“No, I’m not ready to release my….(fill in the blank here with ezine, ecourse, ebook, blog, website, etc.) because it’s not quite ready. I need to…(fill in with your excuse here: do more work on it….have it edited….review the copywriting, etc.)”
How many times has a statement similar to that come out of your mouth? I know for me that it’s happened more often than I care to recount. I am a recovering perfectionist who used to utter some variation of the above sentence with great regularity.
What I’ve discovered in my time as an Internet entrepreneur is that my need for perfection in my products or marketing materials is simply another excuse to procrastinate. Yep, when I try and convince myself that the ebook needs more copy editing or that my website needs just a few more pages to make it say just what I want it to say, all I’m doing is creating plausible excuses to put something off for a few more days, or even weeks or months. Why? Because inaction is safe — you’re not putting yourself out there to the world to face possible criticism. The longer you excuse yourself from taking action, however, the more difficult it becomes to build a business and create the kind of life you want for yourself.
Don’t let yourself fall for your own fabricated excuses. Stop waiting for perfection. It’s never going to arrive. Better to release something that may not be perfect than to release nothing at all. How much money can you make on an ebook that no one knows about? Last time I checked, it wasn’t much!
Sure, you may fall under the scrutiny of other perfectionists in the Internet world who are gleefully waiting to tear you apart by pointing out your errors. Thank them for their constructive feedback, create a correction log, and let the criticism fall off of you like water off a duck’s back. In my experience, those critics who have the leisure time to point out the flaws of others really aren’t doing much with their own lives and businesses. That’s why they have the free time to correct the errors of others.
The whole notion of how perfectionism was holding me back was aptly illustrated at a Coachville conference I attended several years ago. The late Thomas Leonard, founder of Coachville, had brought up on stage a very successful Internet entrepreneur to speak to us about how he had found a great product to sell online and the process he used to uncover the hungry target market who would pay handsomely for the material he was selling. We were all given the 12-page handout of the long sales letter that was used to sell the product, and many of us were taking copious notes.
However, I noticed the guy next to me, an engineer, wasn’t taking notes. Instead it appeared he was going through the sales letter and was making grammatical and punctuation corrections. He disappeared during our next break, and when I returned to my seat afterwards, I discovered that he had returned as well, but seemed to be highly agitated.
Without waiting for an invitation, he proceeded to tell me what had happened over the break that had gotten him so upset. He showed me his copy of the sales letter and the corrections he had made and said that he’d gone up to the speaker during the break and offered to give him the corrections to the sales letter. The speaker took a look and told him, “No, thanks.”
The engineer couldn’t believe that this speaker wouldn’t take advantage of all the work that he (the engineer) had done to correct the sales copy. The engineer thought the speaker was being rather foolish and apparently told the speaker that he was being short-sighted not to take advantage of the offered corrections.
The speaker informed the engineer that the sales letter in question was making him $67,000 per month in sales and that he had no intention of “fixing” a good thing. Furthermore, the speaker explained that because he had worked so hard on crafting the wording of the sales letter and that the letter was bringing him so many sales that he’d be foolish to tinker with any portion of it.
Apparently the engineer left the conversation with the speaker in a huff and returned to his seat, still steaming, and still convinced that the speaker was making a grave mistake by not taking his copy editing advice. The engineer was so blinded by the need to be perfect and be right that he was blocking his path to online success. I bet today that he’s still tweaking his sales copy or his product and has yet to do anything with coaching business.
So, which do you want to be? The engineer with the grammatically correct sales letter that never sees the light of day, or the Internet entrepreneur making $67,000 per month off a product that has a sales letter with grammatical and punctuation mistakes?
Don’t let your need to be perfect hold you back any longer from taking the action you need to release your product or service to the world. In most cases, taking action, even though it might be a bit flawed, is always better than no action.
Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals learn how to automate their businesses, leverage their expertise on the Internet, and get more clients online. To claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at http://www.OnlineBizU.com. Ask Donna an Internet Marketing question at http://www.AskDonnaGunter.com.
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How Perfectionism Kills the Online Entrepreneur
There is a serious lack of marketing skills in the home business industry.The vast majority of people in online businesses do not know enough about marketing and they are intensely interested in finding out how to really make their online, or home based business work.
What Attraction Marketing allows you to do is stand out from the crowd and position yourself as a leader that has something of value to offer. The key to attraction marketing success is to learn what you target market is insatiably interested in learning, and then teaching them those things.
Sounds simple enough and it is if you’re resourceful and creative. And if you focus on learning what your target market is really interested in and you give them that information, you’ll be able to attract quality leads who will turn into responsive prospects and ultimately buy your product, system or become your affiliate or partner.
