This is made difficult when we fail to think like the customer but rather think of the ourselves and the money we will make in the transaction. We tend to think that our product will fit the needs of someone when it doesn’t. The customer always has a conversation going on in their head. They are bombarded with different options when they go to look for a solution to their problems.

If you can tap into this conversation that is going on in their head, then you can find products which will help them out and the sale will be a whole lot easier. In fact, if you tune into this conversation accurately, the customer will ask to buy from you instead of waiting to be asked for the sale.

In the offline world, it’s much easier to find out what someone is thinking when they are making a purchase decision. You just ask them! Ask them about their problems and why they haven’t been able to find a solution. They will tell you in their own words what makes them motivated to buy. Most salesmen would rather talk about their product features before knowing about the customer. By learning about the individual and appealing to his wants and needs, you’ll find the sale comes easier. By talking to your customers, you can then find out if your product can help them based on their answer. You then proceed to tell them that your product will help them with those specific problems.

There are just five simple things you need to learn in order to be a successful salesmen. Learning your prospect’s motivations is just one of those things. It’s a common notion that many salesmen are just out to make money and use trickery or mind manipulation techniques to get the sale. While it’s true and does work to create sales, you have to think about the long term value of your relationship with the customer. If you use tricks to get the sale, and the product does not really help your customers, then your customers will later regret the decision to buy the product. It did not really help your customers. Will they buy from you again or make referrals for you? Probably not.

You’ll find much more success when you follow the five steps to sell your products without actually selling. You’re really helping and recommending. I will not go into detail about these five steps here. Rather, these five steps are outlined in Harry Browne’s book “Secret of Selling Anything”.

Who is Harry Browne?

Other than being a 2000 candidate for President of the United States, he was a successful author, speaker and salesman. He passed away in 2006 from complications of motor neuron disease. In Harry Browne’s book “Secret of Selling Anything” he will show you how to sell anything without being a sleazy manipulating salesman. He offers details of his own sales successes as case studies. His methods are easy to understand and very simple to implement but are very powerful. When reading the book, I found myself thinking “that makes a lot of sense” various times.

The core concept of the book is following five steps in exact order to make your sale come easily. These are the five steps Harry used successful in his career as a salesman. Using these fives steps, you don’t need to be charismatic, extrovert, enthusiastic, or smart. You just have to understand people and their motivations by asking the right questions. This alone will alleviate your fear of selling.

The idea of using these five steps will not only help you sell products and services more easily; they will help persuade the prospect to take action on something such as partnering with you on a project or joining your organization.

Harry’s book “Secret of Selling Anything” is in ebook form because it is a compilation of two books which Harry wrote in 1966 and 1969. They were never officially published. This ebook is 141 easy pages of reading and is sold by Harry’s wife Pamela Wolfe Browne. You can order it and have it delivered digitally at this site:

Go Here to Order “Secret of Selling Anything”. It’s a very affordable $9.75

I highly recommend it even if you aren’t a salesman by trade. It will help you write better ad copy and improve your ability to deal with people. It will help you understand why someone will not buy something either online or offline. Hint: it’s not because of price…

- Gary

p.s. please post your comments if you enjoyed this post

In fact, there are some activities which necessitate being outsourced because you may not have the skills required.

What we’re trying to figure out is when to begin outsourcing.

If you begin outsourcing at the wrong time, it could hinder  your growth and cause more problems.

A lot of people make the mistake of waiting too long to outsource.

By waiting too long to outsource, you could lose the motivation to work on your business. If you have to do everything yourself, it gets pretty easy to become bored and complacent.

If you find yourself doing the same activities over and over again then you must figure a way to systematize your activities and then hand it over to a qualified freelancer.

By creating a system to optimize your work flow, you will reduce your outsourcing costs. An optimized method of doing things will speed up the production of your outsourced project. If you’re paying by the hour for a virtual assistant you could greatly reduce your costs.

Something else to consider before you outsource is your profit margin
and the value of your time.

While outsourcing can cut into your profits, it can greatly increase your productivity, allowing you to scale your business.

Let’s say that you can consistently make a profit of $200 while working on an activity for 4 hours. Let’s say that number is an average profit for 4 hours of work.

When calculated, you’re making $50 an hour. If you can pay someone to duplicate your process for under $50 an hour then you’re making a
profit.

Of course, when you’re first teaching your process to someone it will
take them some time to learn at first. Once they learn the process,
they can complete it faster and increase your profit margin.

Let’s recap what we’ve discussed thus far.

Before you begin outsourcing, you should optimize your work flow by creating a system that is duplicatable by someone who has little to no knowledge of your system.

You should also write down the amount you make per hour doing things yourself. This way you know how much to pay freelancers to take over your work.

By outsourcing at the right time, you will substantially increase your volume of work and not lose motivation in your business.

