Entrepreneur, Gain More Power with This New Year’s Message…

Master Marketer Jay Abraham has been my idol and mentor for years now and I simply love his way of communicating his message and values – at the same time he shares his market proven wisdom.

This time I want to share Jay’s New Year’s massage to his subscribers. Please read it, with heart and thought…

From Jay Abraham Newsletter:

So, ok… 2012 is here. What–if anything, are you… will you be doing
differently this year (than last year), to propel your business to more
success, achievement and greatness?

If you have a great answer, then–stop reading. If NOT, here are some
thoughts to—maybe inspire you to seek more breakthrough thinking in
the areas of marketing, strategy, innovation and self-management.

Winston Churchill is famed for delivering the shortest commencement
speech ever recorded in college history:

“Never give in. Never, never, never–in nothing great or small, large or
petty–never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense.
Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might
of the enemy. “

What’s the implication? Well (I think) there are many. If you’re small
and struggling—take a deep breath, draw in your second wind, dust
yourself off and jump back into the ring -but fighting not against mere
competition.

Rather, fight against mediocrity and commoditization–by making yourself
and your business unique, desirable, valuable–far more valuable than
your competition can possibly equal.

How? Don’t allow us to be mere intellectual entertainment. Make my
resources your propellant towards greater achievement.

Focus on your marketplace, not on your own self interests.

In everything you do online or off–sell leadership. Demonstrate to
people that you feel their pain or hopes or dreams or fears or needs.
Don’t patronize or pander. Definitely don’t self-serve! Provide people
with ideas, advice information that have (and hold) true value or
entertainment or purpose for THEM–not you.

Make your market, your client, your prospect, your recipient of whatever
communication you’re sending–make THEM the center of attention. It’s not
about you. It’s all about them.

This may sound awkward–but–most people fall in love with their product,
service, company or industry. Try–instead–falling in love with the
people you serve, the people you’re communicating and connecting with.

Show people that THEY matter. Their lives, their interests and their
situation truly matters to you and your business.

In life and in business, we are rewarded in direct proportion to the
value, contribution and benefit we bring to others. Conduct a quick
reality check. Do you bring meaningful value to others–in what your
business does, certainly.

But do your communications, conversations, interactions, all bring
people value?

Are they (and you) authentic, purposeful? Remember that the entire
concept of value, benefit and contribution are all–totally subjective.
What YOU think may be appealing, exciting, worthwhile–your market may
find worthless. So let THEM always decide with their response, their
sharing, their positive–or negative feedback.

Always stop and ask yourself, your team, your marketing–do they and what
you are doing and saying– really add value?

I was reading a staggering article from legendary business guru–Peter
Drucker over the holidays. It focused on the misperception most people
have about entrepreneurs.

Drucker says most small business owners are NOT entrepreneurs. They are
merely proprietors–who add no true value to the world other than perhaps
diverting some of the commerce that their industry would normally
generate over to themselves.

Stated differently, the vast majority of businesses are mere
commodities, marginalized, non distinguishable vendors of
stuff–providing nothing unique, nothing superior, no greater experience,
no distinctive benefit or advantage to the consumer.

True entrepreneurs–on the other hand strive to create something new or
better for their marketplace in what they do. They create true value for
the consumer. They engineer it or execute it…or present it…or purvey
it differently than the maddening crowd of generic competitors do.

In small or larger ways, true entrepreneurs are the driving forces of
positive upheaval in their industries, markets and business worlds.

They have passion, purpose–a keen sense of possibility. They are
anything but ambivalent. They are anything but apathetic. True
entrepreneurs love change. They live for the opportunity to flex their
cerebral, creative juices.

Mere business proprietors are in it only for an income. All they do is
what has been done and is being done before them a thousand or a million
times, over. It’s almost a job. But true entrepreneurs–true
entrepreneurs create new satisfaction, new demand, new experiences, new
levels of dimension and possibility to (and through) whatever they do.

So here we are–at the forefront of the New Year, contemplating our
fates, our futures. My question to YOU is this: are you content with
mediocrity? Or are you game to create something (or some things) new,
something different, something better for your market?

Do you have the willingness to transform your business and relationship
with your market? Can you…will you transmute values (as Drucker says).
Will your marketing/selling strategy trigger a positive upheaval that
will transform the way your marketplace sees you, connects with you,
relates to you, respects you, remains loyal and a fan of you?

