The Fastest Way to Build a 7-figure Business
Making a million dollars is not hard. I’ve done it over and over again. At the same time, most budding entrepreneurs I know (along with many “seasoned” veterans) are still concentrating their efforts–and an insane amount of time–on painfully slow business building methods.
What you are doing now is likely painfully slow and potentially pointless. Here’s a list of all the superfluous activities that you need to stop doing, and the one big accomplishment that you must start working towards today.
1. Stop Trying to Build a Big YouTube Channel from Scratch
Despite what you might read from the latest ‘social media guru’, building an audience on Youtube is incredibly slow and time consuming. Worse, even if you are successful at this, your business is completely vulnerable to the whims and decisions of other people. YouTube can literally shut you down in a second and cripple your business for whatever reason they want, and they don’t even have to explain the reason why they have shut off your account.
I’ve never posted a video on YouTube in my life, and neither have most of the other millionaires that I know. I know one or two people who actually make good money from YouTube. Kudos to them, but they could have built their business much easier, and much faster, without putting all that time and money into video creation.
And I hope your account doesn’t get banned tomorrow. But then again, YouTube tends to hate marketers. The bigger your channel gets, especially if you are a marketer, the more vulnerable you are.
In fact, if I were a betting man (and I am) I’d bet the likelihood that your channel getting banned goes up in direct correlation to your success on YouTube. Something to look forward to as a reward for all your hard work, that’s for sure! Why anyone would want to focus on YouTube as the primary way to build a business, I don’t know.
It takes loads of time and often results in just a little traffic – most of which just leads to hateful comments from anonymous viewers. You’ll get bigger headaches than you will results. And any success you experience can all be taken away in an instant. No thanks.
2. Facebook Fan Pages
I have a Facebook Fan Page for our business. We have an employee manage it, and frankly, she puts a lot of time into this task. Despite having almost 100,000 “Likes”, our business email list is literally twenty times bigger and generates over 300 times more revenue. Why am I not spending more time growing my Fan Page? Because it’s a waste of my time. It would be like me spending all day answering the phones in our customer service department. My job, as a millionaire, is to be out selling and marketing, not Facebooking.
And as with YouTube, Facebook is always changing their rules. Good old Zuckerberg also requires us to pay for the privilege of having our posts seen by the majority of our fans. How does that make sense?
Also like YouTube, Facebook can very quickly disable your account. Beyond that, who’s actually making a lot of money or getting a lot of traffic from their Facebook fan page? I’m talking millions of dollars, not chump change. I don’t know anyone who is, and if there is, that person isn’t you.
3. Writing Yet Another Long Form Sales Letter
C’mon…are you really spending your time writing another one of these? Stop. Right now.
Stop spending time writing things that no longer work. Start spending your time writing something that will work.
Listen: Do you want a lot of traffic? Do you want to make a lot of money? Do you want to change a lot of lives?
Here’s how you do it:
Create an insanely high converting offer. That’s the key!
That’s the only thing you need to do. You don’t need Facebook, or Twitter, or Google, or YouTube to make millions. Most times, all that stuff just distracts you from focusing on the one thing that will make you exponentially more money and finally put you on Easy Street with me.
You just need one, single insanely high converting offer. Yes, I know, it’s easier said than done, and that’s why you waste your time on easy things like making videos, posting to Facebook pages, and going through the motions of long sales letters.
But don’t worry, I’ll show you how to create an amazing offer in just a minute.
Here’s the truth about why you need an offer more than you need YouTube or Facebook.
There is no shortage of affiliates that want to make money. If you have an offer that makes affiliates a lot of money, you will have no problem getting traffic, building a huge customer list, or making a ton of money. That’s because there is no shortage of traffic that you can get when you have a high converting offer.
And guess what? No one, not Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, or anyone else, can take away your high converting offer. It is 100% guaranteed to make you money.
Simply put, here’s my #1 Rule for Making Millions:
If you do not have an offer that converts to paid advertising (what we call, “cold traffic”), stop everything else that you are doing and work on creating that offer until you do.
Creating an offer that converts on cold traffic is not hard. In fact, it’s infinitely less work than it would be to grow your YouTube channel or your Facebook Fan Page to a level that would make you even a fraction of the money that having a cold traffic offer will make you.
So how do you do it? Simple:
You must study cold traffic offers and model them.
Do you know any long form, single-page sales letters with a big, fat headline at the top that are working on cold traffic? Neither do I. Then why are you creating more long form, single-page sales letters? Why are you spending your time on that? Why? Perhaps it’s because it’s what you know or what you are comfortable with. Guess what? They don’t work anymore, no matter how comfortable you are with them.
