Praise for Sandi Krakowski on Her “Read Their Mind” Book Tour
“I went to Sandi's Read Their Mind Book Tour to wildly grow my business! I knew I'd learn amazing things that would allow me to connect with my ideal clients in a deeper way. Over the weekend, I absolutely learned those things and sooo MUCH MORE!! Sandi's prayers over my life at this event have been such a HUGE blessing to me! Now, I'm utilizing my solution blueprints to help women entrepreneurs manage their online marketing AND weight management goals!”
Pamela Wright PamelaWrightSolutions.com
“Sandi has helped me find what I am passionate about. I have changed the direction of my business to focus on my analytical strengths. I'm now serving other business owners by freeing up their time and saving them money by taking over all their research needs. Sandi's prophetic gifts of healing and speaking life over people has changed not only my business, but my life.”
Jaime White ResearchSuccessNow.com
“Sandi became my business coach less than 3 months ago. had a great business plan but no website and no real marketing strategy. By using the info she offered for FREE I was able to put up my own website! The budget I had planned to use for the website was suddenly available to use for coaching. It was a much better investment! The group coaching is awesome! It is affordable and there is incredible support and networking that happens within the group. In fact, my first client was a fellow businessperson in the group!”
Vicki Horner MyMothersButler.com
“Sandi is an amazing woman! I found her through a friend and started with her free 30-Day Make More Money with Your Blog program and her 7-Day videos. She truly made everything so easy to follow and understand! I moved onto her free Monday night calls, and as I listened and re-listened to them, I knew I had to work more closely with her, so I joined her Gold program. I've made some amazing friends, gained much more confidence in my business and my direction, and dropped my US Alexa ranking from 577,416 to 184,768 in a month and a half. Getting to meet and hear Sandi in person on her book tour was nothing short of amazing--even things I thought I already understood were made that much clearer, and to feel her energy live was a blessing! Staying connected to Sandi's lovingyet- no-BS way of doing business is what keeps me going and reminds me that I am capable of reaching my goals!”
Kerri Randall HotFunFitness.com
“With all of my technical knowledge and experience, I was lost on how to create a blog that is clear and focused, yet encompasses all of my passions. Now I have a map to follow and a guide in Sandi to show me the way!”
John Hays xFitForLife.com
“In an industry filled with hucksters and big talking, egomaniacs, Sandi Krakowski has emerged as the clear voice for building strong, stable businesses online. Working with her as my marketing coach continues to open up much more than marketing strategy. Sandi really understands how to build, grow, and enjoy a 6 and 7 figure business. In less than a year, we’ve increased my sites traffic by 1,100% without spending an extra dime, created a stable of new products from the activities I was already doing, and added 30 hours of productive time to my business every week without adding any time to my schedule. That is worth its weight in gold.”
PJ McClure TheMindsetMaven.com
“Since working with Sandi Krakowski my approach to business has taken a drastic turn. I am not quite sure how I connected with Sandi, but I am sure that it was divine intervention. She is the answer to fervent prayer. As a minister, I always felt that I had to draw a line between ministry and business, but Sandi gives an example of how God should reign in all areas of my life. I got laid off three months ago and didn’t know what to do. Now I have my own business and am beginning to draw the attention of international followers on my blog. With her mentorship, I am beginning to build the foundation for a thriving business. I can’t wait to learn more from Sandi. Each day is such a joy!”
Dr. Debra R. Brooks HealingEmpowermentInstitute.com
“The first time I came across Sandi, I knew that she was someone I needed to learn from. Not only did she provide me with the daily doses of encouragement that every business owner desperately needs, but she taught me valuable lessons that would help me grow my business, my ministry. In June of 2011, I had the opportunity to attend her Live Book Tour and as promised, I left having gained significant training that not only applied to my business, but skills that I could immediately implement. I thank God that He has given me the opportunity to learn from this incredible woman of God who has no doubt, stepped into her calling! I look forward to much future training with Sandi!”
Jennifer Bennett MySoulMission.org ”Sandi’s hard earned expertise and no-nonsense holistic approach to business is surpassed only by the passion, sincerity and pure love she brings to the people that she works with. Status quo becomes a thing of the past in a world where Sandi leads anyone willing to do the work on a trail blazing path to success in every aspect of their lives! Jump on board and hang on for the ride of your life!”
Kelly Black YourRepurposedLife.com
“I attended Sandi’s “Read Their Mind Book Tour” seminar as my rookie venture as a newbie, entering the entrepreneur world. I was blessed to sit on the miracle couch with Sandi evaluating my business plan. WOW! What an honor. Sandi provided me with the inspiration to Believe in myself and my business idea, TheSeedsToSuccess.com which provides personal development to the business entrepreneur! I want to help others grow themselves as people, which will manifest results in all aspects of their lives, especially their business. Thanks to Sandi who fanned the flames of this fiery dream. It is evolving into my destiny! All my heartfelt thanks go to Sandi who stirred my heart to be the success I can be!”
Theresa Baron
“I am a board certified physician transitioning from active medical practice to creating a virtual coaching business. I was looking for an unobtrusive way to connect with my ideal clients, who happen to be professional women seeking ways to create a balanced wholesome life. Prior to working with Sandi, I was shocked to discover that my Alexa scores were nonexistent, despite having a website for almost 2 years. Within less than 30 days of moving the entire content to WordPress; then posting consistent blog updates, my Alexa score is now a little over a million worldwide and 202,000 in the United States! Sandi has taught me to fearlessly execute, create amazing results that continue to propel me forward- toward my ideal client!”
Dr. Eno Nsima-Obot AskDoctorEno.com Read Their Mind How To Hear What The Marketplace Wants And Build A Huge Business Sandi Krakowski
Published by Sandi Krakowski
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Sandi Krakowski / A Real Change International
Copyright © 2011 by A Real Change International.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, taping, scanning, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher and/or author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of non-fiction. This publication is designed to provide accurate information on the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services or advice. The information is not intended to replace any legal counsel or other professional directives. If professional services or advice or other assistance is required, the services of a professional should be sought.
Cover design: Kim Garst
This book can be ordered by visiting http://arealchange.com
ISBN: 978-1-4661-9645-2 Dedication
There are so many people I need to thank for each role they have played to help me get here today.
All of our loyal customers that we’ve had the honor to serve through the last 14 years. You’re more like family than customers and it’s my honor to mention you throughout the pages of this book. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
My competitors who brought out the ‘warrior’ in me and helped me go farther than I ever thought I could. Every business needs both. Customers and competitors. Thank you!
Bill Glazer, for giving me the ‘map’ to bring this all together and for cheering me on in the process! You’ve been such a blessing in my life and it’s an honor to do business with you. Thanks for being ‘the mentor that makes it happen’ for me!
Dr. LaVonne Atnip, my spiritual Mom and coach who has helped me to pursue my dreams, live in the wild and ridiculous love of God and step into the role of Millionaire Mompreneur with my heart wide open! I love you Momma!
My team at A Real Change Int’l - Rose, Kim, Stephanie, Jon, Tiffany, Victoria, Justin, Kim, Holly, and the countless outsourcers and contractors who make what I do on a daily basis possible.
PJ McClure for taking the messed up pages of this work and creating what we have in our hands today. Thank you for bringing your team together to make it all happen! Thanks for believing in this message so much that you took it on as a challenge so others could receive it! I couldn’t have done it without you.
My amazing children, Jeremy, Justin, and Bobby, who have believed in their Mom even when she didn’t believe in herself. You have loved me through all the phases of my career and made life worth living because of who you are in all your unique special ways. I love each of you so much! I’m so proud to be your Mom and so blessed everyday to see who you are and are becoming!
My husband, lover, friend, the one who comes alongside of me and supports me and tells me, “You can do it, don’t give up,” when I am feeling weary and worn. The man, who has seen me in all of my worst days and because of God’s grace, now lives with me in all of my best days. Alan, thank you for loving me all these years and being the one who completes me! I love you more than anyone else in this entire crazy world we live in! Thank you for always staying faithful and committed to me.
Most importantly, I want to thank my God and my Savior, Jesus Christ, without you this would never have been possible. Thank you for cheering me on, celebrating my victories, helping me to see that the entire world was designed for success. Thanks for letting me ‘play along’ as you have used my mess of a life and my mistakes in business to impact hundreds of thousands of people. If grace isn’t real, what you’ve done in my life is a sheer scandal. I’m so grateful it is real and that you pushed me with your unfailing love to be who I am today! You are the reason I live.
With love and gratitude,
Sandi Krakowski Table of Contents
Introduction PJ McClure
Chapter 1 Getting Mixed-Up In Business
Chapter 2 Starting With ‘Why’
Chapter 3 Gaga Knows Why, Do You?
Chapter 4 Listening Tools
Chapter 5 Going Beyond Keywords
Chapter 6 Listen, Ask, Listen
Chapter 7 I Know What You Want
Chapter 8 Your Passion Leads
Chapter 9 Identify Your Passion
Chapter 10 Your Stage Is Your Purpose
Chapter 11 More Jedi Mind Reading
Chapter 12 The Good, The Bad, and The Awesome
Chapter 13 Ask, Listen, and Speak Their Language
Chapter 14 Activate, Execute and Prosper Daily in Business
Chapter 15 Talk The Through Your Process
Chapter 16 Let Me Show You My Entry Doors
Chapter 17 Release The Gift That God Gave You
Chapter 18 Daily and Weekly Action To Take
Chapter 19 How To Write A Great Bio
Chapter 20 Banner Ads, Mommy Blogs, and More List Building Introduction by PJ McClure
Have you ever had the experience of watching a commercial, reading a newsletter, or hearing someone speak and think, “That’s exactly what I’m going through! How did they know?” It is almost as if they were reading your mind!
I first met Sandi Krakowski by following her on Twitter. Her posts were engaging and often humorous, but more importantly, she wrote things that hit me right where I lived as a business owner. Though we had never actually met, I felt like I knew her and needed to find out how she could help me.
On the phone she was just as engaging, and seemed to take a genuine interest in me and my situation. Within a few minutes she started telling me the challenges I was facing and even how I felt about them. It wasn’t until later that I thought, “How did she do that?”
That answer is what this book is all about. Sandi is going to share the actual nitty- gritty details of how you can read your clients’ minds, how you can know their problems better than they can, and how you can build a dynamic business as a result.
The subject of reading minds (not literally, of course) is especially exciting to me because my entire business is based on entrepreneurs and business owners getting their minds right. As you’ll discover through these pages, having your heart in the right place and having the right frame of mind are the only ways to know what your clients are thinking.
This is not a new tactic or trendy way to manipulate people. Sandi wants to make you a more effective marketer by making you a more effective person. This is deeper than traditional textbook ramble. There is something bigger going on. Getting What You Want From This Book
As Sandi’s resident “Mindset Guy,” I’d like to offer a frame of mind to use so you can get the absolute most out of this book. Before you begin, you need to come up with your “one thing.” What is your “one thing” that you want to get out of this book? Focus on that thing you want to implement in your business right away.
Let me be selfish for a moment and tell you what I want you to get out of this book. If you get nothing else, please understand that you cannot know the who, what, why of your clients until you know the who, what, why of yourself.
The big key to reading your client’s mind is that you’ve got to know who you are, and I’m not talking about in some ethereal metaphysical sense. If you are in a position where you’re repressing things about yourself and won’t face them, you’ll never tap into who your clients are. It just won’t happen. You are cut off from connecting to their needs. That was part of my big breakthrough with Sandi. I said to her, “You mean I can just be who I am and that’ll help? Nobody’s ever let me do that before. It’s kind of scary… kind of cool. I’ll give it a shot,” and it was like the doors were just thrown open.
You have to know who you are. If I know anything about Sandi it’s that she’s somebody who has not been afraid to go face-to-face with the absolute ugliest parts of her life. Instead of turning her head to an issue, she gets nose-to-nose and says, “No. I’m dealing with you now. Go away.” That’s the place you’re going to have to go, too.
You may not get all the way there the first time you read this book, but you’re going to have some tools to start using right away until you get to KNOW WHO YOU ARE. You are going to have some understanding of why you need to do that.
If you’re the person right now who’s saying, “Yeah, I don’t really want to know who I am. There’s some stuff about me that I’d just as soon keep forgetting about. I work really hard not to face that stuff,” – you don’t have to raise your hand, I’ll raise my own.
Here is something that will set the mood for the entire book, because this work is going deeper than any other you’ve read on this topic. Sandi and I both have multiple copies of the most powerful success book ever written (The Bible) and I want to share a verse – Isaiah 43:18.
Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?
Whatever you have brought to this point is an old thing. We’re doing a new thing now. Whatever you brought with you – whatever you’ve been before – you can deal with it. There are ways you can forgive. There are ways you can get over it. You don’t have to take it with you. To get the most out of what Sandi is going to share with you, please take a couple of minutes to consider the fact that you’re allowed to leave your baggage behind. Be willing to look forward. Sandi will bring things up in the course of this book that – God willing – will make you incredibly uncomfortable. It is the discomfort that helps you find your edge; the edge you need to look deep into your market and see the needs and opportunities, and to fulfill them. Your clients are waiting to trade their money for your solutions. It will never happen until you can read their minds.
PJ McClure The Mindset Maven
[back to top] Chapter 1 Getting Mixed-Up In Business
In 1990 and ’91, when my babies were 8, 3 and 1 year old, I got this idea that the best thing I could do for our home was get kitchenware that would help me to fulfill my job as a homemaker in a more satisfying, gratifying and multiplying way. I didn’t want to make bread one loaf at a time; I wanted to make bread 10 loaves at a time!
At the time my husband was making $2,700 a month and the mixer I wanted was $900. I thought, “How am I going to do this?” So I pulled from all the grooming and training for business I had received growing up (which totaled less than zero), and said, “I think I’m going to start a business.”
Not knowing how crazy the idea was, my kitchenware business took off. Part of my marketing model was actually publishing a newsletter the old-fashioned way; the way we’ve actually gone back to doing at my company, A Real Change International – a newsletter that arrives in your mailbox. There were 300 women who were reading that newsletter and I put a little excerpt in there that said, “Do any of you want to learn how to bake bread?” Here’s the wild thing about our system at the time… we had to wait for the letter to come back! I wasn’t using email at that time.
Later, someone wrote me and asked if I had ever done anything online through email. I thought, “With what?” This was back in the days of the computer processor and you logged in to a black screen and a flashing cursor. Do you remember those flashing cursors?
I’ll never forget the day that I thought I had broken my brand new computer. I ended up with the flashing cursor, and my 5year-old, blond-haired genius came to me and said, “All you’ve got to do is type w-i-n-d-o-w-s.” So I typed it… and it worked! I was far from an expert.
Not knowing if the email idea was any good, I asked my client base and the response was a resounding “YES!” So I took everybody that was reading the newsletter offline and brought them online. The business was started with no experience. I had no idea what an email was. I had no idea I needed an EIN (employer identification number) to sell anything. I had no idea what wholesaling was or that you could get larger discounts based on volume.
It all started with me asking, “I need one of those mixers. How many of them do I need to sell so that there’s enough in the middle for me to buy MY mixer?”