Some final points to consider as we begin our 2012 adventure into
marketing down the path of being preeminent.

True entrepreneurs relish the chance to surmount obstacles that their
other competitors find daunting. An enterprise that does NOT commit
itself to constantly innovate inevitably ages, dries up and declines,
then dies.

INNOVATION, by the way does NOT necessarily refer to anything high
tech–though it can be done that way.

It merely refers to anything tangible or intangible that brings greater
value, benefit, contribution, advantage, enjoyment, understanding,
protection or enrichment to a marketplace. That gives you an enormous
array of ways to become an agent of change, a creator of value–through
your marketing strategy and actions.

Finally–you must be willing to perceive change as an opportunity, not a
threat! Stop holding onto what already exists. Breakthroughs only occur
when you are pursuing something better. Drucker says true entrepreneurs
are awash with “rerum novarum cupidus.” That’s Latin for being “greedy
for new things.”

One more point. It’s important: entrepreneurship, innovation,
breakthrough thinking—none of it comes automatically.

It’s not necessarily natural. And YES, it is work to accomplish that
which your herd-based competitors won’t/don’t. But the rarified
satisfaction and fulfillment that comes with wanting to innovate,
reaching for innovation–for the benefit of your marketplace, working for
it—is unimaginably rewarding. Happy New Year!

Jay

P.S. More to come on Entrepreneur vs. Proprietor.

Wishing You too a Wonderful Year 2012!

You can subscribe to Jay Abraham’s Newletter at http://abraham.com/

Each and every person who starts a business wants it to be successful. There is no better feeling than the one that you are on top of the world with your business!

How to make that everyday reality?

Finding and defining your own voice, your unique way of delivering your message makes that small but so important difference. No one else can deliver it like you!

Unless you spend time on defining and developing a persona that your target market is attracted to and one they want to do business with, you cannot hope to succeed in business to your fullest potential.

Once that persona has been created and the narrative for your market has been created perfectly, every single thing in your business will become so much easier, your emails will be more welcome, your content will be considered more interesting, and your offers will be attractive than others.

As you can see it is no small order to shape a persona and narrative! And it’s YOU who is the most important part of that narrative.

Owning Your Voice – The Most Important Part of Your Narrative

You are the most important part of the narrative you craft, specifically, your need to define what are the most powerful and charismatic parts of your persona that will resonate with your clients and target market.

If you are thinking that you are not leading an interesting life enough for “creating a persona and narrative”, relax!  Every person has something interesting in their life that can be leveraged, and it is up to you to find it and shape it into a story of yours.

What Is It in Your Life That Is Interesting?

How does one create an interesting and compelling story? How do you create a persona that is not only interesting, but compelling enough to attract your target market?

To start with,  find out who is it that you do business with? Who it is you need to be for this business?

Do you know how you are perceived by people in the marketplace you have been in? If not, you must ask yourself how you would like to be perceived. While you think about this, find the best way to be perceived by your prospect. Then you can determine if this is something that you can pull off accurately.

Whatever you do, it is important to be as clear as possible about what would be the best way to be perceived. What image would your market, prospects, clients like to do business with? What type of person should you present to them?

So to help your potential prospects, clients and market, what would be your ideal view point, philosophy and opinion about certain issues relating to the industry that you are doing business with?

No matter what it is, you need 100% clarity from the get go. This can be challenging to do just by yourself. That is why coaches and mentors are so valuable. Also, commit time to be part of a power-group that is related to your business. It’s time well spent.

What Is Internet Made Of?

Why do YOU use Internet for?  To find information, to be entertained, connect with others?

In the beginning Internet was for more effective way to access vast amount of information. And it still is. That’s something each provider should keep in mind when creating and implementing their Online Marketing Strategy.

As we all are becoming more and more savvy Internet users, there is a need to give genuine and useful gifts to website visitors rather than creating messages designed to elicit artificial obligations. This has always and will always lead to the development of stronger communities and better trust with prospects and customers.

Secondly, because Search Engines and their algorithms are being developed better and better to provide more relevant search results for the end-user, focusing on quality of content rather than quantity of content. While consistently publishing content is important as part of a content strategy, those that mass-produce content solely for trying to attract search engines to see the website as an authority site might want to rethink their Online Marketing Strategy and it’s ROI (Return Of Investment).

