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How to get your market targeted, your products ready, your promos out, and your affiliate program humming — In short, what you need to know and do to get your products and services selling like ice in the Mojave Desert.
I want to talk to you about a crucial psychological aspect of getting your Internet marketing signed, sealed and delivered!
In other lessons, I will go into specific details about marketing. But first, I need to lay a very important piece of groundwork and that is to find your "just right" gradient and put it on a screen saver, so it’s in your face ever day.
Let me explain: The first secret of getting things humming is called "decreasing the gradient."
Let me explain: In behavioral psychology, there is a thing called your gradient. That is the degree of difficulty of what you’re trying to accomplish. The very first thing you should do if it seems like you’re making no progress is to decrease your gradient. That means you don’t tackle such a steep slope all at once. That means dividing your objective or goal into smaller chunks and giving yourself kudos when each one is accomplished.
If you are beginning your online endeavors with very little experience in business, marketing, computers or networking, you’ve got to be a lot more patient with your progress than a person does who comes into the arena bringing a lot of experience.
You’ve got to walk before you run. And you’ve got to run before you fly. Marketing "gurus" are flyers. They fly. But realize that most have prior business experience, knowledge and so forth.
For example, one of my friends came into this industry and succeeded very quickly. But he had also ran his own business before, had attended numerous business seminars, and had developed potent networking skills.
The point is, tackle a LEARNING CURVE that is appropriate to where you are. It’s hard when you have the pressure of bills, or a spouse or family member who doesn’t fully support your endeavors…it’s hard to find your "just right" gradient. When you feel stuck or stymied, it’s a sign that you need to decrease your gradient or chunk down what you’re doing.
Let’s say you’re writing an ebook. Intstead of making your goal to get the whole thing written, work JUST on the table of contents or the first chapter. Put your focus on that.
If you feel OVERWHELMED, it’s a sign you’re focusing on too big a picture. Set your sights on a smaller, more easily accomplished objective.
For example, when I created my new Marketing Dashboard, I divided the objective into 6 major actions and 6 steps for each action. How do you know if you have selected the gradient that is "just right" for you?
1. Do you feel excited and challenged?
If you don’t feel excited and you don’t feel challenged, then your goal or your gradient is actually TOO SMALL! You need excitement and emotion to movitate you to take action and get things done.
2. Do you feel frustrated, overwhelmed or lost?
If so, your big picture needs to be chunked down into manageable steps.
Once you break your goal down into steps that are challenging but not overwhelming, you write these out and put them on a SCREEN SAVER that will be in front of your face on your computer all the time. Every time you take a break and come back to your computer, there your goals will be in front of your face.
If you’d like help in chunking your online selling goal down into a manageable, step-by-step system, check out my new Design Dashboard at: http://www.designdashboard.com
Best wishes,
Marlon Sanders
Many thanks, Marlon, for this orientation and encouragement – you have given me some renewed energy to get to the top of this mountain. Your Design Dashboard is an absolute Marvel! Some of my next purchases will be your Marketing Dashboard, then your Affiliate Dashboard. I’m located in Australia. You’ve asked us in your recent blog-promo email, if your emails are getting buried. Sending them out at 10pm US EST means I get them at Noon (without allowing for any DST adjustment). This means you jump my Inbox queue and stand out above my morning’s email accumulation. Has to be good! Your emails are permanently on my top-ten list of those that are NOT filtered for reading later. Your work is greatly appreciated – many thanks again, John
[Hi John, I'm thinking about starting a night timer's email list. Are the emails I send in the morning my time buried in your in box?]
Hi Marlon, Your emails are always unburied thanks to the superb filtering capability of Gmail. I’m on 10 of your AWeber lists, but you are only using a few of them. So far in these 3 weeks of August I’ve received 18 emails from you. One, two, or three per day is no problem, 5 or 6 days a week.
[John, when I email, I merge all my lists so you'll only receive 1 email and not 4 duplicates. Glad you're finding my emails. Hope you're getting the Saturday articles? I'm publishing them on my blog now to make them more accessible.]
This is a great article Marlon.
It’s also something good to remember when we are creating a path for our customers (You’re very good at that). Thanks for the reminder. Eldra McCracken BeautifulWarriorWomen.com
[Elddra, what a great blog! Do you wanna type up a bit of your success story and publish here? It's free publicity.]