This was a particularly good message from Marlon Sanders today. I not only promote Marlon’s products, I buy them and use them myself. I enjoy his weekly newsletter and this article seems as succinct a how and what summary as I’ve seen lately. I hope you enjoy it.
How To Go From 0 to $50,000 —
Even If You Don’t Know How, Even If You’re Starting From Scratch, Even If You Don’t Think You Can, Even If You Think
It’s Dreaming
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I want to talk today about how to build something from nothing.
The awesome thing about your online business is you get to come up
with an idea, put it out there FAST and see how it works.
I want to look today at a process for going from scratch to $50,000.
I’m going to break it down into stages:
Stage one: Going from nothing to something
Out of ALL the stages, this is the absolute hardest and yet it’s the most
exciting.
When you go from $50,000 to $100,000, that’s not nearly as exciting as going from scratch to $50,000.
There are 3 things you need to go from scratch to something:
Eyeballs, Pitch, Product.
I call this the “Basic Formula.”
The FIRST thing you have to do is figure out your Basic Formula. After that, it’s relatively smooth sailing.
In this issue I’m using some terms you may not know if you’re a newbie. This link is your best friend:
http://www.marlonsnews.com/internet-business-marketing-terms/
a. Eyeballs
You can’t sell something to someone unless you can get your message in front of their eyeballs.
There are two parts to getting eyeballs:
— Figuring out what eyeballs you WANT to reach
— Reaching them
Ask yourself this question: Where do the folks I wanna reach hang out?
What do they read? Where do they go?
Key: Start with the forums they go to. You can almost always find the forums they hang out in. Then from there, you’ll discover the web sites they go to, the blogs they read and the products they buy.
If you own Promo Dashboard, I refer you to row one for detailed info on this step.
Remember those three things. They are key. You sell them what they already buy in places they already go to and read. These sites are where you do Google site targeted placement or where you buy banners or who you approach for joint venture offers.
b. Pitch
Once you find the eyeballs, you have to develop two pitches.
Pitch one is the email capture pitch. The pitch you make that gets people to give you an email address.
Pitch two is the one you make for a product or service AFTER you get the email.
Once you get 250 people on your list, you can start doing ad swaps like Jit Uppal teaches. But you gotta prime the pump by getting some people on the list yourself.
Everything boils down to the pitch.
I don’t care if it’s a webinar pitch, teleseminar pitch, sales letter pitch, video pitch.
And it’s all pretty much the same formula just changed up a little to match the medium.
The urgency step (on my 12-step formula) is different for a teleseminar or webinar vs. a sales letter.
But it’s ALL a pitch.
If you can’t pitch by talking or writing, you better hire someone who can. True story. But once you learn the TRUE 12-step formula and UNDERSTAND it, you’ll see how to do it quickly.
Most people do NOT understand either “The Amazing Formula” nor my
real 12-step sales letter formula. People just grasp at the obvious parts
and miss the REAL guts.
Once you truly “get it” you realize you CAN pitch even if you think you can’t.
Here’s one of the most useful little big picture formulas you’ll ever learn:
Story + {Benefits – cost} x urgency
Another formula I use is:
probability x saliency = expectancy
Maybe I can talk about that in a future ezine issue.
Anyway, you gotta learn to pitch by doing Power Point videos (slides),
real video, webinars, teleseminars, audio or letters. You MUST be able to pitch in one of those formats or hire someone who can.
c. Product
You either promote your own or someone else’s. I recommend your OWN because then you can go out and get your affiliate army.
Theoretically, you could do that with PLR (private label rights). PLR is good for quick cash or for getting started. For a bit longer term solution, you need your own product.
There are so many easy ways to create products fast now, there ARE no excuses for not having your own. Really, there are no excuses. It’s about you and your TV set.
You decide which do you want more? To watch TV shows for a week or to have your own product.
And if the answer is to watch TV shows, hey — no problem. If you want to keep trading your time for dollars, I don’t have a problem with that. More power to you.
If you want to trade products for dollars, you have to create them.
You can even get PAID to create them, which is the best.
People get hung all up on being perfect. I fall into that trap too. We’ve spent about 6 months TOO long creating Traffic Dashboard. It’s a stupid, dumb trap.
Get good content put into a consumable product and blow it out the door with tight promotion.
That’s how you make your first buck.
Everyone for some bizarre reason thinks the easiest part should be going to $1,000 in sales. If you do it right, that’s the hardest part of making it up to $50,000 — and beyond.
Fifty G’s is 4 G’s a month. I have friends who did that their first or second month in the business. That is NOT normal. What I see as normal is people muck around for 6 months a year or however long it takes for them to grasp the basic principles of direct response marketing.
Then they figure out their formula. Then they sometimes explode overnight. And others just slowly build. Most give up before that because they think it is supposed to be super easy and fast to start with.
They think step one should be easy because it’s step one. No, step one is the hardest of all steps if you do it right.
