Setting Up Your Autoresponder

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There is only so much time in a day and so as much as possible, we need to think about automating our online business. One way to do this is to use a autoresponder to send out your marketing messages in a timely fashion and sequential a order. When comes to running an online business, I would rate choosing the right autoresponder very high on the priority list.

I have used a number of autoresponders and Aweber gets my vote because it is easy to use, reliable, and well priced.

Here is a video showing you how to setup a mailing list through Aweber.

Email Accounts Through Your Website

If you are running an online business, it looks more professional to have your email addresses matching your website address. Nearly all web hosting plans will allow you to have unlimited email accounts as part of the package.

I like to setup one email account for each website and then create forwarding email addresses so that all mail comes into one place. You may have noticed that most online businesses have email addresses such as support@, info@, noreply@. I create my first account with my name@ and then after that I forward the rest to that account. I do this because if I go on holidays, I don’t want to be logging into 5 separate web mail accounts to check my mail every time.

When I am working from home, I like to have all of my mail come into my inbox with Outlook. In this video I show you how to do all of these three things.

Creating Email Accounts Through Your Website

Redirecting Your Nameservers

This may sound a little bit complicated but it is actually a very simple process that will take you literally a couple of minutes. A domain name is like purchasing an address, a web host is a place where you keep all of your stuff (articles, video, audio, pictures…). In the real world when you buy a house the address is usually the same location as the house. On the Internet though, people will often buy a domain name at one place, and the house to store all of their content at another place.

Redirecting your nameservers is a simple matter of changing the address on your domain name so that it points to the place where you have all of your content stored, your web hosting company. Here is a short video walking you through the process.

Redirecting Your Nameservers

Getting the Right Domain Name

If you haven’t purchased a domain name yet and are not quite sure what to do, you may find my article about buying a domain name useful. In that article, I give 7 tips to help you get the perfect name for your business.

If you have your domain name and are wondering which company to host your website with, my post about choosing the right web hosting plan will help you understand what to look for in a company.

Creating a Web Hosting Account

Once you have decided on which web hosting company that are going to house you website, it is a simple matter of opening an account. If you are uncertain about what to look for in regard to web hosting, your can go to the post I made about choosing the right web hosting plan, and you should get a good idea of what to look for.

Once you are ready, it is a few minute process. Here is a video showing you exactly how to open an account with Host Gator.

Opening a web Hosting Account

Open an account with Host Gator today by clicking here…

Rich Schefren and Jay Abraham Release Free Report

Late last year Rich Schefren released a free report that got a lot attention. The report was called, ‘The Attention Age Doctrine‘. It was an excellent read and one of those free reports that is worth printing and reading a number of times with pen in hand.

I had not heard of Rich Schefren prior to reading this report and so I was thrilled to discover a marketer who puts out material that is so rich in content (pardon the pun). Through reading Rich’s report, I learned of Jay Abraham, Rich’s mentor. I posted a 5 part video series of Jay Abraham giving a talk at a seminar. If you love marketing, this video series is definitely worth watching.

This week Jay Abraham and Rich Schefren released a free ebook that they co-produced, The Maven Matrix. I can’t say whether it is good or bad at this point because I have had an enormous amount of work to get through this week and so this ebook is still on my must read list. I will say that anything that I have seen released by either of these two guys has been sensational and so I can only guess that this ebook will be no different. You can get a copy of that free report here…
Hope you enjoy it, I know I sure will!

Slice and Dice Your Market

Who is your target market? This is a really, really good question to ask yourself everyday. What are their problems and what solutions can you provide? One of the common things I see in network marketing is a very narrow view on a very specific target market…the business opportunity seekers.

Their are people in the mlm business who are genuinely aiming to distribute product and we will get to that in a moment, but for now, lets take a look at the business opportunity seekers market.

If you do a quick search on the Internet, you will find the competition for this niche mind blowing. The amount of people trying to get the attention of this target market is staggering. One of the biggest problems I have with this is; if you are training a team of people and you are all vying for the same target market, you are in competition with each other. There are other ways to do this that will allow your team to work together.