In the home business/internet marketing arena, specifically the home based business niche, thousands of other online marketers would love to know how to advertise effectively and drive traffic to their websites. They’re also intensely interested in learning what it really takes to turn traffic into closed sales.
You stand to benefit from offering this information to them and teaching them how to market and drive traffic. You’ll build a responsive list faster and for less money and time than if you do what most other amateur marketers do, which is to simply offer hyped sales pitches to join them in their program.
The SIX KEY PARTS In A Powerful Attraction Marketing System
1. Understand that people are looking for LEADERSHIP & Mentors that can actually show them how to make money online.
This is critical to your success. You must position yourself as a leader and offer your target market the training and marketing information they are seeking. Inexperienced people tend to wonder how they can teach marketing if they’re new themselves…
You can go to ezine article directories like EzineArticles and search for articles on topics you want to learn. Read and learn the topics, and then turn around and teach what you just learned. To a new, struggling marketer you’ll still be positioned as a person who can teach them something they don’t know.
2. Know Your Target Market
If you’re in the home based business industry promoting a direct sales or network marketing program, then you should know the hottest target market you can focus on attracting is the existing network marketer and online marketer. The time in your pipeline will be reduced with this target, they already believe in the industry so you won’t have to worry about going through that skeptical debate and most existing marketers are looking for marketing knowledge and information.
By focusing on the existing marketer, you’ll still attract plenty of new marketers as well so you’ll benefit by attracting both targets.
3. Place Simple, Targeted Ads That Compel Your Target Market To Click
This is where Attraction Marketing comes into play. Knowing your target market well will allow you to identify their main frustrations with their business and what benefits or solutions they are looking for. Phrase your ads in a way that you agitate a frustration and then offer a solution that solves their problem. To get to the solution they must click on your ad to get to your offer. Offering free “How To” information to marketers on learning traffic tactics and marketing skills in the form of a free email course, video series, recorded audios, etc… is a high conversion tactic.
4. Drive That Targeted Traffic To Your Own Lead Capture Page
This is where most online marketers fail. Your company’s replicated lead capture page is NOT the answer. Not if you want to attract more opt-ins for less money. Your own personalized lead capture page should contain a strong “Direct Response Marketing” headline, subheadline and some key benefits about your offer. A free newsletter, special report, video training series, audio recording or other compelling free information should be offered here that is designed to solve the frustration your ad agitated. This is key to building a responsive list.
5. Follow up with a systemized email autoresponder
A series of email follow up letters should be linked to your capture page so that you can follow up with your new leads using automation. This is where the majority of your sales will be made. Constant follow up is crucial in building trust, credibility and rapport with your list. By offering valuable content and teaching them exactly what your lead capture page and your initial ad offered to teach, you will warm up your list and prepare them to buy or join you in business.
6. Close Sales
A tremendously weak part of the average marketer’s system. Most automated online sales systems are great at opening up the sales process and attracting leads in. At that point most rely on the marketer to actually follow up and close sales. This is where most home business systems fall woefully short and cause the high failure rate in the industry.
Depending on the process your system uses, you should be able to close on 1-2 sales for every 100 -150 opt ins in most online based home businesses programs that are considered “top tier” ($1,000+ start up pricepoint). If your system is not getting this closing rate then you should carefully analyze the entire system and determine which part in the sales process is weak. Many programs use leverage, technology and systems effectively to open and attract people into the sales process, only to leave the critical part of closing sales to the weakest part of the system - the inexperienced marketer.
Fortunately in recent months there have been a few automated Attraction Marketing Systems that have hit the market that allow the online marketer to focus on the “front end”, which is advertising and driving traffic to their system. The system leverages professional call centers or specialized copywriting, audios and videos on the sales presentation site that actually closes sales without the business owner/marketer needing to get involved.
For more information on how to leverage the internet and automated Attraction Marketing Systems to generate significant cash flow online people can perform Google searches on “Attraction List Building” or “Attraction Marketing” and also search EzineArticles.com for the same keywords and further their understanding of what is available in the marketplace.
Franco Gonzalez is a professional Internet Attraction Marketing coach who helps families build full time home businesses on the internet quickly and affordably. Visit his Attraction Marketing Training Site for more resources and free training videos on how to build lucrative online businesses.
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Six KEY Parts of an Attraction Marketing System For Online Marketers
Just like a plant, organic search engine positioning is based on cycles. While getting there may be half the battle, understanding the growth, gestation and the budding cycles of SEO as well as understanding temporal relapses in positioning (while data centers unify results a.k.a. the Google dance) for ranking stability is all part of organic search engine optimization.
Just like starting with a field full of potential, you have to plant the seeds to harvest the rewards. That reward is 100% all-natural organic search engine positioning, which is well worth the wait.It is a know fact that 8 out of 10 people (look left) on the screen when skimming search results and focus solely on organic / natural search results while the other 2 out of 10 people (look to the right) and scan or click sponsored pay per click results.