I spent my first couple of months smoking my profits. In other words, finding every which way to spend the money. “We made $500 in profit? Good, let’s go buy that bread baking recipe. We made a $200 profit? Good, I need that tortilla press.” There was no plan for the future or forethought on how a business should run. Why did I tell you all of that? Because every day someone asks me, “Is there any hope for me to make six or seven figures in business if I have no experience?” I say, “Yes, you’re looking at it!”
My first four or five years in business I had no mentoring or training. God as my witness, I built my website by going to Amazon and studying thoughtfully, head in hand, saying, “Ok, so they have the things up here that you’re supposed to click on…”
It wasn’t called the header, because I didn’t know what the heck that was. You put your product in there and you put just enough words with the “Buy Now’ button, and the words should be a small description? I began thinking, “Alright, it’s really the kind of words that people are actually saying when they’re talking about the product. Oh, ok. I can do that. It’s good enough for me!” I was one of the first people to put Bosch kitchen mixers online.
I’ll never forget when Bosch had said, “No, those are only sold face-to-face. Those are only sold in little mom and pop stores face-to-face. We don’t do that.”
The remainder of the conversation went something like this…
Me: “Really? Why not?”
Bosch representative: “Because we have never tried it.”
Me: “Well, do you mind if I try?”
Bosch representative: “Well, it’s not going to work.”
Me, with a quick retort: “What? It’s not going to work? Let me just buy two of them and see how fast I can sell them.” (I am thinking to myself, “One for a customer and one for me!”)
Bosch representative, continuing to push back: “No, we only sell 10 at a time.”
Me: “Ok.” (The whole time I am thinking, “Oh crap… I don’t have enough credit on my card to buy them all at once. Now what do I do?”) The Bosch guy, seeing my frustration, said, “Have you filled out an application for our 30-day net?” I found myself saying, “Oh no, I’m sorry. As a corporation we have not filled out the…” Then I thought to myself, “What’s a 30-day net?” That’s how green I was in business.
I filled out the application, got the 10 mixers, sent something online to my little list and sold them all. Within the first week we did $8,000 in profits with those kitchen mixers.
I remember thinking that I was following my calling of birthing children, keeping my house clean, being uneducated and not a corporate gal. Following that, I reminded myself I wasn’t smart enough to earn a degree and that I was out of my league. “WOW,” I thought, “My husband, who HAS a degree, earns in just over four months what I just earned in one week.” There I was fighting between my religious training that told me I would be insubordinate moving forward with this to, does my husband know what kind of life we could create here?!
You might be wondering if my husband was threatened by this sudden surge in my income. He was cheering me on saying,
“Go mama! Go mama!”
So the very first year we did over $30,000 in profits. By our fourth year, we did $4.5 million.
Here’s something to think about; every single one of the people who work for us, in some capacity, started by being a customer or a client first. When I ran my online kitchenware business I would watch the women who were buying a lot of my stuff, and for the lack of better MBA-type verbiage on my marketing plan and business, I mapped out a scheme of how things were going to work. This was the title and body of the entire plan:
Find the chicks who are buying the most stuff and maybe they can help serve some of your clients.
That’s exactly what we ended up doing.
We were one of the first who got onto Google. I remember when Overture said that they had a competitor – the two dudes that left college and were going to start a search engine. That’s how we marketed our business. It was 90% marketed online with pay-per-click and a newsletter.
Are you interested in how to read your client’s mind so that you can build a seven figure business with just pay-per-click and a newsletter? Good! Because today, the two biggest modes of marketing that I do are pay-per-click and a newsletter.
Back then we would send out a few postcard mailings. I had no idea at the time that they’re called drip campaigns. My marketing was so basic that I would go into my client base and rotate it in Excel. I would pull 500 names out of the 30,000 in our client base and send them a postcard… that’s it!
I didn’t think about sending it to the people already buying something from us. I did not think to send it to the people who were our newest clients. I was really wet behind the ears and treated the business more like Russian roulette than a plan.
We used 8x10 fluorescent cardstock paper, cut it into four equal-sized pieces that basically said, in simple printing, “It’s Mother’s Day. Get $25 off or free shipping on any item.” We would send the card and reap enormous profits. I tell you that because while I’m going to teach you about how to do different things strategically (everything that I do today is very strategic), I pray that you’ll understand how basic my foundation was. It is so very important to the process, and it could be for you, too.
You can hear a lot more about my foundation in the Social Media the Fun Way course and other CD’s. It’s that foundation that, at times, allows me to just follow the intuition I’ve developed so that I can move quickly. I study what’s going on in the marketplace, ask a lot of questions, and then I fire. I aim later.
Michael Masterson wrote an amazing book, Ready, Fire, Aim, which captures how I’ve been doing business for a long time. If I try to ready, aim and then fire, my shot is pathetic. It is much easier for me to shoot, adjust, and shoot again. My issue was never hitting the target, but I found problems with the targets I chose.
When I built the first part of my business, my focus was on money. MONEY. MONEY. MONEY. We made a lot of it. We also were massively in debt pursuing the “American dream.” That single-minded drive for money also had me working 90 hours a week and homeschooling my kids. I wasn’t sleeping. I figured I could sleep when I’m dead. I almost was. Seriously, it’s the truth! I hardly ever slept and it caused me to end up with numerous diseases raging through my body.
In 2001 I was very sick and the doctors didn’t know if I was going to make it....But God had a different plan for my future.
A miraculous healing began in my life and in 2004 I was disease-free. The doctor said, “We can’t figure it out.” I experienced a profound medical miracle and I went back into business. I worked in direct sales for two years and got completely debt- free.
Finding the WHO, WHAT, and WHY and understanding HOW to read my client’s mind came to me when I went back into business. It grew and developed in direct sales and helped me to make $1.8 million in 31 months. Happy ending, right? Think again.
I became sick of the path I was on. I used to think, “I do not care if I sell another diet weight loss kit the rest of my life.” I was tired of prospecting people. Don’t get me wrong, it was GREAT that I broke international sales records. I was proud and happy to help so many people change their lives. However, I still didn’t know who I was and what I was SUPPOSE TO BE DOING!
Taking all of my experience, successes, failures, and the gnawing desire I had felt for years to write, I took the plunge and got into it. It took a lot of encouragement from friends to do it. I never, ever intended to start a company to teach people to do that.
I went through a lot of training and work perfecting my copywriting skills with the intention of learning how to write copy and how to prospect people. I wanted to learn how to speak their language. It was funny because that was the first time I began to hear God saying in my head that I already knew how to read their minds. “They’re talking right in front of you. They’re saying the words you need to say back to them,” He said. Then I started to feel I knew a bit more than I was giving myself credit for.
Now I want to share it with you.
[back to top] Chapter 2 Starting With ‘Why’
When I began to learn copywriting, everything constantly came back to the WHO, the WHAT, and the WHY. I realized I already knew more than I thought. Who am I writing to and what is their most pressing problem?
In plain English that means things are all messed up and they need somebody to give them a WHY and a HOW to fix it. So I would write copy with that in mind. My thought process was pretty simple, so I didn’t have to do all kinds of market research. I didn’t have to create all kinds of mapped out plans. I would go visit my new online playground and I would visit ‘Mommy sites’ and read what these moms were saying.
For example, I would break out a part of a conversation and work it through in my mind like this: “Well, you know, I mean, it’s weight loss for me after having my first child…” so who is the who? Women. I’m going to hone in on moms, women who have had babies.
The WHAT is, “…I’m so sick and tired of not being able to get rid of this belly fat…” and the WHY is, “…because I want to feel hot with my man again…”
Another mom said, “You know what? I just wish I could get the body back that I had before. Whatever I try, I don’t have enough energy. Whatever I try, I don’t have enough time. Whatever I’m doing, I’m working on it and I always feel like I’m constantly hungry.”
One of my clients, Charlotte Siems, has mastered this niche. Charlotte is a mommy with not one, not two, but 12 children. She came to me wondering whether or not she could market to moms! Let’s see…
Would moms be interested in a coach who could:
- Help them to lose weight without leaving the home?
- Help them lose weight without having to add one more thing to their to- do list?
- Help them finally get rid of the belly fat?
All because they wanted to be hot for their husband again, but (for crying out loud!), their to-do list was already too busy. She began to do the same kind of research that I did. I said to her, “Go hang out on all the different forums and other gathering spots on the Internet.” (I’m going to show you in the next chapter the three biggest tools I used to do this.) The only thing that’s changed in the 14 years since I first started my company is the addition of social media.
Years ago it was bulletin board systems and forums. Maybe you have been online long enough to remember bulletin board systems? Well, someone always had to moderate everything because there would always be some idiot who traveled around bulletin boards flaming everybody. That’s what they called it back then – flaming. AKA, somebody had a bad day and they take issue because you say you can lose weight in a week. “What?!? Who are you and how can you make such a claim!!”
Now-a-days you have social media, where no one has to moderate anything. You just block them. “Fine, stay fat. That’s fine, you don’t have to have a good day. Don’t be happy, that’s ok.” You can friend and un-friend whoever you’d like.
I began to teach Charlotte, as I’m going to teach you, how to listen for what they are saying. I know there are some of you reading this who believe you have been all over the Internet and can’t seem to find your ideal client. You are now probably saying to yourself, “I can’t seem to find who they are. I can’t seem to find their pressing problem. I would be happy to find it and I would be happy to write to them. I would be happy to regurgitate the words that you say, Sandi, but I can’t seem to find it.”
By the time you are finished reading this book you will be able to find it all!
To this day, I have never had a client that I couldn’t find. NEVER. The reason is, quite frankly, that the world and the Internet are synonymous now. This is not a virtual world versus a non-virtual world. Years ago you had some things online and some things offline. The crease has been removed. What’s online is offline. If there is a business out there, you will find it online with some of the tools that I’m talking about. For example, you heard of me how? There’s a more than 90% chance the answer is online.
Here is an interesting question for you to ponder. If you learned of me online, do you feel like we’re strangers? No.
Isn’t that amazing? All because of a tool like Facebook, I get to talk to you with my wild personality and my pink hair all day long. We get to chitchat back and forth even though we may have never met face-to-face. PRETTY DARN COOL!
I have actually met thousands of people in the virtual and non-virtual world, and frankly, I TOTALLY love it. I love it because through the social media tools I can feel your energy, I can see your smiles, and can see when you do things.
You may think, “Yeah right,” or you’re rolling your eyes. Here’s the really cool thing… after I meet you in person, the next time you post an update, I’m going to see YOU behind your words. That takes it to a totally different level.
Years ago there was a problem because most companies were offline. Today, sadly, there are still a lot of companies that are not online. I’ll take issue with anybody who wants to tell me there’s a niche that’s not online. Everything is online. It’s pathetic in some instances. Drug dealing is online. Prostitution is online. Good things, bad things, everything is online… so it’s REALLY EASY to research your client.
What I want you to think through first is the WHO. Who is my ideal client? Is it one? Is it many? Do you think you have a pretty good handle on that? Do you think there’s just one person or do you think there are many? I’m seeing some of your faces in my mind’s eye and I know you’ve got a phenomenal handle on it, so we’ll just have to ask God to release your self-confidence here. This doesn’t have to be complicated.
Many of the people in my Sapphire, Ruby, and Diamond coaching programs have gone from thinking I have an extremely complicated system to saying, “You’ve got to be kidding me, she’s a millionaire guru online? It’s actually that easy?” It’s just not that complicated. Finding your ideal client is not that complicated either.
I want you to realize that your ideal clients all have the same problem and they need your solution, but why they need it may differ. THAT’S where you’re going to get a bunch of different people.
Since you are among the people reading this book right now, you’re among backgrounds as varied as my coaching clients. We have CEOs, teachers, Beach Body coaches, copywriters, graphic designers, CPAs, writers (who aren’t copywriters), personal development coaches, people who are in ministry of some sort, moms, dads, grandparents and many more. We’ve got self-employed, entrepreneurs, authors, singers, and team representatives.
If we were to think, “Sandi’s ideal client is a small business owner,” that’s not necessarily so. “Sandi’s been in direct sales, so her ideal client must be somebody who’s in direct sales.” No, only about one-third of our entire database (just over 160,000 clients on our house list) are in direct sales.
The reality is, though, that they all have the same problem. They all have the problem that they want to be able to market online without needing a ton of people to do everything for them. They DO want the right people, because if they’re going to try to build it all on their own they’re going to have a nervous breakdown. However, they don’t want to have a $20,000 a month budget, either.
There’s a lot of wisdom in my clients. They’re not a bunch of people who think, “Hey, I need to take out a quarter-million dollar loan, and then I’m going to start my company.” I don’t believe in that. My company is debt-free. If we close our doors tomorrow I don’t owe anybody anything.
If I had to do a bunch of refunds, there’s plenty of money in the bank that could cover them. That has a lot to do with why I flow in freedom, with no stress or worry. I am not constantly saying to myself, “Oh crap! We’ve got to do these invoices and we’ve got to make $8,000 so we can go back and do this and do that.”
I’ve attracted a lot of people who don’t want to spend a ton of money. They have no issue with spending money, but they don’t want to spend a ton of money, and they want to be able to get an understanding of how to get more clients, how to sell more products and services and how to create long-term business.
Are you someone who’s interested in just a short-term business and would like to make $10,000 this month and then go off to Tahiti? There are people in business who are like that. To each his own, but that’s not what I teach. There’s no relationship in that model. I have very few affiliate marketers who follow me. It isn’t wrong; it just doesn’t require that you have a deep relationship with your client. It does require that you understand what they need, but quite frankly, you can go make a lot of money without building a relationship with your customers.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. If you’re making some money with affiliate marketing and it’s paying your overhead, cool. My son made over a quarter-million dollars with affiliate marketing and was able to buy his first car and his first house. He worked with me from 12 years old until he went and worked with a couple of other companies. Now he runs his own.
He desired to have long-term relationships with people and not only help them produce a video, but help them saturate the Internet, help them to follow their mission, help them to follow their destiny – a long-term business where he’s not waking up every morning going, “Well, crap. I don’t know if I’ve got enough money for food this week. I guess I better just go sell a few things.” My clients want to be able to run a business online. They want to understand offline, but they would prefer to run it online. In fact, in today’s market, people don’t even want to go get an office. We run an office because my husband came home from his corporate job to be my business partner and I do believe that our marriage bed will be a whole lot healthier if we both have an office to work in. If we work in the same house 24/7 we will kill each other. We can have a nice, long lunch, but his boss wouldn’t let him get away with it too often.
We rent an office, but not because I’ve aspired to the success of “I’ve got an office and I’ve got a staff.” We have it so that he and another son, Justin, can run the newsletter division and do the printing away from the house. However, a lot of people in the marketplace want to be able to work from their own home office. If you walk into our house you’ll see that one of the bedrooms is my office. I don’t walk in there – or very rarely – unless I’m working. You will not find me there all day. I don’t work 80 hours a week. I work 30, tops. I outsource 80 to 100 hours a week.
I work 30 hours a week and I do it from the comfort of my home office. And I say “my home office” because when I walk into that office, I’m the owner of a multi- million dollar company. I’m a business owner who’s worked for 14 years and I have clients in 142 countries.
My neighbors have no clue. It’s really fun. There are a couple surgeons in my neighborhood with no idea of what I do. They just think, “Who is that chick with the pink hair? She’s always walking her dog outside and she’s always happy. What does she do for a living? She must be a stay-at-home mom.”
