SEO Blog: Internet Marketing

If you’re a traditional online marketer and are spending the bulk of your time doing any of the following well-known tactics you might be causing your business to die a slow death:

Article Writing
Blogging
Social Media
Copy Writing
Link Building
Getting Paid Traffic
ecommerce Store building

If you play the slots, in Vegas or anywhere else, you’ve got a 32% chance of success. But if you’re a business owner, online or onground, you’ve got a 37% change of success, so there – see? We’ve got THAT going for us. Except, if you like horse racing, then close your business now, because playing the ponies will give ya a 41% chance of success. But wait there’s more: if you’re tired of doing a bunch of number crunching and accounting to keep your business alive – good news! You’ve only got to count to 21 in Black Jack and that gives you a 45% chance of success! Things are looking up! And if you’re a complete slacker, just throw that little ball onto the roulette table, and you’re looking at a 47% chance of success. One of the key principles is the concept of the Law Of Compounding. This Law cuts you a major break. In today’s world of Good to Great, and The Pursuit of Excellence, the Law of Compounding allows you to make changes that result in what most people would consider to be mediocre improvements to the performance of your business yet, because you’re making other changes that build upon the first, the mathematics from this law will cause your profits to double. And that’s why the program tag line is, "the system is brilliant, so you don’t have to be". Now, I don’t expect you to believe a word of any of this. I’m a skeptic too, but I run a company that’s built on testing to eliminate guesswork and skepticism by finding out the facts. So, though Paul’s credentials and track record are impressive, I wanted to see a solid test first. So, we ran one – using a couple hundred people in StomperNet, with all kinds of business models, all different sizes of businesses, and all levels of business experience. They tested the program for about 60 days. Here’s what they reported. It took them 5 minutes, 2 or 3 hours, 10 Hours…. To make $12 k a month, $20k in the first month, $100k in the first year, up $200k over last year – and remember, this is all in the midst of the rest of our economy experiencing a major melt-down. BTW, these folks didn’t get any special treatment. If anything, they got short changed because, the program they worked with didn’t have the checklists, manuals, work sheets, or the full mastermind success coaching groups that the commercially-available program contains. But the results and profits that they did get in such a short amount of time were nothing short of amazing. Actually, let me clarify that – I’ve seen big numbers that happen over a short period of time. Those examples become the poster-boy testimonials to launch entireproducts, and I know you’ve seen this kind of thing before. What I have never seen, and I’ve been doing this for 9 years, is SO MANY consistently big improvements toprofits with such a small amount of effort over such a wide range of businesses, in such a short amount of time. And that’s why I think Formula Five might end up becoming as big or even bigger than StomperNet over the next 12 months. Successful Business is NOT about how much you make, it’s about how much you keep. Like, how cool would it be to run a company that does $500,000 in revenue every year and results in $1,600 in profits He says sarcastically… 62.8% of Entrepreneurs think that the money that falls to the top line is a good indicator and validation of the success of their business model. And then, they go bankrupt. Are you judging the success of your business but how much it’s grossing? Well – Don’t do it anymore! It’s what you KEEP that matters. According to a survey from US Bank and the SBA, one of the top reasons that 62.8% of all businesses fail is lack of profits, meaning, poor or declining margins. But this is NOT one of them: Some folks think that cutting costs is the key to improving margins. There’s NOTHING wrong with efficiency and cutting waste. But in the history of earth, no business ever made a fortune by cutting costs alone. And when they slash and burn, they look for the big dollars – and tell me if I’m wrong if you haven’t eyed that adwords budget and said “Hmmm, if I trimmed a little there, and there…” A lot of people FREAK OUT when thinking about it. They go insane and start huffing that their sales will TANK and they’ll go immediately out of business. Not in a few weeks or months – immediately. If you sell a service that requires equipment in order for it to work, make sure it has a dollar value assigned to it, even if you GIVE it to the customer for no charge – like, if you sell Merchant Account Service for point of sale transaction, and the little credit card swipe machine is part of the deal, make sure your customer knows how much that’s worth. It’s the things you throw in that often add a lot of dollars in Valuizing. If you sell software or a service that requires installation on your company servers, and you include installation as part of the price – make sure you assign a dollar value to it. Why? Because SOMEONE has to pay for it. If you can show your customer how quickly their purchase is going to be FREE, then you’ve got a home-run on your hands. And I’m not