business tips

5 Tactics That Almost Guarantee Success

January 7, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Guaranteed success is a strong prediction; every time people come across the words “guarantee” and “success” together, there’s bound to be some skepticism.

But these five tactics are powerful. The super secret kind of powerful, and I’m about to expose them all. While you may have already heard of some of these tactics, others will be new.

But none of them matter if you don’t take action.

You’d think that something like taking action would be the first tactic. However, we are constantly taking action. Every day, we take a massive amount of action, but our results don’t always match up with our efforts.

Here’s how to make your actions translate into results:

#1: Get Into A Routine

A routine is something you follow without fail every single day (or at least on specific days of the week). Following a routine, or having no routine at all, can singlehandedly make the difference between success and failure.

I recently read The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, and one of his stories about routine really struck home. Here’s how it went:

Golfer Jack Nicklaus was known for his famous pre-shot routine. During an important Majors tournament, Nicklaus was at the top of his game. A psychologist timed the golfer from the moment he pulled the club out of the bag until the moment he hit the ball.

For each shot from start to finish, the timing of his routine never varied by more than one second.

That same psychologist measured Greg Norman during his collapse in the 1996 Masters. As the game progressed, his pre-shot routine became faster and faster.

If you don’t know what you are doing when you wake up, and right before you go to bed, you’re in trouble. Establishing a routine during the bookends of your day will get you into a rhythm of success. What are you doing each morning and evening? And in what order?

I always read for an hour before I go to bed. Lately, I’ve been responding to emails for 15 minutes before I begin reading. I continue to build backwards to get more activities wrapped into my routine.

People don’t mess up because they give themselves many goals. They mess up because they give themselves many goals without designating which portions of the day they’ll start working on each individual goal.

Without a routine in place, you risk missing out on your biggest goals.

#2: Think About What You Can Do

I am having a great time in college. I’m making new friends, running, and doing new things. I recently started to play pool and found myself playing for several hours on any given day.

While doing homework and showing up to a practice aren’t a problem, I was losing significant time for my business.

One day, I had had enough. I decided that I wouldn’t play any pool for one day. With this mindset, I did get more done (but I still ended up playing some pool).

I was so focused on not playing pool that I didn’t think about what else I could do. So instead of thinking, “I can’t play pool,” I began to think, “I can go to the library for an hour each day.” Then I started going to the library and getting more of my work done.

The moment I shifted from “I can’t do X” to “I can do Y,” making the transition became easier. I still play pool at college, but now I spend at least an hour each day on campus working on my business.

It’s easier to fight off a bad habit if you focus on what you can do instead, rather than simply cutting off the bad habit.

Furthermore, if you think you can’t do something, you are right. Only devote your time and attention towards the goals that you can do. Every battle begins and ends within the mind.

#3: Increase Your Desire

The desire you have for your work is important. If you desire your work, you’ll have no problem putting in the hours. If you don’t desire your work, you’ll want to get through it as soon as possible.

Desire gets you across the finish line. A lack of desire encourages you to find any reason to stop short.

If you want to increase your desire, the simple act of writing your desire to achieve each goal will increase your likelihood of success. If you want to get 100 subscribers each day, write the following:

“I WILL GET 100 SUBSCRIBERS EACH DAY BY THE END OF X.”

The all caps is very important here. Not only that, but giving yourself a reasonable deadline will make you hone in your efforts to meet the deadline.

If you give yourself an unreasonable deadline, you’ll lose motivation when you don’t accomplish your goal. If you give yourself a reasonable, but more challenging, deadline, you’ll make daily progress until you accomplish your goal.

If you want to get back in touch with your niche, simply write, “I LOVE [NICHE NAME]” and you’ll come to believe it. If you write about your desire long enough, that desire will ignite in a powerful way.

#4: Read A Lot Of Books

Reading has had a big impact on my success. Reading the right books about your niche allows you to acquire new knowledge. Once you apply the right knowledge, you’ll get better results in any area you are pursuing.

Each month, I set a target for myself to read 10 books. That adds up to at least 120 books every year, which is far more than what most people read. I won’t go into detail about reading a lot of books because I discussed that in a previous post.

