Archive | July, 2021

Goal setting is great in theory. Write down your goals, maybe write them down every day, carry them with you… And in a year nothing has changed. Let’s be honest… Most of the time goal setting simply is not enough to get things done.

Even when you break BIG goals down into little steps and then gradually work towards those goals, it still doesn’t work for many people.

If you are one of those people who can routinely achieve the goals you set, then congrats – you can stop reading right here. But if you’ve set goals – and set more goals – and set even MORE goals – and you STILL don’t have what you want…

…or maybe you don’t even like setting goals…

…then I’m going to propose you do something a little different.

Stop sweating the goals and instead focus on systems.

Yes, SYSTEMS.

You thought I was going to say habits, right? Habits are good but they’re not always flexible enough to get you to where you want to go.

Here’s an example of the difference between a habit and a system. Let’s say you want to bench press 250 pounds. You can make it a habit to do weight lifting at 6am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But if you don’t have a system for increasing your reps and weights over time, you’ll never reach your goal.

Habits are repeatable actions you do without thinking, like going to the gym at a certain time on certain days. A system is a series of actions you take, like systematically increasing reps and weight to reach your goal. If you’re just lifting weight without a system to increase reps and weights, you’ll never improve.

Goals alone without systems can be detrimental and limiting. Princeton’s theology school did an experiment: Theology students were told to go to another building on campus and teach a class on The Good Samaritan. You’ll recall that the Samaritan story is about a man who was beaten and left by the side of the road. Others walked past him, but the Good Samaritan stopped and helped him.

Students were told to go teach the story of the Good Samaritan to another class. But they were also told they were late and must hurry. An actor was planted on their path, lying on the ground, hurt, moaning in pain and even screaming twice.

Every single theology student ran past the injured person to go teach the class on the Good Samaritan. One person even stepped over the person in pain to get to the class.

The goal was to get to the class and make the presentation on time and the students were blind to any other possibility. They were so focused on that goal that they missed the bigger picture and personal perspective to help the injured person. But if these students had a system by which they lived, that system would likely have prioritized living the story of the Good Samaritan rather than just teaching it.

If you have a goal to earn a million dollars a year, you might bend rules, break laws or even hurt people to achieve that goal. But if you have a system that says you make money by providing real value to others, then you’re going to stay on the right path.

I think of the difference between habits and systems like this:

A habit is, “I write every day from 8am to 10am.

A system is, “I work on writing a book every day from 8am to 10am for two months, at which time I’ve completed a book. For the next 3 weeks I market and promote the book during this time, and for the fourth week I do research and outline my next book during this time. And then I repeat the system.

This might be an oversimplification, but the point is the system has more flexibility than a habit, allowing you to adapt as you go. Figure out what you want to achieve and then create systems to get you there. Build flexibility into your system so that when something unexpected happens, you know how to get back on track.

Lastly, focus on your system (the process or journey) and not on the goal (your destination). When you give your attention to where you are now (the system) you’ll find you’re much happier in the moment than if you are continually wishing for the goal itself. You’ll be able to celebrate little victories every single day by using your systems, rather than putting happiness off until you finally reach your destination.

Plus when you do reach your destination, because you have systems in place, you also won’t experience the paradoxical and yet all too common experience of feeling empty or sad because you no longer have that big goal to look forward to.

Okay, this case study is a little strange because I’m basically going to combine two case studies into one. That is, I’m going to take the best of each of the two case studies, throw out what didn’t work well and show you how you can maximize your own earnings with your own PLR site.

I don’t mean a site that you build using PLR materials – this is a site that sells a monthly membership to online marketers that allows them to access and use the PLR materials you supply.

In our first case study, Mark hired someone to create internet marketing type PLR packages each month. Then he sold exactly 100 memberships to get this PLR. The beauty of his plan was that only 100 members would have the PLR materials and they wouldn’t have to worry about saturation. Because of this, those initial 100 memberships at $29 each sold out within a couple of hours.

But here was the problem… it was capped at 100 members. The very thing that made it easy to sell was also the thing that limited how much Mark would earn each month. When someone dropped out of the membership, he alerted his wait list to see if someone else wanted to join. But again, he could never have more than 100 members at any one time.

That’s when Mark got creative: He started building small websites that consisted of a landing page, a lead magnet and a main website that promoted ClickBank affiliate links. Each month he would build five of these, all different but all using the same PLR materials from that month. Some of the materials were used for the lead magnet, some for the main website, and the ClickBank promotions were for related products.

