Tag Archives: Making

Making the Most of Your Biological Prime Time Hours

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Biological Prime TimeFiguring Out Your Biological Prime Time

During the twenty years that I worked as a classroom teacher people would regularly comment to me about my being a “morning” person. To them it was obvious that I was enthusiastic and energetic first thing in the morning, (I don’t usually drink coffee or other caffeinated beverages, so this was all natural) but I did not see it that way. Instead, I believed that I was simply a person who had chosen a career that required me to be alert and on task by seven or even earlier each weekday morning. I dreamed of sleeping in until nine or ten, but even on the weekends I had to be up bright and early to do my real estate work.

Fast forward to 2006, when I left my teaching position and gave away my real estate clients. Now I was an entrepreneur and could choose the hours I worked each day. But guess what? To my surprise I found it almost impossible to sleep past eight in the mornings unless I had been up late the night before or wasn’t feeling well. Since both of those scenarios are rare for me, it’s up with the chickens for me each day for eleven years now.

For a period of about three hours, somewhere between about six thirty or seven and ten or eleven I accomplish more than I used to by working eight to ten hours in my previous life. I believe these morning work hours are my “prime time” and that my brain is ready to conquer the world with my writing, ideas, and creations. I took this phrase from the world of “prime time” television, where the regularly occurring time at which a television or radio audience is expected to be greatest is typically the hours between eight and eleven in the evenings. And it turns out that the study of “biological prime time hours” is a fascinating one with lots of case studies that make sense.

Also, I absolutely love the work I am involved in as an online entrepreneur, and that makes a huge difference as well. Whether I am writing articles, blog posts, and short reports, or creating information products, I’m anxious to get started and enthusiastic about completing each task or project.

Have you thought about your biological “prime time” hours each day? Sam Carpenter coined this phrase in 2009 in his popular and well-received book, Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less. It is my sincere belief that knowing which hours of the day are your best can be crucial to your success. I recommend that you give this some serious thought to figure out what works best for you in terms of writing and creating for your business. If you have a job or career that precludes you from working on your business during these hours, like I did when I was a classroom teacher, then take full advantage of your days off to make up for it.

Also, over the years I have made an effort to get a “second wind” and work for another three or four hours later in the day. Sometimes I am successful with this, but the work I do at this time is never quite as good as what I can accomplish early in the morning. I thought that by napping for sixty or ninety minutes in the early afternoon or evening I might wake up refreshed and ready to work, but if anything this works against me. So I went back to the drawing board and figured out that if I go for a walk or do some other exercise for about thirty minutes I am able to have a second round of prime time. Perhaps it’s the blood rushing to my brain that makes this so. I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this topic of discovering and maximizing your biological prime time.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, online marketing strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker on the topics of entrepreneurship and inner game mind shifts. Let’s connect to see how I may best serve you in the near future. And be sure to check out my popular training course, the Internet Marketing Six Pack.

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Making Affiliate Offers to Prospective Affiliates

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Making Affiliate OffersMaking Affiliate Offers That Are Worthy

If you really want to get the best affiliates then you need to make affiliate worthy offers. Make smart affiliates want to promote everything you have because they know that you provide a great product, good customer service, and amazing creatives for them to use to market your programs. Making affiliate offers is worth your time and effort.

In order to attract the right affiliates, it’s important to share certain types of stats with them so that they know what to expect with your program. Keep in mind, you will not have any stats to show, but as time progresses, you will. As soon as you have this information, start sharing it.

 

Important Stats, Information & Figures to Share with Making Affiliate Offers

Some statistics are more important to share than others. If you just consider what’s important to you about your affiliate program it’ll be easy to see what you need to share.

  • Conversion Rate: They like to know how often a visitor to the sales page converts to a buyer.
  • Commissions: They want to know how much they’ll make per product and whether or not there is potential to make more due to your deep funnel.
  • Upsell: Let them know if you offer an upsell or not and what the commission is on that as well as the conversion rate for that too.
  • Recurring Commissions: If any of your products offer
  • Incentives: Let them know what type of enticements you offer for successful sales.
  • Product Reviews: Do you allow affiliates to review your product free? Hint: Once you have stand out affiliates it’ll pay off to let them have a free copy.
  • Visitor Value: Let them know the target market for the product and the value it offers.
  • Training: While affiliates aren’t your employees and aren’t on your staff, you can still offer a lot of training to help them make more money promoting your products.
  • Collateral: Ensure that you have plenty of professional graphics, copy, and information that enable your affiliates to promote your product.
  • Program Description: Ensure that you’re very succinct and inclusive in the description for your program.

Anything you can let them know at a glance is important to share. You can offer more in-depth information as well but the information right up front should include what they need to know to figure out if your product is what they want to promote to their audience.

 

Keeping Affiliates Happy

Once you recruit affiliates, it’s also important to keep them happy. Happy affiliates will be more likely to promote your products. They may even tell other people about you too. That’s why developing relationships, communicating, and following up with your affiliates is so important.

 

Making Affiliate Offers that Build Relationships

In business one of the most important things you’re going to do aside from creating amazing products that your audience needs, is building mutually beneficial relationships with other people. In order to build relationships with affiliates, you need to understand them as a separate audience. They have different needs from the people that buy or get your products. To help you build your affiliate relationships, here are a few things you want to do.

