The Marketing Formula – Part 4

Want to know how to move from break-even (working for $0) in your business? Want to know how to generate HUGE profits in your business? Then pay attention because I’m going to reveal the answer to these questions.

There are far too many business who never “get” what I’m about to reveal to you – which is exactly why there are so many struggling businesses and why there are so many companies that go out of business.

So what’s this big “secret” that these companies don’t know?

It’s called a BACK-END.

What’s a back-end?

Well, there are many variations. Let’s take a look at some of them:

1. When a customer buys your product A, you immediately start selling them on a similar and related product B. As soon as they buy product B, you start selling them on a similar and related product C. If they don’t buy product C within a designated time, you start selling them on a similar and related product D.
2. When a customer buys your product A, you immediately start selling them on variation B and then variation C and so on. Book of the month or video of the month type clubs are a good example of this model.
3. When a customer buys your product, they get a N day supply. Then, in N days, you bill them again and ship them another limited supply. Or, in N days, they come back into your shop for a new supply. Herbs, supplements, and health supplies are an example of this model. Your grocery store is another example.
4. When your customer buys your product, you immediately start selling them on a bigger version. When they buy the bigger version, you start selling them on an even bigger version. This model is seen a lot in the consulting / coaching world where they sell you into the “Bronze” club. Then, they try to up-sell you to the “Silver” club. Then the Gold club, then the Gold+ club, then the Platinum club, etc.
5. When a customer buys your product, you immediately start selling them other products that are “down-stream” from what they just bought. For example, if a person has just purchased a domain name, then we can reasonably assume they are looking to develop a web-presence. Based on this, they are likely to be interested in website hosting services, webpage design services, shopping cart services, Internet-based marketing advice, and so on.
6. Customers sign up to use your services or facilities and you bill them for usage charges at an appropriate interval. Your telephone and electricity service providers are examples of this model.

Here’s the deal. Obtaining a new customer typically consumes a lot of time, energy, and resources.

Why? Someone who has never done business with you doesn’t know if they can trust you. They don’t know if your product is any good. They don’t know if you will deliver on time. They have a slew of things they don’t know about you and your business that have to be overcome before they will purchase from you.

So, if you only have a one-shot product with no back-end, you will continually face the up-hill battle of finding a new prospect and overcoming all of their objections in order to make a sale.

A much, much easier business model is to make sure that you have a back-end in place so that you can sell each customer (who already knows you and trusts you) over and over and over.

Consumables, memberships, usage fees, related products or services, or advanced / bigger versions are all concepts that you can use to create a back-end of products and services in your business so that you move from break-even to hugely profitable. And by all means, use as many of these back-end concepts as you possibly can.

By the way, there is an important side-implication here. If you have what you think is a great business idea but there's no back-end to it, forget about it. It's NOT a good business idea if there isn't a back-end.

Similarly, if someone approaches you with a business proposition, and it doesn't have a great back-end, send them on down the road because it's not a good proposition.

Here's why this concept of back-end is important to you. An OK product with a GREAT back-end can turn you into a Millionaire For Jesus much more quickly than you might ever imagine.

Peace, Love, and Blessings,
Lane Fox

Copyright © 2006 by Lane Fox, MillionairesForJesus.com

Permission is granted to reprint this article ONLY if a link is included with it as follows:

URL: http://www.MillionairesForJesus.com
Link Text: Millionaires For Jesus - God's Millionaires - Christian Millionaire

Who am I?

I am your constant companion.

I am your greatest helper… or your heaviest burden.

I will push you onward… or drag you down to failure.

I am completely at your command.

Half the things you do, you might just as well turn over to me, and I will be able to do them quickly and correctly.

I am easily managed; you must merely be firm with me.

Show me exactly how you want something done, and after a few lessons I will do it automatically.

I am the servant of all great men.

And, alas, of all failures as well.

Those who are great, I have made great.

Those who are failures, I have made failures.

I am not a machine, though I work with all the precision of a machine.

Plus, the intelligence of a man.

You may run me for profit, or run me for ruin; it makes no difference to me.

Take me, train me, be firm with me and I will put the world at your feet.

Be easy with me, and I will destroy you.

Who am I?

I am a HABIT!

-- Anonymous

The Marketing Formula – Part 3 (A Fundamental Shift)

I want to point out something very, very powerful and important. What I am about to reveal to you SHOULD result in a fundamental and critical SHIFT in YOUR way of thinking.

Once you have put the first piece of The Marketing Formula in place, meaning that you have put forth the effort to create a MONEY-SOURCE (a customer list)…

YOU NEVER HAVE TO PAY FOR ANYTHING AGAIN!

Your MONEY-SOURCE will pay for everything you want.