Businesses that develop compelling and useful content that readers want to link back to or favorite it in their LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Buzz or tweet it in Twitter  will see their efforts pay off in search engine rankings too.

I recommend that all marketers and business owners using Internet as their marketing media to check out Google Webmaster Central’s guide for creating high-quality websites to ensure that their Online Marketing Strategy and it’s implementations remain effective and brings in returns for the money, time, attention and focus invested in building a worthwhile online presence.

What does it take to succeed with a work-at-home online business? Why some people succeed while many seem to “fail”?

One thing for sure it that making a work-at-home online business takes dedication. You need to have a clear reason why you want to master the skills and achieve the level of knowledge fundamental to business success. And it takes more: a different way to think than that you used to think… Self-growth is essential for success, invest into it too, not only tech style know-how of Internet Marketing.

Clarity on what you want to accomplish, and why makes you motivated work at home and reach the income you are targeting to.

To realize the growing and making progress both you and your home business are going, you need to track from the start how well/poorly you are executing and doing what you set out to do, stick to and working your plan as well as continuing to plan your work!

Dream, passion, vision will get you literally nowhere without direction and effort! Inviting to everyone, from all walks of life, work at home business opportunities abound and offer lots to those who chose to embrace it. You need to best equip yourself for this journey of working at and from home. Transitioning into the work at home marketplace will be a new and rewarding experience, if you put your back into it! Be strongly motivated to make a profit and you will. Overcome all the obstacles and challenges, even numerous roadblocks to your successful home based entrepreneurial dreams and soon you too will enjoy the spoils and the fruits of your labor.

Working from home and being your “own boss” is something most people say they’d want to do. Many times getting started with a home business becomes overwhelming just because there are so many ways that you can make money by working at home.

If you look at a formal definition of what a work-at-home business is, it becomes pretty evident that there are lots at play here. Here is an illustrative example of what is meant:

“Any business or commercial activity that is conducted, or proposed to be conducted, from property that is zoned for residential use and is clearly incidental and secondary to the use of the dwelling unit for residential purposes. “

The list of occupations that are specifically excluded from the definition of home-based business include, but are not limited to, bed and breakfast establishments, nursing homes and group homes.

So, you work where you live and live where you work, basically speaking. In short that is a home-based, work at home type business. These and similar definitions are used legally, at tax time to justify myriads of deductions, calculations, profits, motivations for quitting a current, dead-end, unfulfilling job, justify and project earnings income and such. Every business entrepreneur that starts our wants to believe that his idea, product, service and undertaking will thrive. No-one wants to believe that it may fail. So, what is the secret of work at home type business success?

You too can make a very good income online, and even millions on the internet. There is, however, a learning curve. If you accept that and are prepared to take massive action – to completion – you have very good changes of becoming one of those you really make it big with their home based Internet marketing business!

It takes effort to know the “how” and “why”, and “when” and “where” to look, what to do and how to time and position, market and optimize what you have to offer and tap into. But you know that when one learns something and starts to master money making skills, it always becomes to much easier!

For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, may websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace.

The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a “food” section, an “accomodation” section and an “entertainment” section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.

When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page. You can also earn from programs like Google’s Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly.

As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away!

If you are seriously looking at ways to make money from home, being your own boss and using Internet as you way to get your share of riches, be assured that the markets and opportunities are vast, real, HUGE, and growing.

Chances, options, choices, channels to make money, earnings potential and entrepreneurial success online, at home, self-employed, professionally, financially independent business accounts for most of the economic and business growth in recent years. It continues to sprawl and spread, online, to home across the whole world, from anywhere with an Internet access.

Home-based business is literally bursting at its seams, with potential, promise, great growth, vast business success and even wealth. However, the Internet riches do not just burst out of your computer screen – you need to treat your own work-at-home enterprise as a business, it has to be planned, managed and executed well to strive.

In the future, there will be much more to expect from this realm and underpinning of our economies, even those of scale. Consumer trends keep changing and the home-based entrepreneurs stand at the ready to address every call, need and requirement.

So very few work-at-home type online businesses succeed, let alone in its first year of operation, which not a-typical or abnormal in business. However, what is great with most online business is that your risk to lose your shirt with it is small because the initial capital needed to start a online business is so low.