Like any good diet, a variety of foods is needed to make it complete. As with a good marketing diet, tapping into a variety of target markets is also a good idea. So I am not saying that it is a bad idea to target business opportunity seekers, but making it the staple of your marketing diet may not be so wise.

If you decide to make the distribution of your mlm products your staple, and make the business builders the dessert at the end of a hardy meal, your business is going to look a lot healthier at the end of the day. The other advantage to this is your team will no longer be in competition with each other.

If you show your team how to market and allow them to market to their strengths (aka their knowledge, passion, and life experience), you will have a team that is marketing to many, many different niches. This will mean a large volume of product getting moved and a smaller but more productive team of sales reps for you mlm organization. I really feel that people should move away from the ‘recruiting mentality’, and get into the ‘marketing your products to a niche mentality’.

Here is a video I made outlining the marketing pipeline; how and where your different target markets fit into the picture.

Understanding the Marketing Pipeline and Where Your Target Market Is

There are so many niches that are related to mlm products that have not yet been properly marketed to it is mind boggling. Although many people in the mlm industry are flocking to the Internet to generate business, very few are segmenting their market and targeting the people that are seeking solutions to problems that their mlm product could be able to solve.

The Internet could well be the next big Gold Rush of our generation…if only you know where to look for the traffic veins. As Ken Evoy said;

“The people learning to market on the Internet today, will be the diamonds of tomorrow”

So put on your thinking cap, workout what your strength is, and join the gold rush!

To learn more about using niche marketing to promote your mlm retail products, go to the, ‘Levels of Training at The Renegade University‘ thread in the support forum of this site. There you will find a complete breakdown of everything needed to implement a functional marketing system.

Marketing…The Ulitmate Leverage

There is a lot of information around the topic of marketing. When someone has a track record of increasing company profits by 7 billion dollars, they probably know what they are talking about.

Jay Abraham has this track record. He is one of the living legends of the marketing world. Here is a 5 part video series of a lecture that Jay gave. You can see by the way he moves on stage and the rapidity of his speech, that he is a guy who knows that time is money.

Considering Jay Abraham takes a 25% cut of of the profits that he increases for any company, you can be sure that his time is worth money, and a lot of it!

It seems that Jay Abraham is a bottomless pit of information on marketing and in this series he tries to impart as much information in the shortest possible time.

I hope you enjoy and get a lot out of this great series.

Jay Abraham Part 1 - The Concept of Preeminence

In this video Jay Abraham talks about marketing as the ultimate form of leverage. He discusses the fact that it costs the same amount of money to advertise in order to get one sale as it does to get a thousand sales. The strategy that allows you to yield the most for your time, effort, money, and opportunity is highly important.

He also talks about the difference between a customer and a client. The reasons why most people fail in business is also covered. This is my favorite out of the 5 with the “Hot Seat” a close second.

Jay Abraham Part 2 - How Important Is Tracking?

Jay talks about how tracking allows you to know your market very intricately. When you know who is buying, and why they are buying, it makes it very easy to sell, up-sell, on-sell, and cross sell. You can cut your cost and increase your profits exponentially.

He gives an example of two friends that were selling the same product. One friend had great copywriting skills but his promotion only made about $5000 and so he ditched it. The other friend was not so good at copywriting but, he had a different vision and objective to the first guy. The first marketer saw the sale as an end, the second marketer saw the sales as an opportunity to on-sell. The second guy lost $3000 on the first promotion and sold 25 million dollars worth of product over the next year.

Jay also gives some great examples of how just making the smallest change in your business can make a huge difference in your bottom line profits.

Jay Abraham Part 3 - The Power of Leverage

In this video Jay Abraham talks about the power of leverage and how you can use multiple methods to exponentially increase your bottom line. There is a moment in this clip where Jay asks the audience for the mathematical term for leverage and someone responds with the answer; “money”,

Jay’s response to that is quite humorous.

