Well, are you? I’ll share with you a simple 60 second exercise you can do right now to find out.
By the way, this post was inspired by an email I received from a subscriber… she told me about how she works her business for 14 hours a day…and how exhausting it is.
Then she went on to say a few words about how she’s building her MLM and asked if I had any tips for her.
Well, first of all, I appreciate the email, and I have to say that my subscriber certainly sounds like a go-getter and is clearly not afraid to work for what she wants. For that I applaud her.
She also mentioned in her email that she’s experiencing exactly that which I talk about on my websites; in order to find just a few of the right people, one really has to sift through heaps of unqualified prospects.
I don’t think I’m putting words in her mouth when I conclude that she feels like she’s working too hard for too little money.
How about you? Do you ever feel like you are working too hard for too little pay?
Well, surely everyone feels that way from time to time…
But let’s do a quick little exercise together to find out whether this really is so. Whether you really are “underpaid”.
So get out your calculator. Ready? Ok – here we go:
Take your average monthly income for the last 90 days and divide it by the hours you put into your business on average, per month.
For example, say your average monthly income is $700, and you put 14 hours a day into your business for, say, 5 days a week. That’s 70 hours per week. Multiply with 4 weeks to get work hours per month, and that gives you 280.
Now take your average monthly income ($700) and divide it by 280 (work hours per month). That comes out to $2.50.
$2.50…that’s what you’re paying yourself, per hour.
Wow.
Chances are you consider your time to be worth a lot more than $2.50 an hour.
Whatever the hourly rate is that you got from this exercise -whether it be $2.50, more than that, or less – I’d like you to consider this amount for a moment and ask yourself whether you agree that this is, in fact, what your time is worth.
And if the answer is NO, then the next question you need to answer for yourself is why you are settling for so little.
In my case I had been led to believe that this is the way it is with any business in the beginning…that you have to work for basically nothing. And then you get it back later in the form of residuals once you’ve built a big team.
I later discovered that that, in fact, is a bunch of baloney.
You don’t have to slave for peanuts, crossing your fingers and hoping and trusting that “one day you will get it all back”.
You can make money now. Today. Good money. Without burning the candle at both ends:
You can do all this to free up your time so that you can build your business and have a life at the same time (!)
Learning all this takes some work but it’s NOT as time-consuming or difficult as it may look at first glance.
In my opinion, it’s if you are not doing the above, that you’re making it hard to build your MLM – much harder than it needs to be!
Which is likely the reason why you’re exhausted.
Which is likely why you have to work your business every waking moment to see even just a little bit of growth.
Which is why it feels like you’re fighting an up-hill battle, and for every step you move forward you take two back.
So…are you ready to hear what the solution is?
The solution is to learn 1.) Attraction Marketing, and 2.) to automate and leverage your business using the Internet. (The two go hand-in-hand.)
This is what took me from making a couple hundred bucks a month to earning multiple five figures a month.
Give me ONE good reason why it can’t do the same for you…
(The “work with me” link below will give you more information on how you can work directly with, and be coached by, me.)
Successfully,
More here:
Meet me on Facebook
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Get “Her Success Blueprint”
PS: Feel free to re-tweet this post and/or to leave me a comment!
Successfully,
More here:
Meet me on Facebook
Watch me on Youtube
Get “Her Success Blueprint”
PS: If you enjoyed this post, feel free to re-tweet it and/or to leave me a comment below!
Here are some simple, tried-and-true tips that can help you boost your results in 2011. They are based on a list I put together for my own team members recently, but I modified it slightly and posted it here, hoping it could benefit others as well.
These ideas all spring from my own experiences of what has made the greatest difference in my success as an Internet marketer.
I recommended you pick a handful of them and start implementing them in your business today. Let me know which ones you commit to: feel free to leave me a comment below!
1. Connect with two or three people on your team or perhaps in some online networking community that you belong to: touch base often, hold each other accountable. Staying in close connection with other like-minded individuals can make ALL the difference during challenging times in your business.
2. Plan your marketing budget (however big or small) for the next 6 months and stick with it no matter what: What are you going to be spending on your marketing per month for the next 6 months to build your business to momentum?
This marketing budget is not based on whether or not you make sales in your business – it’s funding coming from other income sources. But any profits your make in your business should be added to this budget.
3. Opt in to the email list of one or two successful leaders in the industry that you feel you resonate with: Follow them closely, see how they market themselves as leaders, and model yourself after them (-model, not copy).
4. Bookmark CopyBlogger.com and use it whenever you need inspiration for headlines, subject lines for emails, and other copy. It’s free, and it’s a fabulous place to start learning some basic copy writing.
5. Mark your calendar for your company’s next marketing event and commit to being there. There is simply no substitute for live events, and you can’t even begin to grasp what I mean until you actually attend one. You come back as a changed person, and when you change, your business changes.
6. Add one more hour to your workday: That’s six extra hours a week; 24 extra hours per month. Then, ask yourself what sacrifices you need to make in order for this to happen.
7. Become more deliberate about how you spend your time: Plan your weekly schedule – I recommend using an online calendar and writing down specifically what you will be working on each and every day of the week, blocking out 1,2 or 3 hour blocks of time.
8. Become more consistent about “working your list”, using promos, free offers & bonuses, conducting online webinars for your subscribers, etc, as a way of giving value, building trust & credibility and prompting your prospects to take action more quickly.
9. Learn to leverage & recycle all your content: Here is a youtube video I did where I explain how to do this.
10. Start personalizing your email auto responders. You’ll find some helpful training tutorials for this as well on my youtube channel.
11. Pick one direct response marketing strategy and master it to perfection: focus on that one strategy only; learn everything there is to learn about it.