Yes, I am. And I’m also raising up millionaires as I’m homeschooling. I’m going to share a little bit about time and life management in this book, but I save that mainly for my social media course and in my newsletter. I look at a work week – Monday through Saturday – as 60 hours, and 30 hours is what my company gets. My family, my husband, homeschooling, letting Chalene Johnson beat the heck out of my bootie with ChaLEAN Extreme or another fitness pursuit goes into the other 30 hours, so that’s pretty close to the life I have chosen to live.
What’s interesting to me is that my clients all have the same problem. They’re all looking for the same solution, but why they want it is different. Have you ever heard, “If your WHY is big enough, you’ll figure out your HOW?” Do you know what your WHY is? Have you magically figured out your HOW? Me either but you’ll probably find me online quoting that, too, because it sounded really good. I do believe that you need to know your WHY, because just making enough money is not going to do it.
For me, making enough money is not going to do it. It’s seeing my clients free; seeing you impact tens of thousands of people’s lives, that combined can impact millions of people. One way to do that is through organizations like NMC and the Kenya Baby Center that I support. (In case you are wondering, the website is: http://nmcandthebabycenter.blogspot.com/)
For me, it’s seeing babies like these go to their forever family when they previously didn’t know where they would end up after being in the orphanage. For babies like Baby Precious, in the next picture, to have a chance… that is why I keep going.
That is why, when I want to work all night I say, “No. Endurance, Sandi. Those babies need you to have endurance.” If I was only building it for me, I would work 24/7.
I’ve got babies who are depending on me every single month for their food, and I’m not talking about the ones who live in my home. Those WHY’s are crucial to my life and business, but that WHY alone did not teach me how to do pay-per-click.
As a matter of fact, if I talk about my WHY all the time, my customers get bored sick. If I talk about what I want in business and what I’m doing this for and it’s all about me, my customers are not really interested. The bottom line is YOU are interested in YOUR WHY. God made you that way.
So now that you have an idea about my job – to find out your WHY so I can show you I have the HOW to make you successful – well, hold on tight and buckle up! We are in for a wonderful, crazy ride. We are about to take an adventurous journey together with this book that will change your life.
[back to top] Chapter 3 Gaga Knows Why, Do You?
Can you market like Lady Gaga? Please don’t be offended when I tell you… I doubt it. Like her or not, she gets it. Gaga reads her clients’ minds.
As of this printing, Lady Gaga has more than 13,432,000 followers on Twitter. Those numbers may seem way out of reach, but the reality is, you’re going to have to become familiar with why these kids follow her.
If you look closely for what is going on, Lady Gaga speaks directly to the WHO, WHAT, and WHY of her target audience. She is undoubtedly a free spirit. She is not afraid of controversy, and a lot of people judge her. That’s just who she’s designed to be, and she is a brilliant marketer.
Have you ever listened to the recordings that are on YouTube of what she says to her ‘little monsters’ as she calls them? She tells them, “You’re amazing. There’s nothing you can’t do.” She quite frankly tells them what all their parents, church leaders, and school teachers should be saying.
She knows that element is missing from their lives so she gives it to them. They are drawn to her because she knows as much about their problems as they do. The result? An army of loyal fans who feel understood, and mega-millions in concert and music sales.
Please catch this – her product is understanding. Not necessarily a solution or anything else they can really apply to their lives. But through her words they relate and draw near to her.
If you went after the same niche, your copy will not necessarily talk about all the shattering pain and despondency of a broken home. The marketing and pay-per- click, the ads on social media where all these kids are hanging out, will not necessarily talk about the shattering effects of divorce. No, it will talk about the fact that these kids are amazing.
You’ll share that amazing geniuses, entrepreneurs, sports figures, and successful people come out of shattered homes. You’ll share that they can rebuild and get up; they can be someone and make something of themselves. Quite frankly, there’s no such thing as, “I’ve fallen so far that I can’t get up.” Lady Gaga speaks that kind of thing all the time. Do you see how important it is to find your client’s WHY?
The quickest way to find the WHY of your client is to first find your own WHY. What’s interesting about finding your WHY is how hard people think it is to do. To find your WHY, look for “the thing” that gets you at the core of who you are. In MY plain English – whenever IT happens, IT pisses you off. Plain and simple.
For me IT happens when someone tries to make marketing complicated. I’ve made millions because it ISN’T complicated. If it’s so complicated then I guess I’ve done it wrong all these years and don’t want to do it right.
When someone tries to make copywriting an algebraic equation, as I listen I think how much money I have made with words and the person speaking to me is confusing me to the point of distraction. That kind of thing drives me crazy and led me to find you. By understanding my WHY and how it makes me feel, I’m better able to understand what makes you tick.
Now, if I was only thinking about how much money I wanted to make and the things it would buy – a new house or a bowl of diamonds – I wouldn’t care enough to work and find you. I love nice houses. I’m grateful for the house that we have and I’m very grateful for diamonds. I’m very, very grateful for these kinds of things. I’m grateful for investments. I’m grateful that my husband can triple the size of my diamond, and yet donated more last month than the diamond was worth.
The truth of the matter is, my frustration point is attracted to your WHY. For one of my clients, Elvie Look, my frustration point is that people are making things difficult for her. She is an organizing genius. She has the ability to speak on video, show people how to take a closet that looks like a tsunami went through it and turn it into something that is not only organized, but maintainable.
My frustration point is attracted to her frustration point. Organization comes so easily to her, but marketing her services she just can’t seem to grasp well. If organizing comes so easily, how can getting the word out about her amazing services be so complicated?
Another client, Angela Brooks, is a nurse and was trying to market an energy product via direct sales. She said, “Nurses need energy products, so I’m trying to market my energy product just like all the direct sales people.” She continued, “Uplines, downlines, crosslines, sidelines, flylines and ‘whatever’ lines are telling me to do, and no one’s buying the dang stuff!” Everyone in direct sales has experienced the same thing. I asked Angela, “What have you been doing for the last 27 years?”
“Well, I’m a nurse,” she said.
“Tell me more about that.”
“I’m a nurse at a psychiatric ward; a state-funded psychiatric ward.”
Interestingly, my memory went back to my brother, who passed away in 1995. He loved God and got mixed up in a religious mess that landed him in a state-funded psychiatric ward for eight months because he literally thought God hated him.
So Angela was telling me about her situation and I suddenly had a revelation, because I used to visit my brother and pray over him. God took him home when he was 38 years old.
“Tell me more about that, Angela. What do you want to do with nurses?” I asked her.
“Well, I sure as heck don’t want to coach them.” (Notice, because I’m talking to her as a coach, she is starting to read my mind.)
“Why don’t you want to coach them?”
“Too much drama.”
“Really? Angela, how many nurses go into working in a psychiatric ward unit of nursing and end up on psychiatric medication?”
“Way too many to talk about,” she told me.
“Really? They’re not happy like you?” “Hell no!”
So we began to talk about it. She also talked about her website. She couldn’t get AngelaBrooks.com so she took AngelaBrook.com and began to look for a different direct sales product that maybe nurses could relate to. The one she found came about because she attended a one-day mastermind I conducted. One of my clients there was putting essential oils on me; I had never really used them before. In the middle of this all-day mastermind I had an “a-ha” moment for Angela. All of a sudden I looked at her and wondered if nurses would be interested in how essential oils work. It’s very medicinal, without going into allopathic medicine full-on.
That day in November 2010 she connected with one of my other clients about representing the oils. By June 2011 she had replaced more than half of her nurse’s salary. HOW?
Angela is not on the phone all day long. She doesn’t have time. She is raising an aspiring Olympic athlete. She did begin to write to her ideal clients about the things that frustrate them… things that also frustrated her. She’s the voice for those who don’t have it. She’s the voice for the patient and she’s the voice for the nurse who wants to say, “This is not fair. It’s not working!” She is the revealer for all these different people and talks about the oils periodically.
She does not need to approach anyone and say, “I’m a psychiatric nurse and you need to buy Young Living Stress Relief and it’s only $37.95. Here’s my link!” Have you ever seen the people like that? “Hi! I sell an energy product! Come on down and buy my energy product! Don’t you want my energy product? You can have energy like me!”
Have you seen anyone do that on social media? I saw a Tweet the other day that said, “I have put 200 people into my downline in one week and you can too.” That is all she posted. I was thinking, “Who cares if you put 200 people in your downline?” I’d like to put just five in mine. Maybe the post should say, “You can put five people in your downline in 24 hours and I’ll show you how.”
Angela just began to share what she’s doing and things that were happening to her. On a flight that was seriously delayed she said, “I just put Stress Relief on, and the dude sitting next me… his headache went away.” The head nurse at her job asked if she was over medicating the patients.
“Are you giving them more Klonopin or Xanax?”
“Why do you say that?” she retorted.
“Because everyone’s more well-behaved and calm when you’re on staff.”
“Oh really? I have no idea why,” Angela said. I was talking to Angela about her success and she said, “I take the Stress Relief and Lavender Roll-On and walk down the hallway.” She then shared, “When you have a brittle case, get Sacred Frankincense and anoint the doorposts of that room.”
So she just talks about those stories. She just shares those stories and people say, “What? What the heck is it? I need to know about it.”
When you are in tune with your WHY and can talk to others about their WHY, people would say to you as they say to
Angela, “I don’t know what you’re marketing, but I need some of it. I don’t care what it is, but I need some of that.”
Angela has told me, “I had three people come in. I have no idea where they came from. They just bought a kit, and then bought $300 worth of oils.” I said to her, as I’ll say to you; when you figure out your customer’s WHY, when you find out WHO they are and WHAT their problem is, your next step is to be very careful that you don’t become what I’m going to call a cuckoo-bird. By that I mean when you have a little bit of success and then you change things.
Have you had some success and things are going well, then all of a sudden everything changes? I have. I’m going to tell you a little bit further on, as I discuss doing research on Google, social media, and Amazon, why that might be. A little bit of unbridled excitement can get you in some serious trouble.
Are you feeling really great about understanding WHO they are and what their WHY is?
Next we’re going to learn about three listening tools. You are not going to learn how to do keyword research; you are going to learn how to do listening research.
[back to top] Chapter 4 Listening Tools To Tune Into The Marketplace
Now moving into Chapter 4, one of the big take-aways from the first few chapters should be that you must be comfortable with who you are before you can identify with the WHO, WHAT, and WHY of your ideal clients. I have shared a whole lot about who I am – about my WHY, about my WHAT – to open you up to the idea that whatever your WHO, WHAT and WHY are, it’s ok. It is who you are.
My biggest goals are getting results for myself and for my clients. I’m not a recovering perfectionist, because if you know me at all, you know that I believe perfectionism is actually professional insecurity. Excellence and results in the marketplace are what we want. That means sometimes things may not be exactly as we want initially, but you can get them there as you go forward.
Some of the things that I’m going to show you on Amazon, Google, and social media have evolved for me through the last several years. Even this company, A Real Change International, formally started in April 2010 has evolved from the first WordPress class we taught in November 2009. I went from a header that said, “Putting More Muscle into Your Marketing” to several other related things, with everything eventually evolving into what you see today. It wasn’t really my plan initially to build a business like this, but I kept moving forward, following the WHY of my clients, and asking God to show up every step of the way.
Whenever I write, train or speak I always ask God to open Heaven, because if you only hear from me, we are all in trouble. You don’t want to just hear from me, but you want His strategy in business. As God is my witness, much of what I have learned in business has been from listening to the divine “downloads” (I call them downloads, but you could also call them “a-ha” moments or revelations) that He has given me, and having enough courage to execute no matter what. So if I fall on my face, I can get back up. If I do a failing campaign, I can write another one. If I go do an event and it sucks, I can do another one.
I want to encourage you that as we go into Google, social media and Amazon, yes, it’s all tactical, but the practical aspect is (newsflash!!) you’re not going to do it perfectly the first time. But the more you do this the more familiar you will become.
Carla Gardiner is in my coaching program and she’s been doing auto transport (vehicle shipping) for years. Initially, when she started doing research in Google, social media and Amazon, she found that there are not many books on auto transporting. Therefore, that bucket of her “listening research” was not necessarily as full as some of the others. But she did find other things on Amazon, because she became familiar with the kind of materials her ideal client read. It was interesting because Carla said a lot of the transporting guys and truckers don’t want social media and don’t do social media. But they’re all over Twitter we discovered, because Twitter’s fast. Twitter’s a text message.
I personally feel that there are some people who should be limited to 140 characters per day. We would have a more peaceful world. We don’t need to write them a prescription. Just limit them to 140 characters per day! The point is Carla found what they were saying and where they were saying it by using the tools I’m getting ready to teach you. Not by thinking about the tools. She learned to listen.
I used to be a pathetic listener and I am still not the kind of listener that I want to be. Now, I continue to grow, but something shifted in me a couple years ago. My absolute passion became having ears to hear.
I need to hear my clients. I don’t want to hear what I think they need to know. I don’t want to hear what I think they should get, even though I have a great “this and that.” I know I can change their life with “this and that.” I don’t want to hear how to translate that so they can hear it. I want to hear them! If I can hear them, I can speak to them where they are at!
The neat thing is, because of the spiritual gifts that God has given me; I have the ability to see people’s troubles. I tend to see and feel things. Because I can feel and see things, I would feel their depression. I would see the despair, the trauma they’ve been through and what they’re struggling with. Unfortunately, that fed a lot of my own depression.
What was so interesting was that God taught me, (and some very masterful direct response marketers who didn’t know God was using them) that if you have an ear to hear, you can take that and bring it into the marketplace and your competitors will have nightmares because of you. I began to see where my clients should go because I’d say to God, “I want to see their destiny. I want to see 5 to 10 years from now. I want to hear, when I’m on Amazon, Google and social media, what their real issues are.”
I don’t have mind-reading abilities, but I do have a spirit-to-spirit connection with you, and I have asked God to allow me to serve you in such a way that He will look like a rock star. The result is people feeling like I’ve read their minds as they read my blog posts, my newsletter, my Facebook updates, and my Twitter updates.
I want to teach you to focus when you get into social media. All you’ve got to do is ask that Higher Power (for me it is God) to help you hear what they’re saying, because you can’t sell anything to them. You can’t serve them. You can’t market to them until you hear what they’re saying.
So far we have discussed how to listen generally – hearing what’s out there in the marketplace. Now we’re going to talk about asking the right questions. Asking the right questions is then going to get you specific answers from those who are already following you.
The questions that I ask on social media are not all related to business. One of my most popular questions that I ask regarding social media is, “What’s for dinner?” Isn’t that interesting? I did a whole roundtable at Glazer-Kennedy (Glazer-Kennedy Insider's Circle is about making you money through better marketing) on asking questions, and one man asked, “Why would a dental practice ask what’s for dinner?” I replied, “Because you get people talking. And if I ask you what’s for dinner, you're more likely to tell me whether or not you're brushing three times a day.”
The questions don’t have to be perfect either. I’ve made some of the funniest bloopers when I’m asking questions on social media. While trying to say I was having a steak, a bottle of Merlot, and a great raw salad with my husband and kids, I ended up sounding like I threw my husband on the grill and we’re all having a bottle of Merlot and some raw veggies! Then everybody asks me, “So was he served before or after the steak?” It just gets to be fun and casual.
Earlier this year I wanted to get fit and I actually posted a question out there…
“Is there anybody who’s a bigger brat than I am who could be a coach for me?”
