Archive | December, 2022

If you’ve ever read Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich,” you know that he repeatedly alludes to “the secret” without ever stating exactly what the secret is.

A quick aside here – I wonder if his book would still be popular to this day if he had simply STATED the secret, rather than leaving it a bit of a mystery? I don’t think so.

Some have said the secret is to, “Conceive it, believe it and then achieve it.” That is, you need to decide what you want, believe with all your heart that you can and WILL achieve it, and then take the action necessary to make it happen.

Others have said the secret lies in Chapter 2, where even Napoleon’s own son said he was able to identify the secret. That chapter is about “Desire: The Starting Point Of All Achievement.”

Chapter 2 reads, “The method by which desire for riches can be transmuted into its financial equivalent consists of six definite, practical steps…”

“First. Be definite as to the amount.” Desiring a lot of money or to be rich won’t work. Making a goal of $5,000 a month in income will.

“Second. Determine exactly what you intend to give in return for the money you desire.” You don’t get something for nothing – if you did, you could simply make a wish and your desire would appear. You’ll need to exchange your efforts for the money you desire, so what is it you can do? How can you give tremendous value to others?

“Third. Establish a definite date when you intend to possess the money you desire.” Never underestimate the power of a deadline, or the need to be accountable to someone. Tell the person you least want to disappoint of your deadline, and be sure they hold you to it.

“Fourth. Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire, and begin at once, whether you are ready or not, to put this plan into action.” Decide what you’re going to do, and then just do it. Don’t wait – procrastination leads to excuses which leads to more procrastination. Begin immediately.

“Fifth. Write out a clear, concise statement of the amount of money you intend to acquire, name the time limit for its acquisition, state what you intend to give in return for the money, and describe clearly the plan through which you intend to accumulate it.” You’ve heard this before – Write it down. Make it concrete. Make it REAL.

“Sixth. Read your written statement aloud, twice daily, once just before retiring at night, and once after arising in the morning. AS YOU READ – SEE AND FEEL AND BELIEVE YOURSELF ALREADY IN POSSESSION OF THE MONEY.” Twice a day? I would suggest several times a day. Keep your goal right in front of you so that it’s on your mind always, like a mantra. It should be the last thing you think about as you fall asleep, the first thing you think of upon waking, and your predominant thought throughout the day. As you think about it, BELIEVE it is already done – you are simply going through the formalities.

You’ll notice that these 6 steps assume one thing – that you will take ACTION and do whatever it is you need to do to make it happen.

Six steps, plus action.

If we were to boil this down to its essence, what would it be?

Conceive it
Believe it
Achieve it

And there you have it – Napoleon Hill’s secret to Thinking and Growing Rich.

Famous sales person Ben Gay tells the story of being on an ocean going fishing boat with a very successful friend. His friend hooked a whopper of a fish on his line. The crew went crazy with someone shouting out “slow down, speed up, hard to port, etc.” Crew members were running around doing whatever they do and the entire boat had a feeling of total chaos while his friend was working on landing this fish.

But his friend was as calm as could be. When Ben asked his friend how he could stay so calm amid all this frenzy, his friend replied, “While the fish and the crew don’t know the outcome of this struggle, I do.”

His friend had already conceived and believed he would catch a giant fish. All that was left was to calmly and serenely land him.

Hopefully you are the exception to these mistakes. If you’re not, take heart: 9 out of 10 online marketers make these very same mistakes. Here’s how to rise above your competition and increase your bottom line simply by NOT making these 5 mistakes…

Spamming on social media. You opened your Twitter account with the best of intentions to Tweet valuable content and answer questions, but now nearly every tweet you send out is a link promoting a product. If this is you, then it’s time for a change. Promotion is fine as long as it makes up only 20-30% of your tweets at MOST. The rest should be content rich and helpful to your followers. And this goes for every social media network, not just Twitter.

Not testing. You create a new squeeze page but you don’t test one headline against another. Result? Every day that goes by, you are losing money. Test everything and eventually the exact same effort will yield 1.5, 2 or even 3 times the results.

