Archive | February, 2023

If you already sell your own products, you can double your income in no time at all by adding new price points to your marketing funnel. You don’t even need to create any new products – just new services that take very little of your time. Here’s how it works…

Let’s say you’ve got one or more products in the $20-$50 dollar range that teach something you’re good at. And for this example, let’s say that your product is a book on how to make a website super user friendly so that people stay and buy, rather than getting lost and confused and leaving. (This is a major market, by the way. Hint hint.)

In addition to your book, you can add a personal 1 hour consultation for $97 to $197 to look at and give feedback on one of their websites.

You could also offer to be on retainer for a certain fee per month to check each of their websites monthly and point out the changes they need to make. This fee would depend on the number of sites they have and are adding each month.

You could further offer a coaching service in which you train people to be usability experts and charge others for their services. In this case, you might charge $1,000 or even $2,000 a month for 3-6 months to make them experts.

Whatever your niche is, odds are you can add additional service-type programs that will easily double the amount of money you’re already making.

If you sell just 5 $97 one-time consultations a month, that’s another $5,820 a year.

If you sell an ongoing service at $297 a month and you’ve got 12 clients, that’s $42,768 a year.

If you take 4 new coaching clients for 6 months at a time, twice a year at $1,000 a month, that’s another $48,000 a year.

And none of these services have to take a lot of time. In the case of the 1 hour consult, obviously it’s an hour. And your real money here will be derived from upselling one of your more expensive consulting or coaching packages.

If you’re a consultant, you might be spending a couple of hours a week on each client. If you’re a coach, you might spend an hour a week on the phone, and answer their email questions 3 to 5 days a week.

And notice that you didn’t have to create any new products to do this. You’ve already got the knowledge and expertise – you’re simply offering more of it in a highly personalized manner. Your clients get tremendous benefit this way, much more so than they could by simply buying your book.

You’re happy, your clients are happy, and here’s a bonus: Anyone that you personally work with – even if it’s only for an hour – is far more likely to buy your products in the future, regardless of price.

Do you plan to release a $997 product in six months? Offer your customers personalized attention that greatly benefits them, and you will hit the ground running with sales when you launch your expensive product, guaranteed.

Take a few minutes now and think about what you can offer your existing and future customers that A) Provides them with a tremendous amount of value and B) You can perform in a minimal amount of time. Then quickly write up a page explaining your new service, send it to your existing customers and add it to your sales funnel. You could be making new sales in less than 24 hours.

Alright, some of you are going to say I’m oversimplifying and others will simply disagree, but after years of being super serious about my business, here’s what I’ve discovered:

 

Everything in life – EVERYTHING – is a GAME.

You know how you sit down with a few friends to play cards or a board game, and there’s always that one person who takes the whole game WAY too seriously? They’re getting mad and frustrated when things don’t go their way, they’re celebrating like it’s New Year’s when things go right, and half the time they can’t even follow the conversation because they’re too busy concentrating on the game.

Yeah, that person.

Well, guess what? I’ll bet you that when it comes to Internet Marketing, you are that person.

If you’re taking every decision so seriously, then it might as well be life or death. Exactly how should you word this email? What color should your header be? Should you promote this product at 6 a.m. on Tuesday or 9 a.m. on Wednesday? And so forth.

These are choices that should take seconds.

Yet I was agonizing over each one like it was a declaration to declare war.

I thought I had to nail every decision and make it all perfect. Nothing could be left to chance. If it took me a week to decide something, it’s because that’s how long it should take.

Wrong.

Now I flip a coin. Seriously. If I need to make a decision – but based on all the facts I have I can’t decide – I flip a coin. Sort of like rolling the dice in a game. Because you know what? It’s better to take the wrong action than no action at all.

Sure, fast decisions can turn out to be bad ones. But guess what? So can slow decisions. But no decision at all? That will get you nowhere, fast. Every kid who rides a bicycle can tell you that it’s far easier to change direction once you’re moving and sitting still on that bike, you’re not going anywhere.

And the long-term difference between good and bad decisions isn’t even in the decision itself, or the results it produces. Instead, the difference is in how you react. If you make a bad decision and then confine yourself to bed for a week, that’s not going to help.

But when you play marketing like a game, a wrong decision is simply telling you to move in another direction. You shrug off the wrong choice, glad that now you have more information to head in a better approach this time.