I only had a few responses. Then I got this great idea (because I am a marketer). I’ve got over 20,000 people following me on social media. Why don’t I just get them to hold me accountable?
I began to post every morning, “I need all of you to help me. In order for me to stay focused, my goal needs to be bigger than I am.”
Does this have anything to do with WordPress? No.
Does it have anything to do with writing copy? You betcha.
Does it have anything to do with me being selfish, having a personal goal, and really needing some people to help keep me on track? Yeah, it sure does. It’s also a huge amount of fun! I posted that I wanted to give away $7,500 over 90 days to a charity, and I want you all to hold me accountable. And I posted that, as I’m working out, I’m going to post every day that I’m working out.
On March 27 I began asking people to help me get ripped and I’ll give away $7,500 to charity. That’s where the first $2,500 went. I again posted, “I need all of you to help me and to also tell me what charities you would give to.” I had 26 people respond and over 30 people sent a private email from social media. This is getting questions out there. Why would I ask my audience where to give money away?
- First, because I want to know what’s out there that I’m not aware of.
- Second, it’s very important to me to hear what kind of charities my clients are interested in.
For some people, if I say, “You can be financially free and never have to consult with your checkbook again,” it’s not even important. For others it’s just enough to motivate them.
Some people I talk to about orphanages and maybe they can't relate, but they're passionate about stopping the sex trade. Some people have no idea what a sex trade is, but by asking questions around what I’m passionate about I can find out what they are passionate about.
Why is this important? It gives me a front row seat to what motivates my audience. For some people, if I mention buying a big car and paying cash, they are going to have a blast. For others, their heart’s not going to skip a beat until I say, “Imagine rescuing 10 girls a month. Imagine not only reading about Aaron Cohen on social media, but sending him money monthly, as he goes into Cambodia undercover as a man who acts like he’s buying girls out of a brothel, but he’s actually rescuing them.” NOW some people get passionate. Some get fired up about the scholarships they fund or I hear about what they give to United Way.
When I write copy or I’m having fun in social media, what’s important to me is not relevant. My purpose is to listen, ask, and listen some more.
Obviously, you reap what you sow and like breeds like, so you are probably passionate about a lot of things I am. There are things that I’m passionate about that you are not, and vice versa. However, if we’re going to have a business relationship, it’s IMPERATIVE that I know this about you.
Did I actually read somebody’s mind? No. I turned my own fitness goal into a way to connect with my audience and hear more about what’s important to my ideal customer. It was so wild for me, because this is how God works. He cracks me up. He’s so strategic and I’m so clueless that He’s working in my life and making things happen. Through questions that started with my fitness goal, I learned how many judgments about money my audience had. In listening to the meanings and emotions behind their words, I came face-to-face with my own issue on the subject. I come from a bloodline where there was massive judgment against the rich. Do you think it was real easy for me to make a million dollars and keep it? No, because then instantly I categorized myself with everybody who’s been judged since my childhood. Then, my God did what no man or woman could do and helped me realize, He said, “You know what, Sandi? People are going to go without unless you get over yourself. That means your family might judge you until you leave this Earth. Is it worth it?”
Isn't that interesting? After working and earning for more than 14 years, it was only in the six months around that fitness goal that anyone in my family spoke up. One family member said, “I am so proud of what you do. I read on your website about the money you gave away with your fitness goal.”
It was no longer a struggle between proving to my family that I can be who I am supposed to be as a family member and still be who God wants me to be. I just made it my passion to ask my customers questions and to forgive and get rid of the issues in the family. Look how God repairs the breach. Isn’t that wild?
Maybe you are already asking questions of your customers. Maybe even in social media. Ask them what charities motivate them. Ask them questions about where they struggle. Do you solve a problem with your product or service?
You better be nodding your head, otherwise you're going to be broke. Why? Because there’s no such thing as a business that doesn’t solve a problem. Every business solves a problem. It’s important that you are asking questions through social media and through your email campaigns to identify the problems of your audience and the language they use to describe them.
Then you take the answer and the language and turn it into a headline. For example, think about this one: Tired of writing copy that doesn’t convert?
Am I a brilliant copywriter for having come up with that headline? I have a confession to make. I’m not as great a copywriter as I am a great “question asker and answer getter.”
I hear a lot of people say, “I love writing copy and I like writing headlines. I love testing them like you teach, but I’m tired of writing copy that doesn’t convert.” It turns out that is also a pay-per-click ad I have that performs quite well. I did some research on the number one thing that happens when people come out of a number of copywriting schools. Ironically, after all the time spent educating themselves, they are not earning any money by writing copy online.
Here it comes… another one of my top pay-per-click headlines: Earn money writing copy online. Isn’t that interesting? Ask questions on social media and in your newsletter, even if you only have 73 people following you. You could have somebody give you an answer that’s your next big campaign. We need this communication lifeline because we get removed from where the people are who need our help. We can be empathetic, but the fact of the matter is, if we truly have a solution, we are not struggling like they're struggling. We’re not going to talk to them like they need to hear us talk.
The minute you stop talking to me and I stop asking you questions, I will go bankrupt. No matter how good I am in business – no matter how prophetic, psychic, intuitive, whatever it is I am – if all of a sudden I start talking from where I am and not from where my client is I will no longer have any clients.
A lot of old school marketing taught that you have to get people to where you are, so you can sell to them. The fact of the matter is (and this is a million-dollar copy writing secret) you have to talk to people where they are and where they go. You have to talk to them through the journey as they go.
I talk to God about it every morning and ask, “How many people are depending on me to help them get to where they want to be?” That’s where you want to be in business. Really, it’s not about you. You are asking the questions because your customers depend on you.
You’ll become painfully aware (and I say painfully in a very humble way) that you have all these customers that are looking to you for the next step, because your niche is going to evolve just like my marketing niche has evolved.
It will be really important for you to ask the right questions.
[back to top] Chapter 5 Going Beyond Keywords to Listening Research
So how do we start the investigation into what they are saying? I want to teach you to focus when you get into Google and Amazon so you can find what you need without getting lost. All you’ve got to do is say, “God, help me to hear what they’re saying, because I can’t sell anything to them – I can’t serve them, I can’t market to them – until I hear what they’re saying.”
For example, let’s say your niche is Social Media for Small Business and we go to Google and type in “social media for small business.” What we find are sites and ads for “easy social media plan,” “custom social media,” “social websites,” and so on.
Most of the time I’m going to look at pay-per-click headlines for some words to help me read people’s minds. We are not guaranteed that those ads are working just because people are paying for them, but you can get a little familiar with the words because someone is putting money behind them.
“Social media management”, “manage, measure and improve,” “easy social media management.” Do you see a word that’s coming up often? Management, easy, measure… so we start making a laundry list.
We pick half a dozen from pay-per-click, then we head over to the organic listings. Organic is down the middle, by the way. Let’s talk “social media for business”, “social media for business powered by Dell”… isn’t that interesting? Dell is teaching social media for business?
This is why I started my company, because I began to see organizations like Dell and colleges start creating like a master’s degree in pay-per-click, and started creating a bachelor’s degree in email marketing. You can get an associate’s degree in social media management. Watch for marketing trends.
So pay attention to what they’re saying in the marketplace, because they are spending an awful lot of money that you don’t have to spend.
Now let’s go off of Google and on to Amazon. Say you type in “social media for small business.” The principle I teach about Amazon in some of my courses is to type in your key phrase or niche on Amazon and pull up the top sellers. When you pull up the top-selling books, go to the comment section.
I’ve had people say to me, “I’ve studied that for two or three hours and I still haven’t found the words that I want.” My answer is that there’s a mental block there, because there’s so much it’s like a playground!
Here are a few… • “101 Ways to Grow Your Business without Wasting Time”
• “Social Media Management Handbook”
• “Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, E- books, Webinars, and Engage Customers while Igniting Your Business”
Pay very close attention to the words. Look at the comments…
• “Insanely great book on creating content.”
• “Effective content marketing, easier said than done.”
• “Compelling and honest. The why and how of using content for customer engagement.”
By the way, you’re not going to do this kind of research – your listening research – in one afternoon. I do it at least three hours a week. I’m constantly studying.
If you have been online for longer than five years, you’ve noticed that every six months it changes. Have you ever gotten an update in a newsletter that something huge has happened and you think, “Where was I?” … I have.
I began to realize you really need to stay focused, so it’s part of your budget. And if you don’t have time in your budget because you’re building another business, then hire someone to do it for you. They can compile a document and say, “Here’s everything that’s on Amazon. Here’s what’s on Google. Here’s what’s on social media sites. This is what’s coming this week.” This way you have fresh information and can better pay attention to what your market is saying.
We’ve got over 40,000 people on Twitter, over 6,900 on our Facebook page and 5,000 on my profile, and all of these people are responding to my lists now. We’re getting a ton of what people are thinking already, but I got there by putting in my three hours a week, minimum.
Back to the words in the comments…
“It’s easier said than done – How to demystify social media,” is a really good headline we could pull from them. “Management where you can measure, plan and schedule your week.” That’s not necessarily just a headline, but a focus of an article.
Have you struggled with, “What should I be blogging about? What should I be writing about? What should I be teaching about this week?”
Have you ever read one of my articles and thought, “How the heck did you know what to teach this week? How did you know I was struggling with that?” I’ve gotten emails that said, “Get your doggone camera out of my house. What are you doing? Are you reading my mail?”
No, but I am reading your mind.
The “reading their mind formula” is:
What they're already saying + where they're already at =
Where they want to go via your sales process
Seriously, people are already telling you where they want to go to, and that makes the sales process the easiest thing you can imagine. You need to be speaking to them where they're at with where they want to go.
Your sales process is helping them, not only with what they said they wanted, but begin to see what you know the need is. Here are a few more things you want to write down so that you can use them in your copy:
• “What if…?”
• What if the obsessions stop?
• What if you didn’t fear the future?
• What if you overate and got up the next morning and still felt great?
• What if you didn’t have a problem looking in the mirror?”
Another one that you can use in any industry…
• “You can do this.”
I’m a strong believer of speaking to your client’s potential. That’s how you lead people, by the way; you speak to their potential. That’s why I ask God to show me the potential people have. I want to see them 5 to 10 years from now. That’s another one of my secrets.
You all think I just have all these Jedi tricks. I just ask God to help me see you five years from now!
Angela started coaching with me; I saw her leading a ton of nurses. I saw her in a more regular schedule and I saw her financially free.
She was recently offered a position, with an enormous pay increase, leading all the new nurses who come into the hospital. No more holidays or 16 hour work days. Isn't that fun? She not only would have been scared out of her wits to apply for this job before, but she would never have felt she was qualified to do it. Usually God lets me see something and I just say, “Forget it,” because that’s just too much for me to carry. One day Angela asked me, “Do you have any idea what you said two years ago?”
“No, what did I say?” I asked back.
“You said that you envisioned me leading a bunch of nurses.”
Isn’t that funny? I didn’t say it. He just said that through me.
A few other sayings that work really well in your copy are:
· “You're not the only one.”
· “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
· “Everyone experiences this.”
You can use these in pay-per-click. You can use them in headlines. You can use them in social media.
Another one that works really, really well I used the other day on Twitter. I wasn’t even thinking about it and I wasn’t using it like a trigger word. It’s just a word that I know leads people to their destiny. It got re-tweeted about 35 times.
• “Everyone does _____ from time to time…”
• From time to time we all stop our workouts, so get back up.
• From time to time we all pig out, so get back on track the next day.
• From time to time we all overspend, so start new the next day.
Do you know many people just need you to be a “permission giver” for them to start over? You are now an anointed permission giver. Simply ask God, “I would like to be a permission giver.” Permission to start over, permission to forgive, permission to rebuild their life…
Many of us feel like we need permission to be ourselves. Not everyone is like me (thank God). That would be boring. But we all love each other. Unity is diversity and harmony… and there’s an amazing symphony going on with all of my clients.
Your goal is to serve so that you can truly make a change. This is where our needs and wants are not important… your clients’ needs and wants are.
My social media contact info: http://www.facebook.com/SandiKrakowskiBiz http://www.Twitter.com/SandiKrakowski
[back to top] Chapter 6
Listen, Ask, Listen
Let me show you how to send out a survey and ask the right questions so that you are doing “listening research.” Let’s say you don’t even have a list. Who the heck are you going to survey? I will get into that, but remember that first you must be genuinely, sincerely, interested in helping people and being the change.
For me, this is all just a covert operation. I hate to break it to you, but you have been deceived. No, I’m kidding, but this is all just a covert operation. My big motive is not marketing. I love it. I’m addicted to marketing and absolutely love it. I can't get enough of it. I get headlines in my sleep and copy that downloads to me in the middle of driving. I absolutely love it, but that’s a covert thing for what really motivates me.
After being healed from disease and recovering from massive trauma, my purpose is to love people through business. I want to see people free and to really love them, whether they do business with me or not. What does that matter? You might be able to change somebody’s life on social media.
I have had people write to me and say they were suicidal and my post gave them courage. Then I’m on my iPhone looking through my posts wondering which one it was. Was it about WordPress, copy writing, or what I ate for dinner? What the heck was it?
I don't know how to do business like it’s a big old stage. I don't know about you but I’m appalled by all that kind of stuff. It’s the coolest thing, what’s going on with social media. We get a chance to love people through business, whether they do business with us or not. Believe it or not, your bank account will grow exponentially when you really get that.
As a matter of fact, I’m going to do something really bold right now. If you really want God to help you to love people through business regardless of how much money you earn, just put your hands in the air right now, because I want more, too. I’m going to pray: “God, help us love people, even if we don’t earn any money. Help us change lives.”
I hope you can feel how powerful that is.
Seven years ago, while I was in the ICU with Levaquin in one IV, Roceferin in my behind, Morphine in another one, and sick with bacterial pneumonia for the second time, I was talking to God. I said, “God, I don’t really care if I live in a one- bedroom apartment. I don’t care what happens; you can put us in a box. I just want to be able to live with my family and I want to love people. That’s it.” And look what He did with my business plan. Pretty fun, huh?
This has been the fastest growing company we’ve ever had. I have people around me who constantly remind me what the mission is and what the goals are.
Keep the people you serve, first. Got it? Ok, now on to surveys.
Here, I will reveal the SECRET Jedi Mindreading Copy Tactic. In the wrong hands – and I say that both facetiously and seriously – this could be dangerous, because you could use it for manipulation. You could use it for coercion. Some people use it in a way that’s very self-serving. With the wrong people, it could probably be destructive. I’ve seen it happen. In the right hands you can free an awful lot of babies, you can help a lot of people, and you could impact a lot of people who you might never do business with otherwise.
It’s asking the right questions… with surveys. I always do a survey before I launch something. I did a survey before I launched my first coaching program. It was called B90X for Business 90X. It was the first summer of A Real Change International and I had a lot of people saying they wanted to coach with me. I thought, “Coach about what? All kinds of stuff? How fun that would be!” That’s like a playground for me. Would you like to have a different business to play with every single day?
Before we launched the B90X, I did a little survey and asked four questions:
- What is your sticking point? - Where do you stick the most?
- What would be your biggest constraint?
- What would your business look like if your constraint was removed?
