Marketing vs Advertising

We have outstanding training available with my business, and I never miss a training call with this particular woman. She is incredibly knowledgeable, and she also is able to share her knowledge very well - she's a great teacher. Something she said on a recent call changed my life by inducing a paradigm shift (a radical change in my worldview).  

I have been expending a bunch of time, money, and effort advertising, with unsatisfactory results.  She said anyone can advertise, but marketing is a skill that will feed me the rest of my life if I am willing to master it. Rather than throwing advertisements out there into cyberspace and watching for what sticks, she said marketing involves more purposeful action.

One of the most important tasks is to define my target market.  Who is it exactly I would like to join me in business? What characteristics do they have? What is their passion?  What do they like to do?  Where do they live? What type of income are they used to?  

Then she talked about what she calls "the problem-solution space." People are online searching for things because they have problems they want to solve.  If I can speak directly to what hurts or frustrates them and offer a viable solution, I have a great deal of interest generated in my product or service.   

To refine this further, she suggested to specifically define my target audience, then do research to locate the places they go in order go there myself, grab their attention with a carefully crafted ad, then speak to them about the solution(s) I offer. Sounds simple, no?  Not really.  But at least I will be spending my advertising (ahem, marketing) dollars more strategically.  My conversion rates will definitely go up, because I am addressing an audience that is more open to what I have to offer.  This is every marketer's dream!

Why It Is Imperative for Your Future to Start a Business

I just read this article by Robert Ringer, and it is RIGHT ON. Most of my co-workers and friends believe that they will be able to retire and Social Security and Medicare will be there for them. Yes, it is painful and challenging to make the mental and emotional changes necessary to successfully start and run a profitable business, but if you consider the alternative of the inadequate income and healthcare that will be the lot of most of us if we depend on the government to help us in our "golden years," we will be sadly disappointed and feel betrayed.  Better to get this issue taken care of as soon as possible, and get started with entrepreneurship.

Here's the article:

KICKING THE CAN DOWN THE ROAD

By Robert Ringer

Too bad it wasn't mandatory for every American to watch the segment 60 Minutes did on David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States.  Walker heads up the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which acts on behalf of taxpayers to assure a nonpartisan, honest assessment of government operations - especially government spending.

Walker bluntly stated that the most serious threat to the U.S. is not some guy hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but our own fiscal irresponsibility.  You know he's sincere when he says he has given up on elected officials to take responsible action.  He truly believes the very survival of the U.S. is at stake if voters do not demand that their elected officials make some hard choices. To overly simplify it, the catalyst for our fiscal predicament is the eat-drink-and-be-merry bunch affectionately referred to as "baby boomers."  If you were born between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Vietnam War, when the "culture of consumption" somehow became synonymous with the American Dream, this means you.

Those Florida retirement communities you see advertised on television - the ones where retirees are yukking it up, playing golf, enjoying aerobics classes, and sipping midday cocktails - are where an awful lot of your fellow baby boomers fully intend to be in the not-too-distant future.  And when your time comes, you not only won't want to hear about work, you also won't be in a mood to hear about medical bills.  All you are going to be focused on is that it's your turn to be supported by the people at the bottom of the pyramid.

Only one problem:  The pyramid is upside down.  And it's going to continue to get wider at the top and narrower at the bottom with each passing year.  GAO projections make it clear that just over the Horizon of Fiscal Hell, there won't be enough wage earners to support the Arnold Palmer golf-community folks.

So, when does the sky begin to fall?  It's already falling! The first Boomer, Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, stepped up to the Government Retirement Trough on January 1, 2008. And, along with 78 million other boomers right behind her in the entitlements line, she's looking for her Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Of course, every halfway-informed individual knows that the real culprit is health care costs.  Medicare expenses are five times greater than Social Security benefits. So what did President Bush and Congress do to begin whittling away at this draconian problem?  They passed a prescription drug bill that added $8 trillion (that's trillion) to what was already a $15-20 trillion underfunding of the health care system.  If you or I did something equivalent to this in our own little worlds, we'd be incarcerated without a trial.

Washington insiders agree that most politicians fully understand the mathematics of impending doom, but they aren't about to admit it to their constituents.  The number-one objective of politicians is to get reelected, and they fully realize that telling the truth would get them booted off the Washington gravy train rather quickly.  They are well aware that voters despise truth; and, in fact, have a penchant for tarring and feathering truth messengers.

Which is why liberal and (so-called) conservative politicians just keep kicking the entitlements can down the road, hoping upon hope that the painful truth won't come home to roost until long after they're out of office. Every politician you see on C-SPAN proposing a new sleight-of-hand "reform" of the Social Security and Medicare programs is lying - and s/he knows s/he's lying.  

Nearly 30 years ago, I warned my readers about the inevitable collapse of the vote-driven entitlements system in this country, and proposed a simple solution to the Social Security scam.  I said then, and believe even more strongly today, that both Social Security and Medicare must be 100 percent phased out.  Better a phase-out than a monumental collapse that would not only cause a great deal of pain, but could very well bring about anarchy - which history tells us is likely to be followed by a dictatorship. My suggestion was that benefits be slowly phased out at the rate of 2 percent per year. Thus, people just reaching retirement age, who have been paying into and counting on Social Security throughout their working years, would receive 100 percent of what was promised to them.  People eligible the next year would receive only 98 percent of what was promised to them.  And so on.  In this way, FDR's wicked brainchild would disappear completely after 50 years, with fewer and fewer people relying on it along the way.

