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No-Holds-Barred Conversations with Dan Lok - Part 2
Question: How to deal with ultra skeptical offline or be it Internet surfers in order to reassure them and get them to happily open up their wallets? I like that "happily open up their wallets"! Your customer should be happy to open his/her wallet. When business is done right, everybody wins and nobody loses. You're happy to make a sale and your customer is happy to be getting a good value for the money. Here're a "small" list of things you can do to remove skepticism.
Question: Hi Dan, My husband and I are talented writers who produce enormous amounts of great content on a regular basis. I would desperately like to know how we can streamline our efforts and creativity into tons of well-deserved moolah. We know how to create, to work hard, and to gets jobs done -- we just don't know how to stop reinventing the revenue-stream wheel. We're making a lot of changes in 2005 - I want to make sure they involve working smarter, NOT harder. I can totally relate to your situation because I've been there myself! The turning point of my life...what Oprah Winfrey would call a 'light bulb moment'... is when I stopped thinking of myself as a writer and started thinking myself as entrepreneur. As a writer, or any profession for that matter, you get what I called "earned income." You do a job; you get paid a buck. If you want another buck, you have to do another job in an endless cycle of more work for more money. It's exhausting! What you need to do is to create multiple streams of income in your life...or more specifically, multiple streams of passive income, income that will keep coming in without much constant effort or supervision. When people ask me, "Dan, are you a professional copywriter?" I always said, "Yes and No." To me, writers are broke and entrepreneurs are rich. I am an entrepreneur FIRST, a marketer SECOND, a copywriter THIRD. Writing is a skill I HAVE, but I never look at myself as only a copywriter. Marketing is a skill I HAVE, but I never look at myself as only a marketer. What I really am is a professional businessperson. I am involved with quite a few companies owned and operated by other people, besides running two companies of my own. And frankly, the reason I am doing hell a lot better than other writers who might have 10 or 20 years more writing experience than me isn't because I'm a better writer, a more creative writer, or a genius at writing...it's because I'm a genius at business and a much better businessperson (and with a well-developed ego, too!) I surround myself with smart people. I know how to build a team. I know how to build businesses. I know how to leverage other peoples money and other peoples time. Plus, I am a pretty good public speaker and leader so I can motivate and influence. I don't mean to brag here, but I am trying to make a point: Most writers know NOTHING else, except writing. So the $64,000 question you gotta ask yourself is, "How I can leverage off my skill sets to create multiple streams of income?" Can you use your skills to sell other products besides selling your own services? Do you have the ability to sell online and offline? Can you use your skills to write for entrepreneurs get a percentage of the sales generated? You see what I mean? The minute you stop thinking like a writer, the sky's the limit. But I gotta warn you, the transition from a writer to an entrepreneur is NOT easy. And its definitely NOT for everyone. You'll have to take risks... and that can be scary. You'll have to be willing to delay gratification and that can be tough in the age of 'I want it NOW.' But be prepared, when you're selling a product, you might not see profits for months and months. And there will be moments when you'll feel like giving up and going back to the same old, same old. You'll want to pull the covers over your head, curl up into a fetal position, and go back to your warm, familiar comfort zone. Don't do it! If you can 'tough it out' and if you're willing to take the first step, you will be that much closer to your ultimate goals. So the short answer to your question is to use your writing skill to build a business. Start a business in your spare time. Develop other essential skill sets that will make you a better entrepreneur. And you'll always have your writing to 'fall back on' while you're building your empire! About The Author Dan Lok is the World's First Quick-Turn Marketer, with a proven track record of selling over $17.3 million dollars of merchandise and services. He's the rebel copywriter who's created hundreds of money-making ads and sales letter for over 39 different industries. Pick his brain now: http://www.askdanaquestion.com
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Still, the people who will see your offer will be those who want to show theirs to the world. (Of course they don't necessarily need to be commercial offers, they can be sites devoted to hobbies, charities, private or group obsessions etc. But they all want to SHOW people something rather than SEE somebody else's offer.) Does anything positive result from this fact? And, to pose a much broader question: does the marketer trying to sell to sellers (N marketer in our terminology) have any advantages over the one trying to sell to non-marketers (X marketer)? My answers would be: YES and YES. Why? There are a few reasons. Some of them pretty trivial though not without importance, like the fact that marketer usually is much more exposed to contact with offers from online businesses. Marketer also has some needs that can possibly be satisfied by buying things online. Two sorts of needs in fact. Firstly, the same needs that everybody else has. Secondly, specific needs related to Internet marketing. By being rather more exposed to Internet ads and offers than an average person, more used to it and understanding it better, marketer would probably buy more things online. But the other type of needs is far more important