DAY 1 -- Master The ALL-Important Basics
Your DAY 1 goal is to understand the C 
T P M process. Know how and why PREselling, not selling, is what maximizes profits.
Condensed Action Guide
This condensed version of the written Action Guide has all the essential elements of the full one. If you prefer to read and do not like too many details or fine points or distracting links, use this version. Close this window to return to the full guide.
Today's Action Steps
Build the foundation of your business right now.
How? By absorbing, then living, these All-Important Basics...
- Understand the difference between "PREselling" and "Selling."
- Act upon the "PREselling Reality."
-
Monetize!
Maximize Conversion Rate and profits.
Monetize: Convert PREsold traffic into money. A simple concept.
Step 1 - Understand the difference between "PREselling" and "Selling."
Content Traffic PREsell Monetize.
Success on the Net all begins with a critical mindset shift. This means replacing that well-known offline strategy of "location, location, location" with "Information, information, information."
In the online world, no one just happens to walk past, see your business and enter your Web site. Surfers on the Net are not looking for you or your business. People search for credible high-value information or solutions, anything that can fulfill a wish that they hold dearly or solve a troublesome problem that they are experiencing. After all, if they knew you existed, they would not be searching. They would already be customers.
Online, you must generate your own traffic to thrive and be profitable. Therefore, your primary task, well before you make your first sale or recommendation to a customer (often well before that person is even aware that s/he is shopping!), is to provide the information (i.e., content) that people are searching for, in a way that Search Engines like. In other words...
Give them what they want.
A Theme-Based Content Site contains information based upon a main subject. Each page focuses upon a single topic that is related to that theme. The net sum of all the information on all your pages forms the Content of your site.
These specific "topical pages" are called "Keyword-Focused Content Pages." They rank well with the Search EnginesSearch Engines are generated by small computer programs called spiders. They roam the Web at high speed and return billions of Web pages into an engine's database. Since no HUMAN actually RATES each page, the engines develop "ranking algorithms" to decide how high to rank each page for each keyword search.
The four major Search Engines are Google, Yahoo! Search, Bing, and Ask. Other engines are either of minor importance, or use one or more of the above four.
Confused by the term "keyword"?
Click here for information about keywords... what they are and why they are so important.
The high-value content "warms up" (i.e., PREsells) visitors by OVERdelivering what they came for... information.
Visitors start to like and trust you (based on what you write about on your site). Your content-rich site builds trust and credibility... "PREselling!" The visitor begins to like and respect you... you are a knowledgeable expert.
This credibility creates an open-to-buy or open-to-hire mindset. You are now a mere click away from Monetizing (converting PREsold traffic into dollars).
CONTENT TRAFFIC PRESELL MONETIZE
... works. No matter how you plan to monetize or convert visitors into money (affiliate, service selling, network marketing, Google's Adsense or any other income stream).
Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for you to display relevant Google ads on your SBI! site and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site, you effectively monetize your content. More on this in DAY 4.
Contrast that to a visitor who arrives at a sales site... no inspiring, relevant, editorial content. Selling merely tries to get the sale. If you do not have a brand (and most of us do not), if you have not built a relationship with your visitor, your chances of selling are near-zero.
Why? Well, which person would YOU respond to? A stranger with a sales pitch or a knowledgeable friend/expert making a recommendation? Become that knowledgeable friend/expert.
Great content encourages your visitor to think about you as a "friend/expert" rather than a stranger. And if you create a truly info-rich site, you'll actually become a trusted expert, sharing your wealth of information. You basically create your own brand... your "brand of one."
People "buy" from those they know and like. They resist sales efforts from everyone else.
And that is why 99% of small businesses fail online.
Selling is not your site's first priority. (In fact, you may decide not to sell anything and become an "infopreneur" instead!) Your #1 priority is to PREsell through the delivery of the information that visitors seek.
You "monetize" later.
Effective PREselling creates an open-to-buy (or open-to-hire) frame of mind in your visitors and "gets the click" to your income-generating source (whatever your monetization models may be). That is what produces high Conversion Rates, (the percentage of visitors who convert into dollars) and generates more income for you.
Monetization is the act of converting PREsold traffic into money. It usually involves a click. The Conversion Rate is the percentage of your visitors who deliver the click in question. If 100 visitors visit a page selling your widget, and one person clicks to buy, that page has a Conversion Rate of 1%.
The needs of your target group must be your #1 priority, the reason behind every action you take. Your desire to earn income always comes second. Paradoxically, by doing that your income soars.
You are now ready to...
Step 2 -- Act upon the "PREselling Reality."