Laughing at your bad choices is a good idea, too, because it’s a game. It’s all a game. LIFE is a game.
If you’re down two goals in football, do you overthink what to do next? No. You get the ball and start moving it down the field. If you encounter something new and surprising in a video game, do you shut it down? No, you try different things and see what works. At most you pause the game, go online and find out what to do. It takes you 5 minutes at most before you’re back in the game, fully armed with the knowledge you need to win.

Any difficult obstacle you face can be thought of as a game. And just shifting your mindset to game mode can make all the difference.

I had a friend years ago who went to military boot camp. He looked at the whole thing as a game, and afterward, he reported that boot camp was one of the easiest things he ever did. Other people in his camp took the training so seriously, they were getting sick from fright. Same boot camp, with two different mindsets.

I had another friend in the U.S. who was facing an IRS audit. Scary stuff, and let me tell you, he was deeply frightened and ready to do anything – including signing over a big check – to make it go away. Then he changed his outlook. Now instead of quaking in fear, he declared, “It’s a game, me against them. Let’s see how we can win this.” His fear vanished, he took action, and at the end of the audit, the IRS paid HIM.

Do you want to start an online business? Launch a new product? Approach 25 gurus in the next 25 days. Make it into a game and 4 things will happen:

First, you’ll relax – and people do their best thinking when they’re relaxed.

Second, you’ll have fun – and people do their best work when they’re having fun.

Third, you won’t feel stressed – at least not the negative kind of stress – and you’ll live longer and be happier.

Fourth, when it’s all done and regardless of the outcome, you’ll be eager to do something else because you’ll want to have even more fun in your game.

“Yeah, but this is serious business and I’m a serious person!”

Really? Or is that simply how you choose to look at things and who you choose to be?

Life is a series of choices, and one of the biggest choices we make is deciding how to frame what we’re doing.

Me, I choose to make it a game – one I can’t wait to get up and play each morning. A game that just happens to also make me money. Lots of money.

How about you?

Regardless of what people might think of the Walmart we know today, there is a lot to be learned from Walmart’s founder Sam Walton. If Sam were starting a business in 2020, he would almost undoubtedly be starting that business online.

So what can we glean from the guy in the old pickup truck who loved retailing?

Don’t worry about what others say about you. At JC Penney’s, his first full-time job out of college, the personnel director told Sam, “Walton, I’d fire you if you weren’t such a good salesman. Maybe you’re just not cut out for retail.” No one remembers that man’s name, but Sam built an empire no one is likely to ever forget.

If people are telling you that you’re not cut out for online marketing, just remember Sam and smile.

Go with your strengths. Sam wasn’t good at accounting, he had poor organizational skills and he was hopelessly disorganized. But one thing he could do well built a team of people who could handle these things for him.

Focus on your strengths and outsource the rest.

Build relationships. In college, Same wanted to be student body president, so he discovered a trick that he would use for the rest of his life:

Sam made friends everywhere he went, and you can do the same thing online. Talk to everyone in your niche because you never know who is going to be your next customer, your ally, your promoter, your affiliate, or your next joint venture partner.

Be a learning machine. Sam never stopped reading books and taking courses because he understood that the next great idea could come from anywhere.

Choose 5 or 10 proven online marketers to follow, and then read everything they write. Read a marketing book each week, and develop a curiosity for everything related to your field. Keep an open mind and know that your next great idea is hidden right in front of you – you just have to uncover it and act on it.

Learn from your competition. When Sam bought his first store, he realized the store across the street was doing twice as well. So Sam spent time every day checking out his competitor to see what he was doing, right and wrong. Later he checked out Kmarts, who were ahead of him at the time. Then he visited the headquarters of other retailers who didn’t consider him to be serious competition. Little did they know…

Carefully watch and analyze what other online marketers are doing right and wrong and learn from them. Make friends with them. Ask questions. Bribe them, buy their courses, and do whatever it takes to find out what’s already working.

Continually experiment with your business. Sam was continually applying what he learned elsewhere to his stores. Said Sam:

“I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of my biggest contributions to the later success of Walmart.”

Learn something and apply it. Make it your mantra: Learn something – innovate. And test, test, and test some more to see what works best. In no other business model in history has it been easier to innovate, test and discover exactly what is working and what needs improving than in online marketing?