Not asking for the sale. Whether you’re looking for an opt-in, a share or a sale, tell them exactly what you want them to do. If you don’t make your call-to-action clear, you will get less than stellar results every time.

Ignoring your current customers. Are you so busy looking for new business that you forget to pay attention to your most important asset – your current customers? These are the people who already trust you enough to have purchased at least one of your products. That’s why your current customers are actually your best future prospects in the world – treat them like gold.

Talking about you, you and YOU. Do you know who your customers care about? Themselves. They don’t care about you, only about what you can do for them. This sounds harsh, but it’s true. Yes, you can tell them an anecdote about what happened to you last weekend, but it better have something in it for them. Your customers don’t want you or your products. They want solutions to their problems. Remember this and you can’t go wrong.

“Find out what people want and sell it to them” is advice you’ll hear time and time again. Why? Because it generally works. After all, if someone wants breakfast cereal made out of toads and frogs and you’re the only one selling it, you can command your own price.

But what if there is massive competition in the toad and frog cereal niche? Then you’ve got to differentiate yourself. You’ve got to find a way to stand apart and above the others selling a very similar product.

Or you can go a different route, the way companies like Apple roll, and that’s to find out what people WILL want. You see, all of the greatest products were at one time non-existent. No one knew you could ride in cars and so they used horses and maybe buggies. Then along comes the car – something no one had seen before, and people quickly realized they wanted it. Decades later consumers didn’t know they wanted computers and the Internet. Nor did they know they wanted cell phones and then super sophisticated cell phones, but once they were introduced, people desperately wanted them.

So if you can find a want before it even exists, you’ve got no competition – at least for the first few weeks and even months.

And you can take this even one step further. It’s not just a matter of finding out what people will want, it’s also a matter of finding a way to offer it to them that takes the work out of it. Imagine if Apple sold its products as kits that had to be put together – would they sell as many phones and tablets as they do now? Doubtful.

There was a time when computers were basically sold as kits. You get the plans, you buy the parts, you put together your computer. So who had computers during this time? A relative handful of people who liked to tinker on electronics. It wasn’t until several years later when computers were sold ready-made that the market took off.

If we were looking at this as a tiered system, with each subsequent tier being preferable to the previous, then the first tier is the old standby of offering customers what they already want. The second tier is offering what they want before they even know they want it. And the third and final tier is to offer what they want before they know they want it, and take all of the work out of it for them.

Sell them the ready made solution where the only action they need to take is to make the decision to buy. Make them feel good for taking that action, like they made a real contribution to getting the solution you’re offering. In essence you’re giving them the satisfied feeling that they really accomplished something important when they hit that order button. But in fact YOU are doing the actual, real work, whatever that might be.

If you’re offering a revolutionary new WP theme, install it for them. If you’re offering a complete business solution, set the whole thing up for them. If you’re offering an irrigation system or an automobile makeover or even an exercise program, make them feel that all they have to do is make the decision. That’s it. Then you will do the rest.

Now of course you and I know that in many cases, they will have to do work. But that’s not something they want to think about during the sales process. In the example of the exercise program, all they have to do is show up and then you will guide them step-by-step. They don’t have to think about a thing, they just follow along. You’re making it appear as though you do the work, when in reality they are the ones actually working.

Is this deceptive? Not in the slightest. If you say you will build them a website and then you send them instructions on how to do it themselves, then of course that would be deceptive. But if you build the site for them and then they have to update it themselves, or if you show them exactly how to exercise but they have to actually move their own bodies, you truly are taking the lion’s share of the work of thinking out of it for them.

In the sales process when you are romancing the customer, it’s okay to make them feel 10 feet tall for simply “taking action.” And it’s also a very smart move to continue to congratulate them for their wise decision, since this will make for happy customers who don’t cancel.

Find out what people want, or better still, what they WILL want, and then remove the work as much as you can and you will have a winning business model.