Then he sold each of these five websites, each on its own unique URL. This little step more than doubled his income, earning him about $5,000 a month after the expense of getting his PLR materials written.

Enter Susan. She, too, built a PLR membership site, but her niche was self-improvement. And rather than limit the number of memberships she sold, she instead made her members “qualify”. She did this by having them do one of two things: They could provide the URL of their self-improvement or coaching website or social media page.

If they didn’t yet have a site, they could provide their plan for building their self-improvement or coaching business (20-50 words) and certify they would be using the materials to help others. The idea was that you had to be a self-improvement or coaching professional to qualify, but the fact was almost anyone could pass the test.

Now Susan could sell as many memberships as she liked. And in fact she provided a private Facebook Page for members-only where they could meet, strategize and work together on their own projects. A lot of joint ventures came out of that FB Page. And the best part was, the more people who joined, the more potential JV partners there were.

Susan charges $47 a month for her membership. And because people must qualify, they stay for longer and seem to appreciate the membership more.

Both Mark and Susan promote other products inside their membership area. These are products that are extremely helpful as well as being timeless. No junk is promoted inside the memberships because neither marketer wants to ruin their reputation with their members.

Susan has a unique twist on this: Every six months she has an extra PLR package created. This package is given for free to everyone who has made a purchase from inside the membership site, or they can buy it for $47. This encourages members to buy something in addition to the membership every six months. Susan also sells this package on its own as a stand-alone PLR package. Her upsell? Of course, it’s the self-improvement PLR membership.

Mark and Susan also sell past packages to new members. When someone new joins the membership, they are offered the chance to purchase previous months’ PLR packages. Susan offers every package ever created for the membership, either sold separately or as one big discounted package.

Mark, on the other hand, only sells packages that are at least six months old because of his rule of limiting the number of members he can have. It wouldn’t seem right to him to sell last month’s package to the 100 active members last month AND to 10 new members this month.

By now you’re coming to the same conclusion I reached… limiting the number of members is a BAD idea. A possible exception might be if you charge a LOT of money. But at $27 a month, you really don’t want to have membership limits, even if it does make it easier to sell out.

One more thing… Susan does not allow members to leave and then come back again at a later date. She makes it perfectly clear that if someone resigns a membership, they are gone forever. If you think about it, this makes good sense. Very few people in a membership will leave and then later want to come back. By telling them they don’t have this option, it makes members want to stay rather than permanently losing out.

If someone is having financial difficulty, rather than make them leave she will give them a free month or two to tide them over. This might sound counterintuitive but it makes for incredibly strong goodwill. She’s had members who asked to be comped for a month or two who subsequently stayed with her for another year or two after that period. And she’s even had a few pay her for the months she comped because they were grateful for her generosity. You could say she treats her members like family and it really pays off.

Now here’s what Mark did one day when he was desperate for money: He was in the middle of buying a house and realized things would go a lot smoother if he had another $10,000 for his down payment. The problem was, he needed this money right away. So he mailed out to every single past member of his membership site and offered them a full year of membership for just $99. A surprisingly large percentage of those past members said yes to the offer. Then he mailed to his list and gave them the same offer, resulting in even more sales and close to $15,000 in his pocket.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking… what about his limit of 100 members? He worked so hard not to violate that rule, and then he went and more than doubled his members by offering the annual option. I’m not going to judge – I just report. Again, maybe it’s not the best thing long term to say you’re going to limit the number of members you have for your membership.

If you’re wondering what sort of PLR you would need to create or have someone else create for your site, here’s my advice on that point:

Watch what is selling right now in your niche. What’s hot? What is it that everyone is talking about? Then have a complete package built around that topic including product, promotional emails and ads, sales letter and so forth. Make the quality such that you would have no trouble selling it to the end user. In fact, a great secret to selling any PLR is to first sell it to the end user to PROVE that its good enough to sell.

Imagine if you can promote your PLR membership site by stating that you sold the very products in the site and here’s your conversion rate and here’s your profit and here’s when you sold it. You could update your sales letter each month with the new PLR product and stats for that month. And yes, selling your PLR to end users is just one more stream of income from your PLR membership site.

Here’s one more trick that Mark used to add another income stream and better retain his members: He offered STEEP discounts on products to his members. He simply contacted product owners of relevant, high priced products and asked if he could negotiate a deal for 20 of his members. These are products that originally sold for $200 to $3,000. He offered a discount of 50% to 90% off, but only for the first 20 buyers. Believe it or not, this scarcity technique was highly effective and he usually sold all 20 copies to his membership of 100.