Do you want something for you or your family?

Do you want to do something for the Kingdom of God?

All you have to do is create or acquire a product or service that your MONEY-SOURCE wants and make it available to them.

How much money you want determines how much or how many of a product or service you need to make available to your MONEY-SOURCE.

The more valuable your product or service is to your MONEY-SOURCE, the more money they’ll give you. The bigger the problem is that your product or service solves, the more money your MONEY-SOURCE will give you. It’s as simple as that.

If you think about it, you are a MONEY-SOURCE for others. How much of your money that you give them is based upon how much value you feel they give you. There are some who give you very little value and consequently, you give them very little of your money. But those who provide you with much value, you give them much of your money.

Obviously, the trick to getting all of this to work for you is for you to make sure you have created a MONEY-SOURCE and to make sure you come up with products and services that your MONEY-SOURCE really wants. These are subjects I’ll talk about later.

Peace, Love, and Blessings,
Lane Fox

Copyright © 2006 by Lane Fox, MillionairesForJesus.com

Permission is granted to reprint this article ONLY if a link is included with it as follows:

URL: http://www.MillionairesForJesus.com
Link Text: Millionaires For Jesus - God's Millionaires - Christian Millionaire

The Marketing Formula – Part 2

Back to the subject of Marketing. In this post, I want to discuss the second part of The Marketing Formula first so that you can develop a better understanding of the importance of the first part. The second part of The Marketing Formula is: “Communicating With Your Customer List In The Right Way At The Right Time”. Here’s what you do:

1. Get potential customers to express their interest in your product or service by offering them something that is valuable, important, interesting, and meaningful to them for free. Your free offer can be a special report, a free e-Book or book, a CD or DVD, a sample, or anything that is relevant to your product or service and a problem your potential customer is having that they desperately want to resolve. Your “payment” is the prospective customers contact information and permission to have further communications with them.
2. On an ongoing, non-negotiable, no-excuses basis, use traditional ways (direct mail, email, press releases, advertisements, etc.) as well as new and creative ways to present your free gift offer to as many prospective customers as you possibly can.
3. At an appropriate interval (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly), send useful, helpful, valuable, and interesting information to your contacts. At the bottom of your communication piece, extend an offer for a product or service that is fairly low cost – say in the $20-$50 range. Ideally, you’ll have a number of offers in this low-price range so that if one offer doesn’t grab your potential customer, another one will.
4. As soon as a prospective customer buys one of your low-price offers, he or she immediately move into a new list where you start promoting bigger, similar, related, or more advanced products that cost around $100.
5. As soon as a customer purchases your $100 product, they immediately move into a new list where you start promoting bigger, similar, related, or more advanced products that cost around $200.
6. As soon as a customer purchases your $200 product, they immediately move to a list where you are promoting a $500 product, and then a $1,000 product, then a $1,500 product, then a $2,000 product. The ceiling to how high you can go is limited to only your creativity and your ability to provide value. There are programs that members pay $1,000,000 per year to be a part of. And, these people who pay these membership fees feel it’s worth every penny they pay to be a part of them.

Now, I’ll acknowledge that it’s sometimes quite difficult to develop a progressive customer relationship like this and that some businesses are more suited to this type of progression than others. But that doesn’t take away from the importance of structuring your business this way – even when you don’t think you can, you can… if you’ll get creative. God gave you the ability to create. God gave you the ability to think. See The Thinking Formula and The Thinking Formula – A Reprise.

If after your best efforts, you aren’t able to come up with a way to structure your business, products, and services in a progression like I’ve described above, then you at least want to structure it in a way where your business repeats itself over and over.

Maybe it’s a membership program. Maybe it’s a new “product every month” kind of program. Maybe it’s a “maintenance” program where you are paid on an ongoing basis by your customers so that they always have the latest and greatest product or service from you or they always have you to care for them when they need you to take care of something for them. Maybe it’s “royalties” or “licensing fees”. There are many different method that I may get into in a later post.

What’s important for you to grasp right now is that you are looking for Residual Revenue – money that keeps on coming to you, on regular and repeated intervals.

Peace, Love, and Blessings,
Lane Fox

Copyright © 2006 by Lane Fox, MillionairesForJesus.com

Permission is granted to reprint this article ONLY if a link is included with it as follows:

URL: http://www.MillionairesForJesus.com
Link Text: Millionaires For Jesus - God's Millionaires - Christian Millionaire

The Thinking Formula – A Reprise

If you haven’t already read The Thinking Formula, go read it first and then come back to this post.

I believe it's important to come back to this subject of thinking and elaborate on a few things.