PREselling works... if YOU work it! The reality is that it is all under your control, far more so than in the risky, offline business world. This reality can be summed up as follows...
Post this yellow stickie near your computer monitor to keep this important e-business lesson front and center in your mind. You do not need Lady Luck or Sir Serendipity. Your success depends upon no one else, only you.
So many small businesses fail because they just "put up a site." And then, a year or so later, they say "Nah... the Web didn't do anything for me!" These owners failed to recognize the fundamental reality of how people use the Net.
Their reality is that they never had a chance. Lured by cheap offers, free domains, even free hosting, they waste a year of their lives and thousands of dollars before giving up.
Conclusion: The biggest Web hosts in the world are GRQ masters, promisers of quick-rich-easy. But...
The SBI! Tortoise wins the day... sure and steady.
Do you think that only professionals (called Search Engine Optimizers or "SEOers") can build traffic and highly at the Search Engines? No, in fact you have the huge advantage.
Search Engine Optimizers try to manipulate the ranking algorithms that the engines use to determine the rankings of keyword searches, in order to rank highly.
The emphasis is on everything except building content that pleases humans. It is a doomed profession -- Search Engines and the Web are becoming too complex to manipulate. A book called "The Tao Of SBI!" will prove this later.
Search Engines are in the business of delivering relevant and high-quality results. The SBI! tools take care of the complexities of relevance and your quality delivers what SEOers do not. The combination is relentlessly effective.
Search Engines are generated by small computer programs called spiders. They roam the Web at high speed and return billions of Web pages into an engine's database. Since no HUMAN actually RATES each page, the engines develop "ranking algorithms" to decide how high to rank each page for each keyword search.
The four major Search Engines are Google, Yahoo! Search, Bing, and Ask. Other engines are either of minor importance, or use one or more of the above four.
No need for luck. No need for SEO expertise. Simply follow and trust the C T P M process. The SBI! tools, specifically developed to execute the process, make it all possible. Net result? It works.
It's through the Search Engines (SEs) that you will reach your visitors. Most surfers won't scroll past the first 10-20 listings on a Search Engine's search results pages. That is where you will be.
And second, the description about your site will be interesting and credible. So you will "get the click." (Don't worry! SBI! takes care of all this as you build your site.)
When a visitor finds you through a Search Engine like Google (or Yahoo! Search or Bing, think of how smart s/he feels. After all, s/he found you. You didn't advertise (actually, once you build traffic, you can sell advertising!). All that remains is for you to OVERdeliver -- PREsell!
Once you realize the logic and power of C T P M, then you know that success really is DO-able. It is indeed "yours to be had." And if you don't succeed immediately, keep trying until you find the right approach.
You only fail when you quit. Patience and persistence ultimately rule the day. Or, to quote Calvin Coolidge...
Persistence wins. Keep pushing it... the business you build will take on its own momentum. It will fulfill all your objectives, if you put in the BAM ("Brain and Motivation"), the time and persistence that are required to grow anything that is worth achieving.
We're making superb progress. You understand C T P M. More importantly, you are ready to invest (and "invest" is the perfect word!) time to build C T P before you Monetize. Once you do, converting PREsold visitors into money is the easiest (and most fun!) part of your online business. Let's do it...
Step 3 -- Monetize! Maximize Conversion Rate and profits.
Monetizing PREsold visitors is easier than falling off the proverbial log. DAY 4 discusses the wide variety of ways you can monetize. We'll cover this topic at that time.
The key point for now is... You are not your monetization model. Do not think about "being an affiliate" or "selling an e-good." As a matter of fact, do not decide upon any one monetization method.
First and foremost, you are in the "Content Delivery Business." Then you monetize.
And... Diversify. Have several strong streams of income.
However you monetize, do not push your visitors. Let the content pull them through to your revenue-generating locations rather than stopping them in their track.
This could be a link to a sales page for your product or service, to your merchant-partner's site or to a click on a Google AdSense ad, for example.
Instead of pushing them, make them want to click. It makes all the difference if your visitors feel that it's their idea to deliver your "Most Wanted Response" ("MWR").
The "Most Wanted Response" (abbreviated to "MWR") is what you most want visitors to your site (or to a certain page, depending on the context of the discussion) to do. It is usually the action that generates income for you. And it is almost always some kind of a click (occasionally a phone call to you).
Once you have PREsold traffic, monetizing is limited only by your imagination!
So let's not worry about that now. Instead, let's talk about the broader concept of profits...
There is an easy business equation to follow in order to maximize profit. It's the same equation, whether you are working online or off...
INCOME minus EXPENSES equals PROFIT.
It's not a complicated equation, true! But people tend to forget about it.