There are tons of gimmicky ways to make a G or more. But they don’t figure out the Basic Formula for you so you can’t expand, grow and scale your business.
You MUST unlock your Basic Formula to scale up to 50 G’s then 100, 250 and 500 G’s.
I know you’re thinking, “Can’t someone just give me the ‘Basic Formula?’ No, they can’t. Where do you advertise, with what hot buttons, with what email capture page, with what types of follow up emails with what type of pitch?
Those are all elements of the Basic Formula. If nothing else, the way you pitch will be different from how anyone else pitches. So you have to figure that piece out.
People can give you some of the pieces. But you still have to put it all together.
Once you stop thinking the first step should be the easiest and realize that if you do it right, it’s the hardest and after that it gets tons easier, all of a sudden you have the perspective you need to make strides much faster — as ironic as that sounds.
Basically, step one is experimentation and practice. Experiment with traffic sources, lead capture pages, different pitches. You’re unlocking the secrets to your Basic Formula via experimentation and practice.
Stage Two:
Once you have a bit of a list, a product that sales and a pitch that sells the product, you’re ready to go to a thousand or two thousand a month.
Once you hit the right formula for where to find eyeballs, what kind of incentive gets them to join your email list, what their buy buttons are and how to pitch them in a way that gets a response, you move up to the next levels fast.
See, the WHOLE secret is in the first step.
The hardest thing to do is to unlock the initial combination. Now, the next challenge is how to get more traffic.
If you’re running an affiliate program like I do, you might want a contest. Check out my current one:
http://www.promotemarlon.com/june
I’m not really into the huge prizes like a lot of programs offer. But if you’re in a highly competitive space like Internet marketing, I’m not going to blow smoke up your anatomy.
The competition for affiliates in this space is intense and there are a lot of huge prizes thrown around. This isn’t bad. Some of the marketers do a really, really good job at providing great incentives for affiliates to promote.
As an affiliate, you can score great swag as an affiliate. If you’re a product owner in this market, you better be ready to compete for affiliates. Fortunately, in niches the competition is far less stiff — and sometimes almost non-existent.
But I’d STILL rather be the one at the top of the food chain, not the bottom. The product owner with the affiliate army is at the top of the whole entire food chain. Well, above him are services like aweber, getresponse and so forth.
Those are people making the biggest bank. The point of profit flows upwards in the value chain if you’re read Michael Porter (author of the seminal book Competitive Advantage).
Anyway, stage two is about traffic because you’ve already done the hard part. Finding out eyeballs, finding a pitch they buy from, getting them on a list.
Now you just ramp up and 10X what you already did.
Once you UNLOCK the formula, you often hit the vault fast. I see it all the time. Someone figures out the combination and boom. They rocket almost overnight.
In stage 2 you often blow out 2-4 products fast and the profits roll in so quickly it’s almost dizzying.
Stage 3: Consolidating gains and growing more.
At this point you have growing pains. Customer service kicks in. Holy smokes.I need a refund. I didn’t order this. Could you splain to me which of your 4 products I should buy.
The questions never end.
In the beginning you handle these yourself. But at some point it eats into your productivity and you HAVE to hire part time help. This person will make you a small fortune because they let you go back to expanding on the Basic Formula.
Often at this stage you hire a webmaster who also does customer support. That way, they can help with web pages and such.
If you’re lucky you hire someone really freaking talented and smart who grows with you in the business.
For my friend Lee McIntyre, I think James was the best hire he’ll ever make. For me, it was Lisa.
Stage 4: Repeating the Basic Formula
Once you have your Basic Formula down pat, just REPEAT it to grow.
This works up to around $250,000 to $500,000 and then you often have to change your formula.
But by that time you’ve blown WAY beyond $50,000 obviously.
Somewhere between 1/2 million and a million in sales a year a major
shift has to be made in how you create and promote products and run
the business.
This is less if you run a continuity-based business.
Now, let’s go back and look again at how you make it to 50 G’s.
Fifty G’s a year is 4 G’s a month. That’s a G a week. Or $200 a day. Sell
a front-end report for $7 to $27.
Back end it with $100. Get 100 to 300 visitors a day and depending on the quality of the visitors you’ll be there. Later you add on a $500 product after the $100.
Pop two 500’s a week and there’s your G.
50 -100 front-end sales should pop you two 500’s a week, all depending on your market, positioning, demand and a bunch of other stuff.
This is how you make it there.
Best wishes,
Marlon Sanders
Marlon Sanders is the author of “The Amazing Formula That
Sells Products Like Crazy and the KING of Step-By-Step
Internet Marketing.”
Join me on my new Round Table where for 6 intense weeks I’m going to walk you step-by-step, blow-by-blow through my Basic Formula revealing what it is, how it works, why it works, how to do it, mistakes to avoid, how to pitch, how to find or create products, how to get eyeballs and so much more.
http://www.marlonsanders.com/roundtable
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[tags]Marlons Sanders,product creation, basic formula, Amazing formula,[/tags]