Regardless of what niche you’re in, reading personal development books will work wonders for you. Personal development books help you become the best you imaginable. Some focus on productivity while others focus on relationships, but they all focus on making you perform effectively and efficiently in anything that you do.

#5: Analyze Successful People

There’s always that one cool kid in school who everyone wants to emulate. Becoming cool meant hanging with that cool kid. In a similar way, to become successful, you have to hang out with people who are already successful.

This version of hanging out consists of you reading their content, watching their interviews, and consuming virtually every piece of content they were involved in.

By doing that, you’ll learn a lot about how these individuals became successful. You’ll learn from their habits and expertise. Remember, you’re only as good as the company you keep. If you want to become successful, start following the example of successful people now.

In Conclusion

It’s just as easy to fall short as it is to become successful. There are many people who work just as hard or harder than the world’s greatest innovators.

The difference between these two groups of people is how they devote their time and what goals they pursue and accomplish.

Success requires patience combined with a strong mindset. Once you have that mixture, and live by the five tactics, you’ve already won the battle. At that point, it’s just a matter of time before you inevitably walk into a goldmine.

Which of these tactics resonated with you the most? Have any tips on becoming successful? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Use Pokemon GO For Your Business

July 18, 2016 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Pokemon GO surged Nintendo’s business, and it has the potential to grow your local business too. Local business owners are already using the app in interesting ways to attract new customers.

As an outsider looking in, I analyze how businesses can use Pokemon GO to increase their revenue.

If you enjoy the video, please don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

[Tweet “How To Use Pokemon GO For Your Business.”]

How To Put On Your Marketing Hat

June 3, 2016 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

If you write enough blog posts, you become very comfortable with the experience. All I need is an outline about a topic I would enjoy writing about, and then I’m off to the races.

Producing content eventually becomes effortless. However, if you want to turn content creation into a business, then you need to be prepared to put on your marketing hat.

Creating the content is not the marketing. Create it, and no one may show up. Marketing can get very confusing very quickly. You think you are on the right path, and then all of a sudden, you get a curveball.

It’s possible to achieve effortless marketing, but you have to treat marketing in the same way you would treat writing content and producing videos.

You have to work on marketing your business every day. Some days will be easier than others, but if you pursue someone every day, you will eventually become a master at what you are pursuing.

Putting on the marketing hat correctly means putting the marketing hat on and keeping it on for as long as possible. I sometimes find myself producing content without thinking about the marketing.

I used think about marketing for a few days, grind at it, and then go back to spending my time only creating my content. Now I market my brand every day.

Consistency is vital in everything that you do—especially with marketing. I feel like content creators have consistency down with their content, but the marketing consistency isn’t there at all.

Now it’s time to get the marketing consistency down.

Identify HOW You Will Market Your Business

When you identify the ways you will market your business, it’s always a rough draft. You’ll never have the final copy because you’ll keep on making changes to the draft.

Identification will give you an idea of what needs to be done. The word “marketing” doesn’t indicate what workload you are going to embrace. Will you use social media marketing (which ones), email marketing, local marketing, or something else.

Once you know what you must do, you can implement. During this identification process, write down all of the tactics you will use to market your brand. More specifically, what will you do EVERY DAY in order to achieve the results you are looking for?

With all of this marketing, I’m sure that many content ideas will arise from your efforts.

Set Goals

Setting goals with a deadline gives you more urgency to put in the work. If your goal doesn’t have a deadline, it’s probably not going to get accomplished.

If you create a lot of content, then you are good at setting goals with a deadline. Chances are you have a blog or YouTube channel that must have at least one piece of new content every week/month. The consistency grabs your attention.

Forgetting to write and schedule a blog post for a given day would be devastating.

We need to think about marketing in the same way. To not market your brand on a given day must possess the same feeling of devastation as forgetting to write and schedule a blog post.

One important thing about setting goals is that you must make them attainable. If you set a goal that is impossible for you to reach, then you may get discouraged right from the beginning. In the beginning, set a goal for yourself that is very easy to reach, and then gradually rise your standards.

