Resuming Focus

There are several reasons why I haven't been posting to this blog. I have spent the last few months working as a ghostwriter around a full-time job. I'm feeling pretty good about making a steady income from home as a writer, but I'm still pretty far from my goal to make at least $75,000 a year. So I've been thinking about how to change my strategy.



Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich lays out clear instructions on how to manifest your desires. He writes:



"Write out a clear, concise statement of the amount of money you intent to acquire, name the time limit for its acquisition, state what you intend to give in return for the money, and describe clearly the plan through which you intend to accumulate it."



My plan involves resuming focus on two paths which I already started. I believe writing is my destiny, and so far the only path that has convinced me I can make six figures as a writer is as a copywriter. I have been particularly inspired by Marcella's story, as I described at Make Six Figures from Home. I enrolled in AWAI a while back, and I admit I haven't stayed focused. I need to work to correct that, because copywriting is definitely where the money is.



There is another path I have veered from, and that is SBI. My site is through Site Build It, and they have a very clearly laid out path to success. I've cut some corners along the way and the result is that I am not as wildly successful as some other SBI owners I know. Part of my lack of focus has been my own tendency to get overwhelmed with life in light of my husband's illness and financial difficulties that have happened because of it. Recently my own health took an unexpected nosedive, and I'm still not sure what the end result of that will be.



Maybe I'm making excuses. The only thing I know for sure is I've met several very successful SBIers who have made it to the top 3% of all websites. Visit this page for some examples.

In the intro to the Action Guide, it says "Decide to win no matter what."

And that's what I've decided today. SBI promises that if I trust in the process and follow the directions as they are laid out I will attain success. I am sure that my lack of meeting my potential is my own fault and no one else's. I'm going back to the beginning of SBI and figure out what is different between what I've done and what the successful SBIers have done. I'm going to turn things around.

My focus resumes today.

Recommended Reading: Unstoppable Women

What goals have you set for yourself that YOU talked you out of? How often do you hear yourself say the phrase "if only"?

• If only I had more time
• If only I had more money
• If only I was 10 years younger
• Etc. etc. etc.

Many of us fail to achieve our goals because we make excuses. We look at opportunities that may not have been presented to us or obstacles that stopped us in our tracks and we give up on our dreams.

If you have let your dreams slip away, Cynthia Kersey's book Unstoppable Women: Achieve Any Breakthrough Goal in 30 Days is a must-read. When Ms. Kersey says you can achieve ANY breatkthrough goal in 30 days, she is not exaggerating. She takes the reader by the hand and gives a step by step plan for breaking down goals into small, achievable steps. Woven between these clear instructions are stories of women who have risen above obstacles that most of us have not confronted in our worse nightmares. To say you will be inspired when you read these stories is an understatement.

This is a life-changing book. If you think in any way that you're not meeting your potential and need a guide to put you back on track, this book is for you. It will open your eyes to possibilities you may have stopped seeing years ago. Take the time to read this book. You will become unstoppable.

What to Put in Your Resource Box

The resource box is how you go about promoting your website through article marketing. Most article directories allow you to tell a little bit about yourself in the resource box. What information should you include?

Like a headline, a resource box is your split second chance to solicit a new visitor to your website. You have only one chance to get a potential customer’s attention. Somehow you need to get them to click to your site or to an affiliate program you are recommending. The ability to solicit customers is basically the only compensation you will receive for your article in free article directories. A good resource box is how you are compensated for the time it took to write the article.

Your resource box should include the following:

• Your name. The more productive you are at article production, the more readers will begin to remember your name and think of you as an expert.

• The full website address of your website or affiliate product. Be sure to include http:// Also, the subject of the site you are recommending should be related to the subject you are writing about. Many article directories allow up to three links in the resource box. Don’t be afraid to use all three. But, if you own twelve unrelated websites, there is no point including links to sites that have nothing to do with your article.

• One to three sentences about you: your experience, why you are qualified to give this information, and especially your USP (unique selling proposition). What makes you, your site, or the product you are promoting unique? This shouldn’t be a list of all your accomplishments, but the one that is most applicable to what you’re trying to promote.