  • Communicate – Use email, webinars, teleseminars, and other forms of communication with your affiliates. Some of them will prefer email and others will like the one-on-one feel of webinars. When you keep your affiliates abreast of new products to come, changes in old products, sales, and other information they’re going to be that much more likely to stick with you and promote you because of the trust that you develop.
  • Listen – Communication is a two-way street. Therefore, it’s imperative that you also open the lines of communication in reverse. Ask them questions, conduct surveys, and connect one on one with your highest sellers. For example, you can have a trigger number of sales that elevates your affiliates to your affiliate inner circle where you can help them with all kinds of things.
  • Ask for Feedback – When you send out new products to your affiliates, ask for feedback so you can make the product better before launch. You don’t have to send it to everyone who signs up for your program. Choose a few affiliates for feedback, based on your knowledge of them and their reputation in the business.
  • Show Your Personality – People do business with those that they like, know and trust. The more you can connect with your affiliates and find ways to show your character, the more you can enhance this effect. Add a little personal information in your emails, webinars, and live videos, and live events. Seeing and hearing you can make a huge impression.
  • Be a Helpful Resource – When you really want to have a real relationship with someone, you seek to be helpful. Even if the assistance has nothing to do with your business, being helpful and pointing people in the right direction will go far in helping you solidify your relationships. While you may not be able to pay as close attention as you’d like to each individual affiliate, you can use the information and tools at your disposal to build relationships that will stand the test of time and encourage even more sales if you’re open to it. Use email automation, set up training series, host live webinars to talk about your new products and to get ideas, and otherwise be open to new ways to connect with your affiliates. Remember that your business is about more than just making affiliate offers.
  • Keeping Track of People you talk To — When you are seeking to impress people, one way to do that is to remember who you’ve talked to and what you talked about. A good way to do this is to use some sort of customer relationship software or help ticket software. This is true even if you aren’t really providing customer service to your affiliates due to a product they bought. The help desk software will keep track of all your conversations so that you can easily stick to your promises.
  • Hosting Contests – A good way to kick off some relationship building is to plan and host a contest for your affiliates. Give away some iPads, cash, and depending upon your price range, perhaps a free trip. The more outrageous you can be with your contest the more attention it’ll get.
  • Do What Needs to Be Done – Affiliate’s needs depend on their audience too. Suppose an affiliate contacts you and asks you to do a live webinar with them. It is to be played “live” multiple times. This is a good promotional item to offer your top affiliates. It will help you develop relationships as you get to know each other as you work together on the webinar and get other people involved.

Finally, the most important thing of all is to follow up. Even if affiliates contact you infrequently, make sure that you do contact them. Connect, encourage, and connect more. Always deliver top-notch services, products, and tools while making affiliate offers.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, online marketing strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker on the topics of entrepreneurship and inner game mind shifts. Let’s connect to see how I may best serve you in the near future. And please be sure to check out my popular training on affiliate marketing.

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Making The Shift From Employee To Entrepreneur

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From Employee to EntrepreneurMaking The Transition From Employee to Entrepreneur

Recently I spent time with a group of newer entrepreneurs in a workshop setting. As we sat together that afternoon the conversation turned to the idea of connecting with a non-profit group as a way to network with others. I’m a Rotarian (Rotary is an international service organization) and they were discussing the cost of being a member of this group. One woman said that she had been told that her local Rotary Club cost about seven hundred dollars a month to be a part of, and I reacted strongly to this by saying that the dues were about three hundred dollars a year and that the cost of the meal each week would run somewhere between eight and thirty dollars. I was shocked in part by the fact that information had been obtained second hand, instead of more directly from the organization itself. But I sat back as the group discussed the pros and cons of being a member of a non-profit group like Rotary. The cost appeared to be the first aspect of this that would make the difference as to whether someone would even visit a Rotary Club meeting in their local city.

I realized very quickly that I was actually witnessing a conversation about the difference between employees and employers, and what it truly means to go from being an employee to an entrepreneur. It’s a mind shift that takes some time, and cannot possibly occur until you set your intention and take action on your goals.

When I left the world of classroom teaching and working part-time in real estate behind in 2006, I worked hard at making the transition from employee to entrepreneur. Even though I owned my real estate business, I was far from being entrepreneurial in my day to day activities. The bulk of my income continued to come from teaching, and the employee mentality was a strong one I would have to overcome.

As an employee I looked to my supervisors and administrators for guidance on what actions to take each day. I had some say-so as to what I could do with the children in my classroom, but it had to fit into the structure of what the school and the school district has decided. Now don’t get me wrong here; I had lots of ideas about what would work effectively in the classroom and wanted to share and implement those ideas with others. But the truth was that I was not being paid to have what I considered to be fresh and innovative ideas. No, I was being paid to follow directions and achieve specific results.From Employee to Entrepreneur

Once I left the classroom I began to see things very differently. Soon I was thinking of myself as a creative thinker and everything began to shift. Instead of thinking about how much it would cost for me to join Rotary and be a part of a worldwide organization that could help more people than I could even imagine, I jumped in and got to work. And the interesting thing is that my business took off as a result of the people I met at Rotary and the shift in my thinking that occurred as a result.

Do whatever it takes to achieve your goals. Refuse to continue thinking as an employee who needs constant instructions and direction as to what to do in each situation. Make a conscious mind shift from employee to entrepreneur and jump in with both feet to what is possible in your life and your business. Networking with other like-minded individuals is a crucial step in this process. You can’t possibly change without changing your surroundings, and that includes the people along with the scenery.

Which people and groups do you consider to be a crucial part of your success story?

 

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