First, I stated that “people think they think but they really aren’t”. Here’s what I mean by this. What most people call “thinking” is actually doing one of two things:

1. Replaying old “movies” and seeing old “pictures” of events that have happened in the past.
2. Creating negative movies and pictures based on worry, fear, and doubt. Often, a person will start out with a momentary picture of something they would really like to have but it quickly turns into a fabricated mental movie of bad things happening to them, plans falling through, people laughing at them and making fun of them, losing everything they have, family and friends disowning them, maybe even so far as picturing themselves dieing. Don’t laugh because you’ve done it and I’ve done it.

Either one of these types of thinking is totally counterproductive.

There’s a better way to “think”.

First, when you catch yourself playing negative mental movies, consciously tell yourself out loud that you totally reject all negative movies and pictures and then deliberately envision yourself in a very positive movie with great things happening to you and you accomplishing great things. The bigger and grander you can make it, the better. (Did not the Bible tell us to "Girt up the loins of your mind"?)

Second, start really thinking by asking questions and searching for answers.

What you do is ask yourself the question, “What is it exactly and precisely that I want to do, be, or have?” Apply The Thinking Formula to this question.

Whatever it is that you come up with, DECIDE and CHOOSE to do, be, or have it.

Then, start writing questions down of how to remove or overcome obstacles that stand in your way.

Next, start writing down as many ways or means to remove or overcome the obstacle as you can come up with.

Keep doing this ever-narrowing sequence of questioning and answering until you either have a complete plan or you have went as far as you can.

At this point, you have done the hardest part. You have done what so few people will ever do. Now, it’s simply a matter of taking action and doing all of the things that you know to do to remove or overcome the obstacles.

It’s with this kind of thinking that you transition from being a reactive person into a proactive person. This is how you take responsibility for making your life all that God wants it to be.

Do you know people who react to everything that happens in their life as if they are helpless victims? Those are the people who aren’t thinking properly.

But what if you have a question that you don’t know the answer to?

You say this prayer:

“Lord God, all wisdom, knowledge, understanding, and discernment comes from You. Here is my question that I ask You to bring me an answer to: . Lord, I turn this question over to You in faith believing that through whatever means you choose, You will cause me to fully comprehend the very best answer to this question. Thank You in advance Lord for giving me the answer.”

Now, you simply file the question away in your mind and KNOW that God’s answer to your question WILL appear. Sometimes it’s almost instantaneously and sometimes it can take years. But the answer will come.

Peace, Love, and Blessings,
Lane Fox

Copyright © 2006 by Lane Fox, MillionairesForJesus.com

Permission is granted to reprint this article ONLY if a link is included with it as follows:

URL: http://www.MillionairesForJesus.com
Link Text: Millionaires For Jesus - God's Millionaires - Christian Millionaire

The Marketing Formula – Part 1

Up to this point I have spent a lot of time writing about developing a Biblically-based mindset of wealth. And, because your mindset is 95% or more of what it takes for you to become a Millionaire For Jesus, I'll undoubtedly write more about this in the future. At the same time, I need to start sharing with you the actual business principles and philosophies that every Millionaire For Jesus uses directly or indirectly.

Just to make sure we are together, the cycle of business generally follows this format:

1. Product/Service Creation Or Acquisition
2. Marketing
3. Sales
4. Product/Service Delivery And Or Implementation
5. Product/Service Support And Customer Care

Of these 5 business elements, Marketing is one of the more important elements and yet it is typically the least understood element.

It's worth noting that companies that are good at marketing are typically the most successful companies and they can grow to whatever level they want to - including joining the Fortune 500 club if they so desire. Microsoft Corporation is an example of a company that is great at Marketing.

Because of the importance of Marketing, I'm going to discuss it first. This way, you can start paying attention to how other companies are Marketing and ultimately decide how you want to market whatever it is that you choose to Market.

So, starting at a high level, here is the ULTRA-SECRET Marketing Formula that so few people know about let alone understand:

1. Create an ever-growing MONEY-SOURCE (customer list) by constantly collecting the contact information of as many customers and prospective customers as you can.
2. Communicate with your MONEY-SOURCE (customer list) in the right way at the right time.
3. Attract customers with Attraction Devices.
4. Gain even more customers by using Joint Ventures.
5. Recruit affiliates to bring you business that you would have had no way of getting on your own.
6. Create reasons for customers to do business with you more and more frequently and at higher and higher dollar volumes.

Peace, Love, and Blessings,
Lane Fox

Copyright © 2006 by Lane Fox, MillionairesForJesus.com

Permission is granted to reprint this article ONLY if a link is included with it as follows:

URL: http://www.MillionairesForJesus.com
Link Text: Millionaires For Jesus - God's Millionaires - Christian Millionaire