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Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly.
They lit a fire in the kayak…
… it sank – proving once and for all you can't have your kayak and heat it too.
Ha ha.
Joking aside, we don't know about you, but we were raised to get a good education, build a respectable lifelong career, and work for the man for the remainder of our days 🙁
It seems ‘normal' doesn't it?
It's how society and the education system condition us to think, act, be.
But, unfortunately, it's fundamentally flawed!
Now you might think you've been making wilful choices since your first day on this planet, BUT…
The status quo in society has been ‘working on you' since drawing your very first breath, sculpting the way you view the world, and dictating ‘normal', acceptable ways of thinking, doing and being.
You can't avoid it. We didn't avoid it. Heck, we didn't even realise there was a status quo when we were STUCK in it!
Like us – your parents/guardians likely had the biggest impact on you, including where you lived, what school you went to, and what career you chose. Simply because most parents reciprocate the way they were brought up themselves.
Hence perpetuating the status quo, limiting your choices to only acceptable ones, and squashing your ‘out-the-box' thinking and creative spark forever.
Status Quo Control Stops Here
History can't be changed – you can't roll back the clock on how you were brought up, where you were educated, and what standard choices you've made to date!
BUT… you CAN ‘wake up' right now to the fact you don't have to accept the status quo any longer, from this day forward.
That was the EPIPHANY we had in 2009.
And it's a realization you're likely having too, seeing as you're already aware there are alternatives to the pervasive status quo of working for the man for the rest of your life – or else you wouldn't be reading this post.
So you’re likely interested in generating revenue around your individual lifestyle? As opposed to putting your life on hold for 40, 50, 60+ hours a week while you endure the bump and grind of employment, to provide for the loved ones you don’t have time to be with?
Can you see the irony in that?
Maybe you’re interested in being able to live anywhere you fancy while earning a good income?
Or how about having more time freedom to do your own thing?
We're here to share with you an entrepreneurial way to be self-renewed, self-fulfilled and self-reliant. To get unstuck from that career which probably doesn't make you bounce out of bed any more, or to unchain you from that business which works you like a slave, or to build up a truly comfortable nest egg so you can fully enjoy your Golden Years.
In short – to have your cake and eat it too.
To explain how you can actually have your cake and eat it too, and to help you believe it’s within your capability, we've recorded a brand new three-part video training series for you, with the very obvious title:
How To Actually Have Your Cake And Eat It Too
What we mean by ‘have your cake and eating it too', is to earn a sustainable income but also have the time freedom, flexibility and lifestyle to enjoy it to the full.
That's exactly what we do and there's honestly nothing special about us, so if little old Greg and Fiona Scott can do it, we believe anyone else can do it too.
Click the video below to watch and learn:
As we explain in the video, your mission is to build a lifestyle business, which is an online business where you earn a healthy substantial income, working only a few hours a week.
An online lifestyle business leaves you completely free to travel the world and work anywhere in there's an internet connection. That's what we mean by ‘how you can have your cake and eat it too'.
Think about being in a job where you're working for somebody else, probably working all the overtime in the world just to get a one or two percent pay increase at the end of the year, and possibly a bonus. BUT… your pay is CAPPED. Maybe you'll get a one percent rise this year, maybe two percent next year if you're lucky, yet you have to work many, many hours for that puny perk.
You might have to keep doing all those training courses your employer says to do as well, for very little gain.
Because…
There's a ceiling, or a limit to what you can earn, because your time is a limited resource.
You must realise you don't have any leverage of your time.
The difference with running an online business is you're not capped on how much you can earn, as in, there's no glass ceiling and you don't have to work any harder to earn a small amount of money than you do earn a large amount of money. Does that make sense?
The big difference between an online business and a job is: LEVERAGE.
Leverage in a work environment is restricted because your employer is paying YOU to personally perform the services you were contracted to.
Also, what eventually happens is, you become under-appreciated in your job, which leads to not being fulfilled or passionate about what you're doing any more in your job/career. How do we know? Because that's exactly what happened to us.
What's The Solution Then?
It's not rocket science – sell products instead of your time!
We leverage other people's products and promote them on the internet. It takes a tiny proportion of our time to make our business work, week in and week out, to earn a sustainable healthy income.
