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If you’re new to marketing or don’t yet have a large following, starting your own podcast can be an uphill slog that takes months of work before you start to build real traction.

But being a guest speaker on established podcasts – what I call reverse podcasting – can immediately establish your credibility and send hot prospects to your website.

It doesn’t matter if you have a track record online because your offline experience can work just as well for getting interviewed. Remember that podcasters are always looking for interesting people to interview who bring value to their listeners.

To find out which podcasts might be a good fit for you, choose someone well-known in your niche and then discover what podcasts have had them as a guest. These are the podcasts you want to approach.

Typically, podcasters will want to know what you can offer their listeners in terms of great info. They will also link to your website in their podcast description (great for not just traffic, but also SEO) and place your name in the podcast’s title.

Once you’ve been a guest on numerous podcasts, then it might be time to consider starting your own podcast. And your first guests can be the podcasters who interviewed you since you’ve already established a relationship with them.

A good ‘About Me’ Page doesn’t have to be fancy or complicated. In fact, it just needs to communicate a few key things. And yet people keep making these same 7 mistakes over and over again on their About Pages.

1: Surprise! Your ‘About Me’ Page isn’t about you.

Nope. It’s about the person who visits the page. This is where you tell that person why they should bother with you, or products or your site.

Talk about their problems which you solve. Talk about how you can help them to achieve their goals. Let them know what’s in it for them. And only talk about yourself in the context of how you help your readers.

2: You’re talking too much.

Your About Me Page should be interesting, not mundane; just long enough, but no longer. Write your rough draft for your About Page. Set it aside for a day or two. Come back and remove everything that doesn’t move your prospect closer to knowing you, liking you and trusting you. Then have a friend read it and tell them to point out all the parts where they were losing interest, and either fix or remove those.

3: Your writing is boring.

Borrrrrringgggg. Snooze… Write in your own voice, lose the hype and the jargon, be a little funny and most of all, be your real self and not some drone.

4: You’re using only video.

Sure, video is great for establishing rapport… with those people who like video. But you’ll have visitors who don’t want to have audio blasting for everyone around them to hear, and you’ll have other visitors who don’t want to sit through a 5-minute video.

If you do use video, keep it short and be sure to include text, too.

5: Your picture is AWOL.

Okay, having your photo on your About Page is optional. I know some people like to keep their face on the down-low because, well… trolls. But if you don’t mind having your photo online, then by all means put it on your About Page to give people a better sense of who you are. It will also help them to remember you, too.

6: Your name is missing.

Have you ever been on a website with awesome writing and you wanted to know who is writing this stuff, but the About Page just has some corporate mumbo-jumbo and nobody’s NAME? I have. You need a first name and a last name, so don’t just say, “Bob” because I want to know, Bob WHO?

If your name is too generic, such as John Smith, you might add a middle name to everything you do online to make it easier to find you in the search engines, such as John Vincent Smith. If you don’t want to use your REAL name, that’s okay, too. Many people work under professional pseudonyms. Also, remember to add any professional, relevant credentials you might have.

7: You don’t have an About Page.

If you’ve read this far, then I’m guessing you understand the importance of an About Page, even if you don’t have one yet. If you’re hoping no one has noticed that you don’t have one, well… we have.

And if you’ve given it some totally clever name like, “Guess What?” “The Deets” or “Check This Out” then it would be a great idea to rename it to “About” or “About Me.” Why? Because if I’m looking for the “About Me” page then I’m going to pass right over all those ‘clever’ names and assume you didn’t bother to create an About page.

Million dollar business ideas are everywhere and they don’t even need to be original. If you’ve ever been on Ebay, then you know that once you click on one item, another dozen items will be suggested. And while most are targeted towards you and what you’ve searched for, now and then something odd will pop up. Like Cat Butt Push Pins.

I’m not making this up… It’s a real thing. Intrigued, I clicked on it and found that for about $15 you can buy six plastic push pins (like for a cork board) that are in the shape of six different cat butts; Calico, tabby, black, etc.

Thinking the price was an anomaly, I searched on Ebay and found only one other listing, and that one cost $20. Then I went to Amazon and found I could get their very last set of cat butt push pins sent to me for $17.99.

Walmart, on the other hand, would be glad to sell me a set for just $49. That’s right… $49 for six plastic push pins in the shape of cat’s butts.