• A good technique for a resource box is to offer a free item, leading the interested person to a squeeze page, where you can encourage them to join your list or subscribe to your newsletter.

One approach that works is stimulating curiosity. Write a partial article, and direct the reader to your website for part two.

It will take practice to come up with the perfect resource box. Create multiple resource boxes, and test and analyze which ones are bringing in the clicks.

Don’t hesitate to change your resource box when you are just getting started, until you find out what works. When you come up with the right one, you will know it.

The Most Important Page You'll Ever Create

• Since the path to a steady online income is a list, probably the most important page you will ever create is the squeeze page. The squeeze page is a simple page that has only one purpose: to convince a prospect to sign onto your list.
  
  The bulk of your traffic should be directed to this page. This is the page you should use in resource boxes, blog posts and forum signatures.
  
  The only choice you want the visitor to make is to give you their name and email address, so there is very little content on a squeeze page. There are no ads to distract the visitor or tempt him to click away.
  
  The opt-in box should be near the top of the page. Besides that, a squeeze page consists only of the following items:
  
  
• An attention grabbing headline which announces your primary benefit. If your squeeze page has a low conversion rate, experiment with tweaking the headline.
  
• A list of five or more benefits that you are offering. The prospect wants to know what is in it for him. Emphasize what’s unique about your newsletter or ecourse.
  
• An offer people can’t refuse. Some examples include an ecourse in several parts or one or more free ebooks. It helps to attach a dollar value to what you’re offering, such as “four ebooks worth $44.”
  
  
  The goal of a squeeze page is to convert the maximum amount of subscribers out of your visitors. If you are not attaining a good conversion rate, tweak the headline or the benefits and pay attention to how it affects your conversion rate.
  
  Other things you can experiment with are adding audio, video and testimonials.
  
  Spend some time studying the squeeze pages of very successful marketers. A good way to find squeeze pages that convert well is by looking at the squeeze pages of the top-selling items at clickbank.
  
  If you don’t know how to build a squeeze page, templates are available. Or you can hire someone to build one for you at elance.com. For a turn-key opportunity which will walk you through the steps you need to take to get started, read my review of Affiliate Cash Secrets here
  
  The important thing is to build a squeeze page and drive traffic to it so you can begin building your list. Once you have a squeeze page to work with, you can experiment on making small changes to see what works.

Why You Need an Opt-In List

There is only one surefire way to build an online business with a steady income, and that is by building an opt-in list.

You may have heard a hundred or more times that the money is in the list. Why do you need an opt-in list? The biggest reason is that not all visitors arriving at your website are ready to buy. A visitor arrives at your site, browses, then with a simple click of the mouse, the prospect is gone. If you have failed to capture their email address, you will probably never get another chance to make a sale.

Face it, hardly anyone buys the first time they’re presented with an offer. Some say a prospect must be exposed to an offer six or seven times before they buy. Without a way of following up, potential sales are lost pretty much daily.

Not having a list will cost you an awful lot of time and energy. You have to start from scratch searching for interested prospects on a daily basis.

When very successful marketers talk about making money while they sleep, most of them are referring to being able to send a message to a very large list. If they have grown a list of 10,000 subscribers, they know that with every message they send, some of their prospects will make a purchase. If a $20 product converts at 2% and you have a list of 1000 people, you would make 20 sales or $400. But if you have a list of 10,000 subscribers converting at the same 2% on a $20 product, one mailing to your list could potentially make $4,000.

None of this can happen overnight. Robert Allen in his book Multiple Streams of Internet Income describes being challenged to make $24,000 in 24 hours. Instead he made over $100,000 in 24 hours – but the real secret behind his ability to accomplish this was that he had spent the previous nine months building a subscriber list that had reached over 11,000 subscribers when he took the challenge.

Building a list takes time and effort. Yet if you have only a small amount of money to invest in your business, investing in subscribers to your list will result in much more long-term profit than anything else you can invest in. Some marketers estimate that each subscriber will earn them $1 a month, so if you’re hoping to make $1,000 a month, your goal should be to grow your list to 1,000 or more subscribers.

