Monthly Archives: December 2016

Fear of Success and Failure in Life and Business

Fear of SuccessDo You Have the Fear of Success or Failure?

I grew up in a family based on the principle of fear. There was fear of the dentist, fear of flying, fear of being embarrassed, and basically, fear of failure. This precluded us from trying most things, as the probability of failure increases with each new thing you attempt to do. Fear of success was not even possible because of the other fears that took precedence.

But when I was twelve years old and had a tooth ache, I overcame the fear and called the dentist to make my own appointment. The fear of continued pain was enough to make me minimize the fear of dentists my family had instilled in me. And the whole thing turned out just fine.

It was at this point that I began to question the thoughts, beliefs, and values I had been raised with. What if there was nothing to fear at all? What if I could attempt anything I wanted, with only the natural and rational risk associated with it.

For the first time in my young life I felt truly alive and ready to chase my dreams.

Now I would love to tell you that this felling stayed with me until this day, but that is not the truth. Instead, fear began to creep back into my mind almost immediately. It has been a lifelong challenge to deal with my fears and keep them at bay. But it is worth every moment that I am able to push through and accomplish my dreams and goals.

What are you afraid of? Can you pinpoint a time in your life when someone said or did something that struck fear deep inside of you? Sometimes these experiences are so deeply ingrained in our subconscious minds that we cannot remember what happened.

I would urge you to spend time every day working on dissipating fear in your life. Typically we have fears around failure, sickness, death, aging, and disappointment. Work on your fears one by one and see what you can do to alleviate the pain they cause you, as well as the missed opportunities.

Where it may be almost impossible to eliminate fear completely, it is most definitely possible to think of fears in a rational way. For example, when I wanted to start my online business at age fifty I was fearful of failure in a big way. So I spent some time thinking through each of the scenarios I had fear around and decided to go for it.

Then I learned about a new fear – fear of success. What if I achieved everything I set out to accomplish? What then?

For the very first time in my life I was able to set most of my fears aside and get on with the work of creating something that meant so much to me. Yes, there were still times during that first year where both the fear of success and the fear of failure crept into my mind, but I quickly moved past these thoughts and got back to work.

I would love to hear your thoughts on fears of any kind.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, an Online Marketing Strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker. Let’s connect further and see how we may work together in the near future.

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Relationship Marketing for Entrepreneurs

Relationship MarketingRelationship Marketing

I’ve incorporated something called “relationship marketing” into my business since the very beginning, and now many people are doing the same thing. The idea behind this is that it focuses on client and prospect loyalty and long-term engagement rather than shorter-term goals like customer acquisition and individual sales.

A couple of years ago I was having a phone conversation with legendary marketer Marlon Sanders when I mentioned that I had just got off the phone with one of my new customers.

“Stop the presses!” he exclaimed, just loudly enough to make me jump out of my chair while halfway across the country.

Marlon could not believe that I took people offline to connect with them at various points during our relationship. He insisted on knowing more, so I spent the next two hours sharing what was working for me and answering each of his questions in great detail.

I knew that Marlon did this as well. Years ago I had purchased something from him and had difficulty with downloading the file. When I put in a support ticket I was pleasantly surprised to hear from him personally on the phone. He still does that to this day from time to time.

I shared my thoughts on why reaching out to a prospect, new customer, or to an ongoing client by picking up the phone or scheduling a call with them is such as excellent idea.

First, just about no one else is doing this. Second, when you are speaking directly with someone in this way you quickly establish a relationship with them that is unlike anything you can do through emails or even small group calls or webinars. It’s even better than meeting them in person at a live workshop or conference in that you do not have the distraction of the crowd and the event.

Finally, speaking with them on the phone allows you to control the situation and truly listen to what the other person is telling you. Many times I will make them an offer that I wouldn’t have otherwise because now I know more about their situation and what they need.

Marlon asked me how long these calls typically lasted, and if I followed up with people in the future. I told him that the calls were best when limited to thirty minutes. That way we both stayed on topic and took the conversation seriously. And yes, I do follow up with people by email several days or a week later.

Then Marlon asked me if I had a specific funnel or path I would encourage someone to follow. My answer was no, because one size will never fit all. Each person’s goals and needs are different, depending upon a variety of variables. For example, someone could be brand new to online marketing and need more basic and general online marketing training. Or someone could be working on a book and need my Write – Publish – Prosper training program to help them finish writing the book so they could begin marketing and selling it to their target audience.

That day Marlon and I had one of our most productive conversations ever. We discussed the sales process, what’s new in online marketing, and how we could best support each other in the coming year. Then we got back on the topic of relationship marketing and why it is more important than just about anything else.

After that call my head hurt from so much thinking and analyzing, but it was a satisfying pain.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, an Online Marketing Strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker. Let’s connect to find out how we may work together in the future.

