"You May Not Have What It Takes"

I was pretty shocked to receive this in my email this morning.

It certainly made me open the email. Would you have done the same? I guess so since you're reading this.

Turns out it was from Jay Kubassek, Car bon Copy PRO Founder and CEO. He's a very successful online marketer and entrepreneur. He doesn't pull his punches either, getting straight to the point.

What he's trying to do is to scare away 97% of the people who come to our websites to check out the opport unity. And I believe he's doing it for three very good reasons.

1. To protect people from themselves. Most people (the 97% who end up failing) don't have the
"teachability" or "willingness" or determination to understand and then put the teaching into practice.
Car bon Cpy Pro is not about "get ri ch quick." People who are looking for that may be very disappointed, whether they join C C Pro or any other Internet Bus~iness.

2. To protect the people already in C C community. You see there's a strong alignment between people and their sponsors and others in the 'Pro community. Sponsors invest a lot of time to help new people get started and to grow, while also building their own busi~ness. So that's why there is an application process and the need to show commitment on joining.

3. To protect the brand and its values. The ethos is about giving back. To colleagues, to the market and to our local communities. Our mission is not just about what we can get out. It's about how we can help others. To do that we need firstly to be successful and then to have the mindset to give to others.

I respect these values. I've seen them in action. I've benefited from the coaching of very successful people who are willing to share the latest tips about online marketing, about running a business and personal development.

I am still learning, and, since I subscribe to the 'Lifelong learning' principle, I hope I continue to learn for the rest of my life. It's also in my nature to share with others. Maybe with you. You decide.

Mark.

Lead generation - the importance of a Sales Funnel

Online or offline, any business needs to be generating a continuous stream of leads. Just as high-street retailers need foot-fall - people coming through the front door of the shop - so an online shop needs visitors to its store. An even if your business doesn't take money online for sales the web is still a very effective method of lead generation. Developing a sales funnel makes your lead generation more effective.

All customers, or potential customers, are not the same. They may well have different problems that they want to solve, where your product or solution can help them. They may take a different approach to buying, different timescales, and need different levels of reassurance, to pick just some differences.

Creating a sales funnel with products or solutions at multiple price-points increases the probability that the prospect can find something that meets their needs and budget. The early stages may actually not be a purchase at all, but a registration for some information or communication.

The cost of acquisition of new customers can be reduced, by offering many choices and many ways for them to engage with your business, rather than a single decision, to buy or not to buy.

To provide some numerical examples:

If you generated 1000 visitors to your website for £100 and converted 1% to make 10 sales the cost of acquisition would be £10 per sale.

However, if you provided multiple offers the same 1000 visitors might produce the following spread of results:

• 10 sales for product A as before
• 5 sales for product B
• 2 sales for product C
• 25 downloads of a white paper or report - with email addresses you could follow-up
• 10 registrations for an educational auto-responser sequence - with email addresses
• 5 registrations for a webinar - with emails addresses you can follow-up

And so on. So, your £100 marketing spend has now generated a much greater return, with more short-term sales for different things and different price points, and also produced email addresses that you can market to subsequently, for people who may not be ready to purchase from you just yet, for whatever reason.

Structuring and developing your sales funnel like this is just one way to maximise your lead generation activity develop and grow your business.

30 day detox

This piece and these ideas are based on the thoughts of John Jackson – Carbon Copy Pro Mentor.

In order to get more done and become a better leader John outlines 8 behaviour changes. He challenges us to try these for 30 days and see how we feel as a result. I’ll be working on these too!

- Read positive, uplifting material for 15-30 minutes a day.
- Avoid the TV for 30 days. Create time for other activities.
- Leave the Radio switched off for 30 days. Switch to CD or MP3 music.
- Cancel the newspapers and focus on now and tomorrow rather than yesterday.
- Choose our associations carefully. Spend more time with positive people, less with ones who drag our emotions and energy levels down.
- Drink more water to re-hydrate so you think more clearly and have more energy.
- Excersise more which can be as simple as a walk around the block or to the shops.
- Have some daily reflection time to give thanks for the good and great things in our lifes and focus on our goals.

Get the right things done by knowing what can be left undone. Train yourself to get into the zone and develop tunnel vision for high priority activities.

Focus on high yield activities. One of the highest is sharing a vision with your team. Communicate your vision to others by what you say but more by what you do.

Thanks for sharing John.

Mark

Mission - what's the purpose?

If you’re looking for a ‘get rich quick’ scheme then you’re in the wrong place. 

If your primary mission is to become a millionaire then you may want to step back a moment. 

By all means have this as a goal or as an objective, but as a mission? Yes, this organisation has an objective to create 100 millionaires by 2012. However, the way you achieve that success and what you can do as a result of that success are worth considering. For example, a great way to achieve success is to give before you receive. 

An approach that attracts prospects towards your offer is much more appropriate and successful these days. You’ve probably heard the saying; “Give a man fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” 


Our mission is the latter; to teach people how to market online, to start and run a business and to manage and grow their wealth. 