here. Now for the second type of needs. Marketer will need marketing tools, resources, information... These things change and develop in an enormous pace. This is of course a truism but it's absolutely true. If you're able to quickly find new promotional tools, opportunities and/or information on Internet marketing, you will be in position to sell (more or less directly, we will not plunge here into discussing downlines and referrals) these information - for after all it is exactly information! - to other marketers. I personally see no reason why marketers should be less receptive to this sort of information than average person. In fact they are probably much more receptive, as they know perfectly well how much in their personal lives depends on those tools, information and opportunities. It is probably not true that whole 95% of people trying to earn online is not earning any money, but it must be obvious that most marketers still have not found their way of doing business online and there's no reason to believe that this situation ever radically changes. So it's not only information on new available services and opportunities that is sought after, and therefore sellable. In order to be successful in this sort of business, where there's so much available information, potential chances and risks, and so little road-signs that can be fully trusted, one needs to find their own way. Way of doing business online. Human life being as short as it is, with most often very limited finances (or you wouldn't spend your time in front of the monitor with uncertain result, would you?), people who still haven't found the right method and attained real success in online business will need a "recipe", or, perhaps better, a successful person to help them -- a teacher, or even perhaps what the Americans call "the mentor". (There's this old joke about some American children asking their parents to pay them tree-climbing lessons, but Internet marketing without qualified help is a dreary and very risky thing to do.) If you already are successful, then being the N marketer you have serious advantages. One of them, perhaps the most important, is that you only deal with one (big, that's true) issue: online marketing. As X marketer you would need to handle both marketing itself and the market niche you're in. This fact has some further interesting effects. For example this that by attaining success as N marketer you're becoming a Guru, or "almost a Guru", and this time I'm using this term without irony. What I mean is simply that you've become an accomplished expert in your field, which of course is Internet marketing. While if you attait even the biggest success in selling widgets online, you will be a "Great Expert In Selling Widgets Online". Which means that you will be generally seen as a crossing between "widgets expert" and "marketing expert". Nobody will be certain how good you are in any of those two parts of your activity! Effect of which will be that your success will be much harder to duplicate! You will have much more difficulty in teaching people your tested business methods. If they are not going to sell widgets like yourself, nobody can be completly sure it's the best marketing practice that you're teaching. And the widget niche may be too small to accomodate many new players. It will be a totally different matter with general marketing knowledge that you obtain practicing N marketing. One special advantage that N marketing has is something that I personally call "self-propelling money machines". So far they are not very numerous, at least those that work smoothly and bring tons of money without constant need for adjustments and pushing. But there are some, pretty successful. And their will be more. What are those self-propelling money machines? They are smart combination of promotional resources with selling. One could say that they are resources that sell themselves, automatically. The simpler form cosists of just two main parts: the Lead Generating Module (more often multiple Resources) that are constatly being sold by something that can be called the Selling Module to the leads they generate. One program that I remember that worked like that was CommisionSpyder. In another, more advanced, version is probably best represented by the new "Explosive" ebook by Stephanie L. Woolford, a very successful online marketer. (This ebook can be for example found on http://ebiz-guru.com.) Here one can three conceptual modules: the Lead Generating Module, the Selling Module, and an ebook (that can be either free or paid) that ignites the whole process. I'm not sure I managed to describe the idea clearly enough, but it can be understood when seen in action. Ebooks are supposed to be the almost-perfect business and in near future they may really become that. If we assume that this statement is true, we can say probably risk an opinion that X marketers have greater chance of publishing a competent book on topics related to their chosen niche they know lots about, while N marketers seem to have much greater chance of publishing purely marketing ebook, "viral" ebooks, and ebooks of the sort mentioned in previous paragraph included. Which seems to be another advantage of N marketing. So after all Selling to Sellers may not be so stupid idea, wouldn't you agree? Standing Out Head and Shoulders Above the Rest Using Online Communities to Differentiate Your Website Profiting from Articles - A Step-by-step Guide "Content is King" - that's a given, there's no debate. But how do you get content? Like most projects, breaking into bite-size, easily digestable chunks makes the process realistically achievable. By creating articles, you build and develop that content. So how do you profit from articles? I, personally, find the best way to approach the 'process' of making mony from articles is to work backwards! That is, to determine what your ultimate goal is and then figure out each preceeding step that leads to it.
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