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I’ve been doing a ton of reading lately and one of the books I’ve gotten a lot from is Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson of Agora Publishing fame.

Masterson breaks the book into four parts and each of those parts essentially talks about what your focus should be at various levels of income from your business.

Level one is generating income up to $1 Million per year, which probably covers where most readers of this blog are (although I know I have a few readers doing over $1 million per month).

Before I reveal WHAT you should be doing, let me stress now that if you’re an affiliate marketer running a solo operation then this is a message for you.

Or, if you have your own product but you’re struggling to reach that critical mass of customers then this message is also for you.

And, if you consider yourself a relative newbie who’s still working your butt off (or thinking tirelessly about how to make money online) then this message is REALLY for you.

So here it is - this is what you should be spending 80% of your time on as the leader of your business until you’ve reached $1 million per year in revenue.

It’s not customer support.

It’s not product creation.

It’s not picking out furniture.

It’s not setting up the best legal entity for your business.

It’s not creating pretty website designs.

It’s simply this . . . you should be spending 80% of your time marketing and selling.

Now, I think a LOT of people are grossly - GROSSLY - mislead and misunderstanding what marketing and selling IS.

Here is a simple fact of business - if you are not selling anything, then you are not going to make money and you are not going to stay in business.

And yet that’s the last thing MOST people want to do.  We hate the idea of selling and being sold.

So we engage in passive activities that come close to accomplishing our goal . . . but not really.  We’re sort of selling, but not really.

So, we write articles . . .

We hope someone is kind enough to pick our article up and post it on their site or in a newsletter (something I NEVER  hear anyone talk about anymore and that works better than “bum marketing”, I guarantee you).  We hope that someone then is able to find our article through a search engine, that they’ll read the article and click on a link and end up where we want them to end up so we can FINALLY make them an offer.

So, we hang out on forums with a link in our signature . . .

And we jump into the latest gossip and we hope that someone clicks on our link and goes somewhere and buys something.

So, we post some stuff on our blog and hope that somehow someone ends up there and buys something.

And on and on.

Now, sales do occur with these methods and a lot of the other passive forms of “selling” going on out there.  And that’s the BAD news.  Because these people think they’ve experienced some success without realizing how BADLY they’ve failed when compared with what they’re potential is if they were doing what they SHOULD BE DOING.

This is all a lot like having a crush on a cute girl in the 10th grade.  We devise all of these passive ways of letting that girl know we like her.  And not surprisingly, looking back, she’s not impressed - and then we wonder why she’s going to the prom with the schmuck she’s going with.  It’s not necessarily because that’s who she’d have preferred - it’s because he actually took the chance and did the hard work of SELLING THE IDEA.

What does all of this have to do with affiliate marketing?

I’ll tell you.

You’re one and only focus needs to be on mastering selling, then mastering marketing.  It doesn’t matter if you can identify a hungry crowd if you can’t sell to them.  And that’s why I say selling first.

Yes, it’s uncomfortable.  If you have any conscience, it may never be totally comfortable - unless you only sell products you REALLY believe in.

The reason that affiliate marketing is so important is you don’t have to focus on doing all of the things that you SHOULD NOT BE DOING ANYWAY.

Your focus should be almost exclusively on selling - and on finding more people to sell to.  And then on finding more things to sell to those people.  It should not be on creating products, supporting customers, creating pretty website graphics, etc.

Listen to me because I’m speaking to you from my own experiences and Masterson just put it into words I completely identified with:  until the day came that I STOPPED attempting to be the guru - ie, creating everything from scratch - the product, the sales copy, the site, etc - when I stopped trying to do all of that and I started promoting the stuff created by real-live recognized gurus - that’s when I started making money.

Until you have mastered selling to people, all that other stuff is a waste of your time and resources.

Hey - you don’t have to agree with me on this but I’m telling you the truth here.  Over the next week, see if you’re spending 80% of your time on marketing and selling.  And if the answer is “no”, then tell me you made as much money as you could have made.

All the best to you - X

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, making money, marketing, michael masterson, ready fire aim, selling

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 11:22 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. 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.