Do Research

I wish I could accomplish a goal just by writing it down. Writing the goal down significantly helps out with goal achievement, but you have to put in the work.

Putting in the work is an obvious need for goal achievement, but what type of work do you have to put in?

The answer to that question comes with research. If you want to grow your email list, you would go on Google and type in phrases like “How to grow an email list.” Then immerse yourself in as many email list growth related articles as possible.

Make this research a daily habit. That way, your knowledge will expand—and this knowledge will be SPECIFICALLY RELATED to the goal that you are trying to achieve. And this is knowledge that will actually be worthwhile—unlike other forms of knowledge.

Only the implemented, relevant knowledge is power.

Experiment

After you have the rough draft (plan) and have done the research, it’s time to take action. Some parts of your marketing will be flawless, other parts will be beyond your expectations, and there will be some duds.

That’s one of the universal truths about all of marketing. But the only way you determine which tactics are good is by experimentation.

The most important part of experimenting with your marketing is that you must have data. The data lets you know exactly how successful or unsuccessful one of your tactics is.

You should experiment with at least one marketing tactic per day. That way, you’ll learn more things about how to most effectively market your products and services.

With that said, you don’t want to take experimentation too far. Each change an individual product or service receives should be at least two weeks separated from another change. Here’s an example.

Let’s say you have a Kindle book that is getting two sales per day. You decide to change the description and the book’s cover at the same time. You analyze the results a month later and discover that your book is still averaging two sales per day.

What if changing the cover doubled your sales, but changing the description cut your sales in half? Or vice-versa?

The problem is that you can’t tell. You have no idea what those two changes did to your book sales. If you have two Kindle books, you can change the cover for one of those books and then change the description for the other book.

The key thing is to experiment every day, but at the same time, you don’t want to over experiment to the point where you can’t tell what changes with each new variable (i.e. changing the book cover, changing the description, etc).

Outsource Some Of The Marketing

When you have mastered a certain marketing tactic, it’s time for you to outsource the work. With the mastery, you can easily explain to a freelancer what type of marketing needs to get done.

There’s a smaller chance of error, and if the freelancer is a dud, you can still do the work until you find another freelancer.

Outsourcing some of your marketing is important because outsourcing opens up extra time. With the extra time, you can experiment with more marketing tactics and analyze the results.

As you continue to master more marketing tactics and outsource them, your brand will start growing exponentially. At a certain point, all of the marketing you do will put your content into the hands of thousands of people who would love to share your content.

Now you have a free army of people who will promote your content for you. The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and Mashable among others have done a great job at putting their content in front of people who would love to share that content with their audiences.

In Conclusion

Content creators know how to consistently put out new content. Now, it’s time to consistently wear our marketing hats and put our content in front of people who would love to share it.

What are your thoughts about marketing? Have any tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

The 7 Essentials Of A Successful Online Business

May 27, 2016 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

What makes an online business tick? It’s a question I have been asking myself for many years. In fact, it’s a question I continue asking myself today.

I am what people would call an expert, but the playing field is constantly changing. Live streaming is now hot. Buying backlinks stopped working a long time ago.

In the midst of a changing playing field, there are certain essentials that make up all successful online businesses. It took me a while to discover what these qualities are.

Through a lot of stumbling, I finally ended up discovering what these seven essentials are. The playing field will continue changing, but these seven essentials will be around for a very long time.

#1: Social Media

Every successful business has some type of social media presence. While few business owners can truly master all of the social networks, most business owners master a few social networks and use that knowledge to expand.

You don’t want to approach social media with the intention of mastering every social network right away. The way to master social media is to master one social network at a time. I only saw social media success when I focused most of my time towards Twitter.

That’s the main reason why Twitter is still my go-to social network. Since I mastered Twitter before I mastered any of the other social networks, my Twitter audience continued growing and I know how to interact with them.

It doesn’t matter which social network you choose to master. What matters is that you choose a social network to master and then grow your social media presence.

Once you master one social network, you’ll have the skillset to expand into other social networks. I first mastered Twitter. Now I have a strong presence on Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook just to name a few.

But it all starts with mastery of a single social network.

