The Maverick Marketer Blog

Ever get a box full of really tasty brownies by Fed Ex?

Neither had I until yesterday. See, I did a teleclass on list building recently with Ellen Violette for her students and she sent me the brownies as a thank you.

Let me tell you about Ellen. I think you may relate to her story.

I first met her last year when she signed up for a list building teleclass I was doing that I offered to people who bought my friend Dr. Joe Vitale’s course. Ellen jumped on the opportunity and was an active contributor on the calls. She asked great questions and her writing background gave her some unique perspectives in our sessions.

At the time, she was researching exactly what to do for an online business. Things got crazy for me with the launch of my big list building course earlier this year and over the months I lost track of Ellen and what she was doing.

Well, it turns out she was very focused and diligent in those months because when I saw her at Big Seminar 6 in Los Angeles, she had it all figured out. She’s an ebook coach and teaches a fine course on how to start with nothing and create the perfect ebook for your market.

Her ebook coaching classes are in demand and her business is taking off (she’s got a course coming out early next year… stay tuned). I’ve agreed to do a call with Ellen next year, so you’ll be hearing more her then.

For now, I’m sitting here eating a caramel brownie from Fairytale Brownies (at www.brownies.com is that a cool domain or what?) and I’ve got to say, Ellen is a great example of someone who is doing things the right way.

She focused on one thing that she is great at (writing), identified an opportunity in the marketplace (that people struggle to write ebooks and yet ebooks are essential to your online business), and then she got out there and networked into getting more content for her course (my call, among others). Now she’s in a great position to get success stories from her students and then go back to folks like me for a Joint Venture to launch her book when it comes out.

Isn’t that what YOU want to? To find your ‘killer product’ and then JV the heck out of it? Then keep reading, because it’s no accident that Ellen is in that position. It’s because she did one thing above all else.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

This past weekend when I was at Robert Puddy and Richard Taylor’s Focus4thefuture seminar I realized what the missing ingredient is for most people trying to make money online who are struggling.

Focus.

In addition to all the solid content that my fellow speakers Mike Filsaime, Gary Ambrose, and Joel Comm (I’ll be telling you more about each of them soon), the lesson I took away above all else was that you have to focus on one thing in your business…

…what YOU are good at and outsource or partner up to do the rest. That’s what Robert, Mike, Gary, Joel, and now I, do.

That’s what Ellen did, too.

She took her passion for writing, found an opportunity for her in the market and she’s put together a program that is very popular by adding experts like me and others to her course to teach the stuff she isn’t an expert on.

Can you imagine how long it would have taken her to learn copywriting, list building, traffic generation, and graphics and website programming, etc? She’d still be learning instead of making money right now.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m not saying ’stop learning’.

Far from it.

I buy ebooks, courses, subscribe to content sites, and listen to speakers’ presentations because I am CONSTANTLY learning. But don’t get sucked into the illusion that YOU personally have to master all of the information you are learning.

You just want to feed your ‘infopreneuer’ brain so you can spot opportunities for profit.

At the last three events I’ve gone to what I heard almost EVERYONE say is that they are too busy to take advantage of opportunities in their business because they are too busy wrestling with things they don’t like to do or aren’t good at.

That’s money they are leaving on the table… and I’ve been just as guilty of this as the next person (maybe more so).

As the business owner, YOU feed your brain info about what the opportunities are and the best resources for taking advantage of those opportunties, and then let others carry out the tasks.

Fact is, if you try to do everything yourself, you’re going to do yourself in.

You’ll never make any real money and it will take forever to reach your goals.

The first step is to identify what you are good at, like Ellen did. She’s a writer.

The next step is to see what else you need to do in your business that you are NOT good at or that you can do but that doesn’t make YOU any money.

For example, if you can program websites, but you make money selling ebooks, stop messing around with your websites and focus on selling more ebooks.

Why do you think I buy information? I’m buying the expertise of others. That’s leverage… to buy all that time and effort they put in to become experts at a discount. I’m trading my money for their time.

Time is irreplaceable. You can always get more money.

As an infopreneur, you are selling time at a discount… people will be able to shorten their ‘learning curve’ and get results faster than if they had to learn it all by themselves.

Here’s the simple truth about the info marketing business:

You have to specialize in something so that people are willing to trade their money for your expertise.

So, I suggest you identify the ONE thing that pays the most in your business and restrict yourself to doing that. Become even more specialized in that one thing so that your knowledge is so valuable that you can charge a premium for your time and expertise.

Get yourself a virtual assistant to handle your customer service. Use a company like www.workaholics4hire.com to handle almost every aspect of your projects. Let them be your team.

I know, when you are just starting out you don’t necessarily have the money to ‘outsource’.

But you may not have the money to ‘learn the hard way by doing it yourself’ either.

If you do have to run every aspect of your business, only do it for the short term. Set a deadline to start to leverage your profits by hiring out as you make more money so that at least eventually you break free of working in your business.

Once you have your team, you literally can think of an idea for profit, get your team to research it, put it together in a product, and then you simply focus on marketing your new product through JV’s and other channels to market.

If you do that, then like Ellen did, you can find the right opportunities for you and take advantage of them.

Then, you can literally turn digital information into dollars and make your time worth more per hour than most professionals who have years and years of schooling.

And I’m thankful today that we live in an age where you can transform your life, the life of your family and friends, just by following in the footsteps of others who share their knowledge and pave the way. My life is living proof, as is Ellen’s, as are most of the ‘big names’ you know.

If you are having success in your business right now, you know what I mean. If you are just starting out or struggling, then look to narrow the focus of what you are doing to what you do best and push the rest off to other people who specialize in things that block you from moving forward.

If you find this helpful, go ahead and leave a comment. If there is a lot of interest in this, I’ll do another post on specific resources for outsourcing.

In the mean time, I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving and I’m going to shut off the computer and get back to my brownies.

Ok, I’ll share some with my family, too.

Craig

P.S. I’ve got some interesting things coming up next week, so stay tuned!

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005 at 8:05 pm and is filed under Maverick Marketer Insights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.