I might be in the wrong business…

This isn’t the point of this article but as an aside, here’s a business idea for you: Hire an artist to design 8 cat butt push pins for you, being sure to NOT copy the ones already out there. Find a company – likely in China – who can cheaply manufacture push pins and get an initial run of these made. You don’t even need fancy packaging yet.

Sell them on Ebay, Amazon, Etsy, Mecari and any other website you can think of. Find your best price point where they sell quickly and yet you are making as much profit as possible (Hint: It will be lower than $49 and likely lower than $17.99).

Use your profits to design clever packaging and now get them into stores as well as continuing to sell on Amazon. Okay, that’s one business idea, but it’s not even my point.

Here’s my point – or rather, my two points.

First of all, there are great ideas everywhere, and you don’t even need to be all that original. Clearly there is a market for clever push pins that isn’t being fully satisfied. Who knew? Push pins are the sort of thing we take for granted, but one enterprising person said, “What if? What if I design these in the shape of cats’ butts?”

While his friends were falling on the floor laughing at him, he made a go of it. And without competition, he’s selling these things for a ridiculous price, too. There is room for improvement here in quality, in appearance and in price. Three opportunities in one.

What products do you take for granted that can be improved? If you have no desire to get into physical products, that’s okay. What virtual products need improving, revamping or even inventing?

During the pandemic sites like Zoom and Skype went crazy. But what about people who want to talk online and don’t want to have to think about their appearance or the state of disarray their room might be in? Bingo! Clubhouse was invented – audio chat rooms, no video and no recordings.

Second, when you have a rabid, hungry market, you can sell them the darndest things. People are PASSIONATE about cats and they will literally pay $17.99 for 6 push pins if they are in the shape of cats’ butts.

To put this into perspective, a non-cat-butt-shaped push pin costs a few cents at most, while these cost $3 apiece when bought in a set of 6. That’s not just insane… it’s also a great example of how passions override common sense in purchasing and how you can take advantage of that in the market.

It might seem strange to think of icons as helping with your email marketing efforts. After all, it’s the message that’s important, right? But anything that can help you to better convey your message is something worth looking into.

Icons can highlight your company’s benefits and show the positive effects of your offer. They can demonstrate particular features or characteristics of your product or service. And they can be used to split email blocks, making the message easier to read.

What else can icons do for your emails?

1. Icons help organize the content.

No doubt you’ve seen this on webpages but perhaps not as often in emails. Imagine if your email has three options:

→ Ask a Question
→ Share Feedback
→ Get More Information

Each of these can have an appropriate icon that helps to organize and clarify the options. “Ask a Question” can be a question mark; “Share Feedback” might be a talk balloon and “Get More Information” could be a video icon, a book icon, a person icon or whatever, depending on the format of the information.

2. Icons help express ideas.

There are times when an icon can be used either in place of – or in conjunction with – a keyword to clarify the meaning in a more straightforward manner. For example, a play button icon is so universally understood, it makes more sense to use that than to use the word, “Play.”

3. Icons can replace heavy images.

Images in emails are great… until they aren’t. Images need to be downloaded, they can be blocked by email clients and unfortunately their appearance changes in different apps. While icons are less expressive, there are times when they are a better choice than stock photography.

4. Icons support your brand identity.

If you are using a particular set of icons on your website and advertising, it pays to use them in your emails as well to maintain your overall design and brand strategy.

I’ll bet there are certain businesses that you recognize by icons (for example, social media sites). If you received an email from them that did not contain those icons, it wouldn’t look authentic. In fact you might even suspect it was a phishing email to steal your info.

5. Icons reinforce interactive elements.

When it comes to things like call-to-action buttons, icons can reinforce the action you want taken by the reader. And they can also be animated to draw attention to something important, like the “Check it out” or “Grab your copy” button.

If you’re just getting started in email marketing, give icons a pass until you master the basics. But if you’re looking for a way to increase your email readability and conversion rates then I highly suggest you spend the next week observing how others are using icons in their emails while you devise your own strategy.

It’s surprising what a few little icons can do for your business!

If someone were to ask you what the #1 ‘secret’ to making money online was, what would you say? Any guesses?

Maybe you’d say it’s to find a starving crowd. Or to build and nurture a list. Or to get in on the beginning of a hot new trend. All of these are good answers. And all of these are wrong.

THE big secret to making money online is one that crosses all niches, applies to all markets and marketers, and works just about every single time to make REAL money. It’s how six and seven figure incomes are almost always earned. And it’s also how YOU can begin earning 6 figures in the next 12 months.