Don’t reinvent the wheel – adapt it to your use. According to Sam, “…most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else…”

There are plenty of proven online marketing business models you can choose from, so don’t think you have to invent the next revolutionary thing. Instead, take what’s already working and make it even better.

Make mistakes and then move on. Sam didn’t understand the terms of his first lease or how to buy a business. He borrowed money and went into debt to overpay for a failed Ben Franklin store in Newport, Arkansas. After 5 long years of grueling work and long hours, he had quadrupled sales and had the region’s most successful Ben Franklin store. That’s when the landlord booted him out to give the store to his son to run. There was nowhere else in town to locate Sam’s store, so he drove across four states looking for a new location. He found one in Bentonville, Arkansas, and started over.

It’s okay to get it wrong the first time. You’re probably going to make mistakes and that’s terrific because it means you’ve started. You’re moving, you’ve got momentum and you’re making progress. Mistakes aren’t roadblocks, they’re bumps in the road to success.

Don’t dwell on your mistakes. Says Sam about being thrown out of his store, “I’ve never been one to dwell on reverses, and I didn’t do so then… I know I read my leases a lot more carefully after that, and maybe I became a little warier of just how tough the world can be… But I didn’t dwell on my disappointment.”

Every moment is a fresh beginning and an opportunity to take what you’ve learned – good and bad – and use it to your advantage.

Enjoy the process and your victories. In his autobiography, which was written on his deathbed, Sam wrote, “Walmart No. 18 … opened in 1969, and it marked our return to Newport … nineteen years after we had been run out of town. By then, I was long over what had happened to us down there, and I didn’t have revenge in mind…. As it happened, we did extraordinarily well with our Newport Walmart, and it wasn’t too long before the old Ben Franklin store I had run on Front Street had to close its doors. You can’t say we ran that guy—the landlord’s son—out of business. His customers were the ones who shut him down. They voted with their feet.”

Sometimes success can be a long time in coming, so remember to enjoy the process and the victories along the way. There were 17 successful stores before No. 18 and no doubt Sam enjoyed them all. At first, even your smallest successes should be celebrated, whether it’s your first website, your first sale, or your first $10,000 day.

When it comes to success, Sam Walton may have said it best:

“Celebrate your successes. Find humor in your failures. And remember that high expectations are the key to everything.”

Expect to succeed, act as though you are already successful, do the things you need to do to succeed, and the rest will take care of itself.

A product launches and sells hundreds or even thousands of copies. As an affiliate, you can make about 50% commission. But wouldn’t you like to keep ALL of the commission on the sales?

There is a way to do it. And while it’s not well known, It’s done far more often than you would think. Here’s how it works:

Savvy marketers approach product sellers and offer to buy the rights to their products. This might be a product that didn’t sell well; for example, a great product with poor marketing. Or the products might have been robust sellers, but it’s no longer a hot commodity (which only takes about 3-4 weeks in many markets.)

If a deal is struck, The purchasing of the right product is just as he would if he were an affiliate. However, he’s actually (and secretly) making ALL of the money. The product owner sold the rights and now receives nothing on each sale. That can be a good deal for a product owner since they get a lump sum upfront. But if you’re good at marketing, it can be a bonanza for you, and it’s like having your product, except with a guru’s name attached and ALL of the work done for you.

If the cost is a worry for you, start small with a product that’s been on the market for a while so you can get it for less money. Don’t purchase exclusive rights, just rights for yourself.

Don’t add your name to the sales page – keep it just as it was so the product creator appears to be the seller. Simply replace the payment button and support desk link with your own.

If it’s in the budget, hire someone to optimize the site for keywords based on the product creator’s name. This could be a sale when someone searches for the guru or the product.

Use a domain name that sounds a LOT like the original product name. And then get busy marketing, because all of the profit is yours.

These are, without a doubt, the biggest mistakes new marketers tend to make when it comes to copywriting…

Lie #1: Good copywriting uses many exclamation points and over-the-top jargon a five-year-old wouldn’t believe.

“This Brand New Revolutionary Never Before Seen Blah Blah Will Explode Your (Bank Account! Abs!! Sex Life!!! Etc.)” Seriously, who wants their abs to explode???

“This Revolutionary Once In A Lifetime Opportunity Is Only Available To You Because You’re So Damn Handsome, But It Will Disappear In 10 Minutes, And Then You’ll Be Ugly Forever!!!” Okayyyy…….

