When you think of success, do you envision oodles of money, a mansion, and a fancy sports car? Those items are great, but what about a deeper sense of success – a success beyond your wildest dreams?
However, and more importantly, there are even better stories out there. Like the stories of entrepreneurs and business people leaving their corporate world to go and sell ice cream somewhere in the Caribbean. They, too, are abundantly happy and successful.
What makes up success?
Success is a personal definition – for some, it’s lots of money, and for others, it’s fulfillment and for others it’s freedom. Some people want to live in a mansion overlooking the ocean, while others want to live in a cottage by the lake or down at the farm.
Bottom line – success is what you say it is.
Want to know something even more powerful? Success is even what you say it isn’t. You get in your own way.
Let’s start with defining your own success. Here are a few tips on how to define what success is to you and only you:
Dig deep down and quietly meditate on your true calling, passion and purpose. Everyone has one and it’s only a matter of time before you are one of millions asking yourself, “Is there something than this?”
Do you wish to help hundreds solve a problem you have experience with? Do you value freedom over material objects and items? Start getting in touch with your why.
Once you get in touch with your why, your core need and desire will become to come to light. If you have a driving need to be your own boss or a passionate purpose to help others beyond your wildest dreams, this will come to light as well. Once you know your why, your core desire will come to the surface.
Let’s take a look at several categories of life and how to succeed in each one.
We all have so much going on in life. There’s work, career, school, home and family. The list goes on and on. It’s so easy to lose sight of what our personal goals are. We might want to finish a degree, complete a certificate, write a book or just learn a hobby or skill.
Bouncing from this, here are a few tips on how to create personal goals and how to achieve them:
Career goals may be a little easier to achieve than personal goals. When it comes to personal goals, you get up inside your head and you think or feel too much. It’s easier to set career goals and detach from them in a colder more logical way of thinking.
When it comes to thinking and aiming big, you want to have success in all areas of your life. Success is not related to only money and career. Success in relationships equates to thinking and aiming big in all areas of your life.
If you want big things in relationships, you have to put big goals into them.
Do you see how this could equate to a successful solution? In business, when a boss or CEO blames their employee, their employee becomes defensive and less cooperative. It just makes sense. However, when a CEO guides and leads by example and makes reasonable requests for change and prosperity, people will follow suit. This is the true meaning of a successful relationship. This works in personal relationships as well as career and other relationships.
Money has got to be one of the biggest blocks there is. Money has so much power to control us if we let it. Here are a few action steps to take around having success in the area of finances:
We all inherently know what our life purpose is, but we manage to use several negative tools against ourselves.
If you want to find success and pursue your life purpose, you need to:
Have you ever looked at somebody and wondered to yourself how they did it? Lots of people feel the same way about others who are successful. We tend to look at others and think they are lucky or they get all the breaks or their husband/wife/parent made it happen or they come from money.
Choose an area in your life where you want more prosperity. Is it in your career, your financial status, credit card debt or savings and retirement?
Once you’ve honed in on an area, take the following steps to create prosperity:
Prosperity is a mindset
Once you understand prosperity is a mindset, the rest will flow. Prosperity is not something that happens to you. It is something you make happen. Change your mindset around prosperity.
Your subconscious mind is solely responsible for all of your habits, even your prosperity habits. In order to tap into the power and leverage of the subconscious mind, you will need to work on creating new mindset habits.
Success in spirituality comes when you allow and accept what works for you. No one can tell you what, how, when or where to practice your spirituality or what spiritual practices you should take on.
Once you get beyond the mind and the ego, you can tap into spiritual success. Spiritual success comes from one very important tool – practice.
You need to try on many different things until you find the one or the combination which works for you.