So, can you avoid work-at-home online business failure?

It depends how you define failure. If you set up one website, have one product, and never make more than few dollars out of it… For some people it’s a failure. For others it’s a solid proof that it will work for them.

I still remember my first $6 I made online. For me it was a big moment – I was making money online! I KNEW that I could scale it up and make so much more. That kept me motivated to learn more -and to make my way to much higher numbers!

Remember, if you quit, that’s a failure. If you give up before the game is over (meaning that you died), you’ll never win! Be persistent and continue when most people quit. That’s who you succeed. You might only need to go one step further to reach your finishing line – as a winner!

Learning to write good sales copy isn’t something you can learn by reading a quick tutorial – it takes practice. And practice. And practice. The RIGHT kind of practice because practice alone doesn’t make perfect, it only makes permanent. That’s why you need to be careful on how and what you practice.

Although you probably won’t turn into a world-famous copywriter overnight, there are a few tips you can use to increase the response from your sales letters.

The first thing you should learn is that the headline is (almost) everything. If your headline is terrible – or worse – boring, most people won’t even read the rest of your sales letter. A headline needs to be exciting, enticing, and intriguing.

It needs to grab the attention of your visitor quickly. Your headline might have shock value, ask a compelling question, or be the beginning of an extremely interesting story. “Six months ago, I was living on the streets of L.A., homeless after my Adjustable Rate Mortgage soared so high I couldn’t make the mortgage payments, but now I’m living in a sky-rise apartment twenty stories up that I paid seven figures for…”

This makes the reader want to know more – how did this person go from being destitute to being wealthy? Good sales copy usually tells a story that the audience can connect with. Copy ideally shouldn’t tell a fictional story, though.

You certainly don’t want to run into any trouble with the FTC or an attorney general with something to prove. Good copy gives people a reason to keep reading. If you tell an interesting, compelling story that’s somehow related to the product and how it will affect them, it will naturally appeal to your visitor.

Every single paragraph should lead into the next paragraph, drawing the reader further and further into the pitch. Consumers usually buy based on emotion, and then they justify their purchase with logic. They rarely buy based on logic alone.

They don’t buy a product because of the features – they buy because of the benefits it will provide to them, the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) factor. If you’re selling a car, you can’t tell the buyer that it has Corinthian leather seats, ABS brakes, and a superior sound system.

You have to sell them on the fact that their neighbors and coworkers will be envious, girls will flock to them, and they’ll feel like the king of the world whenever they drive it. Then they’ll buy based on the fantasy you’ve just given them, and they’ll use logic to justify their purchase later.

Within each online sales letter, you’ll want to have a main headline, numerous sub-headlines sprinkled throughout, and aside form the written storyline, you’ll want to add sections of benefit-driven bullet points that break up the monotonous text.

Don’t forget the call to action at the end and a Post Script (PS) or two that sums up the order in case they’re bona fide skimmers who hate to read. Go to some of your favorite sales pitch sites and emulate their style and approach. Bookmark it for your “swipe file,” where you borrow ideas (not content) from the original author and use it on your own target audience.

Working from home and being your “own boss” is something most people say they’d want to do.

Making management decisions as a new work at home business Owner, Operator or Manager, starting and running your own business consulting independent type business is no easy task and a tall order. It will only happen with a plan, goals and some disciplined effort, work and targeted investment.

If your idea is simply to make some extra cash with marketing on the Internet, the decisions you need to make are smaller, yet needs to be done (and kept!) However, if you target to six-figures and want to substitute your day job and “fire your boss”, then you need much more knowledge-based planning and disciplined implementation of your business plan.

You can tap into myriads of online source for work at home business, support networks, SBD (small business development), investment networks, entrepreneurial associations, and such to optimize your chances of success, tapping into what other already successful and what they have learned.

What a work-at-home online business needs to succeed and grow is good quality advice on how to make real money and growing faster, and there’s a lot available online and in print. Sometimes your home business start-up might need some funding or seeding capital, and maybe accounting for work at home business and tax-time ease. The best way to succeed with your new home business, however, is to have a BUSINESS mentor who has already done what you want to accomplish. I am not only talking about techie type of gurus, but people with real life business experience.

Good luck with your work-at-home business endeavor!