Here’s the link to the application which is free to install:
Visa Business Network Application

I tried advertising with Facebook before without success. My ads did not generate a high CTR so they were disabled after generating just a few clicks.

I think your first hurdle is to get a high enough CTR so that your ad not only sticks but your CPC will decrease.

You can generate a high CTR by having a relevant ad to the target market you’re trying to reach. FB allows you to target your ads via keywords and/or demographics.

Next is to make sure that your ad uses keywords which are relevant to the target market.

Third is to use an image which attracts attention but doesn’t scream advertisement.

From hearing other people’s experiences with FB advertising, I can tell you that they are very inconsistent in the way they approve ads. If your ads don’t get approved for whatever reason, try submitting it again as a different time.

Types of offers which work best with FB:

I have no experience with which offers best work with FB. Look through the CPA networks and find giveaways which pays per email or zip submit. Try financial aid offers, paid surveys, dating, acne.

Make sure to know your target audience and speak to them in your advertising. Remember that relevancy rules.

Now that I have the $100 in free credits, here’s what I’m going to try.

I am going to look at celebrity gossip sites and look at hot/controversial topics. Then I’m going to create a simple yes/no poll and advertise it on FB.

For example, I could ask something like: Is ‘x’ celebrity a good match for ‘x’ celebrity.
Vote yes or no. On the landing page, they would have a button for yes and one for no. Whichever they click on would be an affiliate link for a zip code submit offer.

On FB I will target people who are interested in the celebrity names.

On the ad title I would put for example: “Rihanna Controversial Poll?”
I would have a picture of Rihanna and text which says:
Is Rihanna a good match with Chris? Vote and win a MacBook Air Now!

Moving beyond FB advertising, you could use Google’s content network and place your advertising on celebrity related sites.

You can either create your polls by hand or use this software which I use:
Poll Factory

It’s very simple to use and you can create many high quality polls at once for split testing purposes.

I hope you take this idea and run with it. You may find another nice little income stream.

I was intrigued so I asked him how he was doing with it. He said that a few months ago he set up a website selling an ebook and now he’s making close to $3,000/k on autopilot.

Now I’m not going to tell you his niche of course, but it’s a niche that my friend is very familiar with. He created the product and webpage himself.

It’s a rather obscure niche also. My friend is generating traffic via free search engines (mostly Yahoo and MSN). All he did was create videos and posted them on YouTube.

His sales page is not your typical direct response salesletter with bullet points and such. His site does however have a video above the fold which does very well at converting visitors into buyers.

I’m telling you this story because I thought it was interesting how someone turned their hobby into a profitable business without really much thinking about it.

There are probably tons of people out there who create websites just for fun and are making nice sums of money. I think the key factor to their success is that they provide really good content. Everything else works itself out.

You probably have a passion but your passion may not be in a niche where people are buyers. If that’s your case, the best route is to find a hot niche, hire someone who is passionate in that niche to work for you. You pay them to do something that they already enjoy doing.

You can find these passionate people in forums. Did you know there’s a forum for just about everything online? My brother is a member of a fashion forum, a shoe forum, a photography forum and a computer overclocking forum. There’s even a forum for flashlight lovers, lol.

Go find these people in  the forums, strike up conversation with them and then hire them to create content for you.

I’ve been getting into podcasting recently not only because it’s fun but also because it’s a great way to promote your sites and businesses.

With the popularity of the Ipod personal music player, you’ve probably heard the term Podcasting thrown around. This term means either an audio or video broadcast that anybody can create with a little knowledge.

When people listen to podcasts, they can click a button to listen to your audio, download the audio file to their computer or Ipod.

All you need to do is record audio using a microphone or digital recorder and then upload the file either to your own webhost or to a hosting server.

The podcast is not an audio file but rather an xml file. If you know html then xml is very similar with beginning and ending brackets to enclose certain information such as the name and description of your podcast, the location and file size of the audio file, and the date of the podcast.

Here is an example xml podcast file:

<?xml version=“1.0”?>
<rss version=”2.0”>
<channel>
<title>Choose Your Own Title</title>
<link>http://www.yoursite.com/audiofile.mp3</link>
<description>Make a description of your podcast</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<copyright>2006</copyright>
<lastBuildDate>Date Today</lastBuildDate>
<webMaster>webmastersemail@domain.com</webMaster>
<ttl>1</ttl>
<item>
<title>Today’s Headline</title>
<description>How to make money online</description>
<pubDate>Date Today</pubDate>
<enclosure url=”http://www.yoursite.com/audiofile.mp3” length=”1426573” type=”audio/mpeg” />
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Once the file is created and uploaded to your server, you can then submit the url of the file to podcasting directories to promote your podcast.

There’s a lot more I want to cover on this topic after I get more experience. I will report back with my successes or failures so you can give it a try yourself.

To listen to more podcasts visit: www.six figure marketer dot com/affiliate blog.

Here are 5 sites which I have used to get indexed quickly.