Are you holding yourself back? Do you even truly know whether this is the case or not? I ask these questions because they can sometimes be very difficult to answer objectively about yourself. Your subconscious mind tends to gloss over these things unless you make a conscious effort to focus on them. One of the big hurdles which can be holding you back in both personal and business/career growth is that of putting limitations on yourself and your ability. However, these are not (normally) true limitations, but rather perceived limitations that may no, in fact, be true at all! Let’s take a look at perceived limitations a bit deeper.
Perceived limitations can be as challenging as trying to tie a rope with your hands behind your back. We know by watching athletes achieve the seemingly impossible feats of man against the elements, that the mind and body can exceed limits far past what we may expect of ourselves.
We all have that power within us. An obstacle may seem insurmountable, but rather than ask yourself if you can overcome it, challenge yourself to figure out how you can do it.
Endurance events that athletes face are no different than the challenges you face at work, in relationships or in completing goals and realizing your dreams. When you surrender your dreams to the limitations you place on yourself, you’ll never reach the vision of your true destiny.
There’s nothing deep or mystical in lifting the limitations on your life – it just takes persistence and continuous results. One thing you can do to challenge those limitations you place on yourself is to list what you want to accomplish and then think about what you have to do to get there.
Dream big. Don’t just stick to things you know and that are in your comfort zone. It’s those challenges that will spur you on to even greater things. You may change your challenges and dreams as you go along because of a change of mindset, injuries or life-altering situations, but always focus on the finish line you set for yourself.
After you figure out how you can challenge the limitations you set for yourself, it’s time to prepare for the race. You wouldn’t swim the English Channel without preparing months (or even years) ahead for the challenges you’ll face across those treacherous waters.
Prepare for your own journey through extensive training, gathering knowledge, getting your body and mind in shape for the challenge and anything else you can do to make sure you’ll be successful.
You may need to adjust your strategy from time to time as you learn, but eventually you’ll be on your way to the success you envision. Next, you’ll have to put your plan into motion.
This can be a difficult time for some because you’re afraid of failure. After all, you’ve been thinking and preparing for the race – and now you have to make it happen. But it’s far worse to hold back and do nothing than to fail because you didn’t even try.
Last, you need to believe in yourself. You are the only obstacle in your way of achieving greatness and you should never let self-doubt keep you in a box because you were afraid of failure and thought you had limitations you couldn’t overcome.
Think like a child. Children boldly believe they can climb the highest tree or venture out into the middle of the lake. Thank goodness adults are there to hold them back. Those are true limitations.
Your fear of success is false. You may have limited yourself in your thinking process or perhaps others have made you think you can’t do it. You can – and you will – cross the finish line of success when you challenge those perceived limitations you’ve set for yourself.
Never accept any thought or suggestion that limits your ability to achieve everything you can dream of to have the kind of life you crave and deserve. Get busy and begin to challenge those false beliefs! This can be difficult to begin with, but keep breaking down these self-limiting beliefs and you won’t believe what you can truly accomplish when you let yourself believe in what you can do.
This is too important to leave, so start right now; look deep inside yourself, find any self-limiting belief and deal with it head on and watch your life change for the better.
Are you aware of the saying that content is king? While there is no denying that content can make or break a website, you need to ensure that you are creating quality, future proof content for your website as this is just as important to your rank as using the right type of target keywords.
In fact, if you really think about it, quality content on an Amazon affiliate website is only possible once you find the correct keywords so that you can base your content around these targeted keywords so finding the best keywords is a critical step in content creation. Now, quality content on an Amazon affiliate website is not the same as quality content on, say, a bird watching website. What do I mean by that? well read on 🙂
You already know that the first rule about creating quality content is to base it around your most profitable, most traffic generating keywords, but there are other elements that, put together, will make it much more likely that your niche website will rank on the first page.
The first one is length. One thing that you will notice about most sites on the third and fourth pages of results when you start doing your keyword research as explained before is that they do not offer lengthy content around their keywords. They conform with throwing and repeating their keywords around on 250 word articles in hopes that keyword stuffing will get them ranked higher than they deserve. This was the old version of SEO but this doesn’t really work any more.
