Home Business Ideas and Opportunities

One little notebook could be worth a million dollars to you. Or more. Here’s how…

Keep track of everything you do and especially all of your ideas. When you start something new, keep a running record of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.

Two things will happen:

First, you’ll have more and more ideas, and better ideas, too. The simple act of writing ideas down drives your subconscious to create more ideas. Review your ideas weekly and find the gems. Test out the best ones, choose one and run with it. It could be a million-dollar business.

Second, teach others how to do that business. If you find an awesome new way to build an email list, build your own lists and then teach others to do the same. If you discover how to launch a product from start to finish in 3 days, teach others to do the same.

Keep your notebook with you at all times. Write in it when the mood strikes, and even when it doesn’t. Resort to an online journal only when necessary. There’s something about the brain and handwriting connection that inspires more creative thinking than simply tapping keys.

So, do you have your million dollar journal yet?

If not, get one and get started.

Your future self will thank you for it!

Why is it when we want to be at our most creative and innovative, we resort to using the most worn-out cliché at our disposal? “We need to think outside the box on this one!”

Ugghhh.

First of all, that ‘box’ is there for a reason. It gives us boundaries and guidelines on what we want to accomplish. For example, if I say I want you to write an article on new ways small businesses can use social media, I’ve just given you a ‘box’.

But if I tell you to get to work and give you no idea what to do, you’re going to be totally and utterly lost.

Second, if we want to be more creative, let’s start by abolishing the “think outside the box” phrase and make a pact, just between you and me. From this point forward, if you or I say or write ‘th*nk o*ts*d* th* b*x’, we owe $5 to our favorite charity payable immediately.

Agreed? Good.

Now then, what can we say when we want to express our desire to think differently, get off the beaten track, search for an innovative approach, break new ground and take an imaginative leap?

Seriously, I’m asking you for your help on this one. Even the phrases I used in the previous sentence sound worn out and tired.

I did have one thought, but if you’re a Star Wars fan then you might not like it. For whatever reason, people seem to either gravitate towards Star Wars or Star Trek. I’m told Star Wars is for dreamers and Star Trek is for science geeks. This might be wrong, but I can see some truth to it.

Here’s what I do know: In the very first Star Trek series during the opening credits, we hear Captain Kirk saying…

“Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before.” What do you think?

Can we boldly go where no one has gone before?

It beats thinking outside some cliché box.

Whoops! That’s $5 I owe… now where did I put that checkbook… 😉

“The Guide to Oysters” was the first ad advertising expert David Ogilvy wrote for his own agency. In the full-page ad, details on different oysters, where they come from and how they are prepared are given, along with photos of each.

It’s a highly informative article; the kind people might rip out of a magazine for future reference. Oh yes, and in the bottom right corner, Guinness Beer is touted as the ideal drink to have with oysters. You guessed it… the ad wasn’t for oysters at all but rather for the beer.

Sneaky, huh?

No doubt you’re already creating “how-to” content for your readers and sending it out in emails, posting in your blog, social media and so forth. And at the end of your content you might promote a related product, too. For example, you tell how to use a certain method to get traffic. Then you offer a product that teaches 20 more traffic methods.

But what if… now think about this, because it’s a bit of a mind shift…

What if your content told how to USE the product you are promoting? You take that same traffic product, regardless of whether it’s your product or an affiliate product, and you write a post on how to use it to achieve a goal.

I have a friend who does exactly this and it’s made all the difference in his business. Before he started using this method, people would thank him for his great content but never buy the product he was promoting. After he started doing this, people started buying. It was frankly kinda spooky how well this worked.

Me, I was skeptical. But numbers don’t lie.

Before this method, my friend worked a full time job. 4 months after he made the change, my friend quit his job and now does online marketing 20 hours a week and surfs, scuba dives and climbs the rest of the week. I promised him I wouldn’t reveal his name or niche, but let’s go back to our traffic example and I’ll give you an idea of how this works.

Let’s say the product you’re promoting is a course on how to do Facebook Advertising, and the headline for your latest post is something like, “How to Get 50 Buyers a Day for Your Product Using Facebook Ads”. In your post you basically outline some info (not all the info, of course) on how it’s done. But here’s the thing… more than once you reference the product you’re selling as being a key part of the Facebook Ad process.

Jumping into the middle of our imaginary article: “When you get to Step 3, just reference the tool on page 43 of the “Super Traffic Course” and you’ll know immediately which ad is more likely to get the best results.” Or something like that… please note I’m doing this off the top of my head.