Along the way we may sell a fishing rod and net, but teaching folks how to use them is provided as part of the package. 

Momentum – any business needs to generate leads.

Momentum – any business needs to generate leads. It's worth saying it twice!

Without leads you don’t have a business. If you can crack the lead generation challenge you’ve overcome one of the major reasons why a new business venture fails. 

Selling to family and friends, previous customers and clients, walk-in business etc. dries up sooner or later. 

Developing a process for online lead generation using a mix of the many and expanding range of options will accelerate the growth of your business. 

Working with a tried and tested blueprint process and support will significantly improve your chances of success. 

Mark

Mindset

As an entrepreneur it’s vitally important to have the right mindset. 

What does this mean? It's having the right thinking about yourself, your products and services, about your customers, and the way you run your business. 

If you’re making the transition from being an employee to being an entrepreneur then having support, coaching and mentoring during this process will significantly improve your chances of success. 

Many self-help, how-to, and get rich quick schemes ignore this vital step and focus only on technical skills. 

This is just one element that sets this programme apart from the crowd. 

We are primarily a training company, providing an incubator environment for budding entrepreneurs.

Here it’s about joining a community of entrepreneurs, created and built to support and encourage the success of every member. 

Resources - what do you have?

Resources – your time and your money are two of your most valuable resources. 

For most people they are directly linked – people trade time for money as an employee. The more hours you work the more money you earn. As skills and value increases so the hourly rate increases. 

But in many cases you have to work the hours your company sets, even if they are anti-social or if they mean you miss out on family time. And you have commute time as well, which reduces your hourly rate and increases your costs. 

Your ability to increase your hourly rate may also be limited, if someone else is prepared to do the same job for less than you then your chances of a raise are very low. 

And your employer wants to take their slice of profit as well. 

And then global competition and the recession has a massive impact.

If you want to increase your productive time and your hourly rate you need to look at increasing your value and leverage. 


Education and training to increase your skills in in-demand areas will increase your value. 


Your leverage can be increased by moving from a 1:1 application of your skills to a 1:many and a 24/7 availability. 


These are both achievable through use of online publishing techniques. 


These are just some of the ways people are preparing for and moving into the new economy.

Results

Results, goals, objectives, outcomes, targets and a plethora of other terms are used to specify what we and others want to achieve. If you have an ambition to increase your income, to start a business, (either full-time or part-time), to manage your finances, to grow and manage your wealth, to increase your understanding and skills in online marketing, then you’ve come to the right place.

This programme helps you think through and structure your goals and objectives, helps you make an emotional connection with these goals (so important in order to stick with them) and then make a plan to achieve them. 

Beyond that, we provide you with ongoing support and resources to hold your hand through the journey until you reach the destination.

Each journey starts with a single step, so if you want to make progress then you need to take the first step.

Reputation - online Branding and Platform

Our reputations and the reputation of people we partner with and represent is just as important online as it is offline. Reputations offline may take years to build. Reputations online may take a matter of months to build. In the online world our activities are a Search away and we can be judged by the places we go to and the company we keep in a matter of minutes. 

Building a personal reputation online is a recent concept with the rise of social networking and other online media. These allow us to very easily put up information about our business and personal interests. It also allows us to 'walk the talk' too. 

• If we want to be seen as an authority then we can demonstrate that very effectively by what we publish. 
• If we want to be seen as supportive and helpful then we can demonstrate that too through our networking.
• And if we want to be the 'go-to' person for the latest and greatest solutions we can set out our stall online and attract people to us. 

Being able to build relationships with people locally and globally remains at the core of our reputation. Being memorable in such a vast market is a challenge for us all to contend with. 

In this fast developing area it pays dividends to team up with market leaders.

Information overload - six steps to avoid it

Clarity and 20/20 Vision is a blessing when it occurs but without it a whole range of issues and emotions can occur. If you’re reading this Blog you may well be interested in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Social Networking and Internet Marketing. These rapidly developing topics have the potential to very quickly lead to information overload. Unless recognised and dealt with quickly, information overload can be very damaging and de-motivating. Here is a quick outline of my journey over the last couple of months and some lessons I’ve learned.

Enthusiasm

I was keen to get to the cutting edge of Internet Marketing very quickly. Initial Google searches quickly took me to sign-on pages for various ‘offers’. It’s very tempting to subscribe to these attractive offers, so clearly their marketing is working. I also ordered some (4) related books from Amazon, two about ‘Personal Branding’, two about cutting edge marketing thinking. The Amazon books arrived quickly and the content looks very attractive. Also, my in-box was quickly filled up with emails, triggered by the follow-up marketing activity behind the initial offers I subscribed to.