Let's give you some numbers as an example:
We promote a product that pays us a commission of $1,000 per sale (we're talking in US dollars because that's the currency of the internet). If we wanted to replace an annual income of $100,000 then it's simple maths to know we need to sell one hundred units of that particular product that pays us a $1,000 commission per sale to make $100,000 income per annum.
That’s a simple model, however, you need to advertise, so there are advertising costs to account for, which are the largest cost of doing business online.
In an online business, your advertising is vital. There's other little bits and pieces that add up to $20-$50 per month, but your advertising is by far the biggest chunk of your overhead costs.
Back to the example above, in order to make those one hundred sales to earn $100,000 commission per annum, we need to stack on another thirty sales to cover advertising costs. Advertising costs for a year could easily be $30,000 – therefore we need to sell 130 of those units to earn $130,000 commission, less our advertising costs of $30,000, leaves us with $100,000 net profit per annum. Make sense?
There's another nice little bonus here too. When you're self-employed, or working for yourself, you have to put money aside for the tax man, but at least it's not grabbed out of your pay packet every month like it is for employees. (But we're not going to go into that as we're not in the business of giving tax advice and aren't authorised to do so either).
Hopefully, we've explained the numbers clearly to you: so to earn a net profit of $100,000 per annum you’ll sell 130 units that pay $1,000 commission each, less $30,000 advertising costs. How long does it take us to do that? It's a few hours a week, now we're up and running.
Quit Trading Time For Money
You've got to acknowledge it's a completely different business model from trading your time for money to earn the income your employer pays you. The added bonus of this lifestyle type business is: you can be where on earth you want to be. That could be at home, from a coffee shop, or on the beaches of the world.
Hopefully that helps you begin to understand how you can have your cake and eat it too.
You need: LEVERAGE
Next, click to watch this video:
Harness Residual Income
We talked about quitting exchanging your time for money so you can scale your income by running a thriving, healthy, successful, online business. BUT – you're probably wondering how to do that, exactly?
One of the mechanisms you can leverage is called residual income.
A prime example of residual income is our book Living a Laptop Lifestyle, which we wrote once (obviously) but we get paid every time a copy of our book is sold.
We wrote the book in 2012, but every time we make a sale (which still happen like clockwork) we get paid month in month out. Which is a perfect example of residual income. You do the work once, and get paid many times over for that one input of effort.
There are lots of different ways to earn residual income, Living a Laptop Lifestyle is a prime example, but you don't have to write a book in order to earn repeat income… because that's where affiliate marketing comes in.
Affiliate Marketing Explained
You're probably aware anybody in the world can register for free as an Associate of Amazon, which is what Amazon call their affiliates. As Amazon is the largest, most popular, affiliate marketplace on the internet today, it’s got a TON of trust, and is a reputable business model.
When you're an Amazon Associate you can promote our book, Living a Laptop Lifestyle, because it's listed on Amazon – and earn a commission on every sale you make.
As an affiliate for Amazon you can promote any product whatsoever, and when you rinse and repeat the process, you'll build up a healthy sustainable income selling other people's products.
And there's more than just Amazon! There are thousands of affiliate marketplaces out there where you can pick and choose products you're passionate about, in niches you're passionate about.
In a nutshell, promoting other people's products so you make a commission from every sale is what affiliate marketing is all about.
What Skills You'll Learn
It's all well and good talking about affiliate marketing – but what tasks do you have to do to make it work?
Good question!
There are ONLY THREE THINGS to do when building your affiliate marketing business, and they all start with the letter ‘B' so they're easy to remember.
Funnily enough, we call them:
The Three B’s of Online Business – ha ha 🙂
[1] The First B is to ‘Build Your List'
Your list will be a database of prospective customer email addresses, who'll be people with a particular problem you can help solve with the affiliate products you offer them.
In other words, you’ll gather email addresses from people who visit your website, so you can stay in touch with them by email, and hopefully encourage them to visit your website again to consider what you have to offer there.
WHY is building your email list or email database sooooo important?
Let's assume you pay to advertise the website where you promote a high-ticket/high value/top tier affiliate product, so hordes of targeted people visit it. Those visitors will read a bit, dither a bit, get distracted, then click away… because that’s what people do. They hardly ever buy anything off you first-pop. (Consider your own online shopping habits!)
