The Marketing Process: Knowing What it Takes to Succeed
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The first thing you must understand as a marketer is that marketing online, whether it is affiliate marketing, networking marketing or selling your own products, is a process. Marketing is the process of sharing and building relationships with folks and this process takes time and effort.
Most of the people you come into contact with during your marketing will not buy first time. Think about it. When was the last time you bought a product online the first time you came across it? It can be weeks or months before someone is ready to buy your product or join your business. So you need to spend time building rapport and trust with your network of potential customers by teaching and sharing useful content that will help solve their problems.
In this blog post you will learn what it takes to truly succeed with your marketing process. You will learn the number one thing that holds people back and the three things you must do to overcome it.
The three things are:
1. Increase Your Knowledge and Skill Set
You need to invest in yourself and put yourself in a position to provide solutions to people’s problems.
Most marketers have a business or offer of their own and do not need another business opportunity. The biggest problem most of them face is getting enough leads for their business. By increasing your knowledge and skill level, you will be able to lead with coaching and training to people who are already in the industry, and in doing so help them to build their businesses, without the pressure of trying to make them join your business. Then you will be seen as someone who provides value and people will be more willing to join you.
How do you do that? You follow the Learn, Do and Teach principle. This involves first Learning something, Doing it once you have learnt it and then finally Teaching what you know to others. Furthermore, you do not have to become the fount of all knowledge before you can begin to teach. If you learn something new, however seemingly trivial, and you feel the knowledge would be beneficial to others, then your duty as a marketer is to put it out for consumption. As inexperienced as you may be in your marketing there will be other people out there who will be grateful to receive your knowledge as they will not have travelled as far on their marketing journey.
Learning comes from interaction with other Marketers, old and new. Watch their videos, read their blog posts, get on their lists and learn how they do marketing. Buy some of their products and get experience in using them. Attend webinars and Google Hangouts on the various aspects of marketing that resonate with you. The more you listen and learn the more marketing will become second nature to you and the easier it will be for you to teach others what you know. The more you teach the more you will establish yourself as an authority and people will begin to trust you and they will follow you.
2. Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
The plain fact of the matter is that you are going to have to come face to face with your fears and overcome them if you are going to succeed as a marketer. Always playing it safe and not being prepared to go out of our comfort zone is probably the biggest thing that holds us back from achieving our ambitions, and I am taking about life in general here. “A turtle makes progress only when it sticks its neck out.”
For example there are many people who, for various reasons, are unhappy in their job of work but the idea of quitting that job for something that would make them happier would never occur to them because they are not willing to contemplate giving up the comfort of a regular pay check.
One of my fears I am working to overcome in my marketing is doing videos. As someone who is normally a little reserved, the idea of appearing in front of a camera and presenting myself to the world has never held much appeal for me. However I recognize that people join people, therefore if I am to be effective in my marketing, then I cannot hide behind a computer keyboard and expect people to join my business on the back of a few emails. I have to get out of my comfort zone and get those videos out there.
Moving out of your comfort zone becomes easier when you understand why most people are afraid to do it. The number one fear is the thought of failure or the fear of looking bad or dumb, which is essentially the same thing. It is not actually the fear of failing that worries us, because in most cases we would actually be able to deal with the consequences of failure without it becoming too much of a burden. Rather, we dread the thought of what others will think of us when we fail. We are afraid of looking stupid. We are afraid of looking vulnerable and weak.
But outside your comfort zone is where opportunity lies. That is where the magic happens. The question you have to ask yourself is whether it is more important for you to preserve your self-image, more often than not, in the eyes of people around us whose opinion does not matter, or that you go all out to achieve your dreams. You need to look at the actions you are taking, or not taking, and decide if they are influenced by your desire to preserve your reputation by staying in your comfort zone, at the expense of a better life for you and your family.
3. Quitting is Not a Word in Our Vocabulary
There is a famous quote about never giving up, which goes something like…”Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass away anyway.”
Another way of putting it is to say, there are only two ways to fail in this business…you either quit or you don’t get started in the first place. Your success is inevitable, as long as you continue to do the right things and you do them for long enough. Only you can determine when that time will be as it will not only be determined by how much effort you put in, but by your ability to learn and grow as a person (see point 1 of this blog post) and how you apply that knowledge to helping others.
The keys to not quitting are:
1. Always remember why you started out on this journey in the first place…your Big Why. Don’t lose sight of your Big Why when the going gets tough, because, as sure as you are of the nose on your face, you can be equally sure that the going will get tough.
2. Consider what the alternative is…to go back to an unfulfilling life in your comfort zone where your priorities are determined by your desire to preserve you reputation with people whose opinion does not really matter.
Finally I leave you with this quote from Robert Kiyosaki’s Author of Rich Dad’s CashFlow Quadrant:
People say ‘I want to be rich’. The question is, ‘Are you willing to do what it takes?’ – Robert Kiyosaki
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