Now then – before I reveal this ‘secret,’ let me warn you that you might have heard it before. In fact, some online marketers have to hear this a dozen times or more before it really starts to sink in. That’s because the most powerful techniques often masquerade as something a bit boring. Or tedious. Or uninteresting.

After all, taking a wheelbarrow full of cash to the bank is exciting. Earning it is often something altogether different. Ready?

Here’s the ‘secret…’

“Find a profitable formula – and then SCALE it up.”

Yup. That’s it. Pretty simple, I know. Yet 98% of marketers will never do it. And 97% of marketers will stay broke because of it.

Let’s say you spend time making the perfect product for a super hungry niche. You tweak the offer to get it converting sky high. You bring on affiliates to help you promote. Everything is in place. You launch, you have an extremely profitable week…

…and then what?

For most marketers, they will turn their attention to creating the next product and doing the entire process again. And because of that, they will leave a tremendous amount of money on the table.

If your offer sells for $19 and you’re converting at 5%, then you’re making $95 for every 100 people you send to your site. This doesn’t even include the list you’re building and will market to over and over again.

Now then, if you can buy those 100 visitors for $40, you’ve just make a profit of $55. Buy 1,000 visitors and you’ve made $550. Buy 10,000 visitors and you’ve made $5,500. But wait, there’s more!

What if you add a backend product? Just one sale per 100 visitors of a $100 product increases your profit from $55 to $155. 10,000 visitors? $15,500 profit.

You can also add coaching, continuity (membership) programs, etc. for even more profit.

Are you following me here?

Let’s use an analogy: Someone invests 3 months to open a hair salon. They have a big grand opening with lots of customers. And when that dies down, they close shop, move across town and do it all over again. Yeah, that would be pretty crazy. Yet that’s what 98% of online marketers do.

They create a product, launch it, have a great week and then start all over again. And they wonder why they are still struggling. So what’s the takeaway?

→ Invest time in building a profitable, high-converting funnel.

→ Test it out and do the math – how much can you spend on advertising and still make money?

→ Start by investing small and ramp your way up.

→ Don’t forget to build your list – your funnel is your upfront money, and your list is your “go to” money. That is, whenever you need funds or simply want to boost your income, you can go to your list and make them an offer.

What will derail you in this process:

→ Getting lured away by the glamour of creating another new product funnel when you should be scaling up the one you already have.

→ Fear of spending money to make money. Yes, spending $1,000 or more to make sales is scary. That’s why you want to start small, make sure your entire funnel is working, and then scale up. And up. And Up.

Your biggest mistake – would be brushing this advice off. Fortunes have been made simply by creating a profitable funnel and then scaling it up.

FORTUNES.

As in nearly 7 figures made from one ClickBank product…

Per MONTH.

That’s right – 6 Pack Abs at the pinnacle of its success was earning over $11 million per year.

Your results will vary.

Are you doing offline marketing, or would you like a second income in the offline world? Here’s how you can make it drop dead simple and super profitable.

First, build a simple website with a menu card on it. Not the kind of menu you find in a restaurant, of course, but it can look like that if you choose. Your menu is going to offer all kinds of services to brick and mortar businesses.

For example:

→ Local SEO
→ Creating lead capture pages and setting up their autoresponder
→ Website creation
→ Writing blog posts and articles for them
→ Repairing their online reputation
→ Creating a professional looking video
→ Creating detailed reports on their competitors
→ Doing social media (this can be a wide variety of offerings)
→ And so forth…

Give them different prices – some low and some higher, to give business owners plenty of choices.

Now here’s the 21 day trick – through testing, we’ve found that you will actually sell MORE services when you extend the date by which you’ll have the services completed. Naturally you can do many of these things in 2-5 days. But if the client believes you’re working on it for 3 weeks, or even a whole month, the perceived value is much higher and you will sell more.

Yes, human nature is a funny thing, isn’t it?

Now then, before you panic and think you can’t provide all these services, realize that all you need is to visit Fiverr.com. There you’ll find people who can do all of these things for you, rather inexpensively. You will need to pay more than $5 for most of these, but that’s okay because your profit margins will still remain sky high. Typically, you’ll pay $5 to test the gig out, and then somewhere between $50 and perhaps as high as $200 to get your job done.

Meanwhile, you’re selling services for $300 to $1,000, depending how much work it involves. You are the ‘middle man or woman’ getting the orders and then having them fulfilled.