They click away empty handed, never to revisit again!
You’ve wasted ALL your advertising spend. You may as well have flushed that money down the loo.
You KNOW your website visitors have an interest in what you offer simply because you targeted them based on related interests they have, and they willingly clicked to visit your website in the first instance. However, if you've got no way to stay in touch with those people, no way to share more information with them, and no way to pique their interest about your solution to their problem – you’ve got no business! Seriously!
The solution?
Encourage your targeted website visitors to willingly add their email to your email database list, by offering them something of value in exchange for their email address.
You may’ve received the free seven-part video training series we share, which teaches the principles of building an online business and reveals another exciting concept each and every day for 7 days. That free training is a fair exchange for your email address, so we stay in touch with you.
The great thing about building an email list of targeted people with a problem you have the solution for is: you can market to them – repeatedly. What that means is, you pay once (to the advertising platform) to get people interested, then market to those people over and again to offer them whatever products you think are relevant to the problem you targeted them with in your ads.
[2] The Second B is to ‘Blog’
Write/collate content that’s valuable to prospective customers. Provide information to answer their queries. Tell stories that relate to solving their problems.
The reason you blog is to provide valuable information for the prospective customers you have on your list, who you've got there by doing paid advertising. To build a relationship with those people, you educate them, inform them, inspire them, entertain them, and promote to them – all by way of your blog posts.
Let's say you're building a list of people who are interested in weight loss. You’d blog about weight loss, about healthy foods to eat, and how they can remember to put their knife and fork down after each mouthful so they eat slower and feel full sooner. In other words, provide information to help people make an informed decision about buying your affiliate weight loss offers.
In summary – provide helpful information to solve problems for people, to build trust in you as an authority, and to endear prospective customers to accept your recommendation that your affiliate offer is the exact solution they're looking for.
Like a Tripod or a Three-Legged Stool
The third and final B of online business is the one that connects and locks those first two together. Like a tripod or a three-legged stool, you need to have all three B’s in place for your business to have a solid foundation, to stand up correctly.
[3] The Third B is to Do ‘Broadcast Emails’
The phrase ‘broadcast’ is simply terminology used by Aweber, the trusted autoresponder we recommend. It simply means a fresh email you write and send to your prospective customers to pique their interest in one of your blog posts.
So, the purpose of a broadcast email is to get the people on your list, to read a specific blog post so they learn and grow. Your aim is to get their eyeballs on your educational, informational, inspirational, entertaining, and promotional blog posts.
When you think of a new blog post as like a blockbuster movie, then your broadcast email is like the movie-trailer to that movie. It serves to pique the interest of the people on our list, to create curiosity, and to ‘dangle a helpful carrot’ in front of their noses.
A broadcast email the functionality that gets the people on your list, who you get there by doing paid advertising to build your list, to read your blog posts. So a broadcast is the connection between your list and your relationship building blog posts/content.
There you have it – the 3 B’s of Online Business!
Keep It Simple
Run your affiliate marketing business by honing the three B’s of online business. There are only three money producing tasks which make up your marketing… which is why it's a lifestyle business, because there’s nothing else to do!
Therefore, the only three skills to master are:
=> Build Your List by doing paid advertising on third party ad platforms
=> Blog, or Video Blog, or create valuable, helpful, objection busting content
=> Broadcast Emails to get the people on your list to digest your valuable content so they get to know you, like you, and trust your recommendations are a perfect solution for them.
The MOST MAGICAL FACT with these 3B’s – you only do the work once, and each output keeps working for you again and again and again.
That's why you easily scale up your results.
Once a paid ad starts working, you leave it humming along in the background for months, continually building your list on autopilot.
Once a blogpost is published live on the internet, you continue to reference it repeatedly.
Once you write a broadcast email people love, you re-use it again and again.
**Leveraging your outputs in this way, provides time freedom, which means Lifestyle.
BUT… it gets better, because there’s more to Leverage than only your outputs…
Now, click to watch this video:
Three further points of leverage to ensure your online business is a lifestyle business are:
[1] Leverage Other People’s Products
Rocket Scientist's need not apply. Nor people with big brilliant ideas about what to sell online. Because neither matter in Affiliate Marketing.