Unfortunately, humility forces me to admit that there is zero chance the powers that be will adopt a solution remotely resembling the one I proposed.  On the contrary, you can count on politicians to keep kicking the can down the road. Which is why, if you are more than 20 years away from retirement, you'd be wise to assume that when the can rolls to a halt at your feet, there won't be anyone around to kick it any further.

For me, this is going to be a slam-dunk "I told you so."  And that's when you'll want to have your own nest egg safely hidden away. The absolute best way to protect yourself? Start right now by setting up a business that acts as your own personal security blanket. It should throw off enough a steady stream of passive income for decades - and keep you from counting on on institution that's crumbling faster every day.

In Search of the Elusive Lead

In order to attain success in my new business, I learned quickly that  I must master the skill of internet marketing. Now I love to learn, so I was not fazed about the need to acquire new knowledge; I was determined to drive as much traffic as possible to my site. To be quite honest, when I took a good look at all the options available, I was fairly overwhelmed. I didn't know where to start.  

The training that we are getting through the marketing organization is phenomenal! Every week I have been listening eagerly to the training calls. One of the calls in particular I never miss. This woman is a ball of fire, knows her stuff, and communicates it with enthusiasm. She is a master at Google AdWords, the big daddy of Pay-Per-Click online marketing. She gave some advice to newbies which I found sound: Don't start out in Google. Learn the ropes in a smaller, less expensive search engine.  

Since my marketing budget was small, I decided to try Zango.com for my first real-time online marketing experience. Several things tripped me up at first, but I soon learned how to pick keywords, how to bid on them, how to do conversion tracking to see which keywords were giving me leads and prospects, and how to read the reports.  I learned how to get rid of poorly performing keywords.  I learned which ones were good for driving the quality of traffic I wanted to my website.

My marketing budget was exhausted within 2 weeks, so I reluctantly turned it off. Now I am having "lead withdrawal," big-time! Where are my leads?  If nobody comes to look at my site, I am dead in the water. I became much too anxious, to tell you the truth.  The anxiety was interfering with my ability to keep moving forward, trying new things.  I had to pull out of my bag of tricks several different strategies to stay on track, decrease my anxiety, and master the discouragement I was feeling.

Now I am learning how to use free advertising, and I am also writing articles for submission to ezines.  Ah, the learning curve. It can never be circumvented. Patience. It will pay off in the end.

Finally I Found the Business I've Been Looking For!

I have been looking for a business that I could do ever since I realized that my future was going to be grim if I followed the usual career path. You know, "go to college," "get a good job," "put money into a 401K or IRA for retirement," "work, work, work," and finally retire.  You also know the nightmare: time for dollars, enduring overtime, double time, and verbal abuse from colleagues and customers. You may have experienced stress-related diseases that are now chronic and will remain with you the rest of your life. Or perhaps you have work-related injuries. You escape from this grind by numbing yourself out with any of a number of addictions, from TV to eating to drugs and alcohol. I offer deep apologies for dragging you down in this muck and mire.  All of the above I have personally experienced.  

One day I picked up a little book at the bookstore called, "Rich Dad, Poor Dad," and my life changed when I read it.  I had what is called a "Paradigm Shift."  My view of the world and of money changed.  I had been looking at money the way my children-of-the-depression parents taught me. School never taught me anything about money. What I was taught and what I picked up by osmosis was just plain wrong.  

After that I was on a quest to start and maintain a business. Not just any business, but a "B quadrant business," as Kiyosaki named it. I tried 3 businesses before this, my final one:  

1. Amway/Quixtar, the great daddy of them all.  I made no money, but I learned a great deal in the 5 years I was there. I sponsored only 2 businesses. But the best thing I learned was to be positive.  I had been so negative, it was literally making me sick.
   
2. I found a business that was created to help people who had won cases in court to collect the money that the court ordered the loser to pay them.  I had several clients, but again was unable to rustle up any money. My payment was a percentage of the recovered amount.
3. Last but most promising was the course I took to become a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant.  It was right down my alley and used many of my strengths: researching, writing, and interviewing. I had attorney-clients and made money. But it became clear to me that this business was not quite the fit I was looking for.  It would be more of an S quadrant business.

So in December 2007 I found it!  I was doing research on the internet on a business coach/motivational speaker that I was contemplating learning from when I saw a Google ad and clicked on it.  I went through the exact same pages and process you will go through when you click on the link above my picture.  It was clear to me from examination and due diligence that this was the business I had been praying and searching for for a long, long time.  

This business model capitalizes on my strengths and eliminates the need to do the things that I was singularly unsuccessful at in my previous attempts at business.  I was terrible at talking with people and trying to present to them an opportunity and to persuade them that it was something they needed.  People hate to be "sold." Don't you? This system eliminates this.  The website sorts, sifts, and qualifies your prospective clients/partners.  

I discovered that I was at the right place, at the right time, with the right people.  I discovered world-class training - the best I have ever received, and that is saying a lot. I've had a LOT of training in my years.  The people involved in this group are people of integrity - that was a critical component in my decision-making.  I have gotten nothing but support, which I am also prepared and eager to offer you.  The time is right:  this marketing system went online in October 2007.  People are very concerned about the economy and the disappearing middle class, and they are searching for a vehicle to move them up to the rich rather than to keep doing the same thing they have always been doing and ending up in the poor category. Another critical component in my decision-making is that the emphasis in this business is not becoming wealthy for the purpose of self-indulgence, but for the purpose of giving back, of making the world a better place, of leaving a legacy for the ones you love. What could be better than that?