If you are relying on PPC as a marketing medium and spending more than $5K per month, then you may wish to consider implementing a cost-effective, long-term organic organic SEO management campaign. This can reduce your dependency on PPC and offset the rising costs of bidding on keywords based on search volume / supply and demand. Organic traffic is natural and is accomplished through building quality content to funnel relevant traffic to your site.
Without observation (market analysis), opportunities for optimal positioning could pass you by, without participation, the competition takes the lead. If you want increases in user engagement, increased traffic, higher page rank, a higher percentage of sales conversion, then first you’ll need more content to increase the probability that someone, somewhere will be drawn to it and find your pages useful.
But before you look beyond the horizon and obsess about results, having a clear understanding to guide your actions is needed. With a blueprint, you can scale results systematically or determine where you are in each stage of the process.
Observing time cycles for content, the rate in which it gains or loses positioning in the SERPs (search engine result pages) is important. Looking at this from the standpoint of (a) where you are and (b) where you want to be, it is all about developing continuity and developing the trust and exposure required to get there.
Organic Search Trajectory Cycles - determining how new keywords fit into the existing theme model of your existing content (just wanting to rank for keywords is not enough, you have to build the content).
Example, if you have a site about frogs and you wanted to rank for insects, you would have to create a logical bridge between the two categories to expand the focus of your site, without diluting or losing relevance for the terms you have developed already.
If done tactfully, and gradually over time while reinforcing certain aspects of your internal linking as well as adding links with authority form the new topic (from related sites), you can enter a market with enough momentum to out rank your competition in a fraction of the time.
The Cycles of Velocity - The idea behind velocity in content development and building links, content and topical relevance simultaneously is the key to stable rankings.
In the beginning it is harder to make the initial impression as you are dealing with the defensive factor of the other more established pages and their SEO efforts, so you have to really push the envelope to make an impression.
After mid phase (5 articles or blog posts tactfully integrated with enough related material to be considered a valid / relevant result by search engines) it’s still a struggle, but at least you can start seeing the fruits of your labor and hit the top 50 organic results in search engines.
Then, in the end-phase of the gestation process, closing in on your demographic and appearing for a number of related phrases as well as making a debut in the high vertical marketing channels (the top 20-30 results) a new tactic is required to polish the relevance score for your pages which can stem into multiple high ranking phrases.
Creating islands of content is one method that is effective for this strategy; this method relies on making each related segment just as strong as the one above it. So, instead of having flat architecture and having your root folder strong, all of your sub folders and other categories each have the capacity to rank well and elevate the entire site as a result. This requires internal and external links, diversity, topical modifiers and a tactful direction of how those links distribute their weight.
Holistic Nurturing through Consistency - Ensuring you make your rounds to schedule routine internal link audits or check to see how each segment of your site is evolving. The key here is to go back and track your progress as you break into the upper echelon of an industry.
SEO is a process of tilling the soil (keyword research), planting the seeds (content and links) and being patient enough to see the results rise through the surface and achieve relevance from consumers invoking the pages from the index with related search queries.
Search engine optimization, organic search in particular is all about managing multiple miniature campaigns holistically as part and parcel of a larger marketing strategy. It truly boils down to positioning and relevance.
If your positioning is strong in search engines, then you have the potential to be discovered on accident (much like an impulse purchase). You never know exactly which key phrase combinations a search engine query might latch onto, which is why it is important to write quality topical information.
So, appearing in the same genre of results at the right time, for someone seeking a related query is ideal. Through tactfully promoting your content purposely through organic SEO in this fashion, not only does your traffic, branding and exposure reach new heights, but you truly start to appreciate and understand the infrastructure of what drives an industry (through tracking and analytics) and how to hone your pitch to reach each audience with a unique message.
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The Cycles of Organic Search Engine Positioning
Endless flood of traffic to your website with one click! Better than ever. Converts an incredible 1 in 10.
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Auto Hits Machine + Web & Seo 2006.
Sites that are designed to sell products and/or services
must go the extra mile to enhance the visitor’s engagement with the website.
Shopping cart abandonment (shoppers abandoning their carts before deciding to
pay for the “items” they’ve added to their cart) can result in a
significant loss in potential sales. But much of that can be reduced when the
shopping process is streamlined and geared for shopper satisfaction.
The selling process–from initial interest to the very last
checkout page–must be able to grab shopper’s attention and proceed to drive
them through to the finalization of the sale. But even after the sell, you must
deal with customer service issues in order to keep the sale finalized. Good
customer service will bring your purchasers back for another and another and
another. Here are fourteen general usability guidelines that will enhance your
shoppers overall experience on your site.
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14 Website Usability Guidelines That Keep them Coming Back for More