The thing is that short form content doesn’t work very well for quality written content. So the second rule to follow when creating quality content for an Amazon affiliate website is to make it long, and by long we mean 2,000 words long and over. Yes this is long but is well worth the effort and if you are writing a review this should be easy to do. If you want a feference as to how long a 2000 word post is; this post you are reading is exactly 1104 words long.
Actual online marketing researchers have found that the average length of articles on Affiliate websites ranking on the first page of Google results is 2,000 words and longer. The effect that this has is three fold.
In the first place, it allows you to target your niche keywords several times without stuffing, which is just pretty bad for rankings. This appeals to the Google algorithm because it will find your target keywords repeatedly throughout content that is not a string of repeated keywords.
The second factor in play here is that it will allow you to create content that is truly relevant to prospective buyers because a piece of content that is 2,000 words long has to include a lot of information about the product being promoted.
In that sense, these product centered articles are then perceived both by your visitors and Google as buyer’s guides, which complies both with Google’s own requirements for quality content to be relevant and with your visitors’ desire to find help with their purchasing decisions.
That takes us to the third factor in play here, which is reducing the amount of time that it takes a buyer to jump to the checkout once they see a product link or image for the second or third time. Now, to achieve this you will need to highlight the pros and the cons of the product in the article promoting it.
And you have to highlight them at the beginning. This creates the effect of informing your leads on the things that they want to learn about the product right before they get to read the entire article, making them very likely to skip the article, click through an image or link, make the purchase, and then coming back to keep reading in anticipation.
This is possible because they will unconsciously realize that the article is long and that they can simply keep reading about the product that they just decided to buy right after they check out, to build up on the excitement in anticipation of receiving the actual product.
Also, longer content allows you to make it future proof because it helps you to build up authority. Speaking of which, we highly recommend you to print the following statement and to paste it on the wall behind your computer so you can see it every day:
Now, this is where most marketers will recommend you to focus on getting on the paid advertising bandwagon, but like I said before, Amazon affiliate marketing is different, and generating traffic sources takes a different approach.
The best way to create a permanent source of traffic is by creating a series of lists with evergreen content, by which we mean content that stays relevant over time.
These are lists that you have to be updating on a regular basis to always attract traffic through a very specific set of purchase based keywords which include the following keywords:
Best sellers
“Best of”
“Best on a budget” (Such as “Best budget wireless headphones)
The good news is that keeping these lists updated is as easy as going to the Amazon marketplace and sorting through the best sellers list on your niche category, by sorting through the products with the highest buyer review scores and also sorting through the lowest priced items in your niche with the highest scores.
Now, the science behind these updated lists is that it is pretty easy to rank on the first page when you use keywords such as “cheap” alongside a product based or niche keyword as they have very high search volumes on a monthly basis.
In order to keep these lists bringing you fresh traffic all the time through search engine queries is by creating a separate category page on your site. Remember that each product that you insert on your “best of” lists needs to have its own long form product based article that you can redirect to from your list.
Follow these strategies and you will be giving yourself the very best chance of running a successful online Amazon affiliate business. So what are you waiting for? Find your niche, source your items, setup your website and create some great content and by leveraging the Amazon marketplace you can tap into a huge market. So, get started today and keep on working on your Amazon niche sites and your business will blossom. Good luck.
If you’re an Internet Marketer who has an online business, you should always be looking ahead to the end goal i.e. have a long term vision for your business. If you are like most businesses, the majority of your costs are going to be on your “front-end” offers that you are using to attract new customers, so the majority of your profits are going to come from “back-end” products and ideally these should be “high-ticket” products. This is the single most effective way to scale your business and is also a fantastic way to build your own brand and reputation as a premium seller.