So how do you get the clients? All of the usual methods apply, of course. Also, LinkedIn and Craigslist can be great places to get clients with a little practice. Also look at potential client’s social profiles and websites to get an idea of what they might need, and then contact them directly via email or even phone. When you’re ready to take it to the next level, you can also put together a mailer that incorporates your menu and send it to likely prospects.

This is perhaps one of the easiest businesses you can start and almost immediately begin making money. Because you are outsourcing all of the work, you can focus solely on getting clients, making them happy and gaining repeat sales.

And by the way – once you choose a method for client acquisition, you can outsource that as well. Then your only job will be to send orders to your outsourcers and send the completed work to your clients. Not a lot of work for a $5,000 or more a month income…

Are you entering a niche in which you have ZERO experience? Good. Actually, great! Here’s what you do…

Start a blog. From day 1, explain that you know nothing about (your new topic, such as cooking) but you’re on a quest to learn (a specific outcome or goal, like how to make the world’s best pancakes) and invite the reader to make the journey with you.

Now start reading about your topic. A lot. Buy and use the products in your niche. Write about what you learn, and tell about your experience with the products. Recommend the good ones.

Once you’ve got a dozen or more blog posts, start asking experts in the niche for interviews. If you’re too shy or nervous at first, you can start with email interviews and work your way up to audio interviews. You become the researcher / reporter, and you let the experts handle the heaving lifting.

In 1-5 years? Now YOU’RE the expert. And you never had to lie about knowing stuff you didn’t know when you got started. In fact, you got to be honest, truthful and yourself the entire time. And you’ve built a tremendous rapport with your audience who very much feel you’re just like them.

When you use this formula, your readers will trust you and they’ll act on your advice, whether that’s to buy an affiliate product you recommend, buy your own products or eventually let you coach them.

As far back as 1996, Bill Gates stated that the Internet would evolve into a “marketplace of content”. This prediction has indeed come to pass, as content is now considered to be “king” in the world of CRM and marketing in general.

You are already aware that presentation is the key to success. Whether referring to blogs, white papers or the average product update, client engagement is key. Fully developed strategies to implement, collate and present this content are now critical to the success of any business. WordPress has become one of the cornerstones of this industry. What aspects of this turnkey software allows it to be the choice of countless companies?

The Intuitive Edge

Were you aware that no less than 55 percent of the top million most-visited portals in the world employ WordPress as their CMS provider of choice? This largely arises from the fact that WordPress is highly intuitive. In other words, you need to know very little in regards to coding to create a great online presence. From user-friendly dashboards to preview pages to make certain that your page presents correctly, the user-friendly nature of this system cannot be denied. If you are able to edit text within a standard Word document, you will have little trouble adapting to WordPress.

The Power of the Open-Source Force

Another massive advantage of WordPress is that it is an open source. You will not have to pay one cent in order to utilize all of its tools and benefits. This is in direct contrast to other systems which require monthly installments in order to access benefits. Free products and services are attractive; particularly those which are as effective and easy to work with as WordPress.

Multifaceted Multimedia

In the past, embedding videos, GIFs and other widgets into a website were difficult without having a great deal of experience with coding. This frustration has been done away with thanks to the streamlined presentation that WordPress offers. Importing videos, images and graphics has never been easier. As we all know, embedded visual aids can make all the difference between an interested visitor and a high website bounce rate. The built-in tools provided by self-hosted WordPress have made it very simple to design a high functionality, and visually compelling website without very little technical knowledge or experience.

The Mobile-Responsive Edge

It is no secret that modern websites need to be mobile responsive in order to reach the most users possible. This can be difficult to address with in-house systems and if the mobile demographic is not reached, a great deal of business will naturally be lost. WordPress offers a number of turn-key themes which can be quickly integrated into your existing website architecture. This alone can dramatically boost a website’s natural ranking in the search engines, and thus a site’s daily visitor numbers.

Community Help

The open-source nature of WordPress enables you to find help when you need it the most. While most features are easy to use, there will inevitably be times when questions need to be asked. Thanks to a robust online community, help is never far off. This is in direct contrast to other CMS systems which usually provide a much more limited range of community support and creative solutions. With WordPress, there is a solution for nearly anything that you want to accomplish with your website, and if it doesn’t exist yet, you could easily have a coder create it for you on third-party sites such as Fivver or Upwork.

