content through your personal stories. Don’t be afraid to open up. Share everything that is relevant.
Your stories are yours and yours alone. They make you who you are, and they also make you real, compelling and interesting. Use stories to illustrate your points and show the real you to earn the trust of your readers.
3: Always remember that your website, your products, your content and your message isn’t about you. I know it seems like it is, and I appear to be contradicting what I just said about being different and telling your own stories. But everything in your marketing – even your personal story – is about your customers.
When creating anything, always think of your customer sitting right in front of you. This is the person you are speaking to and the entire reason for your business to even exist.
2 Quick Questions:
If you have a 10-year goal but you only have 6 months to reach it, what would you do?
And how would you do it?
Entrepreneurs:
Did you know that chronic stress shrinks your brain?
Or that chronic fear compromises your immune system?
Dealing with stress and fear for entrepreneurs and online marketers is every bit as important as exercise, sleep and proper diet.
What’s in a Pandemic Name?
The next time you name a website or product, you might want to think about the co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates.
Bill and Melinda Gates have spent years helping to eradicate diseases in Africa. The man knows a thing or two about pandemics and about marketing.
In 2015, he gave a Ted Talk in which he told the world that the next pandemic was coming. Few people paid attention.
Fast forward to April 23rd, 2020, and Bill Gates posts an entry in his blog entitled, “The First Modern Pandemic.”
Buried near the bottom of that post – and quoted widely in the media – is a sentence in which he gives a name to this pandemic.
Before I reveal the name, let me ask you this: If you, as a marketer, were charged with ensuring people remain highly aware that another pandemic can occur at any time and that they we need to be READY for it the next time it happens, what would you do?
Would you write long blog posts and articles telling people to remember we need to be ready next time? Create YouTube videos with the same message? Send out a mailer to everyone on the planet?
Remember, Bill Gates tried the video method in 2015 with his Ted Talk. That video received millions views, and yet very little was done to get ready.
Bill Gates has apparently learned from this, and now he’s given a name to this pandemic that tells us in the clearest form possible that this is the FIRST of MORE pandemics to come.
Yes, there was a major clue in that last sentence.
Bill Gates wrote, “Melinda and I grew up learning that World War II was the defining moment of our parents’ generation. In a similar way, the COVID-19 pandemic – the first modern pandemic – will define this era. No one who lives through Pandemic I will ever forget it. And it is impossible to overstate the pain that people are feeling now and will continue to feel for years to come.”
Pandemic I.
We are living in Pandemic I.
I cannot think of a clearer, more articulate or succinct way to tell the world that this is just the first pandemic chapter. If people in the “Great War” had known at the time that a day would come when it was instead called, “World War I,” would they have done more to avoid the second world war? I’d like to think so.
Naming your product or website might not make the difference in whether people are ready for the next life-threatening event. But it can make a huge difference in how people perceive your product, what emotions and thoughts it brings forth, and ultimately whether they buy it.
To read Bill Gate’s entire essay, go here:
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Pandemic-Innovation
Kindle’s Clue on Retaining Subscribers
Amazon’s Kindle has a program called Kindle Unlimited. For $9.95 a month, you can ‘rent’ 10 Kindle books at a time. It used to be a better deal than it is now, because fewer books are available on Kindle Unlimited, but it’s still a pretty good deal if you read a lot and you don’t want to keep copies of the books you read.
Personally, I tend to buy my Kindle books so that I have access to them in the future, which is why I decided to unsubscribe from Kindle Unlimited today.
But… I didn’t unsubscribe. Amazon convinced me to remain a member, at least for another month.
How did Amazon do it?
When I clicked the unsubscribe button, it took me to a ‘special offer’ page.
The offer was for one free month of Kindle Unlimited, after which time they would again charge me the $9.95 a month.
I took the offer.
And they retained a subscriber. True, they make no money on me this month. But I’ve been procrastinating about unsubscribing, so they’re taking the gamble that true to nature, I will continue to procrastinate and remain a member for a while longer.
Do you have a subscription program? What do you offer subscribers when they want to cancel? If you’re not offering some sort of special deal, you are losing out.
You could make the same offer Kindle gave me, or you could give a special rate, such as 12 months membership for the price of 6 months.
You might even entice them with what you have planned for the membership in the coming weeks and months without offering any discount whatsoever.
Don’t let your paying membership subscribers go without some sort of offer to keep them. They are far too valuable to you and you worked too hard to get them.
3 Quick Zoom Tips
While people are getting better at Zoom meetings, there are still a few things we can do to improve the experience for everyone:
1: Don’t use your built-in microphone and speaker. They’re designed to pick up as much information as they can, which will include background noises and voices. Instead, use a wired headset, preferably with a boom mic, because it will pick up just what is in front of the mic.
2: When you are speaking, look a little to the side of your screen. When we look directly at the screen or camera, we get easily distracted by the faces and find it more difficult to formulate what we’re trying to say.
3: Be a little more dramatic and expressive. Theater actors are aware that they have to play to the back row seats, meaning they need bigger facial expressions and gestures to get their point across than if they were playing to an audience of one.
When we’re on Zoom, things like subtle eye cues, nods and chuckles might not be noticed. To give feedback to the speaker that they can see and hear, you’ll want to grin instead of smile, give a thumbs up instead of nodding and laugh instead of chuckling.
Subtlety does not come across well in online meetings, so play things up a bit and become a little more dramatic and expressive to let others know you’re paying attention and not checking your email or zoning out.
The Gene Wilder Secret to Success
Gene Wilder was a movie star, director and arguably one of the funniest people who ever lived.
During an interview, he gave this account of his start in comedy:
“I was 8 or 9 years old when my mother had a heart attack. When she came home, the doctor said, ‘Don’t ever get into an argument with your mother because you might kill her.’”
No pressure there, right?
“And the second thing he said was, ‘Try to make her laugh.’”
“I had never consciously tried to make anyone laugh in my life, but I did from then on. And I knew I was a success when she peed in her pants.”
Gene’s takeaway from the doctor was that his mother’s life depended on him being funny.
And obviously he loved his mother very much. His total commitment from that day forward to learning what was funny and how to make others laugh led to an extremely successful and lucrative career.
What are you totally committed to? What would you be willing to do if it meant saving the person you love most?
If you put this kind of commitment into your work, there’s no way you can fail.
Irving