#2: Email List

The money is in the email list. It is the best method of communication you have with your audience for getting clicks and generating sales. Every successful online business owner has a big, targeted email list.

There are a variety of methods for generating an email list. Facebook ads, AdWords, and organic promotion are some of the key tactics.

However, the email list is the most important platform you have. That is why it is necessary to take your email list growth one step further.

The purpose of EVERY platform you create must be to grow your email list.

That means if you have a YouTube channel, one of your goals for that channel must be growing your email list. The same rule applies if you use live streaming, Twitter, Facebook, any other social network, or any other platform/opportunity.

Always think about growing your email list.

#3: Landing Page

The landing page is the page on your blog that you promote in order to get more subscribers.

If you plan on using YouTube to get more subscribers, promote your landing page at the end of your YouTube videos. But don’t stop with YouTube. Use any of your social media audiences you have built up to promote your landing page.

Promoting a landing page with a free offer is how you get more subscribers. The more optimized that landing page is and the more traffic it gets, then the more subscribers you will get.

The main focus of a landing page is to get more subscribers. You don’t want people to go on your landing page and then find a way to read your blog posts. That’s why for all of my landing pages, I don’t have a navigation menu.

The navigation menu would distract visitors with too many options and result in fewer subscribers.

The landing page’s only mission is to get the visitor’s email address. If you don’t have a landing page yet, you can create one with either Optimize Press or LeadPages. Both of these tools are awesome, so no matter which one you choose, you’ll have awesome landing pages at your disposal.

#4: Product(s)

Every successful online business features a few products. The training course or book is the most popular route that online marketers pursue. Creating your own book or training course is easy with an outline, and it doesn’t cost much money to create the product.

Depending on how you create the book or training course, it may not cost you a single penny.

That makes it easier for you to achieve an ROI. More importantly, it is these products that you must promote to your email list in order to make money.

You can also leverage affiliate marketing to boost your sales. Affiliate marketing is the act of you promoting someone else’s product. However, you need to create your own product eventually, and offering your product as a free bonus can dramatically boost your affiliate sales.

In a split-test, affiliate marketing legend Matt McWilliams discovered that including a bonus to one of your products for a price similar to the affiliate product could result in a 650% increase in sales.

So even if you rely on affiliate marketing for your income, it wouldn’t hurt to create your own product. You’ll make more money when you promote your own product, and you will get more affiliate sales by offering your product as a free bonus.

#5: Mentor(s)

If you are a newbie and don’t do anything I have mentioned in this blog post, then you must start here. Having mentors will make a HUGE difference between success and failure.

The right mentors can arm you with new knowledge and present you with more business opportunities. I have had several mentors who have been critical to my success.

And yes, reading blog posts from experts in your niche helps, but I’m talking about mentors who know you by name and offer advice specifically tailored towards you.

I have a few mentors like that. They know more than me in certain areas, and when the path gets a little fuzzy, I’ll email one of my mentors and ask for advice.

I’d rather get the advice right away then continue for weeks, months, or even years to discover the same knowledge that I could have received just by taking five minutes out of my day to write an email to one of my mentors.

You need to have mentors. Even if you are successful right now and don’t have a mentor, your success will only be amplified with the aid of a mentor.

#6: Resources

If you want to become successful, you must analyze successful people and learn from them. When analyzing successful people, one thing you should pay attention to is the resources that they use.

What social media tools are they using to get better results in a shorter period of time?

HootSuite Pro and ManageFlitter (RAM actions) are the two main tools that I use to continue expanding my social media presence.

These tools do cost me money as do the other resources that I use for my business. However, they save time while providing better results.

I don’t want to go too much into the time concept because that’s the next thing that you must have to build a successful online business.

#7: Time

The importance of time is right up there with the importance of having a mentor. Every minute you spend doing one thing is a minute that you can’t spend doing anything else.

So one must prioritize. You look at how you are using your time, focus on what is bringing you the best results, and then focus most of your time and energy there.

However, certain things get in the way. Scheduling social media posts, creating or finding pictures for your blog posts, and email outreach are some of the things that may get in the way of that one opportunity that brings in the most results.