WordPress is here to stay. As a continuously growing number of websites are building their online presence with WordPress, it only stands to reason that its marketing value for online businesses will continue to grow. It will be very interesting to see how WordPress evolves as the needs of the modern business likewise advance, but rest assured they will meet tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities just as they have been doing since 2003.

Once there was a king who wanted to bathe in a giant swimming pool of milk rather than water… He had heard it was great for your skin, but it was too large a task to do alone.

He first told some of his workers to dig a pond. Once the pond was dug, the king made an announcement to his people saying that one person from each household had to bring a glass of milk during the night and pour it into the pond. So, in his estimations, the pond should be full of milk by the morning.

After receiving the order, everyone went home. One man prepared to take the milk during the night but milk was very rare in this town and he wanted to keep it. He thought that since everyone would bring milk, he could just use a glass of water and pour it inside the pond instead. Surely, because it would be dark at night, no one would even notice. So he quickly went and poured the water in the pond and came back happy.

In the morning, the king came to visit the pond and to his anger, the pond was only filled with pure water! What happened was that everyone was thinking the same thoughts as the other man that “I don’t have to put the milk, someone else will do it.”

When it comes to business help, do not think that others will take care of it all for you. I’m not saying not to accept help where you can get it. Help is important, but remember that it starts with you. If you don’t do things for yourself or at least oversee them, no one else will do it and if they do, you can’t complain that they did it wrong because you used something or someone outside of yourself to make it work.

There are only so many experts, workers, software, systems etc. that you can use to get ahead, all that will come later when you are rolling in your fortune. Meanwhile, if you want quality, get your hands dirty, do the learning, do the work and feel genuinely rewarded from it. This will avoid mistakes caused by others, it will encourage you to take responsibility and it will give you a sense of achievement.

If you have many automatic processes working for you and they are performing well, that’s great. But if there is anywhere in your life that you can step in and say – “Can I do more here? What can I do today that I didn’t bother with yesterday? What extra mile of work can I put in just for now?” Then every day will have purpose and every moment will feel in your control.

Life and business is all about what YOU put into it, so be sure you are doing everything you can every single day to actualize your full potential. Yes, leverage the help of others along the way when needed to improve efficiency, but never fully rely on others. Your life is what you make it, so make it ALL that it can be!

Many people think that they need to have all the answers to be successful in any capacity; business wise or in life. While we all require some knowledge, there are some people in the world that have made it without.

That is, without qualifications, studying, school or even full expert knowledge of the field they want to be in. In fact, the majority of the world’s richest people know that they don’t need to have all the answers in order to gain success, and what’s more, they use that to their advantage.

They may have a certain specialism in their field, but using Henry Ford as an example, having a solid team of people who fill out your knowledge gaps is far more important than having all the answers for yourself. Henry Ford was the founder of Ford Motor Cars and was a very wealthy man in his time.

A Chicago paper published some articles after the First World War, claiming that Henry Ford was an “ignorant pacifist”. Mr. Ford rejected the idea that he was ignorant and retaliated by bringing a libel suit against the paper, even taking the not-so-common approach of putting himself on the witness stand to prove that he was in fact, a very clever man with nothing to hide.

The court lawyers asked Mr. Ford a series of pointless general knowledge questions and accused him of being a man who runs a car company with no real knowledge or experience with cars, the industry, academics or mechanics. The answer he gave silenced the court and became a very famous statement…

“If I should really WANT to answer the foolish question you have just asked, or any of the other questions you have been asking me, let me remind you that I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk, and by pushing the right button, I can summon to my aid men who can answer ANY question I desire to ask concerning the business to which I am devoting most of my efforts. Now, will you kindly tell me, WHY I should clutter up my mind with general knowledge, for the purpose of being able to answer questions, when I have men around me who can supply any knowledge I require?”

This retort was genius. The fact was – Ford didn’t have all the answers and that was OK. He had instead kept his mind free from clutter and employed experts in their fields to answer his questions while he focused on keeping his company running smoothly. If he needed to know about brakes, he would push the button for that expert, if he needed someone to explain engines to him, he had another. He used the specialized knowledge of others as an external brain to store extra information in and it made him the success he was.

You Too Can Be Like Henry Ford

We now live in the greatest information age of our time. You can Google any question you may have, so without qualifications – we are becoming experts just by searching.

The point is this – do not avoid a certain field or reject a job opportunity or investment because you feel you are not up to scratch, use other experts and research to find out as much as you can about your industry. Knowledge is power. If you think you don’t have it and that’s stopping you from moving forward, find someone who does and get up to speed.