We had almost 800 people apply for that program, and then it came down to those who were actually ready to move forward. By that I mean everyone wanted a coach, but who amongst those applicants was willing to take the time, invest the finances, and commit to doing the work? We had 10 people who were ready and we had ridiculously wonderful results. That motivated me to launch my big coaching programs the following December.
Really, it was the simplest version of a survey. I asked just a few questions.
I have my own frustrations about how the folks with the master’s and bachelor’s degrees and those that claim to be the big pros in the online industry state that a survey must be larger and more complex to be accurate. I say, “Not on my watch.” If there’s anything I can do, it’s market online. I am tired of people who either vomit the whole thing out to the point where everyone is completely overwhelmed and confused when they're done. Often you end up with incremental little steps that get you nowhere. They're sold for pennies and it’s just regurgitated nonsense from somebody else.
I asked a couple questions in that survey, and you may have heard what happened... We sold out our coaching program in just a of couple days. It was enormous! We wrote almost $500,000 worth of business going into the next year in just a couple days.
The first thing I did was physically hit the floor at the end of those couple of days – in amazement and exhaustion – and thought to myself, “Oh God, what have I done? Can I actually help all these people?” Then the second thought was, “I must have Dan Kennedy or Bill Glazer. One of them has to be in my life every single month or I’m not going to be able to do this.” It took almost $40,000 to have them coach me, but we went forward.
I told Bill about the results and he said, “Well, you already know how to ask questions. That’s a good thing, because I’ve been coaching with people for years who won't ask the right questions.” He continued, “But let me teach you a three- step process. I recommend you try it with a free offer and let’s see what happens.”
More information about that whole process is coming a little bit later, but the way that you handle those questions is what I want to teach you right now. When you do a survey, I recommend you use Survey Monkey. I think it’s up to 200 responses for free and then you pay a small fee. It is a very inexpensive tool to use.
I’ve had some people say, “Well, my list is so small, why don’t I just send the questions out and have them reply?” Because it doesn’t look as professional as it should. And, if you have 42 people on your list and then you end up with 42,000, you have to rebuild your whole business. I want you to run your business like you’ve got 42,000. That way you don’t need therapy halfway through because you have to completely restructure your business since you can no longer run it like you did when it was smaller.
Survey Monkey is the easiest way to do that. With Survey Monkey, you can actually ask questions on social media. It’s $16.99 for a month. Ask a question, get the stuff you need and then cancel it. There’s no need to keep it monthly. That’s how I am. If I’m going to use something for a month, I’m going to use it and cancel it and I’ll come back to it when I need it.
What you want to do is ask questions that lead in the direction of the answers you heard in your listening research. Rather than asking, “What is your biggest health problem?” you want to ask a more direct question with focus, not one that could bring up everything from irritable bowel syndrome to PMS. Try this question on for size…
“How do you feed a family of 5 for under $100 per week, in a healthful way?”
Let’s say you’ve done your research – you’ve seen all the books and things that say how a family of five could eat for under $100 – and you notice the verbiage that people use. They want a step-by-step plan. They say that they want grocery lists. They say that they want something they can actually change. It’s not set in stone because they don’t like one plan or another. The questions that you would ask would have an A, B, C or D answer.
“What is your biggest problem grocery shopping with a meal plan under $100 for a family of five or less? Is it…” and you list the things I just said:
a) Lacking in flexibility?
b) Too hard to follow a plan?
c) You don’t believe it can be done for under $100?
d) All of the above.
Do you see how that works? I’m leading with the answers I already know.
If you do graphic design, web design, or any kind of custom design and website work, you will find that many people in your market say they don’t want to pay so much for the web work. They want something that they can upload themselves. They don’t mind getting somebody to do graphic design, but they don’t want the person going into their FTP and all this other stuff and uploading everything… they just want the graphics. They want something that can be changed easily.
Let’s say you want to roll out three packages or you want to roll out how to update things. You might say to a potential customer, “If you have us do your graphics, we’re going to give you the price of $97 a month for three months and we’re going to teach you how to do these specific things.” You’re going to do a survey and you ask, “What is the reason you won’t hire someone on a consistent basis?” Is it because:
a) It costs too much?
b) The web designer doesn’t let you upload anything yourself?
c) It can’t be changed easily?
d) You’re not taught how to do things on your own?
e) All of the above
The answers may shock you, but most of the time, because you’ve already done your listening research, people will come back and tell you it’s all of the above or it’s two or three of what you asked.
After that you can say, “Because you’ve told us…”
You already know what they’re going to tell you because you’ve done your listening research. You’re actually helping people to think through what they already know.
When I ask people, “What’s your biggest struggle with writing?” One of the top reasons they give is, “I don’t know.” Saying “I don’t know” is a great way to shut the mind off.
I ask, “What would it be if you did know?”
They get writer’s block. Here are four typical answers to why people get writer’s block:
a) They can’t seem to come up with frequent content.
b) They don’t know if they’re being heard.
c) They don’t know if what they have to say is important.
d) All of the above
Can you relate with all four of those answers? If I said that I was going to release a class where I can:
- Help you get past writer’s block.
- Help you discover whether or not what you have to say is important, or if you need to re-engineer it. - Help you determine whether or not people are listening and how to get them to listen.
- How to do this regularly, with fresh content, without being overwhelmed.
Would you be interested? Most people would say yes.
That’s exactly what I mean by, “I did my listening research and I turned it into my sales process.” People already told me what they wanted.
One of the best headlines I had in a weight loss campaign was, “Stop lying down to put your jeans on. Stand up and be thin.”
It sounds great and catchy… maybe a little disgusting, but I guarantee you some of the folks reading this book would confess to laying down to zip their jeans, at least once or twice.
When the whole skinny jeans thing came out a couple of years ago, I was still writing copy. I thought, “We’ve got to do something more than just tighter abs. We’ve got to do something more than just a leaner belly.” Through my research I kept finding people who would laugh and say, “Skinny jeans are awesome, but for crying out loud, either I’m going to need to be put into the dryer or I’m going to need to lie down to put them on.”
I thought, “Stop lying down to put your jeans on. Stand up and be thin.”
Guess what? Huge conversion! Am I a great copywriter? Personally, I think I’m just a good listener and researcher. And that’s what I want to help you become.
Your first step is to ask the right questions. Then comes step number two...
Again, I absolutely have to give Bill Glazer the credit for this process because this is his masterful plan. He told the hot seat panel at Info Summit about this step. He then said, “You really need to pay attention to the survey that you did, because what you did sold the program out and just got thousands and thousands of opt-ins. You just need to pay attention to it.” He looked at me and I looked at him… and it went right over people’s heads.
But it won’t go over yours.
[back to top] Chapter 7 I know what you want… because you told me.
The master plan Bill Glazer revealed to me had three parts. Part one was the survey format and strategy in the previous chapter. The second part is to reveal the answers to the people who took your survey.
You already have a pretty good idea of what the answers are going to be, but you don’t know where the weight is going to go. This is where your direction comes from. The weight might go in a different direction every six months in your business. I’ve got a whole lot more people wanting to learn specific things now than they did say, when we had 25,000, just because of the different quality of clients we have.
You say to them, “We did a survey with 73 of you and I’m really, really grateful for those of you who answered and YOU HAVE TOLD US…” (By the way, those are trigger words you want to use in your copy. Trigger words can be used beneficially or manipulatively. There are words that I can use that cause people to take action, and if they are words that are not offensive, I’m going to use them.)
The reality is, “Let me tell you what you said,” is not going to work. Nobody’s going to listen. “You told us…” or “You revealed to us…” connects better with them and preps someone for action.
If I was talking to someone about interviews I conducted, I wouldn’t say to that person, “Now, let me tell you what they said.” Instead I would say, “Let me share with you what they revealed. Look what we found out from this.” You find those kinds of words in all of the copywriting manuals. They are called trigger words.
“You revealed to us… 73 people told us… 127 shared with us…” This is what I did with my Social Media the Fun Way course. It was one of those events where I hung out and said to myself, “Holy cow, God just put 12 hours of this stuff in in two days.” We had more than 750 people fill out the survey for that course.
I knew what I wanted to teach and I also knew what people struggled with on the topic of social media. I wanted to see where my audience was, and the survey results sent the weight in a direction that I had no idea it was going to go. It was just mind boggling to me how many people said they wanted to stop intruding and bothering people.
Those were their words, not mine. What did the headline say?
“Stop bothering people, intruding in their day.”
Those were the words that came through at the end. I said,
“What do you feel like when you do this?”
They said, “Like I’m intruding. I don’t want to bother them.”
I hear so many people say they are trying to build a business. I’d love to lead you through a simple process. The survey they completed gave us some information that was very revealing.
It showed me where people were struggling:
• They didn’t know how to get followers.
• They didn’t know what to reply to.
• They didn’t know how to re-tweet.
• They didn’t know how to sell their product without feeling like they're “salesy.”
• They weren’t clear on how many times a day is it acceptable on Facebook and Twitter to post their product.
• They didn’t know if there is a difference in how they use Facebook versus how they use Twitter.
By the way, posting on Facebook and Twitter is different and it talks and the materials talk about that. If you posted on Facebook instead of on Twitter, getting that mixed up, you would probably lose a ton of followers.
If you do things on Twitter that should be done on Facebook, or if you do things on Facebook that should be done on Twitter, you can either double your results, or cut them in half. Facebook and Twitter are two different animals. We also asked, “When you use Facebook for business, what’s the sticking point?”
These were percentages that Survey Monkey gave us:
56% said – all of the above.
They didn’t know what to say, didn’t want to sound “salesy,” and were unclear on how to use their profile page versus a fan page.
In the copy we said:
• Learn simple tips for personal profile usage.
• Learn how to talk to people.
• Learn what to say.
To the question, “When using Twitter for business, where do you get lost?”…
49% said – all of the above.
They don’t want to sound “salesy,” and they don’t want a bunch of garbage connections.
“When running a marketing campaign, where’s your biggest stumbling point?” we asked.
63% said – I feel like I’m intruding.
Do you see why that went into my headline? It’s on every CD. It’s on the back of the CD cover! “Stop bothering people,” it says.
Don’t worry about bothering people. Do you feel like you're intruding? Why would I ask that… why would I say that? Because out of 750 people surveyed, over 63% said, “I don’t want to bother people.”
Do you worry about bothering people? Go ahead, ‘fess up.
I’ve got a question for you if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook. Do I bother you on social media? I’m a nut! God bless you if you're getting my texts live. I apologize ahead of time!
When I go on a rant, there might be about 23 Twitter posts in 30 seconds! Charlotte Siems is a “Ruby” client and actually gets my Facebook things sent to her wall in SMS… bless her.
One time, all of my Rubies were in Chicago for a mastermind retreat, out having dinner, when I posted, “We need an audio person. Anybody in Chicago who can help?” All of a sudden I get a text message, 30 seconds later, from PJ McClure, who was with the group! He said, “What the heck’s wrong with your audio? Do you need any help?” I said, “Are you spying on me?”
“No, Charlotte gets your SMS messages and she just saw you send out an S.O.S.” he said.
I thought, “Well, that was interesting!” And by the way, we got it fixed!
I don’t wake up every morning worrying about intruding. It has everything to do with my belief system. I don’t feel like I’m bothering people. The only reason I would be bothering people on social media is if they only have about 23 friends, because then I’m probably going to dominate their wall.
Ok, back to the survey. To finish it out I asked:
“If you could learn a way to effortlessly talk through Facebook and Twitter and people would love to hear from you, would you want to learn it?”
97.6% said yes.
We’ve sold, to date, almost 5,000 copies of that training. It’s been a blast! Do you have a copy of it? If you do, did you learn anything new about talking on social media? We have a couple of companies who recently bought it because they want to learn how to be more effective on social media!
The bottom line is, I went back and repeated in my copy what my clients had said in the survey. People gravitate to what they're familiar with.
Here’s a question for you… Do you do work coaching or helping people with their blocks? I mean, coaching in fitness, helping people with their mental blocks, or helping people spiritually or any other way. I’ll say again, people gravitate to what they're familiar with. As a matter of fact, when push comes to shove and stress rises, they will default to what is going on in their subconscious mind all the time.
Out of the mouth comes the heart. The mouth comes out this way on Facebook, Twitter, and Google, too. If you want to speak to the subconscious mind that your client is already hearing, it is usually coming out through what they say.
One of the biggest things we have to work on with people most of the time is to change their subconscious block, but you have to talk to it first. You can't just say to people, “That’s wrong.” If people say, “I want something easy,” then you may have to lead them with, “Here’s one easy step.”
It’s not deceitful, and it’s speaking to where they're at. Something like, “Here’s one way to get rid of an anxiety attack,” or “Here’s one way to get rid of a migraine.” I know somebody who had over 30,000 hits on her YouTube video because she showed how to get rid of a migraine during a storm. One little tip here, though… If she had gone into a whole nutraceutical, meditating, full-on thing, people would have been completely confused and overwhelmed. That’s too hard!
You can also create some great videos where you just give one little tip. The fastest road to a result for your client is being led by what they're already thinking and already speaking. This is why many times when I’m coaching I will say on my Facebook and other social media the way they should be thinking.
Rather than constantly saying, “What if it doesn’t work?” let’s think, “Well, what if it does?” Why don’t you go through today expecting the day will be a success? Why don’t you go through today expecting that people will like you?
What is it that I am doing? I’m speaking to them because I already know, in their subconscious mind, they are people like me. Am I’m intruding? No… I’m serving.
This is an easier way to me. It’s a servant’s way of leading people as opposed to saying, “No, no, that’s not how you're supposed to do it. You need to go this way.”
People buck that. People buck when somebody’s bossy. I know I’m not the only one who bucks when people are bossy. If you said, “Your house is a mess and you know you feel like crap, so we need to organize it and I’m the girl that can help you.” Or, “You know you want to get rid of that stuff and you know you're hanging on to the divorce from so and so and you know that’s bothering you and so I’m the gal who can help you.”
(Wow, what a mouthful!) If you say things in that way, people are going to shun you. You can actually help to lead people by listening to what they're already saying and feeding it back to them.
[back to top] Chapter 8 Your Passion Leads To Your Ideal Client
What have you gotten so far that you can apply to your business? Do you feel like what you learned for your business could apply to your life as well? Who knew that the same stuff works for business and life? Do you think we would have much easier lives – much more fulfilling lives – if we were incredible listeners?
Now I want to talk about how your passion actually leads you to your ideal client. It is my belief that when you were knit in your mother’s womb, God had a message that you were supposed to give. If I was a betting woman, I would bet that there has been a great deal of conflict inside of you as far as releasing that message.
There has been a great deal of conflict for me to step into what I’ve been doing the last 14 years. Two of them have been…
• People telling me not to compete with them.
• The fear of people controlling me.
Sometimes people in business will do that because they have no confidence. The only people who’ve ever said to me, “Don’t compete with me, don’t go into speaking,” lack confidence, as if the gift that God gave me is somehow going to bother their gift.
Do you see how dysfunctional that is? Anytime I’ve ever had somebody say, “Just don’t compete with me,” or something similar, that shows a small vision. It also reveals to me somebody who does not know the passion that God has ignited in them. There’s this woman on television, who’s one of the major influences in the world… Oprah. Ever heard of her?