“If you don’t have the Super Traffic Course yet – seriously? What are you waiting for? – you can grab it here. Or you can spend a few hours gathering the same info that you’ll find on page 43… not the best use of your time, perhaps, but trial and error will eventually see you through if you stick to it. Once you’ve used the tool of page 43 and you have your numbers, you’ll know exactly which ad to run first as well as the best time to run it. Now the next step is to…”

Using this method requires two things:

First, you need a shift in your thinking. Odds are you’ve always written something like, “Tip 1, Tip 2, Tip 3, oh by the way, buy this product.” But now the product is actually an integral part of the content. You are teaching them as though they ALREADY OWN the product, which does something wonderful to your reader – it makes them THINK as though they already own it.

Except… they don’t.

So now they feel like an insider but still on the outside. Darn it, they’re missing something really awesome!

It creates a cognitive dissonance in them that can be easily resolved by… TA-DA! Purchasing the product, of course. This is soooo sneaky, isn’t it? Ha! I love it.

The mind shift on your part is the first thing you need. The second thing is some well executed balancing which will come with practice. You want to give enough info to make the post helpful even if they haven’t purchased the product. Your posts should stand on their own. But they shouldn’t give away all the secrets of the product – not even close.

You’re creating intrigue and a sense of missing out for those who don’t own the product while simultaneously giving good info they can use. See? A balancing act. And all the while you are also making it completely clear that owning the product will make the process easier, faster and in this case more profitable.

My friend says this was the hardest part to learn. He had to figure out how much info to give, what to withhold and how to seamlessly promote the product within the article. He also said the first time he tried was a hot mess, but he kept at it and within a week it was easy and within two weeks it was second nature.

It’s simply a matter of learning a new way to frame what you’re writing.

His posts aren’t super long, either. They’re usually just 500-1,500 words, depending on how much he covers. And then he promotes his posts extensively and shamelessly through social media as well as to his ever-growing list.

Million Dollar Side Point: Half of his posts actually reference and promote free lead magnets he’s giving away to build his email lists. He has lists in a dozen sub-niches to his main niche, and those lists are growing FAST. He especially promotes these posts on social media. And he reposts these posts every month or two and again promotes them on social media as if they are brand new. His rate of list building using this simple technique is blowing my mind right now.

I think I may have ‘buried the lead’ with that last paragraph, so if you’ve read this far, congrats. You now have a secret to list building that others missed!

Bottom Line: Write “how-to” content that works in conjunction with the product you are selling (or the list building lead magnet you’re giving away). These posts work as covert sales letters that set you up as the authority, teach useful skills AND sell the product or the opt-in.

I know it might be different from what you’ve done before. And the first time or two you write content like this, it might seem weird, awkward or strange. But done correctly, it can also be super profitable.

In the 70’s they did an experiment to see if the same college students who turned in their assignments on time also had clean socks. (No joke – they seriously did this.)

The hypothesis was that people who got their schoolwork done would be the same people who got their personal chores done as well. But the results were the opposite of what they expected.

Students who turned assignments in on time were terrible about keeping up with their laundry, and students who kept up with laundry turned in their assignments late. What was happening?

Researchers later realized that we only have a certain amount of attention and willpower we can pay during any one day. If we first pay that attention and willpower to doing laundry, we feel depleted before getting homework done. If we do the homework first, we tend to put off doing laundry for another day or even another week.

In a second experiment, people were left alone in a room with cookies. Some of them were allowed to eat the cookies while others weren’t. Both groups were then given an extremely difficult puzzle to solve.

Those who were allowed to eat the cookies along with a control group who never saw any cookies spent an average of 20 minutes working on the puzzle. But those who had to practice willpower by not eating the cookies only spent 8 minutes working on the puzzle because they’d already spent much of their willpower.

If you go to a mall and give people simple math problems to solve, those who have spent a long time shopping will give up on the simple math problem much faster than those who just walked into the mall and haven’t been shopping yet.

Understanding what these experiments mean for you can completely change how you plan your work and how much you can accomplish in a day and in your life. Each of us has a finite amount of willpower each day, and it gets depleted as we use it. And here’s another surprise: We use the SAME stock of willpower for ALL tasks, regardless of what they are or how important or unimportant they might be.

We don’t have laundry willpower, homework willpower, cookie willpower and math willpower… we just have one amount of universal willpower that we are given each morning when we wake up.