Becoming more productive will allow you to use your time more effectively. However, there is one rule that even the most productive people can’t escape.

There’s only 24 hours in one day. And most of that time is spent eating, drinking, sleeping, and doing other things necessary for survival that have nothing to do with the business.

While this is a rule that affects all of us, there is also a workaround—outsourcing.

You can hire other freelancers to help you pursue your goals. By allocating the right tasks to freelancers, you will take the workload off your shoulders. I used to do several tasks each day that I have now outsourced to my freelancers.

I save a little over two hours each day. Those extra hours add up, and those extra hours are the reason I can get more stuff done.

In Conclusion

Building a successful online business is NOT harder than ever. There are different platforms constantly emerging, but the basic storyline remains the same. Have persistence, have mentors, have the desire, and put in the work each day.

Maybe a few years from now, something completely new is superior to live streaming. However, these rules for online success will remain intact and continue to serve as an effective guide.

How do you define online success? Do you have any tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

3 Truths About Spending Money On Your Business

February 10, 2016 by Marc Guberti 3 Comments

Money. There will be no other thing in the world that we are so familiar with but don’t know much about. Money provides us with more purchasing power as consumers and business owners.

We use money to make investments, buy products, and all of that stuff.

But when you spend money on your business, money takes an entirely new dimension. The way you spend your money on your business can entirely make or break your business. It’s that important.

As a Daymond John brand ambassador, I was lucky enough to get an early copy of Power Of Broke. It is a book that I highly recommend for all entrepreneurs.

In the book, Daymond discussed money in a way that fascinated me. I learned new things about money, its benefits, and the potential destruction that it can cause.

I combined the knowledge I learned from Power Of Broke with my own knowledge with spending money on my business. Most of the money I spend is for outsourcing.

However, I am also spending money on important tools like HootSuite Pro and Dropbox.

The fascination from Power Of Broke combined with my prior knowledge resulted in these three truths that I present to you in this blog post.

#1: Having Too Much Money Can Be A Bad Thing

Huh? That was my initial reaction when Daymond John introduced this idea in his book. We are raised in a world where the more money you have, the better you do. That’s true for the most part.

The problem with having too much money to spend for your business is that everything about your business may suddenly become complex. The mission changes. There may suddenly be a stronger focus on making money than satisfying the customer.

When businesses have more spending power, the challenge is discovering the best way to spend the money. Sometimes marketing teams get it right. Other times they mess up.

Think New Coke, if you even remember what that is (I only know about New Coke from Daymond’s book).

So don’t live in the mindset that you need to have a lot of money to be successful. Sometimes money complicates the issue and shifts the business plan from a simple success to a complex collapse waiting to happen.

Part of it has something to do with whose hands the money is in 🙂

It is very possible to become successful with a lot of money, but it’s not the only thing you need to become successful.

#2: Gradually Increasing Spending So A Profit Is Always Maintained

The amount of money I spend each month is dependent on the amount of revenue I will receive in that month. That’s because I am focused on making a profit.

And in the end, the profit is all that really matters in the money-making game. Your business could be making $300,000 in sales every year, but if you spend $400,000 every year to keep your business going, then you’re swimming in debt.

I’d rather be the debt-free person who makes $10,000 every year.

When my revenue increases, my spending also increases. With that in mind, my revenue always increases more than my spending.

That’s because I view profit differently from most people.

Most people view making a profit as getting the scraps. These people think of profit like this:

Revenue – Expenses = Profit

With this equation, the profit barely gets any attention. It’s simply the result after revenue and expenses are accounted.

Here is how I view profit.

Revenue – Profit = Expenses

Now expenses are the last thing I focus on. The amount of money I can spend is dependent on revenue and the money that I choose to keep for myself.

In this equation, profit receives more attention and plays a big role in how much money can actually get spent. This added attention discourages a negative profit and encourages the business owner to always maintain a profit.

Gradually increasing spending as your revenue increases boosts the likelihood of you securing a profit.

This tip would be incomplete without a big shout out to Mike Michalowicz for writing the book Profit First where I first came across this new approach to making a profit.