Let someone else think through all that.
Leave the creativity and hard graft of pulling a product together for others to do.
Leverage other people's products to sell, and receive a commission for each sale or referral you make.
Sit back and let the product creator take care of:
- delivery of the product
- payment handling and secure merchant accounts
- customer support queries
You don't need to do a scrap of any of it, yet you'll still receive a referral commission for finding that customer.
Couldn’t be easier!
We fell in love with the simplicity of the affiliate model – that, and the fact it saved us having to rack our brains for clever ideas
[2] Leverage Other People’s Skills (particularly sales skills)
We make sales 24/7, all around the globe, and we’ve never had any sales training whatsoever.
We make sales even when we're not at our laptops.
We make sales when we’re sleeping, flying, hiking, skiing, scuba-diving!
How that possible? Well, we don't actually make the sales ourselves. We leverage a sales team who are trained in sales and who manage customer conversions for us without us having to lift a finger.
The sales team works around the clock, irrespective of what we’re doing. We leverage their skills and time, so we're free to do what pleases us most.
Imagine not having to negotiate your own sales!
Don’t know about you, but it’s a huge thing for us because we're not sales people, we’ve never had any training (well, apart from writing work resumes and CV’s), and we don't know how to sell. We simply have someone else manage that for us 🙂
[3] Leverage Other People’s Tools
We talk about automation a lot – because automation frees up your time.
Online tools aid automation. They make it easier for you to have tasks happening on autopilot.
So, here are some of the tools we love most:
AWEBER email database autoresponder – it works on autopilot for us 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Yes, that means we can be wherever we chose, because we have the piece of mind our autoresponder is operating in the background.
Another piece of software we absolutely adore is ROBOFORM. Working online means having a ton of passwords and login details – Roboform not only remembers every single password it also securely remembers the website the login details relate to. Roboform saves us hours every month.
Some of the people we coach keep handwritten notebooks with all their passwords in – and it takes f o r e v e r for them to log into their affiliate marketing platform. We sit there drumming our fingers on the table… w a i t i n g ! When, with Roboform, it’s a one click wonder.
The final suite of tools we couldn’t do without is offered by Six Figure Mentors – it's DIGITAL BUSINESS LOUNGE.
Imagine easily getting a website set up and live online in a matter of a few clicks! Digital Business Lounge makes that possible.
Digital Business Lounge also includes lead capture page software, professional graphics creator software, link shortener software, and all the tools you need to operate a business online.
The suite of tools within Six Figure Mentors’ Digital Business Lounge is unrivalled anywhere else. We, quite simply, couldn't get by without them. Which means you don't need to reinvent the wheel and build these tools yourself!
So there you have it!
Having Your Cake And Eating It Too quite simply involves LEVERAGE
Leverage affiliate marketing and residual income.
Leverage other people's time, creativity and expertise.
Leverage other people's products so you don't have to have any wild crazy ideas yourself.
Leverage other people's tools – particularly automation tools, so you free up time to do what makes your heart sing – that’s what a lifestyle business is ALL about.
Having your cake and eating it too is the ability to create a healthy, sustainable income online, BUT still have the time to enjoy it too.
Which ISN'T the way it works in traditional employment.
When we ‘worked for the man' we put in 60 hours a week for an annual salary – the more hours we spent in the office, our true hourly rate was slashed, because a fixed income, divided by more hours, means a lower hourly rate. That's simply NUTS as there's no way to scale it up.
Here's the NOT FUNNY part – it took us 25 years to work that out!
Which is why we're keen to explain to you in the hope it doesn't take 25 years for the penny to drop for you too.
To get unstuck from that career which probably doesn't make you bounce out of bed any more, or to unchain you from that business which works you like a slave, or to build up a truly comfortable nest egg so you can fully enjoy your Golden Years – it all starts with learning how to leverage other people's products, time, skills, expertise, tools in the booming affiliate marketing industry.
If learning such life-changing skill is of interest to you too, we highly recommend this exact same education which got us started. It's up to you whether you take back control of your time and life, however this absolutely works for us – it's transformed our lifestyle and allows us to travel the world for 9 months each year.
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