Maybe you’re going to use that long form, single-page sales letter to run a product launch with a sale and a timer. Guess what? Affiliates do NOT want to promote those types of promotions any more. Customers do not want to BUY from those promotions any more. They don’t want to be sold to that way any more.
And why would they, when they don’t have to? You see, there are much more passive ways for you to market, and for customers to buy, that work much better.
Here are the two types of offers that convert on cold traffic:
1. Video Sales Letters (VSL)
Maybe you don’t really understand or know anything about creating a video sales letter. That’s no excuse. The fact is at one point you didn’t know how to do anything. But eventually you learned how. And so now you’ll follow the same steps to master Video Sales Letters. Study what works, create your own, and test the response. Take the test results and use that information to improve your VSL. Repeat that process until you have an offer that is making you real money.
2. Two-step Sales Letters (article to sales page)
These are becoming increasingly popular and just like Video Sales Letters, affiliates love these offers because they convert into sales better than long form sales letters.
Why? Because they don’t require a long-winded sales pitch in an email to promote them. Instead, an affiliate can write three sentences, insert a link to your sales page, and sit back and make ten times the money with one-fifth of the work.
Customers also love these offers. Why? Because the “sales letter” delivers great content without being beat over the head with “sales copy” that puts a hard sell on them.
Affiliates don’t want to write a hard sell email just as much as a customer doesn’t want to read it. Instead, when you can point folks to “free content” and have it convert, you now have a MILLION dollar business.
Naturally, you can’t just throw up any video or any article-to-sales-page lander and have it convert like crazy. If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.
So how can YOU create a winning video sales letter or 2-step lander?
It’s really not that hard when you know what to do.
1. Get every VSL that converts on cold traffic in your niche transcribed. Print them off. Study them relentlessly. Study the lead. Study each “section”. Study the pitch. Study the close. Study how they piece each section together effortlessly and seamlessly.
Take notes. Create an outline. Use a highlighter. Go back to “school”. Study, learn, and then pass the test by creating a VSL that would get an “A”. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but if you can study hard enough to earn an A, your VSL will make you a LOT of money.
(If you are looking for a more formal course on writing a VSL, I’d recommend Jon Benson’s www.3xVSL.com. That said, nothing takes the place of simply studying transcripts of offers that are converting on cold traffic. I recommend both to give you a full education).
2. Follow the same process for the 2 step article landers – you can see one at www.OldSchoolNewBody.com. Print these websites, dissect them, study them, take notes, create an outline, and write your “A+” version of your own.
That’s really all there is to it! Dissect the things that work and discover WHY they work. Then put what you learn to work for you. Model it. Key word, MODEL. Do NOT steal copy, not even one sentence. Write your own darn copy, or you’ll just make me even crankier.
You learn from others; you don’t steal from them.
Bottom line, if you want to have a BIG business you have to have an offer that affiliates can promote passively with a click-driven email at ANY time and have it convert.
When you have this, you will very likely be able to BUY your own traffic as well. Between those two avenues, you’re looking at millions of visitors a month. If you convert at 0.5 – 3% (a great conversion rate on a click-based email depending on traffic source), that’s thousands upon thousands of customers a month.
That’s tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of DOLLARS per month.
Then, through back end email marketing you will be making into six figures a month.
Congratulations, you’re now a millionaire. Google, YouTube, and Facebook can’t do anything about it. And honestly, it shouldn’t have taken you that long. If you start from ZERO–I’m talking totally from scratch–you can make a million dollars in less than a year.
Hopefully, through reading this rant of an article, you now know what to stop doing, and start doing. Get out of your comfort zone and master one of the above 2 sales methods. Model what works. There are dozens of templates that ARE working right now for you to follow.
If you don’t have a cold traffic offer up and running in the next 3 months, it’s your own fault. You just didn’t want it bad enough, and you were too comfortable to step out, study the exact things that are working today, and create your own “A” grade project. If you do, however, kudos to you for listening to smart advice.
Or, of course, you can always continue to drain your time on things that won’t have nearly the impact on your business that spending your time on this will.
Farewell, and good night,
The Cranky Millionaire
[Ed. Note. The Cranky Millionaire is a friend of Craig Ballantyne’s. Five years ago he was making $40,000 per year in an average job. Then, by getting coaching from Craig, relentlessly studying what works, and working harder than almost anyone else that Craig knows, he became a multi-millionaire by delivering solutions to people’s problems. He’s one of the top Direct Response marketers in the world today. And most of the time he’s incredibly happy, except when he sees people wasting their lives.]