I heard a teeny tiny business owner who needs to seriously get a “clearing” say that you shouldn’t follow your passion, that you could end up broke. Then I hear multibillionaire Oprah say, “Your passion is where everything else flows from.” What I am doing now is my passion. Marketing is my passion. I love to speak to people about personal freedom. Just start talking to me about boxes and judgments and systems of control, coercion and all the other types of stuff people use to control others and you’ll start finding out where my passion lives.
When I was a little girl my mom used to say, “You’re always saying what everybody’s thinking.” It got me into a lot of trouble because I was little and not groomed for success. would say, “Well, did you mean this or that? Did you just say that like this and you meant it like that?”
My passion was to help people work through some of what they were thinking. It wasn’t even until I got into business that I realized it was actually one of my purposes.
I realize that we’re all at different places in our journeys and some might get all wigged out when I talk about divine purpose or mention that success book that I love (the Bible). But I never do it from the standpoint of force or judgment. It is part of who I am and the reality is I love all people.
We have people in our database who are from all different belief systems and backgrounds and I believe that’s why I’m such a rich woman. I’m not talking my finances, either.
God has given me favor with all kinds of different people. It is my belief He did that because I became very clear on my passion, and I believe it’s a divine passion. It’s a purpose. It’s something that He put in me just like He put one in you, and if you don’t fulfill it, the Earth is at a loss.
There are a lot of people who will say, “Well, somebody else can do it.” Surely, He may want someone else to do something. But it is my belief that if we don’t step into what He called us to do, the whole planet loses.
I’m not saying that to put you on some guilt trip or whatever. No, no, no, no. I want to motivate you. Some of what’s been churning in you since you were probably a little kid could be a direct connection to millions and millions of dollars in profit. It could be a direct connection to financial freedom. It could be a direct connection to wild experiences like I had a couple weeks ago.
I had the desire to go to Maui for over 15 years, but because of some pathetic programming about fear of flights (especially long flights), spending the money, and many other things, I never allowed myself to go. Well, when I finally got there, I discovered that it was about more than just refreshment for my spirit and my family. There was a surfer, a sushi chef, a single mom and other people who God himself wanted to send somebody from Timbuktu, Indiana to Maui to let them know, “You're amazing. You have a purpose. You’ve done a great job.”
The surfer that I met had made his brother and sister’s purposes in life more important than his. I don’t believe anyone had ever told him he was a warrior and a champion. I got the absolute privilege to tell a 45-year old man, “You are doing a phenomenal job. God has made you to be a warrior.”
How was I able to do that? Because my son took surfing lessons from him and the wildest thing happened. He said to me, before we went out, “Now that I’ve told you all the things that can happen – how he can split his head open and all those other different things – are you religious? Would you like to pray?”
I said, “Well, I ain’t religious but I sure am spiritual and I’d love to pray.” So, I’m asking God for surfing angels, the ones that come around and inspire people. I prayed, “This kid of mine, he’s not designed to just sit in front of Xbox or sit in Timbuktu, Indiana. He’s a warrior and he’s wild and he needs to experience that.” It was so funny.
I said, “Thanks, Scott.” He said, “Did you want to pray any of that over me?” Isn't that fun? And all these years before, I kept myself from going by thinking things like, “Well, I don't know… It could be a nine hour flight.”
We left at 7:00 a.m. and got there at 9:00 p.m. Maui time. You think God helped me get over that? I was over it before we left. I am convinced that we were supposed to go do something over there to encourage people. And that’s not even mentioning that it’s a great place to just go live for a month a couple times a year, get a little renewal.
God has put in each one of us a desire, and if you could care less about jewelry, it would probably be a good idea that you not try marketing jewelry.
For some people that’s huge. “I never even thought of it that way!”
If you could care less about weight loss and nutrition, it’s probably a really good idea that you don’t market weight loss and nutrition. If you're the kind of person who’s designed by God to be wild and chaotic, you're the kind of personality that the system would love to medicate and shut off the five brains. I say release the five brains!
We need some entrepreneurs. We need some doctors. We need some accountants. We need some people in government who can think, for a change. We need some people who haven’t been medicated with Ritalin from the time they were 5 years old so that their brain settles down.
Do you want to know one of the reasons I have a yoga ball in my office? Because I think better sometimes when I bounce up and down on it. Do you have any idea how many times I’ve been told, “Sit down, shut up, and be quiet”? Well, I’m not anymore.
There are people that are designed with that high energy and then there are other people who are very calm. My husband is very calm. The first couple years of our marriage I would say, “Move it. Come on. Can we do something?” If I became like him, I would probably be suicidal. If he becomes like me he will have a nervous breakdown. But, isn't it interesting how we’re designed to be together?
Your Passion and What you want To Do in Business
It is likely that you’ve let the thought of pursuing your passion as a business cross your mind. When it happened did you hear, “No, but I can't do that”?
When you think about:
• What you want to do;
• What you’ve wanted to do forever (your passion);
• What you’ve wanted to do forever in business; and
• When you’ve thought, “I can do this in business”
Do you instantly think to yourself, “Well, I don't think I can make money doing that. I don't know if it will work. I don't know if I’ll be any good at it”?
What things have you told yourself, for example, “No, I will never do that.” And I’m not talking immoral or illegal.
For me it was, “I’m not ever going to teach anyone how to write.” Give me a break. I don’t have a desire to do that. It’s the thing that I love. I didn’t realize that they were intertwined until I started seeing people process their thoughts in a blog post.
People started writing out what they would never be able to speak. People are able to express things that they’ve never said publicly and 73 comments come in. I didn’t have an intention of doing that. I wanted to teach people how to make money online. That’s the big bait and the hook and God said, “If you go this way, you could make a lot of money.”
In my selfish, immature state, it was always the money, money, money. I don’t want any of you to feel like it’s ungodly, selfish or evil to be led by money. The reality is He’s called me to make a ton of money… truckloads!
For me, it was always the thing that motivated me as long as it was attached to something that I wanted to do. There was always an excuse until He finally said, “There are some people, Sandi, who make a ton of money really, really fast, really, really easily.” The hard part is managing the money for good.
Some people say, “I’d love to make a ton of money really, really fast.” It’s quite a burden when you do. You think it’s difficult to give away $5,000? Try giving away $50,000. Try giving away $500,000. You’ve got to ask where it’s supposed to go. I’m sorry, but not every place where you want to give money is a great place for it to go. You become very aware of things.
To me, money is just digits. I was a little girl when I first said that. It’s just digits. It’s just a thousand and a million and a billion. It’s just digits. It’s just multiplied. I had no idea that attitude contributed to my gifting. So God has led me many times to go in bonus pools, go do a ton of stuff, until finally I realized, ‘Wow, if I do twice this, I could go feed this many kids.’
Many women struggle with making millions of dollars, especially if they are married. And if they’re not married, they are scared because they are trying to figure out who the heck they ARE going to marry.
How about feeling like your friends at church or your local community might think differently of you if you made millions of dollars? Anybody have a passion and a desire but when you come back to where your feet are planted there are ramifications for you?
What if your friends find out that you write a newsletter about your experience at the psychiatric nursing hospital and you start selling all kinds of products and replace your income? Before you know it, all these industry websites want to publish your stuff. Then you have several dreams and strangers tell you you're going to end up on Oprah and, “Oh my gosh, what if my friends find out?”
Have you ever thought through what might happen if your dream actually comes true? Does it scare you? Does it terrify you?
If so, that’s a really good sign that you're supposed to follow that thing.
Have you ever been terrified of going to a regular job? Have you ever thought of the social ramifications and what your church friends and what everybody might think if you take that position at that job?
Did you think that they’d probably like you more if you took that job?
What if they found out that you got a job in management? Now what?
How about in sales? Do you make a lot of money in sales?
I used to never want to tell anybody what I did because folks would say, “Everything you touch turns to gold and that’s how you make a lot of money in sales. Very few people can make money like you do in sales because you're gifted to make money in sales.” I would say, “I’m sorry, everything I touch does not turn to gold. It has taken an awful lot of mentoring to get to this place. According to my recollection, everything that I touched turned into a mess and I was on a path to make psychiatrists rich.” Isn't it interesting? Do you have things that pop up when you start pursuing your passions?
Isn't it interesting that everything I just asked you is everything I’ve experienced? You are my ideal client?
I want you to take out a pen and paper and I’m going to ask you some questions, but you don’t need to send me the answers, because these are for you.
I have a couple rules that you are supposed to apply before you write your answers, though. Raise your hand and say, “I do solemnly swear to obey Sandi’s rules.” Phew, I am a bit bossy, aren’t I?
[back to top] Chapter 9 Identify Your Passion
We’re going to push you down the road to your passion with some simple questions. First, though, I have to establish a few rules.
1. When you answer these questions, I want you to remove the filters.
2. I want you to remove the judgments. The ones you’ve had and the ones others have placed over you.
Some of your answers may cause a block because of resentment toward someone. These are issues that need to be forgiven for you to move on. I understand how hard that can be because there were areas in my life where I said, “I love you God, but hell no I’m not forgiving that.”
I remember when I told God, “Well, you are a miracle worker. If you can help me work through that, that will be pretty incredible, because I have no idea how I can do it on my own.” And He did. I think He’s challenge-driven just like I am.
3. I want you to remove unforgiveness. You may not be able to do that today – you may have to answer something and next to put the letter ‘F’ which means, “Ohh, I’ve got to come back to that for forgiveness.”
4. I want you to remove fear. All the what-ifs, how come, what for, how do I, and so on. Just for the next five minutes, I want you to remove that.
5. Now for my fighting words… I want you to remove religion. Religion is the most vile spirit on the face of this earth. The God of the Bible is not religious.
He’s actually a radical rock star who uses all kinds of people who are absolutely messed up, jacked up, screwed up, leaky, broken, and shattered, and He looks good when He uses them.
If you ever take the time to read the Bible from cover to cover, man, there’s some wild sex in there. There are wars in there. There is all kinds of stuff that would make the local deacon board have a fit. According to religion, I am completely disqualified to be doing what I’m doing with all of the different things I have done in my life.
Want to know something cool? God has 100% forgiven me. There’s nothing He can’t forgive, but religion puts boundaries and rules where none should be.
And as you answer these questions, I’m going to give you permission to lay down the bondage of religion. Remember, I told you I want to be a permission granter? More people get jacked up and have no idea what they were designed for because of religion.
He has raised me from the dead.
When you’ve been where I’ve been and you’ve sucked on chemo and you have dealt with the big old cancer word and you have dealt with rape and you have dealt with death and you have dealt with all that kind of crap and you’ve come back to life, you're about ready to tell religion… well, let’s just say that we can remove religion.
I’m very spiritual. I love my God. I talk to Him all day long. He is just a living, breathing presence in my life. It’s not like I just talk to Him for a half-hour in the morning and then I run through my day. I do not want my pulse to beat apart from Him and I know that it won't, because I know He will never abandon me and never leave me. I can't mess up enough that He’s going to say, “Pffft.” He has no lines, and so to me, I’m not religious.
Now for the questions. I want you to put your blink answer. That means in a blink something comes to your head. Remember, you did say, “I solemnly swear to obey Sandi’s rules.”
If you blink and something says, “Well so and so said… well the church board said… well that’s really fearful… I need to forgive somebody for that one…” you're supposed to write it anyway.
1. What do you always daydream about? What are you always dreaming about? What are you always thinking that makes you say, “Come back to reality, why don’t you?”
2. If you were a kid again, raised in what you believed to be a perfectly free home where you had the freedom to pursue that thing you could not let go of the second you woke up, what would you be doing as a kid, currently?
Open yourself up and think, if you were a child again and your mom said, “Hey baby, what do you want to do? Where do you want to go? What should we do today? Want to chase butterflies?” What would you say?
Do you want to know a vision God gave me as He was healing me? I saw myself at 8 years old and I had on a white dress and I was twirling in a field. That’s right… twirling. That is the life that I now live. I feel like a little girl and the world is my field and I just get to dance around and twirl.
Sure, there’s a bunch of bumps and whatever, but the flowers are up to my knees and anytime anything gets very restrictive, instantly He downloads information to me. I see the little white dress. I see the little girl twirling. 3. What makes you excited? What motivates you? What makes your heart skip a beat? What inspires you? It’s the kind of thing that gives you those butterflies. You're not quite sure if you're excited or you’re nervous or whatever but there is something. What is it?
I’m so proud of you because you are willing to take a look at these questions and answer them for yourself. That is awesome.
As you look at your answers and try to fit them into your vision of the world, remember that some people are called to lead and some are called to support. One is not second. One is not first. Leaders are not more important or stronger than supporters. I have an incredibly strong support team. I could not be the leader that I am without the people who work with us.
Some of them love to support me, to help, and can become less efficient and happy when they try to lead. I would try to be a supporter all the time, and I am supportive in my leadership, but I always ended up trying to fix a bunch of leaders and it got really dysfunctional.
You will probably want to look at and really process your list of answers. One of the most difficult things that you might have to work through is allowing yourself to be who you are, because society tells us leaders are higher than supporters. That’s a bunch of phooey! Every leader needs a supporter and there are supporters who rock and change the world.
There are supporters who spend their time on their knees and change countries. There are people that I will call the most unsuspecting warriors you would ever think of, and they are changing your city daily. Half of the time they spend is on their faces, behind the scenes, talking to God. They're the big old pillars that you just don’t see, but if they were removed, everything would fall apart. You might be a supporter. Both of these start with passion, and the one person that you need to work on the most is yourself so that you are able to speak to your ideal client.
I had to give myself permission to be a leader.
Do you know what’s really wild? My husband has a supportive role. All the time I’m trying to be a meek and mild homemaker who’s supportive, and he’s trying so hard – all 6’3”, 250 pounds, 52-inch back, handsome hunk of a man that I love – trying to be the leader because we thought that’s what godly families are like.
Quite frankly, God is the one who made me a leader. God is the one who made him a supporter. I do believe he’s the leader of our home. We don’t have that kind of dysfunction where he’s bossy and rude or I’m the one who wears the pants.
We work together to create unity in our home. I could never do what I do if my husband was not behind me. You all could write me a fan letter. I could get millions of business offers. If I did not know my husband was home loving my boys right now, if I did not know that he believed in me… forget it, not doing it. Just one ounce of his support and I’m like G-force.
And he knows, “I am always here for you. When you have to make a decision, I am here for you. We’re going to work on this together. There is always a solution. We can walk through this. If I’ve got to love you, coach you, encourage you or whatever, I am here.” And that has taken an awful lot of work to get to.
We had to let go of all those judgments. We had to let go of all those little filters – all the fear, all the religion – to get here. It was interesting because my husband tends to be very conservative in his spiritual beliefs and I’m saying, “Whoohoo! You want to raise somebody from the dead? Use me!” and, “Oh, oh, should we ask for a miracle? Let’s do it!”
He just ignited me with faith and my husband is very calm. The man’s got this gift of healing. He is the only person who can pray for me and BAM!, it’s gone. Although he’s not quite sure he believes that he has this healing thing.
I remember when God said to me, “You create unity in that home and I’ll help you to create unity all over the world.” It’s a challenge because I want to change him and he wants to change me. We don’t grow by changing others.
The reality is, working more on myself than my business grew my business. Working more on myself has allowed me to connect with you and share things that I wouldn’t share with my family. Some of the people in my church have no idea what I do.
Occasionally I tell people, “I work at Wal-Mart. Why do you ask?”