Well, the answer is simple really: it is a product or service that you’re going to charge a lot of money for. There’s no strict definition of where a high ticket price should begin as this is largely determined by your niche and the market you are selling to, but the minimum is probably at least $97 and this can easily rise to $2,000, $10,000, $20,000 all depending on the nature of the item, the marketplace and your own status. This is why branding is also critical in allowing you to position yourself as a premium seller/brand.
The obvious advantage of a high ticket item is that you are able to generate a lot more profit from far fewer sales. Rather than earning $17-27 for an ebook, you might now earn enough to live on for a week, month or even a year by selling this one, high-quality, exclusive product.
At the same time, high ticket items help you with your positioning and authority status; they make you appear more important and they will help you to strengthen your brand. Think about this; when you price your information product or service, you are simultaneously valuing yourself and other peoples perception of you! If you are willing to sell your time for $10 an hour, then people may well think you’re small time and a low-end seller and it can be difficult to remove this perception.
There are other benefits too. One is that having fewer customers means that you will have less customer support issues, fewer emails to answer and fewer complaints. Another is that high-ticket customers actually tend to be the best type of customers who have the fewer complaints in the first place as they are willing to pay a premium for the information that they require; it’s all about the mindset!
And when you get to this situation, you can now start selling a product that you really believe in and that really delivers quality and value. At the same time, you can care for each of your customers and give them the time and attention they deserve.
The problem here is that a lot of people don’t have the confidence and knowledge that is worth a high-ticket asking price and so they’re too shy to start asking for that much money.
This is definitely not the case. There are plenty of things you can sell that will be worth $2,000 and more; the key is just to understand why people are willing to pay that kind of money and to find something unique and worthwhile that you are able to bring to the table.
Your aim is to get as many positive testimonials as you can; NEVER underestimate the power of social proof! Not only will this help you sell more copies but it will also give you the confidence in your product and your abilities to produce premium high-ticket offers in the future. It is a great feeling to know that what you are selling is definitely worth the money you’re charging, and that it is having a positive impact in your customers lives.
So what are you waiting for? Get cracking and start creating your high-ticket offers today and become a premium seller in your niche. If you aren’t sure where to get started I have created a short report that can help you on your way. If you would like a copy just click on the image below and I will get a copy to you immediately so you can start to reap the benefits of adding a high-ticket line of offers in your business.
OK, so you are interested in becoming a coach and helping others to succeed; that’s great but how do you go about getting started in the first place?
Before you start, let’s take a quick look at the pro’s and cons of running your own coaching business so you can decide whether this is an avenue you really want to pursue.
This could be quite a lengthy list as coaching is a business that anyone can embark upon, but here are five of the top benefits to becoming a coach:
Now, before you even think about starting up a coaching business you need a thorough understanding and acceptance of who you are. Don’t forget that the most valuable resource you have in your business is you. It’s the one thing your business cannot do without. Take time to really understand what makes you tick, how you ended up where you are and who you want to be for the rest of your life. Yes, your business will provide an income (hopefully), but it’s also an opportunity for fun and fulfilment.
All great creations start with a dream. You have permission to dream about what you want, where you want to go, who you want to work with. Make this dream as real as possible, use all your senses. Yes, create a vision board and mind map. Test drive that dream car. Record your dream in a way that you can revisit it as often as you need for inspiration. Then check how comfortably your business fits in to your dream. And this is important, if it does not fit, then you need adjust your business, not your dream.
Still here, good! Now let’s take a look at a few personal qualities that you will need to succeed as a coach:
To succeed as a coach, you must not be afraid to invest in yourself consistently. Take a look around and you will see that this is a trait shared by the best coaches. Think about it; if you aren’t willing to invest in yourself, why should a client invest in you? You can’t help others see their blind spots if you can’t see your own. The best coaches are constantly getting support from other coaches.