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Creating Your Sales Offer Funnel

Sales Offer FunnelWhy Do You Need A Sales Offer Funnel?

Your job is to create the right information and content to lead your audience from awareness to purchase. A great way to do that is through creating a sales offer funnel. You’ll match each stage of your audience’s buying cycle to the content that helps them become a paying customer or to move through your funnel, buying more expensive products or services.

 

Planning an Info Product

One of the best ways to get people to sign up for your list and get into your funnel is by creating an information product. The best way to plan any information product is to figure out at least one problem that you can easily solve for your audience. The information product can be a longer report, a short report, a checklist, or something else that is useful for your audience.

Everything starts with knowing who your audience is, where they hang out, what they do, and what they want or need. You could start with a small item as a freebie opt-in, building up to the most expensive products and services. However, there is an even better way to create your entire offer funnel fast.

Once you have done the research about your audience, you know who they are, what their pain points are, and how you can solve their problems then you can actually build your offer funnel backward. Instead of starting with the smallest thing first, start with the biggest most outrageous expensive product or service that you can offer then tiered down to the least expensive item or freebie after the fact.

 

Identify Your Most Expensive Product First

Depending on your niche, start by writing down what your most expensive product or service will be. It will help to write it all down as if you’re going to create a sales page. Choose what the price point will be for this most expensive product or service and all the benefits of it to your audience.

If you already have a super expensive product or service such as a long-term, one-on-one coaching package, start with that. Because everything you do is designed to get more of your audience into your one-on-one flagship product or service. When you start from there you can easily create the less expensive products and opt-ins that will most fit with this audience.

 

Identify Lower Priced Products that Work with Your Most Expensive Product

Now look at any lower priced products that you have that fit in with your flagship product or service. If you don’t have any, you’ll need to create them as they fit in with the buying cycle of your audience. For example, your flagship product is a $10,000 dollar a year group coaching with one-on-one coaching options mastermind. What can you find or create that will appeal to and help your coaching clients? Items like checklists, Facebook Groups, webinars, courses, training, information products and more can all fit into your sales offer funnel as long as they make the audience curious about the flagship product.

 

Identify Free Content/Gifts That Leads to Increasingly Higher Priced Items

Finally, you can fit in freebies that attract people to your flagship product or your lower-priced products too. These might be free webinars, blog posts, infographics, eBooks, small reports, case studies, interviews, and more. As long as it’s of interest to those who would want your main product you can use it. For example, keep in mind you want people to join your flagship coaching program mentioned above, you might offer content that explains why coaching can work using case studies to prove your point.

 

Forms & Formats of Products & Services

Let’s look at some potential formats of different levels of products and or services to help get your creative juices flowing. Your most expensive product has a format, as do your other offerings. Some products include a combination of formats. This is just a potential example for you to use as a guide.

 

Most Expensive (Flagship) Product

Offer: Group coaching, with one-on-one coaching possibilities, as well as a membership website that offers a lot of materials and lessons. Your price is $10,000 a year and includes all the bells and whistles. Your exclusive clients get access to all your checklists, mind maps, infographics, lessons, courses, information products, group chat, group discussion board, weekly webinars, weekly Q & A, a one hour one-on-one call each week and daily email access and discounts on live events and other products that might be of interest to the audience.

My Flagship product is my Internet Marketing Six Pack training course, even though I also offer a Mastermind group through the Online Marketing Incubator program.

 

Mid-Range Product

Now that you have your product, you can easily identify mid-range products that will solve a problem or two for your audience, while also make them want more. A great mid-range item is an information product that solves one of your audience’s problems. For example, if you’re a business coach, you might offer a course on branding, content planning, or social media marketing. Essentially, you can take one small part of your cornerstone product and make it one of the mid-range products you offer. Say that one of the things you help your clients do is choose a business name. You might offer a short course on naming your business.

 

Intro Product

When you figure which items you’ll offer in the midrange area, then you can identify the intro products to offer your audience as a part of your sales offer funnel. Intro products can be low priced or free products. Anything that requires an email address to opt-in will work great here. Webinars, teleseminars, podcasts, social media posts, Facebook live, YouTube videos, free eBooks or reports, checklists, and so forth all make great intro level products and services as long as they offer a taste of what’s in the flagship or mid-range product or service offerings. Let’s say you have a mid-range product that is a six-week course on branding. You can offer a free branding checklist to collect email addresses and market that mid-range product and the flagship product to the people who signed up.

 

Free Products

While some of your intro products may be free, there are things that you may not consider free products. Blog posts, social media posts, guest posts, images, and other things can be also being thought of as products. But, if you have a good grasp of what you can do and what is possible, it’s going to be a lot easier to figure out what you need to offer your audience in terms of tools and free information. For example, I offer many Special Reports at no cost whatsoever and these serve me well in my business.