This video also covers sequential marketing and the power of referral marketing.

Jay Abraham Part 4 - The Hot Seat

In this video Jay Abraham has a member from the audience come onto the stage and he quiz’s him about his business. It definitely is a hot seat, but if you where a business person and had the chance to get grilled by Jay Abraham, no seat could too hot.

Jay Abraham Part 5 -

This is a question and answer session.

Jay Abraham is someone who doesn’t waste a second; it is clear that his mind is very quick. To some people, he may seem a little abrupt, but if you apply the old adage, ‘time is money’, then Jay Abraham’s time is worth an obscene amount of money. I got the impression that he was only short with people because he just doesn’t like to waste a second of his time or other people’s time.

I would love to hear what was the most valuable piece of knowledge that you gained from watching these videos. Why not post what you learned in the ‘comments box’ below?

The segment that resonated most strongly with me, at this time, was the first video. It was the section where Jay talks about preeminence. He goes on to explain the difference between a customer and a client. His explanation of what your services means to your client was totally inspirational. When he talks about the fact that;

“Most people in business have problems which they may not even be able to articulate, and when you, and you alone, articulate their problem for them, you have won. When you empathize with your clients on that level, you become their most trusted adviser.”

Really powerful stuff. Basically, from about the 10 minute mark onwards in the first video was gold for me!

Love to hear your comments!
Steve Anderson

I sure hope that you get a lot out of these great videos.

Wine and Web 2.0?

You may ask what on earth has wine and web 2.0 got to do with each other? Just about everything if you listen to these snippets of the interview that Rich Schefren did with Wine Library TV host, Gary Vaynerchuck.

Gary is not a ‘teacher’ of marketing so much as a doer of marketing. His video blogging site is incredibly popular and if you watch a few of his shows, you won’t have to read a book to find out what web 2.0 and social marketing is all about. Gary is web 2.0 personified.

Before you listen to his candid discussion about social marketing, you may like to watch a couple of minutes of one of Gary’s daily Wine TV Show that he hosts on his blog. I think you will understand instantly what it is all about, enjoy!

Wine Library TV

Audio # 1 - Introduction. Becoming part of the community

Gary talks about the importance of becoming part of the community and providing good content as opposed to selling.

Audio Snippet # 2 - The importance of repetition

Gary talks about about sticking with it in the early days when not a lot is happening, continue to provide good content, consistently and eventually things will gel.

Audio Snippet # 3 - How fresh is your content

In this snippet Gary talks about doing what you love and are passionate about, this is the only way that you will have the energy to carry you through.

Audio Snippet # 4 - Knowing your niche

Gary is blown away by the fact that their are so few video bloggers out their on the ‘net. He feels that there is just so much opportunity that it just drives him nuts to think about it!

Audio Snippet # 5 - Market to your strengths

Gary is sure that he could do 6-7 different niches that would make him a lot more money but doing what you love is the most important thing. He really wants people to think about what it is that they absolutely love.

Audio Snippet # 6 - People want to be talked to, not down to!

You need to make people feel comfortable with you and what you do, they must feel as though they are hangin’ with a friend. This is the age of Americana at it’s best, the balance of power has swung back to the people with the advent of the Internet and web 2.0.

Audio Snippet # 7 - Content is not enough, you need the secret sauce

You can win on content but if you are looking for home runs, like scary success, you need a little extra. You still must be 100% who you are and not do things for the sake of marketing alone. You need to find a contradiction in your niche.

Audio Snippet # 8 - It is not about you…at all!

You must be 100 trillion percent dedicated to your audience…full stop. Every waking minute must be dedicated to provided great content for your audience. If you are in the content providing business and you are thinking about what it can do for you, you’ve already lost.

Audio Snippet # 9 - The Process of mastering social media

There was a couple years of homework city for Gary. One of his key things is reading great blogs. He would go to Technorati and pick the highest ranking blogs and read all of them. He loves people and that is part of the reason why web 2.0 works for him. Even if you don’t love people, you can adjust and still win.

