Business Builder Plan Blog

Writing articles positions you as an authority fast. You can send waves of traffic to affiliate products or you can promote your own products and services and send waves of traffic to those.

It is the most cost effective way to market yourself 100% free. For those of you who have been around the internet market community for some time, and think articles are not as powerful as they once were, that is 100% false.

Articles are more powerful and more effective than they have ever been because of all the social bookmarking and other ways you can support your articles. You write your articles and forget them. You leave them out there, and you will have customers coming from your articles everyday for months and years to come.

You can learn every sales technique in the book, master every sales strategy and spend all of your free time learning how to prospect better, close more effectively and give better sales presentations but, if you have low self-esteem you will still never become a sales super-star. Why not? Why is your self-esteem the most critical aspect of your sales success?

Self-esteem is how you perceive yourself. It is your personal assessment of your self-worth and it is the ‘governor’ that determines your ultimate performance and success no matter what your chosen career or activity.

From the Wisdom Vault…

• Is every single client you have a pure joy to work with?
• Do you easily find the time to market for new clients and create new programs?
• Are you making the income from coaching that you had in mind?

If you answer ‘no’ to any of these questions, you’re not alone. Most coaches grapple with these interrelated issues throughout their career. That was me just five years ago. I was working very hard and getting by but not having the experience I hoped for.

And here’s why… I’d take on nearly any client, any speaking opportunity, say ‘yes’ to every proposal and leap at all the bright shiny objects — those irresistible distractions that waste time and energy. I figured, any client at any price is better than none and any opportunity available now shouldn’t be passed up. Have you ever thought that?

‘The Apprentice’ TV reality show is described by boss, Sir Alan Sugar, as “a job interview from hell”. By the fifth episode, five out of sixteen candidates had been fired.

Sir Alan described his ideal apprentice as “someone who is drop dead shrewd.” The word ’shrewd’ suggests practical, hard headed wisdom and common sense. In some ways, it is the opposite of ‘artistic’.

In episode five, Sir Alan wanted to see if the apprentices could sell in the soft sell world of the art market. He met them at Christie’s. Here, art works sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds.

For Sir Alan, selling art is just a business like any other but he admits that it demands a special kind of selling:

One of the best ways to improve or grow your business is by improving employee performance. A great way to do this is by putting your business Policies and Procedures online. How can that help, you may say? Before I answer that, let me say that business fundamentals which include policies and procedures are a major part of business functionality.

However, something has to be done with that knowledge before it can be realized. There are a lot of educated paupers out there. You don’t want to have the best policies and procedures of any business but still go out screaming that you went broke because you didn’t apply what you learned in the process.

Knowledge must be managed to be effective. Some great ways to do this are:

It’s a concept that has become common place in society and it has infiltrated the selling marketplace with negative consequences. I’m referring to the concept of entitlement. If the trend, as it exists, continues to grow, I believe the competitive advantage long held by the western free market system will be seriously eroded. If you sell for a living, I suggest that you need to read this article.

Many companies and individual salespeople seem to have adopted the attitude that simply ’showing up’ in the marketplace entitles them to be successful. While we enjoy exceptional benefits from living in a free enterprise society which produces enormous abundance, it seems that some people think that they should reap maximum benefits with minimum effort. Personally, I Don’t Think So. It can’t work that way long term because of the universal law of cause and effect.

We need to speak the language of our prospects. That particular thinking goes far beyond verbiage alone, it must include an understanding of their very philosophy and beliefs. We must get inside their heads to effectively understand what drives them.

It is only after examining our prospects and customers at such a level that we can effectively communicate with them and interest them in our message. If we present a great message that misses the mark because we selected the wrong audience, we will have failed in that effort.