#3: Maintaining A Budget Will Inspire You And Teach You A Lot About Money

A focus on making a profit also comes with a focus on maintaining a budget. With the Profit First equation in play, you can’t spend more money than you make.

That means your budget is a real budget. You can’t go over it.

There will be times when that budget leaves you frustrated. And that’s a good thing because the frustration challenges you to think outside of the box.

Maybe you have a budget of spending $500/month, and you are currently spending $490/month. You want to hire someone who can manage your social media accounts because you read one of my blog posts about outsourcing.

The problem is the person you want to hire will cost you $30/month. That can’t happen since you would be over the budget.

What do you do then?

You look at all of the ways that you are currently spending your money.

How are you wasting your money? How can you spend less to get the same result you are getting anyway? Are certain opportunities you are pursuing not worth the cost (or not as good as the outsourcing)?

In other words, how can you squeak $20/month out of your current spending so you can hire the person to manage your social media accounts?

Let’s say you manage to find $20/month that you were not spending properly and you hire the person to manage your accounts.

Now you are at the $500/month budget. However, you will get exposed to different tools, training courses, and opportunities that cost you money.

Especially outsourcing because once you successful outsource one part of your business, you’ll want to outsource as much of your business as possible. The cost can add up to a lot.

No lie there.

So how do you spend money when your budget is at its max? The answer is that you make more money so you can expand your budget.

If you make $2,000/month and want to save $1,500/month, then that’s how the budget is $500/month.

If you make more money, then you have the option to spend more money.

Imagine how different the budget would look if you were making $20,000/month. Let’s keep everything in proportion and assume you would want to save $15,000/month.

Now the budget is $5,000/month. That’s looking a lot better than the other budget. But the only way to reach that budget is by making more money.

Then think about what that budget would allow you to do. Imagine all of the time you would save and all of the opportunities you could now actively get involved in.

You’ll become a hungry entrepreneur who will put in more work than most people as you charge towards success. Literally charge because no successful entrepreneur ever walks their way to success.

In Conclusion

When you spend money on your business, you are forced to make decisions. The dollars you spend on outsourcing cannot get spent on online advertising or anything else.

Every dollar matters. Whether you are trying to make a bigger profit from advertising or save time with outsourcing, you must consider all of the ways that you are spending your money.

Analyzing how you spend your money will allow you to make better decisions with what you do with your revenue.

And remember, it doesn’t matter how much money you make. What matters is your profit.

Which of these truths about money do you believe is the most important? Do you have any other truths about money to share? Sound off in the comments section below.

Don’t Change At The Cost Of Losing What Makes You Unique

June 7, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

unique Stand Out

When my blog surpassed the 100,000 annual visitors milestone, I wanted to make drastic changes so I could turn 100,000 annual visitors into 100,000 monthly visitors. There is no limit to how much a blog can grow, and even the people who are getting 100,000 daily visitors are still looking for ways to get more traffic. The more of traffic we have, the better.

However, one of the drastic changes I was going to make was only publishing 1 blog post every day. This part of the strategy was that I would be able to write a 1,000 word blog post, and by having longer blog posts, I would rank higher on Google’s search engine. Therefore, I would be able to get more traffic from SEO than ever before.

The problem was that writing these blog posts took a lot of time, and I also felt uncomfortable thinking about the blog post I would have to eventually send out telling everyone that I would not be able to publish two blog posts every day. Being able to publish two blog posts every day is something that few people are able to do. It is one of the characteristics that makes this blog unique, and when I realized that, I wasn’t going to take it away by only publishing 1 blog post every day.

My blog posts are simple and to the point. That’s how I like writing them and that is how I will continue to write them. There will be some longer blog posts slipped in every once in a while, but for the most part, everything is going to remain the same. Once you become remarkable in a certain area by performing a certain activity that few people do (or no one at all), it is important to continue performing that certain activity. That’s the decision I made when I decided that I would continue publishing two blog posts every day.

What are your thoughts on becoming remarkable and remaining remarkable without changing what allowed you to become remarkable in the first place? Do you have any stories of your own? Please share your thoughts below.