Audio Snippet # 10 - Marketers are the most disliked people on the Internet…on the planet!

Even though marketers are hated, if you embrace the web 2.0 revolution and reform yourself, you will become the hero and not the villain. Gary is incredibly marketing driven and he feels that marketers do have a huge advantage if they can adapt.

Audio Snippet # 11 - Don’t be 40 and act 100! You need to adapt

Marketers have to give up their old ways, they are dead! You need to become part of the community and give excellent content. Gary spent over 10 million dollars on advertising for his business and now his blog gets more attention for free! Rich gave away adwords and concentrated on great content. It was then that he started to make money. Rich feels to give people value, even if they don’t buy from you is super important.

Audio Snippet # 12 - The Consumer wants more and expects more

In the past customer service was not part of retail, you used to pay for gift wrapping and now it is free. The Internet is evolving in the same way, if you don’t provide really great content, your dead. What does being 1st place on Google matter if you suck?

Audio Snippet # 13 - Don’t think of yourself as an Internet marketer!

You have to be passionate about giving people your absolute best, your A+++ 1000% best effort. If you look to where you came from, you can be happy with where you are as opposed to looking to the future, and being disappointed with where you are not.

Audio Snippet # 14 - The beginning is the most exciting time of any business

Embrace the early growing period, don’t think of it as something you have to go through to become successful. Choose what you love and then you won’t have to worry about this, embrace every stage of your development.

Audio Snippet # 15 - The 5 Steps to learning social media *****

Gary would rather be on the front page of Digg then the front page of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. He goes through the 5 top tips for learning social marketing.

Audio Snippet # 16 - Listen to your inner voice and then execute!

People work really hard but they still don’t succeed. People need to listen to their inner voice and do what they love…you will be able to quit your job sooner than what you think. When you love it, you don’t sleep, and when you hate it, you sleep. This is the ‘Gold Rush’ of our generation! The secret to success is to care about the health of your friends and family.

Well that is it!

I hope you have enjoyed these audio snippets, Gary Vaynerchuck is definitely on fire when it comes to web 2.0. I would love to hear you comments on what you though was the best of the 16 and what you learned most from this wonderfully passionate guy, Mr Web 2.0 Vaynerchuck!

You can download the full interview at Rich Schefren’s site, Strategic Profits.
To see more of Gary Vaynerchuck’s material either go to Wine Library T.V or Gary’s 120 website. This is web 2.0 at it’s finest.

Here are 2 other great resources on web 2.0:

Bill Ortel’s, Definitive Guide to Finding the Best Social Networking Sites (only $17)
Craig Desorcy’s, BookMark Traffic Secrets Revealed

Not Another Salesperson!

To be a sales person can be a very deflating and demoralizing experience for some people. Let’s face it, dinner conversation often turns to a few wise cracks about the pesky sales person that someone had to ditch at the first possible chance. Before long everyone is joining in on how they too, got rid of a unwanted, pesky sales person!

If you are in sales, you probably would be wriggling in your seat and feeling a bit uncomfortable at that point in the conversation. You may even want to tell them all that, “we salespeople are human too you know…ah I mean those sales people are human”

Somehow amongst the cheering, jeering and great fun of swapping ‘give the stereotypical salesperson the flick’ stories, you probably feel that it is not quite the right time to speak up.

In the defense of the people making these wise cracks, there are some pretty ruthless sales people that call you at home, at inopportune times, and will do anything to keep you on the phone. It is those tactics that give the sales profession a very bad name.

So does it have to be this way?

Thankfully not!

There is a way of approaching people that will make the whole sales experience a joy. The key to the whole problem is actually in the last sentence, ‘approaching people‘. It actually should be the other way around…they should be approaching you.

