Your 2013 New Years Resolution – With a twist
Make your 2013 new years resolution to turn your passion into profits.
In the updated version of her book, ’31 Days to Millionaire Marketing Miracles’, my friend Tracy Repchuck explains how deciding to make a different New Years’ Resolution in 2007 changed her life forever.
Like many people she usually made a resolution each January 1st to lose weight but come the following January found herself making the same resolution again. For most of us our resolutions don’t usually make it past the end of January and clearly Tracy’s resolution to lose weight didn’t make it either. (To be honest I didn’t think she needed to lose weight but that’s often true in many cases).
Anyway, in January of 2007 she decided to take the resolution idea and spend the next 31 days posting to her blog exactly what she did each day to make 2007 her year of financial freedom and provide a blueprint for others to follow. Instead of losing weight it was going to be a year of teaching others how to gain wealth like she was. And what a year it turned out to be. I highly recommend you get her book and read her story
How about making this coming January your time to turn your passion into profits? There are thousands of people coming online all of the time and they would love to read and learn from your journey as you achieve your new years resolution.
Where to start?
I’ve said many times that Internet Marketing is simple. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, it isn’t. Internet Marketing is a business and running a business is rarely easy. The Internet is a wonderful tool. Whatever topic you want to learn about you will find information about it on the Internet. As fantastic as that is it doesn’t come without it’s problems.
Today, there is so much information online that overwhelm is a common problem. When you’re starting out online you are faced with such a volume of information to sort through that it’s not surprising that people get confused.
You’re presented with lots of different bits of information that often don’t seem to be connected in any way. Working online can be a very lonely activity. You can feel very isolated, trying to wade through the swamp on your own. Add to that, the fact that you may not have any experience of running a business and you can quickly feel like you would be better off sticking with that job you hate and forget your dreams of a better life.
How do you sift the good from the bad. What information do you actually need to make the progress you want to as opposed to what you are lead to believe you need. How do you piece together the various bits that you do need?
It almost seems like a right of passage for new people coming online to make money to have to spend 6 – 12 months wandering around in the wilderness trying this and that ‘sure fire way of making money’ before they realise that t’s time to go back to basics, get the help of someone who has gone through the process and follow their plan. Some people spend many more months or even years lost and sadly many never get there, they give up in frustration convinced that this idea of making money online must be a scam. Like all ways of marketing anything there will always be people that want to scam you to make a quick buck. That’s one of the things we have to put up with.
You’ll be pleased to know that it isn’t a scam, it’s another way of marketing – a very effective way, but it does need some skills that may be new to you. The good news is that the skills you need can be learned or outsourced to someone else so if you have been feeling that you don’t have the technical skills for this you have no need to worry.
If you’ve already spent months trying this and that and feel now that you have just been wasting your time you’ll be pleased to know that everything you’ve learned will be useful as we work together on your journey to financial freedom.
Goal setting
When I work with my coaching clients I Usually find that they don’t expect to start by talking about goals. They just want to start making money as quickly as possible and see talking about goals as just getting in the way of that. Surely, wanting to make money is the most important and usually the only goal they should have. The thing is that ‘I want to make money’ isn’t a very useful goal. It doesn’t say how much money, or in what timescale or in what niche.
Before you start anything you need to have the end point clearly in mind. You may have heard the saying that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Don’t gloss over the significance of this, it is the key to rapid success. The most successful people online and offline refuse to get sidetracked by anything that doesn’t contribute directly to what they are trying to achieve. They set a goal and work consistently towards it. Lots of people have difficulty when it comes to setting and achieving goals but it’s really important for our success so let’s look at how I recommend we do that.
Goal setting isn’t a passive process, something that you do once and forget. It is an on-going process that you need to update regularly. You need to know what the end point is before you can set out the straight line between where you are and where you want to get to. Let’s look at an example to illustrate this point. Let’s suppose that you want to make $10,000 over the next 12 months. You have two hours to work on your business each day and you will work on your business 5 days a week. If we break down our end goal into smaller chunks we find that we need to make around $834 per month or $42 a day. So our start point is to create a plan to make $42 a day. We will look at how we go about generating $42 a day later but for now lets keep going with our example. Now since we are starting from scratch we won’t make money from day one, we could spend the first month gettng things in place.
So looking back at our example we now only have 11 months to achieve our goal so that changes the figures. We now need to make around $910 a month or $46 a day.
Do you see now how goal setting isn’t passive? We need to keep reviewing it as we progress.
Your First Task
There are some basic things that you need to have in place in order to start marketing online. Actually there are only three things that you must have and I’m going to show you how to get two of those at no cost and the third one very cheap. What other business can you get started with for no cost? – probably none right?
Now just because I’m going to help you get started for free, don’t make the mistake of undervaluing what you’re getting. This is crucial. It’s too easy to not value something we get for free, don’t do that OK, value the fact that you got a lucky break to kickstart your online business.
So what are the three things you must have? A domain name, a hosting account and an autoresponder account – that’s it. With just those three things in place and some knowledge about marketing online you are set to make millions, literally. Sounds too good to be true I know but thousands of people have done it and are doing it all of the time.
Domain name
First of all you need to decide on a domain name for your business and buy that – I can’t help you there. You need a hosting account so that you have somewhere to build your web presence. All websites on the Internet are stored on a server (a special type of computer) in a data center somewhere. Websites are stored in a similar way to the way that you store the files on your own computer at home. I’ll go through how to decide on your domain name in my next post because this wil be very long if I cover it here.
Hosting account
There are lots of companies that provide hosting services all over the world. The most popular of these is Hostgator who host millions of websites. However, I host websites myself through my own hosting service and as a special for my readers I’m offering to host your first website on my servers for the first year for free. I’m doing that because I want to help you get started as quickly as possible for as low a start-up cost as possible. If you’d like to take me up on my offer just drop me an email to hosting-offer@trevor-greenfield.com with your request and include the domain name that you want to use for your site. If you’re unsure what to do, just email me anyway.
If you’d rather go with Hostgator or someone else, that’s fine but you do need to get a hosting account in place.
Autoresponder
An autoresponder is an email service that allows you to contact lots of subscribers at preset intervals or whenever you want to send out a broadcast to your list. One of the keys to success online is having a responsive list that you can send out your offers to. When it comes to selecting a provider for your autoresponder the popular choice is aweber. They are the biggest and most used of all the autoresponder services but does have a minimum charge.
When you’re just starting out and need to keep costs to a minimum I would recommend imnica mail. There is no charge to use their services until your list gets over 1000 subscribers and you send out less than 6000 emails a month.
Your first niche
While you’re waiting for my next post about choosing a domain name and sorting out your autoresponder account, start giving some thought to the niche that you want to be building your web business around. I’ll go into that more next time as well.
Until then,
Remember “Nothing happens until we take action”
regards,
Trevor