If you think you lack willpower to exercise after work, it’s more likely that you used up all of your willpower at work and have none left. Exercising before work will solve your problem.

If you decide to go grocery shopping before you get your work done, you’ll use up your willpower making hundreds of little decisions on what to buy and what not to buy. That’s why when you get home from the store you might find yourself wasting time on the internet or television, because you have no more willpower for doing real work.

If you do your creative work first thing when you get up in the morning instead of putting it off to the end of the day, you’re going to get a lot more accomplished.

There are ways you can conserve your willpower and attention so that you have more of it for your important work. For example, you can prepare the same foods for each meal so that you don’t have to decide each day what to make. Better still, you can pay someone to prepare a week’s worth of meals for you. If you don’t understand how willpower works, this may seem like an expensive option. But when you eliminate the attention, decision making and willpower needed to shop for and prepare 21 meals a week and instead use it on your work, you will likely make far more money than you spend on the meals.

Much like Steve Jobs, you can wear the same style of clothes each day so that you don’t have to decide what to wear. Steve Jobs would grab a pair of jeans and a black turtleneck each day without expending any of his attention and willpower on what to wear.

Don’t check your email in the morning. Reading a hundred subject lines, replying to 30 emails, writing 5 emails… this all adds up to a tremendous amount of decision making, attention and willpower that could be better spent doing the work that makes you money.

Any unimportant tasks that you can eliminate or delegate will reduce the number of decisions you have to make and the amount of willpower you expend each day, leaving more willpower and attention for your main focus. You’ve no doubt heard this technique of prioritization referenced as the “highest use of your time.”

A $5,000 an hour professional does not spend 5 hours a week cleaning her home. Why would she, when she can hire someone at $20 an hour to do that for her? She is still able to earn $4,980 an hour employing the maid while doing her own work. But if she spends 5 hours cleaning her own home, she has lost $25,000 in revenue. Or to put it another way, she spends $25,000 a week cleaning her home, which is ridiculous at best and incredibly stupid at worst.

Here are the only three takeaways you need to revolutionize your life and double or even triple how much you accomplish:

1: Eliminate every little job and decision you can, freeing up willpower and attention for what is important. Get someone to clean your house, cook your meals, run errands and so forth. Get rid of anything that takes time and attention but doesn’t provide you with a good return for your time. This might mean eliminating obligations such as being on a committee for a non-priority cause, quitting a hobby that doesn’t give you satisfaction, simplifying your home and belongings, simplifying your wardrobe and so forth.

2: Start your day doing the most important thing, followed by the second most important and so forth. This might mean you first exercise, then perform the highest value work task, then the second highest value work task, etc.

3: While we didn’t cover this, it is important to find something you completely enjoy that is totally unrelated to what you normally do. In other words, get a hobby you thoroughly love and spend a little time on it at the end of the day. This will take you out of the work realm, reduce stress, give you satisfaction and make it easier to get up tomorrow and jump right into your most important task of the day.

When teaching and selling via video, nearly all of us could do just a little bit better. We could be a little bit more interesting, a little bit more enthusiastic, a little bit more entertaining and a little bit more charismatic.

It’s not easy to narrate a long slide show or to face the camera for a length of time and hold attention. Most of us are not professional presenters or announcers and we haven’t been trained in how to hold an audiences’ attention.

But there is one trick I stumbled upon that can instantly improve almost anyone’s delivery, and it’s this:

Speed up your performance just a little bit.

You can do this one of two ways:

Either edit your audio/video to remove any ‘umms’, ‘ahhs’, ‘let-me-see’s and so forth. Remove them entirely. Long pauses? Remove them. Anything that doesn’t move the story forward? Rambling? Needlessly repeating yourself? Remove it. If you don’t want to edit your video, get someone to do it for you.

The second thing is to speed it up. Just a little. You don’t want to sound like a chipmunk. But if you slightly increase the speed of delivery, either by speaking faster or speeding up the video, it can make a remarkable difference.

Play around with this and see what happens.

One last thing… smile. Regardless of whether they can see you in the video or just hear you, they will know when you are smiling. Laughter is great, too.

Don’t even second guess when I tell you that an abundance of typos on your sales page will create doubt in your prospect… They’ll suspect you have no clue what you’re doing.

Further, they may suspect you’re a fly-by-nighter, someone who threw a site up to grab sales and then disappear like vapor in a storm.

Yes, we all make typos – including and maybe especially me. But I take great pains NOT to make them on sales pages, for good reason.