12. Unsubscribe to all those email lists that you never should have gotten on in the first place, which are doing nothing but filling up your inbox.
13. Start calling your leads. NOT calling your leads is a right you have to earn, and unless you’re generating 30 or more leads a day consistently and/or making $10K a month, you haven’t earned that right yet.
14. Commit to doing keyword research for everything you write and publish: if you aren’t using keywords properly in all your online marketing, you are going to get buried in the Internet graveyard where no one will find you.
15. Become crystal clear on your “why”. Why do you do what you do? Where are you going? If you don’t know where you are going, why would anyone else want to follow you?
16. Every day, focus on profit producing activities. There are only 2 of them: Marketing, and talking to people. In other words, driving and converting traffic.
17. Consider getting a screen capture software such as Camtasia, and start shooting video tutorials where you teach and train on specific marketing strategies.
Post these to your youtube channel, and also, use a video distribution tool such as Traffic Geyser to blast your videos all over the net. Video tutorials are incredibly effective in attracting high quality prospects. They make you look like an expert in the eyes of your viewers, too. ;-)
18. It is never too soon to start creating your own unique offer: an ebook, a video series, a live webinar course, a pdf file or another type of report… There’s probably nothing more powerful you can do as a marketer in order to establish yourself as an authority and to build your brand.
Plus, with your own offer 100% of the profits go back into your pocket!
19. Become consistent about tracking your traffic. Because how can you know what marketing strategies are working for you if you don’t know what traffic sources are producing for you and which are not?
20. Consider outsourcing some of your work: Use odesk.com, guru.com, or the warriorforum, to hire some helping hands – whether it is to write articles, create banners, build a blog, or whatever.
Outsourcing – which does not have to be expensive by the way – can be a life line during those times when you feel especially overwhelmed. As a wise person said, “Do what you do best, then outsource the rest.”
PS: Let me know about your progress… Perhaps you have already implemented one or more of these strategies and have seen a big difference in your business and your life? If so, be sure to leave me a comment right below! Also, as always, if you think this post can be of help to others, feel free to retweet it.
Successfully,
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If you’ve subscribed to receive email updates from me, and you have “replied” to one of my emails – perhaps with a question or a comment – you know that my email account is set up to deliver an “vacation reply”.
And, if you are receiving information from me via email, you also know that if you want to talk to me – if you want to get me on the phone – you are asked to submit an application first.
Why?! Do I think I’m that important? Am I just a snob?
Or…is there perhaps a different reason?
The video below seeks to answer that question.
Recommended: As soon as the video starts to play, point your curser in the bottom right hand corner and click on the little icon you’ll see there that looks like a video screen. This will open the video in “full-screen” mode.
Successfully,
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Get “Her Success Blueprint”
I remember how some years back — I was working a traditional MLM business at the time — I heard a fellow distributor recount his activities for the day on a team call (a daily routine instituted by the leadership to further accountability)….
I remember how taken aback I was to hear how this particular distributor – let’s call him Nick – had gotten into talking with a lead he called for the purpose of getting a product sample out to the person, and that the chat had (get this) turned into a 1 hour long dialogue…
A conversation about sports and travels, and goodness knows what else — anything BUT Nick’s business or products. As the phone call came to a close, the prospect agreed to take the sample pack, but, as Nick himself admitted to us, the guy likely did it only because he felt he owed it to Nick after taking so much of his time.
Even Nick realized how completely wasted that hour was. He could have made ten other calls to prospects during that time and gotten a whole bunch of sample packs out. Instead — thinking that if he just did a real good job of befriending the guy, he would want the product — he got caught in a conversational trap he couldn’t get out of.
And…yes, you guessed it…in spite of Nick’s unsurpassed amicability, they prospect did NOT become a paying customer.
This was a few years back, and I’ve since made the transition to online marketing. Now, as Internet marketers we don’t dial for dollars, and so we don’t need to worry about getting stuck with prospects who aren’t right for our business. Or do we…?
Well. Just because we do a large part of our marketing online and spend less time on the phone, it doesn’t make us immune to vampires of our time.
And social networking sites can be dangerous that way: You log onto a place like Facebook to check your messages for a few minutes, and lo and behold, “pop” – that tiny pop-up window appears, and one of your many (way too many) Facebook “friends” demands your attention.
You don’t want to be rude to your “friend”, so you politely reply…and before you know it you’re dialoging about the weather, about what an amazing movie Avatar was, and about whether Tiger Woods deserves a second chance.
You may even be sharing ideas about marketing, crossing your fingers and hoping the dialogue will lead the other person to ask you about your business so that you can direct them to your website…
But, of course, nine out of ten times that doesn’t happen.
Don’t get me wrong…I love social networking. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkdIn…all are powerful marketing tools for us online entrepreneurs — if used correctly.
Five minutes here and five minutes there…before you know it, you’ve spent an hour in unproductive dialogue. And just like Nick could have spent his hour getting bunches of sample packs out, you could have spent your hour, too, on REVENUE producing activities.
So what are revenue producing activities? Two things: marketing and talking to people. Which means that if you are engaging in conversations with people online, you are in fact doing something right!
You’ve just got to make sure you get your message across to as many individuals in your target market as possible, all at once, and don’t get sucked into lengthy discussions one-on-one with people who may or may not be looking for what you have to offer.
In all your marketing, be it pay-per-click, article marketing, social media marketing, or anything else that you use to drive traffic to your websites — you’ve got to think VIRAL.
Fortunately for us Internet marketers, there’s a whole bunch of tools we can use for that purpose: automated Twitter tools, video distribution tools, article submission software, and the list goes on.
Think MASS communication. Successful marketing has always been and always will be about numbers. And social media marketing is no different.
Successfully,
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