Growing your list can’t be your only concern. Remember that your subscribers can choose to unsubscribe in a split second. Treat them as the most valuable asset of your business, because that’s exactly what they are.

Choosing a Path

I've been absent from the blog for some time, but not because I've been idle. Actually, if anything I've been very focused on exactly how I'm going to pull off my goals.

In his awesome book "Multiple Streams of Internet Income", Robert Allen makes the following statement:

"Successful people rely heavily on their mentors. Ordinary people don't."

I chose a couple of mentors and attached myself to their coattails. Then I came to a fork in the road.

I had narrowed down which path I wanted to follow to two possibilities. The first was selling digital goods, primarily on eBay. I have a tremendous amount of respect for John Thornhill, a Titanium Power Seller on eBay, and I decided to begin selling ebooks on eBay. My early results were encouraging. I opened an ebook store, which I still have at http://vals-bargain-ebooks.com and I was hopeful of developing a steady stream of income in this way.

Then the other shoe dropped.

eBay decided to restrict the sale of digital goods to classified ads (Read more at http://www.work-at-home-parenting.com/digital-goods.html

I'm not saying I have totally abandoned the possibility of making money through selling digital goods. It's just it's not going to be quite as simple as it was. So I have put that path on the back burner for now.

I have decided for the time being to focus on affiliate marketing. I have dabbled in this direction for a while now, but have felt that I somehow have missed the point on how to earn a stream of income I can count on from affiliate marketing.

The one thing I know is people make five figure monthly incomes this way. And I believe this statement (from the movie "The Edge"):

What one man can do, another can do.

If others can make five figures a month in this way, then I can too. I am the first to admit I am technically challenged, which is why I chose to open a site through Site Build It. I'm not afraid to learn, yet there is a learning curve still ahead.

I have been studying everything I can get my hands on regarding affiliate marketing to figure out what I might have missed and I learned the following:

• The money is in the list
• Driving traffic to a squeeze page is a must for building a list
• Follow up messages need to be plugged into an autoresponder

These are the areas I am going to focus on in the immediate future, and as I learn important points, I will share them here.

The Mistakes I Made in My First Year

An old friend of mine used to say, “A smart man learns from his mistakes. A smarter man learns from the mistakes of others.”

My website is just over a year old, so I’ve been reflecting on my first year and some of what I did wrong. I think at the top of the list would have to be the fact that I didn’t ask exactly that question of other marketers:

What would you do differently in your first year if you knew then what you know now?

Here are my own answers to that question:

1) Trying to go in too many directions at once. In my first year of internet marketing, I was like a kid in a candy store. I could see and smell success all around me and I knew I wanted some, so I tried a little of this and a little of that. End result – not a lot of progress. I switched lanes way too often.

2) Being a serial buyer. Along the same lines, I was intrigued with way too many products, many of which were useless. I wish I could have back some of the money that I spent foolishly so that I could spend it with forethought and planning.

3) Not sticking close enough to SBI forums My site was purchased through Site Build It!, and the information they provide is very in-depth. At the top of the list of what is accessible if you purchase a site through them is an incredible forum full of very experienced and helpful people (many of whom have sites in the top 1% of all websites. See results here.). In fact, the forum alone is probably worth the price of SBI. Also, Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich talks about needing a Master Mind group – in other words, putting your head together with others who have similar goals. Or in his words, he defines the Master Mind as “Coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose.”

4) Not using a daily or weekly planner.I rely way too much on my brain. I expect myself to remember things, and often I let myself down. I am unable to work on my website full-time, so in the snippets of time that I do have, I often have found myself wasting time “warming up” because I don’t remember where I left off or what I was trying to accomplish. This is one big thing that I am working on in the coming year – making out a schedule for the coming week at the beginning of the week, so I remember exactly where I’m trying to go.

Mistakes aren’t all bad – they always offer lessons. Or as John Powell said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” I’m looking forward to a better year becauseof the mistakes I made last year.