Here’s an example of something he sold recently: It was a $1,000 product that he offered to his members at an 80% discount, bringing it down to $200. 50% commission meant he earned $100 per sale, times 20 sales and that’s an extra $2,000.

PLR is alive and well and selling like gangbusters. And with a little planning you too can have your own PLR membership site with potentially several streams of income.

Ouch! You’ve got a great product. In fact, there’s never been another product like yours in the history of the world. Your product is going to sell like GANGBUSTERS because, well, because you just know it will. Because it has to. Because you just sunk the last 6 months and several thousand dollars into building the product, but, it’s going to all be worth it as soon as these stupid, snobby, too-good-to-talk-to-you big shot marketers come down off of their high horses and promote it for you.

Whew.

Okay, maybe that’s not exactly how you see it.

But you do believe you’ve got a great product that will sell well, and you know you’re doing these other marketers a FAVOR by offering them the chance to promote it for you. Because after all, they have nothing to do and nothing to promote. They’re just waiting for you to come along and give them a chance to double the millions they’ve already earned…

Yeah. Right.

I remember all too well how hard it was to get anyone to take a look at my offer, much less promote it for me when I was new. And do you know why? It’s because like almost every new marketer out there, I had it backwards.

Imagine a man knocks on the door of a woman he’s never met before. She opens the door a crack to see who it is and realizes she doesn’t know him from an axe murderer. Through the crack in the door he says to her, “Hi Baby, I have a fantastic deal for you! I’m going to do you a huge favor by letting you drive me in your car to an expensive restaurant where you’ve made reservations for us. I’m going to let you buy me dinner with cocktails and a bottle of wine, and afterwards I’ll let you take me to an expensive Broadway show that’s booked six months in advance. And after that, I’ll do you an even bigger favor and let you sleep with me. What do you say?”

Seriously, what do you think she’ll say to this stranger at her door? I suspect she slammed the door shut when he got to the part about the expensive restaurant and reservations.

And yet new marketers take this exact same approach all the time when asking established marketers to act as their affiliates or JV partners.

“Hi Joe Marketer, I have a fantastic deal for you! I’m going to do you a huge favor by letting you devote several days of your precious promotional schedule to selling my product to your list and followers. Sure, you don’t know me, you don’t know my product and you have zero reason to trust me or my product. But I still expect you to drop everything and instead of promoting something you KNOW will sell and you know your customers will love, I want you to take a huge chance on promoting a product that might not sell at all, that might be awful, that might alienate your customers and ruin your reputation. Because hey, that’s what you should do for a total stranger, right?”

Now imagine receiving one or even several of these requests every day. Is it any wonder that seasoned marketers stop answering their email, and new marketers have trouble getting anyone to promote for them?

Let’s go back to the guy and gal analogy. What if that guy were to come up to the woman – not at her front door, but at work – and simply introduce himself and maybe thank her for something she did at her job? Maybe he comes back in a couple of days and comments on something she wrote or asks a relevant question. He starts following her on social media and engaging her there.

A little bit of interaction here, a little bit there…

Then maybe he does something nice for her – shares one of her links, tells his Facebook Fans about her business – or he simply buys one of her products. She’s starting to take notice of him. He’s not scary and in fact he seems like a nice guy. What’s this? He’s got a website. She checks it out. Hmmm… this might be someone worth getting to know better.

The following month or maybe the following year, what happens? She’s promoting his product. Or maybe she’s not, but maybe she introduced him to a friend of hers that’s an even better fit for a joint venture.

You already know the point I’m getting to here – don’t pounce on strangers and expect them to do you a huge favor when they don’t even know you. And yes, promoting your product is indeed a huge favor.

The 3 Secrets to Landing Big JV Partners:

1. Build the relationship before asking for the favor, whatever that favor might be. (You already knew that, right?)

2. Build your own audience through social media, list building and so forth. Then when your product is ready to launch, launch it to your list first. Take note of the clickthrough rates, conversion rates and refund rates. Now you’ve got something to tell potential affiliates and JV partners other than, “I think this will sell well.”

3. Realize that not everyone is going to promote your product, no matter how good you are at building relationships first. Maybe they only promote their own products. Maybe they just don’t think your product is a good fit for their list. Maybe they’re having a bad day/week/life. Don’t worry about it. If you build enough relationships with others, you’ll find that some promote, some don’t and it’s all good.