Too many coaches only want to coach. That motivation and passion is critical, but as a coach, you’re also a solopreneur. For better or worse, the stamina you have for coaching has to transfer over into maintaining the bottom line, and no matter what, running a business is serious work. This means personal branding, social media strategy, writing articles, speaking to audiences – and that isn’t even delving into the financial management and bookkeeping elements of running a business. It’s not about whether you can do it, it’s about whether you can enjoy it enough to do it. The major reason that many coaches fail is not because they can’t coach enough clients, but rather because they lack a strategic business plan. Seeing clients is a small slice of it… a good coach gets and enjoys all aspects of the business, especially the marketing.
Studies show that listening skills can actually boost economic success, yet coaches often fail to apply this in their own practice. The worst coaches are focused only on feeding you information whereas a great coach has the skills to facilitate a shift in your mindset and perspective, which is only possible by really listening to you and understanding you at a deep level. Once that inner shift occurs, it is reflected back with massive powerful results which will ultimately benefit both coach and client.
Ok, so you have got this far and you are definitely invested into becoming a coach. Here are 7 quick steps you can use to get going.
You are probably aware that life and business coaching are extremely popular, but they aren’t the only types of coaching you can do. If you are in the fitness niche you can become a weight loss, fitness or health coach. What about a sports coach? You can also become a parenting or relationship coach, organizational or productivity coach, technical coach, sales coach or a career coach. Where is your area of expertise and work from there?
Decide your business structure, create a business name and get a business license if required. Write a coaching contract that outlines your services and expectations.
If you’re going to be doing video conferencing, download the needed software and purchase a quality headset and webcam. Some coaches record calls and give them to their clients so they can review the session. If you want to do that, you’ll need to get a recorder that will record your video/audio calls. You can use Skype which is free to hold these types of calls. If you want to run group sessions, you could run weekly webinars etc. so you will need to invest in webinar software. Whatever you do, it is important that people can hear you clearly so invest in a quality microphone such as the Blue Yeti.
Potential clients need a place to learn about your coaching business and there’s no better place to sell your coaching and related materials than on a website.
You will need to purchase hosting and a domain name (preferably the name of your coaching company). Using WordPress, you can quickly get a website live online and customise the look and feel through various plugins and themes. If you aren’t very techy, you can outsource this to freelance sites such as Fiverr.com or Upwork.com and get someone to install and set this up for you (remember that this is an investment in your business and not a cost).
Write content that is client-focused on how you can help them improve their lives. Once you have testimonials, post them on your website as social proof is very powerful.
Do thorough market research to figure out your ideal client and where you can find them and then develop specific marketing strategies to lure them to your business. For example, if you’re a business oriented coach, you should develop a LinkedIn profile. If you’re a personal training coach, you might want to have videos on YouTube that offer fitness tips or teach specific exercises etc. Really delve into your market and understand what makes them tick, their hopes and fears, and determine how you can position yourself as the answer to those hopes and fears.
In all honesty getting your first client will likely be the hardest. Use your personal and professional network to help. Like I have already stated in this article, consider offering a heavily discounted, or even better, a free 15 or 30-minute coaching session to entice people to try you out. Deliver as much value as you possibly can during these sessions as your business could depend on it. Just because they are free, doesn’t mean you should hold back. Help them as much as you can, and once they see the benefit and that you are genuinely interested in helping them, hopefully the decision to invest in you becomes a no-brainer.
This may seem to be obvious but it needs to be stated. Coaching isn’t a business to take lightly. People are entrusting their emotional and possibility their physical well-being to you. You also owe it to them to stay on top of current trends in your industry, as well as best practices for coaches.
Remember that ultimately you will be judged on the results you achieve for your clients, so give them 100% and as they see the results, you will probably get referrals and your coaching business will soar. You could become the go-to coach in your niche with all the recognition and kudos that brings, and you know that you are affecting many people’s lives for the better and there is no greater feeling that that!
I hope this post has given you some insight into the benefits that starting your own coaching business can give to you. If you want to learn more about starting your own coaching business, I have also recorded some video training that you can see here: warr.us/atgmen1
