‘7 Steps to a Spectacular 2010 — My Own Personal Checklist You Can Steal’ by Marlon Sanders

Marlon Sanders’ latest article is titled “7 Steps to a Spectacular 2010 — My Own Personal Checklist You Can Steal”. [Article]

Marlon Sanders’ latest article:

Ready or not, 2010 is here.

I want to lay out a checklist you can take to make 2010 a great one.

1. Focus 80% of your time, energy and efforts on getting new customers.

The hardest thing you have to do in business is to get a new customer. This should be the focus of your mental energy and time.

Without a non-stop supply of new customers, you’ll not have the year you want.

In my business, I’m renewing my commitment to my affiliates. And also trying a few new methods.

Focus on getting new customers. Then focus on it some more. Now go get some more. Keep ’em pouring into your funnel.

2. As a corollary to that, make sure you have all your ducks in a row in whatever method you
use to bring in new customers.

If you rely on an affiliate program as I do,make sure your entire systems hums like an engine.

— Double check your affiliate tracking.

Turn your cookies off on your web browser (usually in the privacy settings). Click on an affiliate
link and you should see a message pop up asking if you want to allow the cookie.

There should be a way to view it. Inside, you should see an affiliate id. That is how you know the cookies work.

In my system, we can also place fake test orders to verify the tracking works.

— Make sure your affiliates go into your autoresponder and confirm. If you don’t have your
affiliates in an autoresponder, find a way to get them in one.

— Make sure you have your commissions set up properly.

— Make sure you communicate weekly with resellers.(This is one I dropped the ball on in 2009 and we’re fixing in 2010. So if you’re one of my affiliates, you can expect more consistent and
frequent communications.)

— Make sure that the return email address you use passes all tests. Go to mxtoolbox.com and
run your domain through their tools to check for problems.

— Develop frequent new promotions for resellers.The minimum standard here is monthly.

This means new products or promotional tools for your affiliates to use.

— Perform a monthly test to make sure your tracking works as it should.

If you have some other way you bring in new customers, then create your own checklist for it
to make sure you have it running on all cylinders.

If you don’t have a way you’re bringing in new customers, then pick ONE and do it. Get it going.Realize that usually any method takes tweaking.

For example, when my friend Joel Peterson runs pay-per-click ads, he often starts at a high cost-per-click and slowly lowers the price until he’s paying 1/4 of what he started with.

My friend Kirt Christensen does the same thing.

The point is, don’t expect it go great guns right out of the gate. Keep tweaking it and making little changes until you hit on the right formula.

I interviewed Sean Mize for the new product about traffic I’m working on. Sean is the king of
article writing.

Every month he has outsourcers write hundreds of articles for him. He kept mucking around with that method until he turned it into a well-oiled machine.

Sometimes you have to do things a bit differently.One of my friends is crushing it with his affiliate program. But he came up with a unique offer for a few super affiliates that no one else is making them. You may need to add your own twist to what you’re doing to get the results you want.

3. Sort your results from 2009 from top to bottom,cut out the losing products or activities and plan to expand the ones at the top.

If you have multiple products you promote (whether your own or as an affiliate), create a ranking of products in order of sales.

This gives you a good idea of what to focus on more in 2010.

If you don’t have sales, rank the activities you DID do in order of effectivness. It’s important
to know what things were a good expenditure of your time and what weren’t.

You accomplish more by doing less by tracking what works and what doesn’t. Then cut out the things that work less well and do more of the few that work better.

4. Double check your email capture process

Pretend you’re a customer. Subscribe to your email list. Walk through the process.

Does it distract from your sales process? If it does,try something different.

I’ve always used “fly in” ads for email capture.But right now, I’m testing out an “inline” email
form that goes right in the sales letter and is less of an interruption to the sales process.

On one of my sites, I found that after you joined the email list and clicked the submit button, you had to click the back button then X out the pop in order to read the sales letter.

You had to REALLY want our product just to wade through the obstacles to reading the letter.
That’s why we’re trying out the “inline” email capture to see how that works.

Your emails and autoresponder broadcasts are your main tool for promoting your back end products. If you don’t know that terminology, just keep reading my ezine and I’ll get you up to speed on all the lingo.

5. Plan-Do-Check-Act

If I could only give you ONE tip for 2010, it’d be plan, do, check, act.

— Come up with a target condition

This is a result you want to achieve.

— Create a simple plan to get CLOSER to your target condition.

You do NOT try to do it all at once. Find something you can do you’re pretty sure will get you CLOSER. Now do that.If it works, find the next thing and do it.

If you have Ockham’s Razor, the principle applies.The simplest solution is usually the best.

What’s the LEAST you could to have a decent chance of meeting your target condition?

— Do your plan.

— Check to see if you got closer to your target condition or if you moved away from it.

This is one place a CHECKLIST comes in real handy.Actually, if you aren’t using checklists in every area of your business, now is the time to start.

— Act or adjust your plan based on that feedback.

I believe it’s absolutely essential to track your main numbers monthly like sales, leads, and
affiliate sign ups and sales.

It’s very easy to implement ideas then forget to check to see if they made things better or
worse! Not every idea works.

Inch-by-inch anything is a cinch. So just keep taking baby steps towards your target condition and you WILL get their by the end of 2010.

6. Zig When They Zag

It’s easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing.

For example, everyone I know is focusing all their time and attention into building a continuity program.

I’ve revamped Ateam for 2010 but I don’t plan to make it the main focus of everything I do as some are doing.

Why?

Because of the law of supply and demand. When everyone does it, the supply goes up and the demand goes down.

To get caught up in that vicious cycle doesn’t add up to me.

NLP teaches a thing called “pattern interrupts.” You do what others aren’t.

The single most effective way to break through the noise is with pattern interrupts.

If you saw our S. Mouse emails, you probably experienced that first hand.

I’m also re-launching our Pizza Cast to affiliates:http://www.promodashboard.com/pizzacast/

It’s definitely not the same old thing you see from marketers.

I’ve practically built my career on pattern interrupts.Do you remember my “Jumbo The elephant” promotions for Push Button Letters?

If not, maybe I should revive those too.

I think there’s a time to learn from other marketers and do what they do. And there’s also a time to innovate and zig when they zag.

To me, that time is when everyone jumps on the bandwagon.By then, it’s too late.

7. Avoid getting so caught up in the details of running the business and learning new things that you neglect to focus 80% of your time and attention on getting new customers.

Here’s the truth:

Getting new customers isn’t easy. It’s the hard work of business. The “fun” and easy part is making sales to your existing customers.

So it’s EASY to get caught up in doing that.

But typically promotions for new customers never work as good as you want them to. I mean, by all means, if you stumble across something that brings in new customers like crazy, push on the gas pedal and don’t let up!

But short of that, it takes effort to bring in new customers.

So it’s easy to neglect it.

However, the engine of your business is new customers.This is something you can’t let slide by the wayside.

Marlon Sanders

Marlon Sanders is the author of “The Amazing Formula That Sells Products Like Crazy.” If you’d like to get on his mailing list and receive tips, articles and information about online marketing, visit: http://www.marlonsnews.com.

*IMNewsWatch would like to thank Marlon Sanders for granting permission to reprint this article.