“What do you do for a living?” they ask.
We have 147 countries and 150,000 people.
“Oh, I just impact people’s lives all over the world.”
I don’t answer like that. I soften it up a little bit. “I just coach people to do stuff online, that’s all.”
Honestly, I haven’t quite figured out what I do. I just show up and say to God, “Reel me in when it’s time for a break.”
Where is God taking you? Did you come up with any questions within your answers? To fully embrace your potential and move forward, you have to put deep supports in place. I’ve mentioned people like Bill Glazer who pour into my business life, but I also have personal growth supports in place.
I always call PJ McClure, The Mindset Maven, my brother from another mother. My brother passed away in 1995. PJ has a very strong spirit like my brother, except he’s very healthy. My brother tended to be real religious. PJ has really helped me and spoken life into me with my mindset so that I can be who I am designed to be.
There have been times when he’s told me to, “get the flip over it,” or, “You know, you were designed to do that.” He has a really unique gift from God. I truly believe he has a strong role to support and release leaders and supporters all over the world.
He is like a Spec-Op agent that swoops in and helps me destroy the blocks preventing me from being all I’m capable of. I’m constantly sending people to his website, www.TheMindsetMaven.com, or telling them to find him on Facebook. He is one of my supporters. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you were to ask him about helping you.
It might have been difficult to bring up your answers, or you may have had a hard time writing them down. Don’t be afraid to go for it now and sort it as you go.
I remember doing this exercise with Angela Brooks and she would say, “Ooh, I don’t have an answer.” Or she would write down an answer and say, “Oh no, now what does that mean, because that’s so much different than what I’m doing?” Her business, career, and life have broken through countless barriers. She is freer every day.
You can be, too.
[back to top] Chapter 10 Your Stage Is Your Purpose
Everyone has a stage, whether you’re a Broadway performer or a stay-at-home mom. A stay-at-home mom is the job that equipped me to run companies. We needed and used schedules, charts and balances. We were flexible and moved things around. All of that taught me how to do a lot of what I do today.
Being a mother is one of the highest roles God has given me. For some people that’s what their calling is. They have no desire to be in business. Sadly, there are stay-at-home moms who have been led to feel like they are less than a business woman. That’s just a bunch of garbage. Then there are stay-at-home moms who have dreams and visions of being business owners.
I’m so challenge-oriented that I made staying at home a competition! How many times can you clean a house? How many times can you schedule the chores and the home schooling and the whatever? I’m a whole lot nicer mommy when I work and I still only work part-time.
I turn into a drama momma when I have way too much time on my hands. Trust me, I don’t want to live with me (and you don't want to live with me either) when I’m a drama momma.
Each one of us has a place in which we are supposed to shine, a place from which we are supposed to impact others. It’s the place that you were designed for. Not something you have talent in that can be taught. Attitude, heart, passion… those things cannot be taught. You are designed with those things; they are part of who you are.
A lot of the time it seems like there are kids coming out of schools and colleges who either have no passion or someone attempted to train passion into them. Maybe you can relate to that. It’s not the real passion they have. But, they believe they can make an awful lot of money with it, so they get really excited about it and mistake that for passion.
Each one of us has a place, and we are supposed to release into the world what God gave us. I'm a business trainer and I talk about life and I share my story. This has become the platform that God is using me on.
I share my story – a woman who once was shattered and broken, who as a little girl, would wake up in the middle of the night on the other side of the house cowering on her hands and knees, not knowing how she had gotten there. Who would sleepwalk, always waking up feeling trapped, like she was suffocating.
A woman who, as a young girl, went for a drive along the streets of Detroit with a guy she trusted and some of his friends, and found herself locked in a phone booth being horrifically gang raped. A woman who SWORE that she would never trust a man again. As you can hear in my heart now, God has set me free from all of that. I could easily hate men, but I don’t. Men are in my business. I have sons I’m grooming.
Am I perfect? No. It seems like every now and then something might trigger something from my past. But I have people around me who support me.
God, with His marvelous wisdom, brings women into my life who have never suffered any kind of abuse. They tell me, "I don't look for a predator around every corner or expect opposition in every corner.”
If I wasn't standing on the stage God provided to share my story that would never have happened. It would not have come back to help me become more of who I am supposed to be.
There was a time when my desire was to no longer be alive anymore. I figured my kids would be a whole lot better off without me because I was a mess. God allowed my kids to watch their mom go from not knowing who she was – always cranky, trying to be perfect, convinced that nothing’s ever good enough – to this wild woman with this big ole’ tattoo of a dancer who’s dancing for freedom. They saw me get pink hair. They saw me fall madly in love with God and fall crazy in love with my husband again.
My responsibility was to find out what I was supposed to be doing. And, boy oh boy, did I fight God about where He was sending me! “No! I’m not going to speak in front of people. I’ll speak with other people or alongside other people. I’ll help other people that speak.” That was scary.
For years I harbored huge judgments against churches and pastors. Now I have the most amazing pastor. He has a church of 5,000 people, but used to be in sales years and years ago. He currently has a radio show, “Fanning the Flame,” which is in over 100 countries. Four years ago I only wanted to tell him a little bit of what I did for a living, because I figured I would end up hearing stuff like, “Is your husband the head of the home? What are you doing with all that money? We need that money. You might want to give that money away.”
Last year we were fortunate to give almost 40% of our income, but we were constantly getting barraged with that kind of stuff. I told him, “I’m going to do business training and I’m actually opening the Bible to do it.”
He said, “Cool! Do it! Open your mouth. God will fill it!”
I thought, “Whoa, even my pastor’s behind me! Now my husband is behind me and my pastor is behind me. Oh dear! I don’t have very many excuses left.”
And then I would get text messages from people and they would say, “Hey man, we’re praying for you. I have no idea what it is that you do on the Internet, but I sure love your newsletter.” Pretty fun, huh?
I have seen more people ignited into their spiritual destiny through business than I’ve ever seen leading Bible studies and telling people to grow up and shut up and get over their stuff in the church.
For me, my gifting comes out in business. What have you got to lose when you’ve been where I’ve been? People want to say, “You’re one of those Jesus freaks? What are you going to do?”
Yes I am, and I love people who aren’t. I love people from all different kinds of backgrounds. Quite frankly, I’ve tried everything there is, and He is the only thing that’s satisfying. My husband will tell you. I’ve tried to let him satisfy me, being a mom satisfy me, and even running a business satisfy me. However, He’s the only thing that satisfies this crazy, wild, restless heart of mine. Then my business gifts start coming out through my story.
I believe that everyone has a story. All of us. There’s something to be learned from every experience. You don’t have to be as transparent and bold with your experiences as I have been. More of my story is included at the end of this book to give you an idea of where I come from and maybe some hope. I’m not saying you have to do that. I’m not saying that is your ideal business model. That’s a unique thing that He has called me to do and it certainly isn’t for everyone. But, if you didn’t have access to some of that story, might you look at me a little differently? You might have thought it all comes real easy. I’ve had people say, “Oh, you’re just always happy. Have you been like that since you were a little kid? It seems so easy for you. It must be fun for it to be so easy to make millions of dollars.”
“Oh, you obviously haven’t heard my story,” I say.
It’s important to me to get people sharing their story. We can impact more people in the world if you share your story. Whether you share it in business, whether you share it in a book, whether you share your story on a blog… it’s all up to you.
Quite frankly, I believe that my story is supposed to be filtered through marketing.
I think it’s great to write a story about somebody who’s just shattered and broken and God put back together, but there’s all kinds of books out there like that. People will make a ton of money with the things that we teach and maybe get a lesson for their lives.
I’ve had people say to me, “I wrote an email and made $4,800 with what you’ve taught me, with one email. But what has happened to me as a person has completely changed everything.” And I’m sitting there thinking, “From a copywriting class? How does that work?”
Periodically things come up, and the reason somebody won’t write has everything to do with their own deal, their own thing. The reason they don’t believe they can write an email that would make $4,800 is because of their own personal issues. I tend to get into that space. People release the issues and before you know it, their whole life is changing.
There are situations in some stories that will relate to different people. If you are like my friend Chalene Johnson, you are someone who has not suffered that kind of stuff, who has not been violated, but was raised to be everything she was designed to be. You might be wondering how it is possible for you to relate to other people who aren’t exactly like you. How does she have 58,000 fitness salons full of women who are messed up? How the heck does she relate to them?
She’s a rare little diamond that God sifts all over the world through her workout program, Turbo Fire. She works on her personal growth more than she works on her fitness.
What’s so neat is she gets to speak into people’s lives about their potential. People become fitness experts and people become business people. They all become different because of how she relates to them. Chalene’s stage is attached to video and fitness. What is yours attached to?
Speak into people’s lives. I don’t say this to everybody, but if you had a year to live, what would you do? If I was given a year to live, I wouldn’t change anything.
Be a lesson for others. That is the message I have for you. Be a light for others. Trust me, if you have suffered any kind of trauma, struggle, anything; it’s not about you. You are the hero that God wants to use. You’re the work in progress that God wants to use.
The one thing that I have as an asset with all that I have suffered is that there’s a ton of people that I can reach; men and women going through all kinds of different things. I’ve made a lot of money and I’ve lost a lot of money. I’ve managed money really, really well and I’ve absolutely sucked at it. I’ve been a really, really great wife and I’ve been a wife like the Bible talks about – a cantankerous wife that makes a husband want to go sit on his roof.
Everyone has a story and something to be learned from every experience. Everything becomes a story, a picture and is activated in some kind of experience. Find your WHO, WHAT, and WHY to market to where your client’s story is at right now, to where they are at and to where they want to be. [back to top] Chapter 11 More Jedi Mind Reading
I don't make a lot of money to understand geography. I outsource. Just tell me where I need to go and how to get there. That's what my clients hire me for, right? Just tell me where I need to go, how to go, and how to get there.
This is the third part of the survey, by the way. You take questions, you do your research and look at what people are already saying, where they are already at, what they are already doing, what they are already saying they struggle with, and what they are saying their unique problem is.
In fact, before I even tell you how to speak about the results, you want to look up “4 U’s A Real Change.” My page will come up. You can do that by going to Google.com. This article is on The Power of the 4 U's. In copywriting there are all kinds of different rules, and I'm not saying the rules are not relevant and don't matter.
I went to an amazing copywriting school, and I was only there for two months when they had me critiquing everybody's copy. It was so funny. I paid an awful lot of money to go to copy school because I wanted to make sure I was doing it right. I learned, after 12 months, that I was doing it fantastically. But I did find that people were struggling with some of the rules they needed to follow in their copywriting, just like what people were doing with bread making.
When I was teaching people how to make bread, there were basic ingredients. You need good flour with the right amount of gluten. You need the correct temperature of your water, and that will change depending on where you're located. You also need really good raw honey, preferably. You need really good activating yeast. Then you're also going to get into oil. You want light oil.
These are the basic ingredients. I would teach people how to do this; how to make perfect bread every time, the texture of Wonder Bread, but with all kinds of whole grains. Occasionally, people would get so hung up on things like where they got their honey, if you're using a good cold pressed canola or vegetable oil, which one, which company, and so on.
If I said you had to use hard white wheat or you want to use kamut, which is lower gluten, it would be which one of the kamuts? It's like struggling with the basic principles, and a lot of times people wouldn't end up with the kind of bread that they needed.
Now, some people were more lackadaisical and would say, "I don't want to throw honey in. I don't like honey. I'm going to toss in some raw sugar or some white sugar." Or they would say, "I don't think I need cold pressed oil. I'm just going to toss in some regular oil." Or, "Why do I need the fresh wheat? I'm just going to buy it from the store."
I used to teach people how to take it from the grain and throw it into a grain mill. What would happen is you lose all the enzymes when you're making bread and you’re using flour that's already been milled and packaged. Then people would be lackadaisical.
Well, I find it ironic how (talk about the prophetic, and maybe it's just the way I see things) everything becomes a story and a picture and is activated in some kind of experience. I started seeing the same kind of things happening when people were writing copy.
The things you really want to focus on are the urgent, pressing problems. That's why I said to ask your clients what they struggle with.
This is why we're in big trouble if we start marketing to our clients from where we are, because I hope to God that you have solved the urgent, pressing problem for yourself, first!
I hope you're not still trying to figure out how to get traffic online and you're teaching people how to get 1,000 people to their website a week. Otherwise, you're going to end up with some kind of physical abnormality or something because you have a serious conflict. You're trying to teach what you haven't done.
I know some of you just got a major download, because I know there are some leaders out there that say, "What kind of bright, brilliant business would you like to teach?"
"Well, I'd like to teach people how to get 20,000 followers on Twitter." You never once heard me tell you how to get 20,000 followers on Twitter until I had 20,000 followers on Twitter.
I would even tell people, "I've got a huge list." So does Glazer-Kennedy, over 1 million, and they've got maybe 20-30 thousand people following them.
That tells you why people have different modes of how they want to consume your content. You want to have it all over the place, because people are going to pick and choose how they want to read your content.
I didn't say, "Let me teach you how to get to 25,000 followers on Twitter in under 90 days" until I did it in under 90 days. From 4,000 to 25,000, thanks to brilliant team member Kim Garst, whom every single one of you should follow on Twitter.
We're actually producing a product – how to add 20,000 followers by using Twitter, who are your ideal clients, in under 90 days. Kim Garst, go follow her on Twitter!
Now, when I go into talking about the 4 U's and all that, I find many times people's belief systems get them all caught up on the tactical process. When I hear people say, "Just give me the tactics," I can always tell it's a head issue. Most of the time, no, 100% of the time, once they got their head clear they didn’t get obsessed with all the tactical aspects.
If your head is clear and you're listening to your client, you will be seeking the urgent, pressing problem. You won't be making your focus…
"I know what your problem is, Jennifer, so let me tell you how to fix it.”
“I know what your problem is, Tiffany, and I'm your girl."
That's what I call pimp marketing, and I see it all over the place.
[back to top] Chapter 12 The Good, The Bad, and The Awesome of Listening
You have to know the urgent, pressing problem. When you do the research with Google, social media, and Amazon, you will know their problem. So in your survey you can lead them by asking, "Is this your problem?"
Remember that we're not asking because we are unsure, but because we have identified the pressing problems and we want to zero in on the specifics of our audience. (“I know that this is a big problem, but I want to know exactly where you are with it.”) We can find out with these surveys.
Because of the questions I ask, I discovered the need for a new coaching level in my business. We called it Sapphire, and it fit right between my Gold’s and Ruby’s. These are clients that understand the basics and have elements of their business in place, but aren't at a level of focused business strategy.
We've also discovered in the surveys we have conducted that my Diamonds didn't need to talk to me every week. They are so stinking busy activating that they want to talk to me like twice a month, and they prefer a retreat with me three times a year. I get all of them in a room and things blow up! It's much more powerful and effective for that group than struggling to find time to get on the phone.
By asking the questions, I know if I were to put my Gold’s in a 12-month program, they might get worn out and weary. They need some intense boot camp-type training, and they need to be activated in some different things like my Inner Circle where now it's time to run the race.
Because of the questions I ask in surveys, after all of my posts, or after one of my free group coaching calls, I know the needs of my clients.
