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How To Fix A Bad Relationship With Money

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Above all else, it is vital that you understand your finances right now, as well as in the future. It may not be something that interests you much, but learning about money will help you feel more confident in the decisions you make now and will help you plan for the future. This article will help you understand and better manage your personal finance.

Try to build a budget around reasonable figures. The first step is to determine the total amount of income your household earns after taxes are deducted. Also, include other sources of income. You should never be spending more money during the month than you are able to make.

The next step is figure out your expenses. List all of the money that your family spends. Be sure to include expenses which come up yearly or quarterly. Include all costs associated with your car, such as new tires and oil changes. When you factor in food costs, include both grocery spending as well as money spent dining out. Make sure that you are comprehensive in including all expenses.

Now that you know how much money you are making, you should be able to create a workable budget. List your monthly bills and expenses. Review the list and question each item, asking yourself which ones are really necessary. For example, the amount you spend on eating out might not be necessary if you can cook at home instead for less money. Look for innovative ways to do things that will allow you to save your money.

Check out the mechanical systems in your house as well, if they seem outdated or defective, fix them or buy new ones. You can start with buying energy efficient windows that will help to lower your heating costs. Installing a new tankless water heater can result in additional reductions in utility costs. Check all the plumbing in your home, and repair any leaks you find in order to save money on your water bill. Wait until your dishwasher is completely full before you operate it in order to limit your energy consumption.

Consider replacing old appliances with newer energy efficient models. In addition, keep appliances unplugged when they are not in use, particularly appliances with indicator lights. Indicator lights can use a lot of energy over time.

Upgrade your roof’s insulation to keep your home from losing heat or cold air. Performing these repairs will make heating and cooling your home much less costly.

Using these ideas canhelp balance your income and save money with your expenses. While initially expensive, the money you spent on new, energy-efficent appliances will more than replenish itself. You will see smaller water and electric bills each month, which can replace the money you spent on the appliances in the first place. This makes you the master of your money.

Self Help Made Easy: Quick Ways To Get Better Results

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When you take the time to develop and improve who you are as a person, you are taking the time to care for yourself. Everyone needs to do this, though some people just feel that others are more important. This article will give you helpful advice so that you can start making yourself a priority.

A great self help tip that can help you change your life is to start breathing right. A lot of people make the mistake of breathing short, fast breaths. Breathing like this will make you anxious. Try to focus on taking in deeper breaths in order to be more relaxed.

Keep lists of your progress daily. When you have completed these lists, don’t be so quick to throw them away. Just because the lists are complete does not mean that you are done with them. Try surrounding yourself with your progress by keeping them and displaying them. This can give you drive and let you know that you can accomplish your goals.

There is no time for excuses in personal development. Stop excuses at the door, and nip any laziness in the bud. One bad move can lead to a long-term bad habit, so preventing laziness before it starts is really just saving you future work. Personal development is about being your best at all times, so practice what you want to achieve.

Set yourself up for success by making your goals manageable. Your plans should always be set up so that you cannot come up short, but you should also take care to avoid putting forth excess energy. You’ll find it easier to manage your time and goals through consistent practice and with prioritizing.

You can see how important it is to take care of yourself. If you are not working to better who you are, you are not growing as a person. Take the time to love yourself and use these tips to continually work on your personal development. You don’t have to do everything all at once, just take it one step at a time and you will begin to notice subtle changes.

Success Tip #201

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“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

 

Your path toward personal success may not always lead you in a straight line. Most paths have hills and valleys with a wide array of obstacles in between. If your journey has taken longer than you expected, don’t get discouraged. Keep your road map in hand, and KEEP MOVING!

 

Success Tip # 201: Don’t waste energy worrying about past failures. Each day is a new opportunity to start fresh. Make conscious choices and celebrate each accomplishment. Your mind and body are energized by reaching goals — Create the evidence that you are confident in facing the challenges of this day.

 

Learn to embrace the freedom that comes from creating better results.

 

Setting Your Meetings Final Close

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At this point you have contacted your prospects and they have now become leads. 97% of the time you will not be able to sell your services during the initial contact with you prospects. Therefore I prefer to schedule another appointment to close new clients. The location depends; initial I only worked with offline clients within a relatively close radius so I could do meeting in person. However as my business grew and I began expanding my offline business I started to close clients over the phone as well. Both are viable options its just a matter of how aggressive you want to be in closing leads.