“This Incredibly Awesome Majestic Indescribable Super Secret Opportunity That Only The Super Duper Uber Wealthy Rich Know About Can Be Yours Because This One Rich Nerd Guy Decided To Spill The Beans Because He’s Angry At All The Other Rich Jerk Guys!!!” Yeah, who doesn’t believe that?

If you think you need exclamation points, it means you need a thesaurus. Writer Henneke Duistermaat gives some great examples of this. Instead of “It’s big!” Try “It’s enormous.” Instead of writing, “That was brave!” Use, “That was heroic.” Finding the right words instead of lazily using exclamation points makes your essay more persuasive and compelling.

And forget wild promises and over-the-top worn-out phrases. Instead, try being honest and genuine, like talking to a friend over tea. Your sales copy will get noticed and read because it sounds like it’s coming from a natural person and not the worst possible version of a used car salesman.

Lie #2 – You can ‘swipe’ to copywriting success.

Just rip off other writers, substitute your product for theirs, change a bit here and there, and call it good. Yes, it will save you time, and you might make some sales.

But it would be best if you had fresh thinking and an actual copy to be genuinely successful and be a success (two different things, by the way).

Because unless you are selling the same product to the same customers, ripping off someone else’s copy won’t provide the sensational conversions you’re looking for.

Telling your own story in your way will.

Think about every blog that you read regularly. Could someone else write those blogs and have them be the same? No. If someone tried to rip them off, would they be as successful as the original authors? No.

Once you master copywriting, you’ll have tremendous power to write your paychecks because you will be the source of new ideas and perspectives that resonate with your customers and create buying frenzies.

Lie #3 – Copywriting is simple once you know the ‘secrets.’

That’s right – spend $997 for my latest course, and in no time, you’ll know all the secrets of the pros and be a copywriting savant.

Actually, no. There are no secrets; you won’t become a copywriting wiz overnight.

The fact is, there is a multitude of books and courses that will teach you about copywriting. But there are no real secrets except this – there is no substitution for practice. And more practice. And more training after that.

Hopefully, this won’t sound too sentimental, but great copywriting is about one thing: Caring.

He is caring for your customer, caring that he gets the best possible solution to his problem, caring enough to see to it that you make every effort to get that solution in his hands.

It’s about empathy, stepping into your customers’ shoes, and seeing life from their perspective. Living with the problem they have, knowing what it’s like to want the solution desperately.

You can’t outsmart your prospects. What you can do is be one of them so you can talk to them and counsel them as they would want to be talked to and counseled.

You’ll be a great copywriter when you learn how to do that.

The more you discover why people buy your products, the easier it is to influence them to buy more or persuade prospects to become new customers.

Plus, the more of these reasons you can fulfill with your copy (without going overboard), the better your odds of making the sale.

Here are a dozen of the most potent reasons someone might buy your information product.

To make money. This one is easy; sometimes, you’ve got to spend money to make money, like buying a course on investing in the stock market or starting a business. One of the easiest ways to make a sale is to show that your prospect’s small investment can be turned into a much bigger return.

To save money. Buying a water filtration system can save a person hundreds of dollars over buying bottled water. If your solution saves money, show them how much. If you teach them how to make money, show them they can make money with your product and save money by not making stupid mistakes. If you sell dating products, offer them how finding the right person quickly will save a fortune in dinners, movies, and bad dates.

To save time. Instant coffee, fast food, and done-for-you solutions fall into this category. So does anything that shortens the learning curve. If you sell courses, this one can be big. Do they want to build a business in six years? Or buy your system and make it in 6 months?

To feel important. No one needs a Rolex or a Ferrari, but they feel better about themselves when they own one. Status is hugely important to some people – why else would they spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars on a purse or a pair of shoes when something from the discount store would work just as well?

To make it easier. Let’s say you sell an excellent course on how to get a particular result through a series of steps. Yes, they could do everything you teach in the system – or you could offer to do the work for them for a price. They won’t have the hassle of doing it themselves and can be sure it will be done right.

To feel good. This one is broad and encompasses a lot of things. We feel good when we pamper ourselves. We feel good when we do something for someone else. We feel good when furthering our education or providing for our future. No one buys something to feel bad. The question to ask yourself is, how does your product make your customer feel good?