Recently I was intrigued by an email promising to build a news site that would generate an income for me. Okay, I know what you’re thinking already. Yeah. Right. Sure it will.

But what the heck… I clicked the link, scrolled down a bit, and here’s the first paragraph I read:

Last Trending News
Your News Dashboard Bring To You The Last News to Easly Click and Post. You Can Pin The The News With One More Click To Make Your Posts Unique.

How many errors did you find in this tiny bit of copy?

I found 6 or 7, depending on how you count them.

It should read…

Latest Trending News
Your News Dashboard Brings To You The Latest News to Easily Click and Post. You Can Pin The News With One More Click To Make Your Posts Unique.

Even then the writing is terrible.

Yes, English is obviously their second language. But they couldn’t spare a hundred bucks to get someone to check their copy for them?

Sale lost.

Lesson learned: Typos in sales letters can and will lower your conversion rates. Go the extra mile to avoid them, and always have at least one additional set of careful eyes look over your pages before going live.

You send out an email to your list promoting your webinar replay. Of course, you might not call it a webinar replay because some people don’t want to sit through a recording that lasts for an hour or two.

They like what they read in the email.

They click over to the page with the replay.

They like the copy on that page… “This is interesting! Maybe I want to buy this… hmmm… let me click on this video…”

“ARGHHH!”

“Two hours long??”

“No way.”

They close the page.

And you just lost them.

Whoops.

What happened?

They liked what you said in the email. They really liked what you said on the page. But when they clicked the video and saw how long it was going to be, they abandoned ship.

How can you fix this?

A couple of thoughts…

First, tell them what they’re going DISCOVER in the video. Sell the video, not the product. Let them know the video is chock full of awesome, usable information. Invoke a strong sense of curiosity as well as the feeling they will miss out if they don’t watch it.

You might think of this step like a movie trailer… showing just enough of all the best bits to pull them to the screen and make them drool for more.

Second, don’t make the video two hours long.

Or even one hour long.

Make it about 10 minutes in length.

“Wait! I can’t sell my program in 10 minutes!”

You don’t have to because you’re going to use more than one video.

Here’s the key…

In the first video, hit the ground running and immediately give them something great such as a huge benefit and what they need to do to achieve it. Leave out the step-by-step instructions of how to do it because you’ll teach that in the paid course.

Then tell them what you’re going to reveal next…

And here you can either use a script that automatically brings up the second video, or if you’re not that fancy, give them the link.

The end of the first video sells them on watching the second video. The end of the second video sells them on watching the third video. They are binge watching your videos, something they are accustomed to thanks to streaming services like Netflix.

In each video, gently let them know that as great as this information is, paid members get the mother lode of life-changing or business-changing info. Using this method has a couple of advantages…

You are hyper aware that every second of video needs to either convey great info or sell them on watching the next video. You don’t allow yourself the business-killing luxury of being boring.

And the viewer gets pulled in bit by bit, much like a seduction. Done right, there’s no way they want to miss what’s in the next video. Throughout the process, viewers are being courted into purchasing your product.

Give it a try… I bet your conversions will increase dramatically.

There are times in our lives where we are compelled to stop and take a look at ourselves and ask the question: Who am I?

Obviously there are several follow up questions to that one, most often: Am I happy? Or What do I want now? But really all the follow-up questions we might ask are simply extensions of the first: Who am I?

We might ask that question on the eve of graduation from high school, or university, just before we start that first job, as we enter that first or last relationship, begin a family, buy a house, or start a business.

How do you answer that question? What would you identify yourself as?

Each of us is unique in the world, but we also each try to conform to a type. A mother, a father, a husband, a wife, a professional, an employee, an employer, an entrepreneur. You tell yourself that you are the role you are in.

Whatever you think fits you most comfortably is what you conform to. That is what you think you owe to yourself and others to be. And of course, you want to be that to the best of your ability.

In the case of building an online business, we are entrepreneurs.

So let us look at that word and honor what it really means to fit into that role. Our goal isn’t the financial gains, since for the entrepreneur that is simply a scorecard. Our role is to gain independence and freedom, to follow our passions and to dream bigger than a normal 9-5 job would allow you to.

It is to see gaps in the market that others don’t and to not be afraid to take risks and leaps in investment. Being an entrepreneur is often to follow your gut feelings and to want more: to see the bigger picture.

You have to be who you are in this world, in accordance with how you define yourself no matter what, and as always – remember that money is not the only goal – the journey is!