Your product generally will be a combination of all of these types of content and services. One way to figure out what you can offer in every step of your sales offer funnel is to conduct a content audit. When you find out what you have, and what you need, you can fill in the gaps.

 

I’m Connie Ragen Green, an Online Marketing Strategist, bestselling author of more than a dozen books, international speaker, and Mentor. I would love to connect with you to see how we might work together in the future.

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Podcast: Expand Your Product Line

Expand Your Product Line How to Create and Expand Your “Product Line”

This month’s podcast is a discussion of creating your “product line”  of courses and information products for online entrepreneurs. Here are some of the points I explain in great detail during this training call:

The first discussion point is…

What does it means to create and expand your “product line” instead of just creating individual information products? I’ve done this successfully over the past twelve months and you can, too. Let’s discuss this topic in further detail…

So, How Do You Create and Expand Your Product Line?

  1. Make a detailed list of the topics you teach others. Take the time to include everything you can think of, even if you have yet to teach it to others.
  2. Choose your overall topic and begin outlining a Signature training course on this. The idea here is to become known for being an expert and authority in your niche.
  3. Now make a list of everything within your Signature course that could be turned into a “stand alone” training.
  4. Start teaching where you are most comfortable, even if it’s not in your overall area of knowledge, experience, and expertise.
  5. Begin with a regular (weekly, bi-weekly) free teleseminar series and create a unique Study Guide to share with listeners each time.

Begin by taking these steps to discover what your product line could encompass…

Go through your blog posts to see which topics you wrote about and which posts received the most comments and social shares. Those topics are most likely the ones that are resonating with your audience and readers.

Read through the emails you’ve been sending to your list to discover which topics generated the most replies from your list.

Outline a course you could teach during the next thirty days based on these topics that you know so well. Keep it simple!

Use my strategies to create and expand your product line during 2017.

Think about each of these questions, listen to the podcast, and then comment below. I would love to hear your thoughts on these ideas and concepts in regards to how defining and refining your niche and building a responsive list will enable you to be a more successful entrepreneur.

These list building tips online are intended to focus and guide you through the process of building a success online business. If you’d like to download my latest Focus Guide on Repurposing Your Content, click on this link. Feel free to share it with anyone who may benefit from what I am sharing. Also, my Study Guides are available here for many of my recent podcasts. This one is from December 1, 2016, so simply look for that date in the list and download your Study Guide.

Are you ready to be surprised? Recently, I have introduced a new feature during these podcast training calls. I will always have the latest course or program, either one of my own or one offered by someone I highly recommend, at my Surprise! link. Check it out today and see what I am recommending this time. If it’s not my own program, product, course, or live event then it’s always from someone I know, trust, and highly recommend as a great value to you as an online entrepreneur.

My most recent book is now available. It’s entitled Doing What It Takes: The Online Entrepreneur’s Playbook and I’d love to hear your Doing What It Takesthoughts on it by way of a review on Amazon after you read it and implement my suggestions.

Are you already a part my list community and receiving my daily email updates and training? If not, please give me your first name and primary email address in the form on the right-hand side of this site. If you are brand new to my podcasts, you will be interested to know that this specific training call, as well as all of the calls in my podcast series is intended to teach you and other new online entrepreneurs how to take your business to the next level quickly and effectively, and as a way for me to share my exact methods, techniques, Case Studies, secrets, and advice on creating a profitable and lucrative online business using the ‘multiple income streams’ approach. People on six continents have now discovered that starting an Internet business is the very fastest way to achieve both time and financial freedom, as well as to great success in all areas of your life, and you need help to get there quickly. That’s why I started this online marketing tips podcast for my community.

You will see that each podcast session is first recorded live as a teleseminar, and then repurposed into a podcast to extend my reach to the world. Please join my list (opt in on the right) to be included on these calls, and be sure to introduce yourself and share your site for optimal exposure for years to come! Also, check out my Podcast Show Notes site to see how you can subscribe at no cost to both of my podcasts, and please leave me a review on one or both of them if you are so inclined.

If you would like to get started earning income online right away then I recommend affiliate marketing as the stream of income that will allow you to “earn while you learn” You may now pick up my popular training on winning affiliate contests and other online marketing tips for only seven dollars at Affiliate Contest Secrets. This training regularly sells for $27. Use the discount code CONTEST to bring the price down to $7. This training has been completely updated for 2016 with the latest information, strategies, and Case Studies for you to use in your own business.

Please be sure to leave your comments below so that I may get to know you better and to serve you as you continue your journey as an online entrepreneur. List building tips online is a great place to begin. Getting started with an online business will change your life forever and my reward is your massive success!

Subscribe To My Online Marketing Tips Podcast Today!

 

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