A traditional retail sales person would not feel the same level of discomfort when people are making quips around the dinner table because people come to them, they are not chasing people. The customer is coming to them because they have what the customer wants? Or do they?

That would be the absolute first place to start a sales conversation, finding out if the person actually wants something or are they just randomly shopping around to kill time.

Typically the question is:

“Can I help You?”

or

“Is there anything in particular that you are looking for?”

Can you imagine if you walked into a shop and the sales assistant starts raving on about, ‘how great these new jeans are, and the material, and how they are made, and on and on’. You would probably think to yourself, “that is great but I am just filling in time while my wife gets her hair cut!”

So the fist question is actually a qualifying question to see if that person has any interest in general and then there will be subsequent questions that are more specific in order to qualify the customer/prospect even further. Why would your waste you time on someone who has no interest? It only makes you tired and the other person annoyed. So as you can see, even if someone is approaching you (aka coming to your website or your shop), you can still blow it very easily.

Never assume that you have is what they want or need.

Let’s take one step back and look at the process of what it takes in order to attract customers so that they are approaching you.

Why Marketing Is So Important?

Marketing and Sales should go hand in hand and really should be a seamless continuum. A great marketing system will do most of the qualifying and the salesperson should only have to deal with interested prospects.

So what is a great marketing system?

There is a lot of talk about the conversation inside your prospects head, if you can tap into that and address their concerns, you got it. On this site, there is a post with a 5 part video series of Jay Abraham, the marketing legend, talking about exactly this. It is in the first video at about the 10 minute mark. The way he puts it leaves no doubt about how important this level of empathy is in your marketing. If you understand your prospective clients problems on an emotional level, then you will be able to connect with them every time. Marketing is sometimes referred to as sales in print.

That being the case, we can approach our marketing in two different ways;

1. The whack them over the head and drill them with messages until they respond, one way or another.

2. Put yourself in your prospects shoes and workout what their needs, wants, and desires are; and then offer them the best possible solution.

The second method is the obvious choice but those great marketing methods can still be sabotaged if the sales skills don’t match. I remember listening to a fantastic interview with Vincent James (he built a $100, 000 000 nutritional supplement business in one year through offline, online and television marketing) and he said that he would tell his tele-salespeople not to sell anything, just take inquiries and handle the orders. As he put it;

“the people operating the phones in the call center could undo all your great marketing work in a matter of minutes”

Here are some points to remember when on a sales call;

1. Always ask if it is a good time to call

2. If you have called them, alway state the purpose of your call and tell them how much of their time you estimate you will need

3. Qualify your prospects on time, money, and desire

4. Spend 80% of the call listening and 20% talking

5. Take the time to find out exactly what they want before you offer anything to them

6. Only when you have understood what they want should you offer them anything and only offer them information that is specific to what they need

Once you have positioned yourself like this, you actually become a consultant rather than a salesperson. Much of it is determined by who finds who first as to how this plays out. As much as possible you want people finding you.

You must think of yourself as a problem solutions provider for your clients. Sometimes you won’t have the ability to help them and so being honest and telling your prospect that, rather than get the sale at all costs will payoff in the end. Never sell something for the sake of getting the sale if it is not a good fit for the person.

Consultative selling is definitely a much more rewarding experience for the buyer and the seller. You can read more about this approach to sales in the book, The New Conceptual Selling. It is a great read for anyone wishing to understand a natural approach to sales.

Revolution WordPress Theme

This post is more of a rave than a review. I love Brian Gardner’s themes and his latest offering, The Revolution Pro, has not let me down, it is a cracker!

This site is a customized working version of the Pro theme and I am so happy I could do back flips. The home page is the part of this theme that I really love; it allows my blog readers to find relevant information super easily.

Let’s break down some of the components and see what is so good about Brian’s Gardner’s latest WordPress theme.

Here is a screen shot of the top half of the Home page:

1. The home page acts much more like a traditional website but at the same time, it has the feel of a blog. The tabs across the top are all static pages. This is perfect for letting people have easy access to important information.