talking about Free Trials. In Valuizing, you made the customer aware of the DOLLAR VALUE of what your products features are worth. When you Turn on the Total Return Engine, you’re showing the customer how much they will MAKE – just like Put-In-Your-Pocket- Profits. Again, the key concept here is DOING THE MATH for the customer. Remember, the customer is distracted, is afraid of making the wrong decision, and doesn’t have time to talk themselves into a purchase – it’s your JOB to help them find the Implicit Decision Trigger – the moment where THEY decide that this is the right purchase for them. And if you can cause an IDT to happen, you’ve got em. So, don’t skimp on the MATH. According to 20 years of data I analyzed from the U.S. Census Bureau – this is hard to believe but -- within six years, two-thirds, actually 62.8%, close to two-thirds of all businesses will fail. New businesses enter, old businesses leave, but after every six years they have cycled through, two-thirds of them are completely finished. So… That doesn’t give you very good odds. By understanding what the market is telling you and why it behaves the way it does, you can tailor your marketing and be more effective. The info I’m about to show you came from a survey was done by U.S. Bank in conjunction with the Small Business Administration. They asked a group of several hundred failed business owners “Why had they failed?” Here’s what they said – and oh, by the way, these answers are not in order of how often these answers were given, but all these answers were in the top tier of the reasons that people gave for failing in their business. One was a lack of vision and the strategy to implement that vision. So no strategy, no vision, they failed. They lacked a system for marketing and sales. Notice they didn’t say there -- no marketing and sales. They just didn’t have a systematic approach to marketing or sales. They lacked a system to monetize their clients. They might have been good at getting clients but they didn’t do anything to make repeated offers and resell them. They were trying, perhaps you are guilty of this one, to do too many things at once. They didn’t have a plan to invest profits for growth. In other words they didn’t have enough internally to grow and they didn’t have any way to get enough resources to grow. They got caught up in their day to day which means that they didn’t spend their energy building the future of their business. They do or did – because these businesses are toast now – they did everything ad hoc and didn’t follow a system, which means they made it up each time that they were doing it and they didn’t create, or stick to, action plans. These are the reasons that these people failed. I want you to think for a minute about your business and how you run it, and whether or not any of these major reasons for failure apply to you. Because if they do, you are most likely heading for trouble. Now many business owners operate with what I call a rescue fantasy. Their rescue fantasy sounds like this: If I could only just get good at that one part of my business which I don’t really know enough about… which will make the critical difference in my business… then I could get rich” Have you had a thought like that? You think that there’s just one more thing you need to know? Like, if you knew that one thing, it would all work out? But, let me ask you what are the chances that it will all work out? And, really, do you want to risk your success on that one thing? What are the odds of success… So here are the five things. You have to have a strong value proposition, which simply means that you have something that people want and you’re charging the right amount of money for it; a strong value proposition that leads to a strong pricing proposition, which leads to higher margins. Remember this, grab a pen and write it down, “Business is not about how much you sell, it’s about how much you keep.” It’s not about the revenue, it’s about the margin. Keeping that in mind may change everything you think about your business. Next, you need a continual stream of new visitors or leads or business opportunities. What else? You need to cost-effectively and consistently convert those leads into paying customers, cost-effectively and consistently. You need a way to fully monetize those customers instead of selling to them just one time. In other words you have figured out how to provide a steady stream of value to your clients and customers, in exchange for which they will give you a steady stream of money. Who wouldn’t like a steady stream of money from each one of their clients? The fifth one is a little different from the others, which is that you need to run your business in a way that’s efficiently and effectively working so that people get enough of the right things done in the amount of time you have. Working 18 hours a day is not a sustainable business. When I was in my 20’s I had a software company and we sold to international banks and I worked 18 hour days. I worked six and a half days a week. On Sundays I worked about seven hours. I called that a day off and that was okay, but when I sold that company after three and a half years I pretty much collapsed because it’s not sustainable to do that. So you want to make sure that people are able to get things done in an efficient and effective manner. And you have to have all five of these things.