To move us closer to our goals. Whether those goals are primary, like food and shelter, or grander, like taking over the world, we will buy almost anything that will help us get whatever we want most.

To move us away from pain. People will buy whatever that pain might be – physical, mental, emotional – if they think it will help ease or erase it.

To be superior. Few openly admit they want to feel special, yet almost everyone does. This is why people buy products they think are ‘cool’ or will make them look good, like tattoos or fast cars. They’ll buy things simply because they’re new or upgraded or because they’re better versions than what their friends have.

To keep up. People will buy something because everyone else has it and doesn’t want to be left behind. Look at smartphones. The more people had smartphones, the more pressure there was on everyone else to get one, too. If your product can reach a tipping point of popularity, people will buy it simply because others have purchased it.

To be a good fan. Football fans buy giant foam fingers to show they’re fans. Coke product collectors will buy anything with a Coke name on it. People who love Apple will stand in line to buy the latest gadget. Followers of a particular blogger will buy that blogger’s new book without hesitating. If you can build trust with your community, you can get them to purchase products simply because you recommend those products, whether they’re your products or someone else’s.

It’s on sale. Or scarce. Or both. Customers will sometimes buy things simply because they’re a good deal. If you don’t believe it, check out any black Friday sale – people line up to buy stuff they didn’t even know they wanted until they saw it would sell cheaply. People are also much more likely to buy if they think they’ll lose the chance to buy because of scarcity or the opportunity to buy at this low price because the price is about to go back up.

Bonus Reason: Because you orchestrated a marketing campaign that took away all the risks and provided many benefits, they couldn’t help but buy your product. And when they bought it, they did a little jig in front of their computer or held their phone, because they were so happy they got it!

I’m about to teach you two surprising things about the technique for selling affiliate products…

First, it’s surprisingly easy. It’s so simple you might be tempted to dismiss it. Don’t. This method has been proven effective, and you want to put it in your marketing arsenal.

Second, while it doesn’t take much time, it can be a real money maker. If you choose an affiliate product that pays instantly and has a traffic source (such as your list, social media, etc.), you can put money in your pocket in less than 3 hours.

Here’s how it works: Choose an affiliate product you like. It needs to be one you have, one you can get from the seller for free, or one you buy. Regardless, you must have a copy of it yourself. Also, it’s better if it’s a product you like and use, although that’s not required.

Read the sales letter carefully and choose the most significant benefit. This might be in the headline, or it could be in the bullet points.

Write a short report – 5 pages are fine, ten pages is super, and you don’t want to go any longer than that. The report details how to do this one technique you’ve pulled out of the product that provides this benefit. For example, how to get 10,000 visitors a month to your blog would be a benefit.

If you don’t want to write the report, outsource it.

Create a squeeze page and use this significant benefit as your title. “How To Get 10,000 Visitors a Month To Your Blog.”

Once they enter their email address and press the opt-in button, they are redirected to your affiliate page for the product. Few will buy at this point, but they must see the page.

At the end of the report, send them back to that affiliate sales page. You might write something like this: “I hope you put this into action, but if you’d like to take a massive shortcut and reduce the time it takes to get 10,000 visitors a month to your website, click here to get the complete fast-track system.”

Use your wording. Your message is that what you just taught them works, but to do it quickly without trial and error and mistakes, they can get the fast track system because it’s so much easier and faster. Plus, they get tons of other benefits, too.

So what you’re doing here is building a list, giving them real value, and then immediately marketing the same benefit they’re looking for to that list. Plus, of course, you can follow up with those that don’t initially buy and also sell other products to them in the future.

Once you get good at this, it shouldn’t take you more than 3 hours to set up, and you can use your system for as long as you like. Send website visitors to it, tell your lists, offer your free report on social media, buy ads, etc.

Does it sound too easy? Often it’s the simple techniques that create the most significant results. Making a couple of thousand dollars on each one of these systems that you set up is not unheard of. And depending on how much traffic you send and the product you choose, it could be even more.

And if you like, you can outsource the entire thing for a reasonable fee. Imagine if you just set one of these up a week. It might not be glamorous, but the path to wealth and riches is frequently a simple process applied consistently. The method described above can be your path to financial freedom.

