Every sale you make is a sale you have somehow purchased. And once you get your mind around this, marketing will become a lot easier.

Free traffic? There is no such thing. Maybe you didn’t spend money to get the traffic, but guaranteed you spent time.

Sales from affiliates? You spent time recruiting them and you are paying them a commission on each sale.

Sales to your own list? You bought those customers from the method you used to get them on your list, warming them up, getting them to trust you, etc.

You are always investing SOMETHING to make a sale.

Which is why, if you haven’t already, you need to learn to make $1.50 on every $1 of advertising you spend. By spending money on proven methods to get sales, you can rapidly scale up.

You spend $1000 on Facebook ads and make $1500? Congrats, you now have a sustainable business. Rinse and repeat and repeat and repeat.

This is the ultimate goal – to stop spending your time and start investing your money to get sales.

After all, you only have so much time, and every minute is precious.

But when you can make money every time you invest money – NOW you are truly a marketer, and that six and seven figure business is just around the corner.

Let’s say you’re building a sales funnel to promote a new weight loss program.

Your lead magnet should detail ways to lose weight. But here’s the key – make these methods painful. Discouraging. Problematic. Complicated. Etc.

Maybe you give them a diet that’s difficult to follow. Or a workout plan that’s enough to make an athlete cry. Whatever.

It should be something that will definitely get the job done, IF they follow it.

But they won’t want to, which is the point.

Because then you will ‘save the day’ by offering them the ‘easy solution.’

Which is, of course, the program you are promoting.

This way you get the exact people you want to enter your funnel (people who want to lose weight) and you prime them to grab your easy solution, because otherwise it just seems too difficult.

This works for almost anything. Do you sell software? Make your lead magnet about how to manually get the same result your software will provide for them automatically.

Do you sell a book writing service? Tell them how to write a book in excruciating, pains-taking over the top detail. Remind them at the end of every chapter that you are there for them if they want to do what so many others have already done, and hire you to write their book for them while they go about their merry lives.

You get the idea.

Make your lead magnet helpful but painful. Then offer them the easy, fast solution they really want.

I recently saw a video clip of a heavy set young woman running behind a car.

The car’s truck is open, and a young man is sitting in the car’s trunk facing the running woman. In the man’s hand is a stack of one dollar bills, and as the woman chases the car, the man repeatedly hands the woman a one dollar bill. If she keeps running, she gets more dollars. If she can’t keep up with the car, she gets no more money.

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Crazy? Maybe.

Effective? Only in the short term.

Is it realistic to do this every time she goes running? Probably not.

Which raises two questions:

First, what will motivate you in the short term to just get started on your next project? What will get you moving right now?

And what will keep you moving in the right direction over the long haul?

For example, if your goal is to write a book, then maybe treating yourself to a night out once you have your outline completed will get you started. But you can’t treat yourself to a night out for each milestone, can you? Maybe you can. But more likely this won’t continue to motivate you.

So what will keep you moving over the long haul to achieve your big goals? If you’re like most people, it’s focusing on the reason WHY you’re doing what you’re doing.

Take a moment and see your future once you’ve completed the goal. Is the picture motivating? Good.

Now keep replaying that ‘reason why’ in your head over and over and over again until you reach your goal.

This is what motivates people to do great things – focusing on that big reason of WHY they are doing it.