Power Up Your Engines
June 20th, 2011 by Diane Conklin under Direct Mail, Information Marketing, Marketing. No Comments.
Your Business Spaceship, “MSS Info-preneur,” Is Ready To Blast Off!
What Would Happen If You Fell Into One Of The 10 Most Common Marketing Black Holes?
Imagine that you get into your 2011 model “marketing spaceship,” named “MSS Info-preneur” and you point it straight at the million dollar solar-mass black hole, in the center of our info-galaxy. (Actually, there’s some debate about whether our galaxy contains a central black hole, but let’s just say it does.)
About 823 miles from the black hole, you turn off your rockets boosters and coast in. What happens?
You’re in free fall, so every part of your body, and your marketing spaceship, is being pulled in the same way, so you feel weightless. (This is exactly what happens to astronauts in Earth’s orbit – even though the astronauts and the space shuttle are being pulled by the Earth’s gravity, they don’t feel any of the gravitational forces because everything is being pulled in exactly the same way.)
As you get closer and closer to the center of the hole, you start to feel tremendous gravitational forces. Imagine that your feet are closer to the center than your head. (Now won’t that feel weird?) The gravitational pull gets stronger, and stronger as you get closer, and closer to the center of the hole, so your feet feel a stronger pull than your head does. As a result you feel “stretched.”
This force is called a tidal force, because it’s exactly like the forces that cause tidal waves on earth. These tidal forces get more and more intense as you get closer to the center, and eventually they will literally pull you apart.
You might not even recognize that you’ve tripped into one of these black holes in your business. You go along every day, doing your thing and then someone points it out. Entrepreneurs, business owners and marketers tend to be very intense and get stuck in a vision or in specific way of doing things – sometimes they don’t take advice or bother to look right or left – until it’s too late! The vortex has sucked them in and so goes MSS Info-preneur.
If you want to be successful in Business, Direct Response Marketing, or Marketing in general, you need to avoid these common mistakes.
The Ten Solar Sucking Black Holes That Most Entrepreneurs Fall Into
1. Procrastination
Putting things off is a killer. You NEED a plan and systems in place. Prioritize your tasks and keep lists of everything that needs to be done. And no matter how much you don’t feel like doing something, just get it out of the way and never leave it until the next day.
TIP: Use post-it notes, a white board, to do lists. They are low-tech, but work.
2. Striving for Perfection
You’ll never have a perfect website or product. But you know what? It doesn’t matter! Good is good enough! It’s important to get started as soon as possible. Bringing in revenue is the key here. You can tweak things as you go along and improvements will come – but if you try to get everything 100% perfect, before you start, then you never will.
TIP: Do some marketing every day; it’s more productive and less stressful than trying to do everything at once.
3. Wasting Money
Don’t get caught up jumping from opportunity to opportunity, or buying everything that lands in your inbox. We call it chasing bright shiny objects. You’ll be surprised how much you can get for free or at very low cost. You don’t need half the stuff you see online or otherwise. Try to control your emotions and think before you buy unnecessary items – this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend money on your continuing education – you absolutely should do that on a regular basis!
TIP: Ask questions in forums and to educated professionals.
4. Not Spending Enough Money
You will need to spend some money to get started in your business, and more as you get bigger. For example, on the internet you’ll need a domain name, a hosting company, and an Autoresponder – but these are pretty affordable these days. The bulk of your expenses will be on marketing and promotion, usually Ezine ads or pay-per-click.
TIP: Keep your Business Income separate and re-invest some of it into your business.
5. Wrong Markets
If you are determined to conquer a particular market, you could end up on a long and expensive journey into a black hole that is doomed to fail. Do your research and due diligence before you enter any market. A niche market is where you want to be, but only if this niche will spend money! Niche markets that spend money, or have a strong desire to make money are great markets, because those are strong human emotions. Lucky for us, there are a lot of them around!
TIP: Find something that interests you, or that you already know how to do, and use a website like www.nichebot.com to see how many searches there are for that subject.
6. Lack of Growth
You must continuously grow yourself and expand your mind. Learning is essential. Without growth, you’ll be stuck with the same skills and ideas, and you’ll never even notice when you are bogged down in complacency and routine.
TIP: Put some time away each day to read a few articles, a chapter in a good book, or browse some websites. Attend seminars, workshops and teleseminars routinely. Learning just one new idea a day can increase your potential rapidly.
7. One Is The Worst Number
You can do it alone but it’s harder. Without a strong support team for success, you’re much more likely to fall into that black hole abyss. Online forums, for example, are an amazing source of ideas and encouragement. Forming or participating in Joint Ventures, mastermind groups, or something similar, can really leverage your efforts and you’ll accomplish far more than you ever could on your own.
Don’t isolate yourself – it’s tough enough being an entrepreneur. Don’t try to go it alone, get some support from like- minded people.
TIP: Join Coaching groups, masterminds, forums etc. Invest in yourself to avoid the big black hole.
8. Small Money – Small Income – Big Money – Big Income
You’re never going to get rich selling $20.00 items. Include higher priced goods and services in your marketing. Small dollar items are great for building your list. Larger priced items may get less sales, but they will generate more profits. You’ll never know what your clients will buy from you until you branch out with some new and exciting offerings!
TIP: High ticket sales items work better with existing customers, who you already have a relationship with, than with new clients who don’t yet know, like and trust you. Try the higher priced items as your back-end sales.
9. Separating Life and Work
One of the biggest pitfalls, whether you work from home or own your own business and have an office, is the fact that life can creep into your activities – simply because you are always thinking about your business. Separate the two and have fixed times when you work, and a set area to do it. Work doesn’t have to take over your life, but neither should you let life interfere with your work.
TIP: Use a spare room or a spare corner in your house and only use it for work.
10. Dream, Meditate and THINK BIG.
You won’t know unless you do it. Know that you can do anything – because you can! You may not be ready to do it yet, but don’t set up mental blocks in advance. You create your own profitable items, sell them with integrity, and have others selling them for you. Use the Law of Attraction to fill your rockets with fuel and skyrocket to the moon!
TIP: Read positive books and read them again. Develop a library of inspirational books to lift you up, and keep your rockets firing in the right direction.
Don’t allow yourself to fall into the Black Hole. Once sucked in, it will be difficult to start your engines and fly out.
“Marketing is not an event, but a process . . . It has a beginning, a middle, but never an end, for it is a process. You improve it, perfect it, change it, even pause it. But you never stop it completely.”
– Jay Conrad Levinson