How to Prepare

Now that you’ve made appointments it’s time for you to begin preparing for your meeting. First be sure to follow up with the business owner sometime before to confirm your appointment. Once you start to prepare for a meeting you need to get yourself in the right mindset. Personally I am naturally a very confident person so it doesn’t take much for me. Regardless if you are confident or not, you MUST be confident in your abilities. You are the expert and have probably invested years and thousands of dollars investing in your skills, so have confidence in the services you have to offer.

Next you need to do some more in depth research on your leads. You should have some basic information about the business from your prospecting stage, now its time to take it up a notch. The amount and type of research you do depends on what services you are offering. But some basic research that you can include are things like: competition analysis, website analysis, keyword research etc. You can also include any information about additional services you may offer i.e. mobile search per month, video rankings or social media errors.

Once you have completed client research you should prepare a nice document which the client can review while you presenting. When I’m meeting with a new client I like to bring the following things

  • Client questionnaire
  • Professional information packet
  • Any contracts needed
  • Ipad or Netbook Laptop

The Meeting

When you start the meeting with a prospect the best thing to do is start building some rapport. When it comes to your offline business and managing clients rapport is your secret weapon. Rapport building starts with this first face to face meeting and continues throughout the entire time you provide offline services. Here are some great questions to ask to start building rapport during your first meeting:

  1. Tell me about your business
  2. How long have you have you had it
  3. So what did you do before starting this? How did you like it? Etc. (this line of questioning just helps build some personal rapport between you and the business owners)
  4. What are you goals for your business
  5. What are the biggest problem you have with you marketing efforts
  6. What are some areas of your web marketing that you would like to see improvements in your marketing
  7. When it comes to investing in new marketing efforts what are some of the criteria that you use

This line of questioning will help you build instant rapport with any business owner. You want to get the business owners talking about themselves, in so doing this will make the business owner like you!

After your initial rapport building line of questioning it is time for you to present your information. The information you present should be specifically created for that business and show how you can help their business. This also shows that you are an expert in the field of internet marketing. You can find lots of templates to use when presenting certain services to business owners within the Warrior Forum.

Close

Before you begin to sell its important to note that you should NOT be selling your services instead sell what your services can do for the business. With that in mind there is a very effective way to close the business owners. This method is known as the “logic close.” This means that after you have presented all of the information it’s simply a forgone conclusion that the business owner will purchase your services. You simply have to present the solutions from your presentation with some of the problems the business outlined earlier.

Personally I like to do this in the form of MORE QUESTIONS. For example when offering my SEO services I will go lead into my close the following way.

“John based off the information you told me it sounds like:

  1. You are the type of business owner that wants to get more leads on a consistent basis for your business, right?
  2. Your business could also benefit from increased customer loyalty, correct?
  3. Finally you want to stop wasting money on ineffective marketing and increase ROI, right?

“Well great John then it sounds like you would be interested in our Premium SEO services”

What’s Next

That’s it. The local close is simple and effective and what I use every time. Once you have your meeting set up you must prepare for the meeting. Get into the right mindset and have confidence in your services. Before your meeting you will also need to prepare some sales material to help show your product or services. During the meeting remember to build rapport with the business owner right away. Once you’ve developed some rapport simply present your information and move into the close.

Before you begin meeting with clients you should thoroughly practice a sales meeting. Also go through a couple of scenarios with someone just so you can get more acclimated with the process. The more comfortable you are with your sales presentation the more new clients you will close.

 

Choosing Your Niche

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“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
― Confucius

Your Niche

Welcome to day number 2 of your 30-Day Offline Marketing Empire Private Coaching. This training will cover one very important topic, choosing your niche. When most internet marketers decided to venture in the world of offline marketing they are looking for any business they can find. However dealing with multiple niches / industries / verticals can be an absolute nightmare. So today you will be choosing a niche that you can laser focus your marketing efforts on and completely dominate.

By the way, this is how all of the big marketing companies do it. In fact when I worked with the fortune 500 marketing firm all we did was work in the HVAC (Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning) industry… NOTHING ELSE. But we did it well, and we served over 500 of the top HVAC dealer across the US.