Did you know there are four types of residual commissions? Let’s explore them…

Automatic recurring commissions are likely the ones you’re most familiar with. You promote a membership program and get paid monthly for as long as that customer retains the membership you sold.

Cookie commissions – when you sell a product, a cookie is placed on that customer’s computer. Then anything else the customer purchases from the seller is linked to you, and you get a commission. But if the cookie is deleted or the customer changes computers, you will no longer receive commissions on their purchases.

Lifetime commissions work like a cookie commission; only the product seller uses the customer’s email address instead of a cookie to track sales. Thus, as long as the email address remains the same, you can receive commissions on all sales from this customer for years.

Second tier commissions – this is when you refer other affiliates to the merchant. Sort of like a multi-level program, you get a small commission for the sales your referral affiliate makes.

Now then: If you make a traditional affiliate sale, you get paid, and that’s it.

If you make a monthly membership type of sale, you get paid until the customer cancels, which means you usually get paid for several months. Not bad.

But if you promote products with either cookie or lifetime commissions, you can get paid for years on anything else they buy from that vendor besides the original sale.

Imagine a product seller with a fleet of 30 or 40 products. You promote just one of their products, and 20 customers buy it. Over the next few months and years, this product seller promotes other products to these 20 customers, resulting in a further 80 sales over time. Usually, you wouldn’t make a dime on these sales, but you make the full commission on everyone in this case.

So next month, you get unexpected commissions, and the month after that, five years from now.

Nice.

And it’s all because you promoted products with lifetime referrals or cookies.

So where can you find these products?

One method is to keep your eyes peeled. Not all selling platforms allow lifetime referrals, so by looking at those that do, you can find the product sellers who will pay you for every product they sell to your customers, not just the ones you promote.

Next, use a search directory, such as www.affiliatescout.com. When doing your search, choose “lifetime commissions” under “features” without any other search parameters, and you’ll find hundreds of results. Go back and narrow your parameters to find the programs your audience might be interested in.

Whenever someone asks you to be their affiliate, ASK if they pay lifetime commissions. Sometimes they’ll have two programs, one in which they only pay commissions on the first product sold and a second secret program they reserve for their heavy hitter affiliates in which they do pay lifetime commissions. It never hurts to ask.

Bottom line: If you can make recurring or even lifetime commissions from your promotional efforts, why not? You do the work once, and you get paid repeatedly. You can’t beat that.

Once an online marketer gets to a certain income level, that marketer almost invariably gets stuck. They can’t seem to make any more money, even when they pour more and more of their time into their business. Why? Because they are working IN their industry rather than ON their business.

That’s why it’s essential to begin outsourcing as soon as possible, much sooner than you probably think. If you believe you need to bring in a hefty six-figure sum before you can get some help, think again.

The sooner you begin outsourcing some of your business, the more mundane and time-consuming facets, and the sooner you can start powerfully growing your business.

You’ve only got a fixed number of hours in the week. Do you spend them doing the following:

A: The tasks you don’t like to do
B: The tasks you don’t mind doing, but they could quickly be done by someone else
C: The tasks that you’re brilliant at doing and that you enjoy performing
D: Planning and strategizing to take your business to the next level

You want to delegate A and B as fast as possible so you can focus on C and D.

Are you doing your support? Are you answering your emails and phone? Is it taking your entire morning to help, answer emails, and so forth?

Next question: How much do you earn each time you work your support desk or answer your emails and phone? What’s that? Nothing? Maybe it’s time you hired someone to do it for you.

If you do it correctly, hiring someone to perform your support tasks can pay off from day one.

That’s because it frees you up to do the things that MAKE YOU MONEY.

Ah-hah! Imagine that – devoting nearly all your working time to those tasks that make money rather than doing support.

The military has two distinct areas of operation: Front line and support. The front line wins the battles while the support does just that – support those out there beating the actions.

In sports, you’ve got offense and defense. The defense is crucial for stopping the other team from scoring, but they generally DON’T SCORE any points themselves. The offense does that. If you’re spending all of your time on defense (answering emails), then you’re not devoting any time to crime (making sales.)

Here’s how to hand off the bulk of your email tasks to your new assistant: If you don’t already have a private email address, create one. You give this address to JV partners, fellow marketers, and your mother—the people who matter most to your business and personal life.

Once a day, you check this address and answer these emails personally.