Exponential opportunities

So the reading starts, with a chapter or two from each book, to get a feel for their style, and the journey they would take me on, so that’s a few hours. Going through the in-box went up from a few minutes a day to maybe a couple of hours a day. Initially this was all in the name of ‘education’, and the enthusiasm is still high. Very quickly there were additional ‘attractive offers’ coming through. This also included various video pitches and webinars – which can be 30-60 minutes each. These are very cleverly constructed, initially providing great insight, value and education but all the while building desire for the ‘closure’. Subtly their message is that there’s loads more that you need to learn. Then the finale arrives, with the offer to ‘sign-up for the chargeable plan’. Don’t get me wrong, it’s usually good material and it’s also clever marketing. But it quickly generates information overload, and also anxiety that success will be elusive without various additional information and training resources.

Unfinished business

OK, so the information keeps coming, but now there’s a big additional element. ICT, Social Networking and Internet Marketing all need to be put into action in order to bed in the knowledge and gain some experience and results. So now the task list starts growing as to-dos are added in increasing numbers. At this stage there is a danger that ideas from the latest email go to the top of the priority queue on the basis of ‘I’ll just do X, while it’s top of mind’. Also, going into a new area with lots of new content there is no frame of reference. Quite deliberately, in order to take on new concepts it can be helpful if judgement is suspended. When you learnt to ride a bike or to swim, logic said you would fall off or sink, but somehow you had to block that out and give it a go. Learning new Online marketing topics I think are similar.

Going under...

So the emails keep coming, the books are half read and the task list is still growing. Unfortunately the tasks being tackled are never as simple as the ‘author’ suggests. If only it was Step 1, 2, 3 done. Each task seems to turn into a mini-project. And it seems that every project being tackled require further reading to understand them to the next level. So now the prioritisation really starts to kick-in. No longer is it a case of prioritising individual tasks, but now whole sections are prioritised. And unfortunately in the early days there are few results to show for it, especially if the updating of social networks, blogs etc. is not done regularly.

The ‘light at the end of the tunnel’

There does come a time when the mist starts to clear, believe me. I’m now at a stage where I feel I can look back at the process I’ve been through, what I’ve learned, what I’ve done, and how I’ve developed. Things that have helped are:

• my frame of reference has been sufficiently updated to enable pretty good prioritisation to take place
• tasks are now taking less time and mini-projects get delivered
• maintenance and updating of social network sites is becoming part of the daily routine
• my email in-box can be processed quicker as I can sort the wheat from the chaff easier
• results are starting to come in, which is increasing my satisfaction levels

Lessons learned

There are too many to itemise, but to pick six big ones:

1. Get organised and stay organised: have a structure for filing documents, emails and userid/passwords so that you can file and find them quickly and easily
2. Plan the use of your time: allocate time slots and stick to them, and stick to the task in hand
3. Don’t take on too much in parallel, or at least be prepared to drop things before you drown
4. Realise that you won’t understand everything first time round, but do ‘give it a go’
5. Accept ‘adequate’ and don’t aim for perfection, mistakes are not the end of the world
6. Appreciate that progress and success means ‘going public’ on social networks, so be bold!

I have also been very fortunate to link up with a mentor and a support organisation that provides education materials about social networking and internet marketing.

If you’d like to find out more about this group from me and my colleagues then visit my website at www.blueprint2020.com

If you want to enter your details I’ll get in touch with you ‘on the other side’

Mark.

20/20 vision

Clarity, acuteness or clearness of vision depends on the sharpness of the focus and the sensitivity of the interpretative faculty, well, according to Wikipedia anyway. The abundance of information on the Internet can easily be overwhelming. How do you sort out what is relevant from what is, frankly, a waste of time. 

This website is part of a programme that works on many levels to help you achieve just that. Together we provide the focus and clarity to demystify complex topics around internet marketing and wealth creation and wealth management. 

We will also help to develop your skills to discern the value of information you receive from the many other sources in daily life. Developing a new frame of reference helps to make better and quicker judgements is a new area. Clarity of vision is just part of that, to help to clear the fog and the blurred images.

What do you want a Blueprint of?

What is it that you want to create or build?.

What is the end result for and what does it look like?

Setting down some clear goals and parameters is a great, and essential, starting place.

Is it for yourself or does it include your nearest and dearest? Is it for a new venture or a step-change for something you’re already doing? Is it for a primary or secondary income? Are there some other essential goals? What are your timescales and resources available?

From these and other top-level questions the Blueprint can start. Key elements are: where are you today, where do you want to be in the future, and how can we work together to help you to get there.

Sharing and working with others adds to the richness of the experience, and is a massive motivator along the way. And ultimately, working as part of a team contributes massively to the success at the end.

Blueprint for success

Historically a blueprint is a paper-based reproduction of a technical drawing, documenting an architecture or an engineering design. More generally, the term "blueprint" has come to be used to refer to any detailed plan, which is exactly what is available here. 

This blog and associated sites provided detailed plans to help you develop the skills to start and grow a business, to develop effective online marketing campaigns, to manage your budget and investments and to grow your wealth. 

But more than that, it’s a route to membership of an organisation which helps people like me and you to continue to grow our skills, and to meet and mix with leaders, entrepreneurs and millionaires.

Learning from leaders, and applying that knowledge, will make a massive difference to your success.