2. The second nav bar is what Brian calls the ‘tabber’ section. Each one of those tabs is a different category that I have chosen. Each time a new post is made in one of those categories, it will show here. So essentially, you have your 7 most important categories at the fingertips of your readers.

This makes it super easy for your visitors to find posts they are interested in. The other very cool feature is that it pulls a different image from each post that you make. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Instead of just a link for your visitors to see, they have an image to capture their attention.

Once they have finished reading, they can easily head for home and find something else of interest. The longer people stay on your site and read, the more the search engines will view your site as a creditable source of information. So this home page is making the search engines very happy because of all of the short keyword descriptions of the posts on the home page, and hopefully; visitors will find more content and stay longer (our whole objective, really who cares what Google thinks).

3. This is a preset box coded for YouTube videos that you wish to display. To change the video, you simply copy the url of the desired video and paste it in the theme options area and it is done. It is super easy.

Lets move on down to the bottom half of the Home Page…

This area again is designed so that readers have as many of your blog posts easily available as possible. There will be 14 available posts for your visitors to choose from.

You will see where I have put ‘five links text’; at the top is the most current post and then there are 4 links to related posts from that category (not showing at the moment as I am yet to post in these categories).

Next you will see the area to the right, I have named this, ‘Product Review’. This will pull the four most recent posts from this category, including the images that you choose.

This home page is so impressive because of the ease in which people can browse your categories. There is access to 10 main categories on my home page and 21 links to my most recent posts. Unlike a typical ‘Recent Post’ area on a blog, this home page gives the visitors images to draw them into your posts. This can only help people click through your site and that is exactly what you and the search engines want.

A few features that I didn’t use…

Usually there is a sub nav bar under the main nav bar where you could have another 8 or so categories. This will also have a drop down box showing the posts within each category. I have modified my blog for simplicity sake.

The main nav bar and the sub nav bar actually both have drop down boxes so that visitor can see all the the posts that you have made in each category and all of the sub-pages in your static content. This makes it so easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for it is crazy. Essentially this theme is the ultimate content management system.

There are a few other things that I don’t have on my blog that come standard with this theme. You will notice in the upper right hand corner of the screen shot; the email, RSS, and Comments icon. Again, this theme is making your visitors experience as easy as possible.

The next thing you will see is the Flickr photos. This is basically a media theme, but if you where doing a book review site, you could put images of books you are reviewing. If you had an art-work site…I am sure you see what I mean.

The Blog Proper…

Once a person navigates to a post from the home page, the Revolution theme then reverts to a more typical blog format. The side bar to the right has some pretty nice features as well. The email subscription box at the top comes standard with this theme. To activate it, all as you need to do is go over to FeedBurner and grab you id number, copy it, and then paste it in the theme options area and you are set.

Under the subscribe box is an area where you can put your featured ad, this would be for the number one product that you want to promote. To get this ad working, you simply go to theme options, enter the url of the image you want to appear in the ad, and then in the area below you enter the url where you want to direct people. It is as easy as that.

The other thing that I have not used is the Google Adsense feature. This allows you to put Google ads very neatly at the bottom of each of your posts (I personally would rather people stay on my site but for the people that like adsense, this is very nice).

I am not a techie kind of a guy, and I am definitely not a coder, but this theme is well within my ability to work with. The other great thing is the support forum, it is incredibly interactive and so if you get stuck, someone will help you out, and usually very quickly.

So these are the main things that I love about Brian Gardner’s latest Revolution theme. There are some other things that I have not discovered yet, but I have only been using it for less than a week so it will only be a matter of time.

Big Thumbs Up

So without even a trace of reservation, the Revolution Pro WordPress theme gets the big thumbs up from me.

I was so happy with this theme, I purchased the developers package so that I could build my other niche sites using variations of the Revolution theme. There are 6 to choose from, each one more suited to a particular industry.

So what are you waiting for? Go grab one of Brian’s Revolution themes today! Get it here…

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