Everything else – EVERYTHING – goes to your support address or support desk, where your support person checks it daily or several times a day.

This includes payments, autoresponder emails, hosting emails, customer questions, complaints, testimonials, affiliate requests, etc.

Your support person has access to your accounts, too. Your hosting account, autoresponder account, PayPal account, etc. I know – it seems like a giant leap of faith to give someone else access to your PayPal account, but no worries. You can limit the PayPal functions your support person has access to. For example, they can issue refunds but not withdraw funds.

Your support person or team will run your business’s day-to-day operations for you.

When training your support staff, you can write step-by-step procedures on how to do things, record videos or audio, or have them contact you when something comes up they haven’t handled before. In other words, there is a learning curve. But after the first week, you shouldn’t have to spend much more time on training, especially if you’ve got the right person for the job.

You can also have your support person or team do all those other things you don’t like to do, such as analyze stats, clean email lists, install websites, and social media, etc. Whatever you prefer to hand off, go ahead and do it.

Hiring someone for 2 hours a day frees up 2 hours of your own time. If you pay them $12 an hour, that’s $480 a month – possibly more than you currently pay for programs and how-to info.

And it’s 40 hours per month that you’ve just gained. Imagine using that 40 hours each month to create and market a new product – 12 new products in a year. If each product would initially make you just $3,000 and then just another $500 a month – well, you do the math.

If you’re still hesitating, think about this: If you strike a deal with your support person to pay them monthly, then you’ve got 30 days to use your newfound time to make more than enough money to cover them for the first month.

Thirty days and 40 newfound hours. But that’s not even the most significant benefit of bringing someone in to help you with your business.

The most significant benefit is what it will do for your mindset because suddenly, you ARE a business person. There’s no more wondering if you’re dabbling in a hobby. This stuff is REAL, and you are now responsible for someone else’s income. This motivator will kick you out of bed each morning and ensure you have a successful day.

Use one of the freelance sites to find someone. Yes, it will feel like a big step because it is. A big step in the right direction that is. Because the rewards will prove that taking this next logical step in your business evolution was worth it.

Standing apart from the crowd of other emails in your prospects’ inboxes isn’t easy. There are gimmicky ways to do it – write subject lines that shock, use lots of funny characters in the subject line, use the latest “hot” subject line [for the past year, this has been “Hey”], and so forth. But how do you get your recipients to become avid readers of your emails?

Sane Method #1 – Tell stories. There is a marketer who appears in my inbox about once a day. Gmail highlights this email because Gmail knows I read his emails. Why? Because he entertains me with stories. When I click his email, I will get swept into another world. And even if it’s just his world and just for a minute, it’s a great escape to my otherwise sometimes monotonous day. And yes, I buy his products, too.

There’s a bonus to telling stories besides the fact that your emails get opened and read, and it’s this: Telling stories is fun. Instead of selling, selling, and more selling, you’re now entertaining. You can embellish, you can be flamboyant, you can add your personal touch, you can get creative, and you can have a blast doing it.

Suddenly your day is just a little more exciting because you’re watching for the next story to fall into your life every moment. Even a routine trip to the store can become an exciting adventure. The newspaper holds new meaning, and the websites you visit are a treasure trove of possible stories you can share.

Sane Method #2 – Be a coach. Think of your readers as your students. Love your subject and stick to your topic. Only build your list with people who want info on your subject, then teach them all you can about it. When recommending products, tell them the good and the bad. Give them lots of detail. Be their coach first and foremost; they will hang on to your every word.

This method works incredibly well if you love your topic. It’s for you if you spend hours on the Internet learning about this topic, hitting all the forums and websites, finding the best products, and so forth. Every new site you visit is an adventure because you continually seek more information to share with your students. And selling becomes easy because you share your knowledge with your students.

The [Not-so] Crazy Method – Hide clues in your emails that lead to prizes. I haven’t yet tried this method, but I’ve been tempted. What if every email you send out holds a clue to a valuable prize? Collect all the clues, and you will find the award online. There’s little doubt this method will open your emails, but will they be read? In the right niche, yes. Imagine doing this in a gaming niche – what a killer technique. The viral effect alone could be huge.

So tell me – is this last method crazy, or a millionaire maker? I don’t know of anyone who’s doing it – yet. But no doubt someone will. And in the right hands, it could be decisive, indeed.