1.) Craislist.org

Post an ad in one of the major cities such as San Francisco and Chicago. To get a link in your even if your ad doesn’t call for a link, you have to get creative. Use an image link and link to a 1×1 pixel image on your site. Make sure to set the image border to ‘0′ so that it doesn’t create a blue border around your image link.

Here’s a sample code for you to use:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com”><img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/1×1pixelimg.gif” border=0></img></a>

2.) Technorati.com

If you have a blog you can create an account here and submit your blog.

3.) Ezinearticles.com

Write an article and submit it here.

4.) Socal Bookmarking

Sign up for various social bookmarking sites and go to onlywire.com to submit your site in one swoop.

5.) Submit a press release to Webwire.com

It costs $20 but it’s worth it for creating additional buzz for your site.

You only need to use one of the above methods so take your pick.

When you purchase PLR content, the main benefit is that you will be able to claim copyright to the content and do whatever you want with it besides selling the rights to others.

This is great for marketers who don’t want to write original content but want something that they can put their name on. The main drawback is that PLR content can be sold to others so it’s not unique.

Here are some of the most common uses for PLR content:

• Use as content on a website.
• Rewritten and submitted to article directories.
• Compiled into a report or ebook.

You can get a lot more benefit from PLR content if you think out of the box and use them in ways most people don’t even consider.

For example, you can:

• Record the content and turn your recording into a podcast. Then submit the podcast to podcast directories online for increased traffic.
• Post snippets of your PLR content to web forums to establish yourself as an expert.
• Translate your content into other languages and grab a piece of the increasing international traffic.
• Create an instructional video where you read the content and post to video sharing sites.

• Compile your PLR content into a report and sell the report for $1-2. Now everyone who buys the report becomes an affiliate and earns 100% commission. They will promote the report and generate free subscribers for you.

Think outside the box and you’ll surely gain more benefit from the PLR content which might be sitting on your computer.

I’ve just been too busy with other projects to devote to this so I’m laying it out for someone else to take and run. The market is huge so there’s no worry of competition.

Many small businesses have no idea how to market their brick and mortar stores. They usually just rely on word of mouth or walk-in traffic. If they get the chance, they’ll use coupon and/or postcard mailers.

What you’re going to do is offer them a chance to have their business listed in your local business directory.

You would register a domain name, set up a directory script, create a unique design and then contact local businesses.

By setting up multiple categories for specific cities, you could generate huge revenue by charging people either a recurring monthly charge or billing them annually.

The preferred method of contact would be postcards as they’re cheaper than regular mail and you can get higher conversions if you have the right message.

What do you put on the postcard?

Like in online marketing, it’s always best to test.

Start the first test by putting your website URL on the postcard. When businesses see this, they will be curious to see what other businesses are already listed.

Here’s is roughly what my postcard would read:

Is your business listed in our local directory yet?

Visit: http://www.localdirectorycityname.com to find out.

Be the first to get listed and we will grandfather you into

our discounted rate of $19.97/month. (time limited offer)

Visit: http://www.localdirectorycityname.com for more

details…

You ask them a question to get them thinking. In marketing, the more interaction you get from the audience, the better.

Then you give them the url to check out your site because they’re curious to see if they’re listed. You then offer them a special

discount to trigger an impulse purchase. The pricing is very cheap so it makes it more likely that they’ll make an impulse purchase.

When they get to your site, they can register themselves a free account. You have their email address so you can email

them whenever you want with upgrade pricing etc. Let’s look at the income potential of this method. You spend approximately 40 cents to mail out a single postcard.

In your first test run, you send out 500 postcards which costs a total

of $200.

You charge $49.97/year for upgraded listing and only 2% of the businesses bite. Your profit is about $500. You only need a conversion rate of .80% to break even. Even if you generate a 0% response rate, you only spent $200 to test the idea.

Unless you royally screwed up somewhere I don’t see why no one would order an annual listing in your directory. It’s only $50 and they often times spend thousands to advertise their business. Let’s say a lamp store wants to have a listing.

If they generate even one sale from that listing in a year, they’ve made a profit. You could even increase your conversions by targeting businesses which are already advertising. You can check out the papers, postcards, flyers around town to see who is already spending money to advertise their business.

Let’s say that your first test run generates 8 orders. You’ve just generated a 100% ROI or doubled your money! Just send out more postcards. You can sale a successful campaign up and test and tweak as you go along.

This whole process should not take long at all. Buying the domain, setting up a directory script and designing a header graphic for your site should take no more than a day.

Designing and mailing the postcard should take another day. 2 Days and $200 could net you a potential six figure annual business that doesn’t require much work. There’s no reason not to try this.

To get addresses you would create a script or find a script which scrapes the online Yellow Pages website.

To create postcards, you can use Vistaprint.com or various other companies you find online. The php directory script is also up to you but make sure you get one which has the ability to email members.

If you succeed at this, make sure to let me know.