So I want to make this training so simple that no one can fail. When deciding what niche to target there are a couple of things that you should consider to ensure that you are working in niche that will be profitable in the long run. To do this simply ensure that your niche falls within one of the following criteria:

  1. High Profit Margin:  ensure that every new customer you bring in the client almost covers (or very nearly) the cost of your services. This will help justify the prices your charge. This is basic business principles here, if your marketing services cost $2,000 per month but you bring the business in $6,000 in new customers then any business owner will be happy to pay that.
  2. High Repeat Customer Percentage: these types of businesses charge an average on a per customer basis however those customers come back multiple times per year. So if you bring a business 5 new customers per month, and those same customers visit 3-5 times per year then the company is happy to pay for your services
  3. Highly Aggressive / Competitive Marketing:  the highly competitive markets are already spending a lot of money on aggressive types of advertising. The also tend to have large marketing budgets. Best of all these markets still focus mainly on traditional advertising, and what little online marketing they do employ tends to be ineffective
  • Medical Professions
  • Home Remodeling Companies
  • Lawyer / Attorneys
  • Construction Companies
  • Accounts / CPAs
  • HVAC Company
  • Plumbers
  • Mechanics
  • Hair Salons
  • Electricians
  • Carpet Cleaners
  • Real Estate Agents
  • Insurance Brokers
  • Independent Car Dealership
  • Nursing Homes / Retirement Homes

There are certainly more business that fall under the above categories, these are simply ideas to help get your mind going in the right direction. When deciding on your niche just be sure it meets one of the above mentioned criteria. Do some research find the niche that fits you best. Maybe you want a high profit margin niche so you can charge premium prices. Or maybe you want niche with more repeat customer so you can deliver more leads monthly. Whatever it is for you find the right balance between one or multiple of the criteria.

Now some may suggest that you find a niche that you are passionate about or have past experience with. However that is not necessary, what is important is that you choose a niche in which you can spend a lot of time researching. So if you hate going to the dentist and don’t want to learn about dentistry, then you should avoid that niche.

Throughout the coming months you will spend a lot time researching and learning about the niche you choose. You will be heavily involved with the niche on a daily basis.  Therefore it is imperative that you choose a niche that you don’t mind learning about and work with for the foreseeable future.

Niche Prospecting

Now before you begin prospecting, you must clearly understand the difference between prospecting and lead generation. Prospecting is when you research information about potential leads. For example simply finding the phone numbers of 100 Lawyers is prospecting. These prospects must be filtered before you can actually consider them a viable lead. This section of the training will be about prospecting for potential leads in your niche.

To begin it is good to start in a local area which you are familiar with. For most this will likely be the location they currently reside. Next simply combine your area with the niche you will begin focusing on. For the sake of this training we will use the “Houston, TX” area and the “Kitchen Remodel” niche. Now before we even begin for businesses that fit this description we must first set some basic prospecting guidelines.

  1. The business must meet our niche criteria
  2. The business must already have some type of online presence
  3. They must have invested in online marketing (past or present)

If you have an area and a niche that meets theses guidelines then you are ready to begin prospecting for new leads!

The first place to start is Yellow Pages. Simply start by typing in your keyword phrase (niche + area) or in this case “Kitchen Remodel Houston, TX”

We are prospecting on yellow pages for a very specific reason. All of the businesses that advertising on Yellow Pages have pay to be here.

You will be able to click on any of the business listings because they already meet all of our prospecting guidelines. From Yellow Pages you can then go to the business’ website and record some basic information including: business name, address, phone number, email, website address etc.

Pay close attention to the business listed on the top and side under “Sponsored Listing” or “Featured Listing.” Much like Google PPC ads these businesses have paid ever more in an effort to get more customers!

Here are some other resources that list businesses with paid advertising:

Prospecting is a critical step in not only getting your first client but also in building your business. Use all of the resources listed above to find as many prospective companies as possible before continuing onto the next training. If you local area is small, expand into neighboring city or towns until you have multiple businesses. The more business you collect in the prospecting the higher you chances of success!

What’s Next

Now that you’ve made it through training number two, its time to take some ACTION!

Make sure you pick a niche that you are comfortable with and meets the criteria for long term success. Once you have chosen your niche and area you want to focus on its time to start prospecting for potential leads. Remember there is a difference between prospects and leads, so be sure to remain conscience of this fact during this stage. Finally be sure to visit all of the resources provide so you can find prospects the meet the guidelines of a good prospects. Record as many businesses as possible because the more effort you put in now the more new clients in the long run.

 

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