If you can increase the amount of money that is coming into your business, and lower the amount of money that is going out of your business, you will have more money staying with your business.
So let's start shifting that profit equation in your favor (and your bank account's!) by improving the first part of the equation...
Income
There are two major ways to increase income (i.e., the amount of money you make through your products, services, and/or other monetization efforts). You need to...
1) Expose more visitors to your monetization models...
This means that you need to attract more targeted traffic, people who are specifically interested in your theme and your topics (related to that theme) on your Web site. High-value content is the key factor behind traffic volume and your ability to increase and sustain it. And here's the good news...
If you get the keywords "right" on your page and if you have great content, you will have substantial, evergrowing traffic! And here's the best news...
That's exactly what you will do during DAYs 6-10 of the SBI! process.
Once you have this traffic on your site, your "Most Wanted Response" ("MWR") can vary...
- If you are a service seller, the MWR is a click on the "Submit" button on the Contact Form to reach you -- close the deal and secure a work contract.
- If you are a product seller (hard or digital goods), the MWR is a click on the "Buy" button on your order page.
- If you are an affiliate, the MWR is a "click-through" to the sites of the merchant-partners that you represent.
- If you are a pure infopreneur (i.e., no "customers"), Google AdSense will play a large part -- there are ways to place your Google Ads to maximize clicks (and your income!). And there are other ways to earn income without ever dealing with a customer!
2) Maximize the percentage of visitors who "click" (i.e., your Conversion Rate)
No matter what, your goal is to "get the click." Convert your visitors into clicks, which in turn convert into money -- maximize those clicks!
Conversion Rate is nothing more than the percentage of visitors who click and convert into dollars, one way or another. Great content and proper strategies maximize your Conversion Rate, no matter how you monetize.
Your visitors arrived on your site, loved your content, and either decided your recommendation was credible or were interested in a Google ad or bought your e-book. They clicked!
Content... to traffic... to click... to dollars of income. The higher your Conversion Rate, the higher your income!
Let's use an affiliate business to illustrate. In this case, the CR would mean the percentage of visitors to your merchant-partner's site who deliver the response for which the merchant pays, whether that's a click, a lead or a sale.
The more traffic you receive, the more chances you have to increase your CR. For example, you refer 100 visitors per day to a merchant-partner and 1% buy. You get paid for that one purchase. But if you send 1,000 visitors per day and 3% buy, you get paid for 30 purchases!
Now for the second part of the profit equation...
Expenses
Every business has expenses. Maximizing profits does not imply that you must minimize expenses totally. After all, if you spend no money or time on your business... you have no business!
You have already substantially cut expenses by purchasing SBI!. There is no less expensive way in the world to build a successful online business.
SBI! saves you countless hours, too. And time is money. Naturally, like every startup, you still invest time upfront to reap your rewards later. Unlike "traditional" online business-building, every SBI! hour is time perfectly spent.
For the first while, traffic and income will be low. That's normal -- you are an entrepreneur building a business, not an employee ("the entrepreneurial mindset"). And then...
The build starts. Like a snowball gaining momentum and size, your business grows and grows... life changes.
Right now, though, these early days are about laying the foundation. And in particular, the first five DAYs will result in a very unusual species of small business person...
The Totally Prepared!
On DAY 6, you start creating pages. Whether you use your own HTML editor (ex., DreamWeaver, KompoZer, etc.) or you use SBI!'s block-by-block SiteBuilder, "plugging" your pages into the SBI! system takes an extra minute. But each of those minutes saves you tens of hours on the backend...
That amounts to huge savings in expense.
Moving Forward...
To succeed online, you must start where your "pre-customers" start...
People search for information, look for solutions. They are not looking for you. Give them what they want by converting your knowledge into high-quality, in-demand CONTENT.
Before you can do that, you must figure out...
- what they seek
- how often they search for it
- how badly they want it
- what competitors already provide, and how they do it
- what Content you will deliver, and how.
And THAT is exactly what you and Brainstorm It! are going to be doing from DAY 2 to DAY 5. Remember... don't rush. The rest of your business depends on it.
So many of us want all the answers right now, if not sooner, and are not ready to do the work (preparation and execution) required to get there. In that respect, SBI! is as much a course in personal development as it is in business development.
To get to where we want to be in business and life takes work. It takes time. Preparation. Work. Failure. More work, sometimes new directions. Persistence. Execution. Success.
When we want to get it all done so fast, we end up feeling overwhelmed. The solution is so simple....
You'll be amazed at how far you'll go by slowing down, getting started well, and following the Action Guide carefully, one simple step at a time.
Onwards and upwards...