I'll keep saying it – I’m not a brilliant marketer or copywriter, I am just someone who is able to put my agenda and ego aside and listen. I know what it takes to market, hands down. You could drop me out of a plane with my laptop and my iPhone, and if there is a marketable product or service, I could sell it and make money. I want to teach you how to do that, because with marketing it doesn’t matter what it is.
Where to Find Great Marketers
Some of the best marketers are actually in prison. Do you know why I say that? There's an organization in Texas called Prison Entrepreneur Program where they have some people who, unfortunately, took their marketing and gifts from God and marketed things that are illegal. They marketed immoral and illegal goods and services because they found a market demanding it, and they know how to listen to the market. What's so neat about this program is the recidivism (return to prison) rate is super low. They have large corporate owners like myself going into the prison and working with the prisoners. I've seen former gang members and drug dealers build a $4 million company in their first 24 months out.
These guys already had the strategy:
“I'm going to ask the questions, I'm going to listen to the answers, and I'll be happy to serve your addiction.”
So, as a good business person, I'm going to ask the question, happily hear the answer, and give you what you need.
What is so awesome is that you and I get to do that and see lives changed. So please, make a sign to put above your computer that says, “Ask questions and listen.” When we show people that we are actually listening, they tell their friends. And that's a great way to amplify your business.
For example, when I ran Making More Money with Your Blog, we got 354 tweets and 1,770 people ‘liking’ it on Facebook.
Why does that matter? I’m going to do the math for you for 1,770 people ‘liking’ something on Facebook.
Let's say, on average, those 1,770 people actually have 956 people each on their Facebook profile. My page just now went to 1,692,120 people – for free. But it gets even better.
Mark my words, Facebook will be the largest search engine to hit the Internet and will bypass Google because they're already using Google's infrastructure for search. If one of your friends searches “making money with a blog” on Facebook, my page will probably come up because you ‘liked’ it. Is that trippy or what?
The fact of the matter is a lot of people have more than 900 friends, so do the math. That's called “The Good Kind Of Viral.” How did I do it?
I took the survey, released the answers on the sales page just as you can see on my Social Media The Fun Way page, and I did the same kind of thing with Make More Money with Your Blog.
We told them what we were going to do in the product and used all the answers we received in the survey to repackage as a course.
“This is what you said, and this is what we're going to release to you.”
Then I got this interesting idea… "Wait a second. I could turn that information into a free offer really fast." I've had over 700 people tell me what they need. I've had several thousand people go through the class. We've got a ton of feedback. I think I might have a really good handle on what could be a killer free offer.
So I brought that information into my free offer –
“Have you been trying to build an online empire yourself without any results?”
People tell me all the time, "I've been blogging. I'm talking on social media. Nothing seems to be working."
I turned that into my copy –
“Maybe you've been blogging and talking on social media and nothing is working.”
Do you remember what I said about the trigger words, "You're not alone?"
The next sentence said, “Well, you're not alone.”
I continued, “The fact of the matter is, in working to figure all of this out myself – how to combine all the different things together, how to build rapport, do blogging, build a newsletter and use WordPress – with all the courses out there, it's getting more difficult every day to know who to listen to.”
I can't tell you how many people say that to me. “For everything I've invested, sometimes, man, all I've got is a bunch of confusing chatter going on in my head. I have no idea who the heck to listen to.”
Then the copy took them here –
“140,000 customers can't be wrong. This IS the most in-depth, yet simple training online today!”
Do you see where the capital letters are used? Very strategically, this IS the most in- depth, yet simple training online today. People say to me, “I want all the nuts and bolts but keep it simple.” It’s just like when I hear someone say, “People want health, but they want it overnight.”
It's an oxymoron to say, “I want all the details, but keep it simple.” It's like saying, “Okay, I'm pregnant… tell me how to raise my teenager successfully.”
I also show up very unpolished, by the way. This is one of the reasons this thing went viral. You don't see a film crew shooting scenes of me walking on the beach talking to you. People need to see something they can relate to.
Do you think a new business owner is like, “Oh my God, this is probably a $25,000 budget. I can't produce a video like that. Do I have to produce a video like that to be able to generate leads? I can't do that. I need to go buy one of those courses where it says it's easy and I can do it for under $50.” I don't want my videos to be so polished and advanced that people can't see themselves doing it. I'm able to know all of these things and more by asking questions and listening. Have I pounded that in enough yet? Good. You're going to do great.
[back to top] Chapter 13 Ask, Listen, and Speak Their Language
"How do you get so many people to re-tweet, and how do you get so many people to comment and ask questions on Facebook and Twitter? Everybody just flocks to you. If only I had as many customers as you do and my customers loved me as much as they love you... but I only have like, 23 people."
I'm not going to tell you that the number of followers does not impact how many people tweet and comment… it does. However, you can get the ball rolling with just a few. It does not happen magically or just because of numbers that so many people re-tweet, comment, and like my material. It happened because I asked them to do it.
At the end of your video or post, ask them to come to Facebook and tell you what they liked most about what they saw. Or tell them, “Five days from now, come and tell me what was most important, significant, or where you are stuck so I can help.” It also makes you not look like this big almighty guru who's not available to anybody, and you'll have to pay to talk to me.
Obviously, I can't talk to 150,000 people, so you're going to have to pay to have one-on-one time with me or I'll have a nervous breakdown. People might never have known that I'm available on social media had I not told them.
There's a book called “Predictably Irrational,” and the author says, “The fact of the matter is, if you don't direct your clients and customers to their next step – to ask you a question, to give you feedback, to give you input – don't be surprised when they predictably don't do it. They might not even think about it. They might not know they're allowed to.”
I've had people ask me a question and a staff member who helps manage my Facebook page will answer or I will answer, and they will say, “Oh my gosh, I actually got a real answer. I was curious whether or not I was actually going to get a real answer.” How amazing does that make us look?
First of all, to me, it makes me irritated and it fires my passion. I think of all the people who have said, “Come and ask me a question on my Facebook page” just to make themselves look good. So it lights a fire under what I need to do anyway, which is good. It's keeping my zeal alive.
Another thing that helps certain projects go viral is how I encourage them by saying, “From time to time, we all get off track,” so they know how to get back when they derail. “So no worries, here's your next lesson.”
I am not motivating with guilt. I am not making it sound like it’s their fault because apparently they forgot to go to the next lesson. It sounds pathetic, but I've seen people behave in that manner. The only difference between somebody who's gotten success and someone who hasn’t – whether it's with weight loss, emotional issues or self-image – is they just know how to get themselves on track when they derail. We're all human. We all derail. We all fall off. We don't need therapy for a week and a half to recover. You just recover in a couple minutes.
One of the tips that I give in the 30-Day Make More Money with Your Blog is dealing with overwhelm. When you get overwhelmed, set a timer. Just shut off everything. Shut off the cell phone. Shut off the social media. Shut off the Skype. Set the timer. Write whatever you need to write and just dump it. At the end of the hour, get up and go do something.
People responded in droves and told me, “This is wild. I'm now able to do my blog post after just several minutes.”
That’s another way to make your thing go viral. Give real value.
If you give away something of enormous value for free, your customers will have no problem paying you. Most free offers are just a bunch of crap. That's all they are. There has to be actionable steps that bring results.
The way that these go viral is leading with what they want. It's hard to lead people with a whole new idea because by human nature we resist.
You may be gifted by God to help people with change. That doesn't happen instantly.
In marketing you're going to have to lead people with what they want in order to help them get to where they need to go. They don't resist what they already want. That's why we lead them with what they have already said. That not only needs to be in your copy, but that needs to be in the verbiage on your videos as well.
I don't know how to confess this to you, and I hope you get this. I'm going to ask God to just download it to you. It's a whole lot easier to do a 2-day event, write my newsletter, and coach people when we're working together. When I know what they want and can lead them where they need to go because they have told me and I've listened.
I'm not trying to figure out and hoping somehow or another I can change your mind so you can finally get it and make some money. I've heard people say, “They just don't get it.” That's human nature, too. Most of your customers will re-engineer or go backward first before they get it, but you're going to have to walk through that journey with them.
Then it's a whole lot less work for you as a leader, as a writer, etc. Your customers have already told you how to lead to them. That is my definition of servant leadership. The people who have helped me the most really affirmed where I'm at now. About 99% of the time I already know when there's a problem, and don't need you to get in my face to confirm its existence.
When you come in, you're firm, walk with me from where I'm at, and then we get to talk about what I need to fix. “Dang,” I think, “It's a whole lot easier to walk over here.” Before you know it, we're over there having a party. I'm wondering, “How the heck did I get from there to here?”
That's what, quite frankly, I think Chalene Johnson is a master at. She helps people get fit physically, emotionally, and even spiritually through her training, but she constantly affirms you where you're at.
She'll frequently say things like, “I've noticed this bad habit, where every time a family member calls and the conversation is going to be longer than 15 or 20 minutes, I'm walking over to the kitchen cupboard. Before you know it, I'm mindlessly eating things.”
Wait a second! You look at Chalene and see this gorgeous, beautiful woman and you think, “You do THAT?” She encourages and comes to where you are by saying, "I've had to change my habits. Now I water a plant or make sure the things I need to do that are only 5 to 10 minutes long are in a basket or whatever.”
When you lead people with tools like that, they feel a whole lot better. They are thinking, “Ok, if you overcame this, and you're just like me, great! I can do this, too!”
• Lead people with what they want.
• Lead with what they've already said.
• Lead people from where they're at.
• Lead them with the things that concern them.
One of the biggest things I learned in my business experience that I want to pass onto you was first taught by the amazing Tony Robbins...here it is: "It's not about you."
What concerns me is not writing copy that converts. What concerns me is what YOU are struggling with and how I can help.
One of the most important psychological needs that God put in each of us is to belong. This is why cults and unhealthy groups do a really good job of helping people with what concerns them; leading them, and before you know it they lead them right into a pit.
If you want to love people through business, you are designed for this challenge. It's like having a near death experience… to really get over ourselves and let what concerns other people become our challenge as opposed to “I know what your problem is, and if I could just get you to do this, we could get a result.”
That is not going to work. We can't push people around with our agendas and expect them to say, "Well, thank you so much, and here's 200 more dollars so you can beat me up."
I've had clients in my Gold group who have posted to Facebook, “Oh my gosh, Sandi's been reading my mail. Holy smokes, that was like a hammer on the head.” I always say, “It's with love.”
Sometimes I have to say to people, “Hello, talking all day on social media and only getting five people in your opt-in is not a business.” That's a good way to lead people. You give the solution, and you help them with what they already know. But it has to be led with love and with what concerns them. This is how you are actually talking to people's subconscious mind; because they are already speaking about what bothers them.
Another element of speaking to their subconscious is to speak and write at a level they will easily accept. Write this down: the FK score. FK stands for Flesch-Kincaid and it is really important. The readability score of Flesch-Kincaid has been proven and you can implement it easily in Word or online. Michael Masterson, a multi-millionaire copywriter and business builder, has a phenomenal article on Flesch-Kincaid score. Just type in Michael Masterson and Flesch-Kincaid in Google and you'll see his article.
Obviously he tested a ton of copy. People have been discovering over the last couple of years in an enormous way that when the Flesch-Kincaid score is below 7.2 or 7.3, it will convert more. Each whole number represents a reading grade level. Seven is approximately a 7th grade reading level. I'm here to tell you that people don't think on a Flesch-Kincaid level 16… even people with five master's degrees.
Have you ever spoken to somebody who's a Harvard grad, who's very intelligent and very smart? The funny thing is, they do not speak like they would write their highly intellectual papers. They think and talk in a very relatable way.
When I had copy clients, I would go into their company and instantly say, “Let me see your auto responder series. Maybe we can get some results. Let me see where things are. I want to ask your clients a couple questions, et cetera.” I instantly put their auto responders and their email campaigns for the last six months through the Flesch-Kincaid scoring.
If that score was anything over 9.0, I knew I could make them money, especially if they were not at $00.00 on their ledger. If they were making a couple hundred thousand dollars and the Flesch-Kincaid score was way up there, it was a very easy thing to do.
When you're going to talk to somebody's subconscious mind, if you are talking the way they already think, the wildest things happen. I've been writing copy for so long that I actually speak at a Flesch-Kincaid below 7.5.
You might wonder why and how the heck I know that. I'm so serious about serving my clients at the highest level possible that I will run my transcripts through a Flesch-Kincaid to see whether or not I'm confusing the heck out of them when I'm speaking. When it told me my Flesch-Kincaid was below 7.5 for the whole two days I spoke, I knew that I was on track.
Writing will make you a better speaker. I've met a lot of speakers who need to start writing. When I speak publicly, I can go off on a tangent and tell a story, but then I have my copy writing rules that say, “Bring it back together. Reiterate where you went.”
Speaking to people where they're at is huge. I did some work for someone who had purchased a company that was worth almost $3 million. A software engineer purchased a direct sales company. Nothing was broken. Why they felt they needed to re-write everything is beyond me, but he figured it was broken and that people didn't have enough information. The way he worked with the software was with the assumption that people needed information to make their decisions.
People don't need information to make decisions. They need you to lead them through a process to help them get what they want, period. Even if they're a CPA, even if they're an attorney, and even if they program things in their sleep like I write headlines.
So I went through the Flesch-Kincaid of all their rewritten emails, and they were at 14 to 16.8. I thought, “Holy cow.” Some of them were attached PDFs because they were 8 pages long. They were still making over a million dollars a year because the company before them had a very loyal client base. I went in and said, “I think we need to rewrite this and keep it simple. We need to take these first two emails and turn them into a 10-day drip campaign.”
They said, "Do you think people will make a decision?"
“Yeah. I basically just want them to get the information and find out who's buying the kit and who's not buying it so I can go onto the next person.”
There was no motive of serving with this particular campaign. It was all about how much can we sell. I came in as the copywriter and ended up working as the VP of marketing. I ended up really helping the whole company redo what they were doing and get back over to $3 million in under a year.
Here's the reality; rewriting the copy just to be Flesch-Kincaid below 7.2 was huge. It made an enormous difference in the results that we got. The clients already loved the company. They had a lot of repeat orders even though the owner completely jacked up a lot of the campaigns. One of the other things we did was create a newsletter to solve a problem. Everyone was constantly asking for someone to give them tips every month.
There were over 22,000 reps, and they weren't really publishing anything, but they were constantly trying to get enough information out so people would buy the kit. So I said, “Why don't you just publish a regular newsletter where you give a tip every month?”
They said, “Well, we do that already.”
However, the tips were turning into algebraic formulas. They were nearly written to read, “You're stupid and you should know this. It's bothering me to even have to tell you again.”
By the way, if you have any judgments against your customers, you should fix that. If you call 10 of your customers stupid, it's not likely God's going to send you 10 more. The person who has 20,000 customers loves their customers and doesn't call them stupid. God will gladly send your 10 customers to them. “Well, you know, these are just these stay-at-home moms. Just buy this kit. We just need to get these stay-at-home moms to buy more of this product. Can you just like hype-up the copy?”
Okay, self-control. I said, “Well, I happen to be one of those stay-at-home moms who happens to make seven figures from my home, and hype is not what sells things.”
So we went in and re-wrote what they were already saying. We did something brilliant. It was just genius. It should have been on Oprah it was so innovative. I asked them every month what they struggled with.
Okay, we're in January. We just got done with New Year events, and they were doing event planning, working up to this, that, and the other thing.
• What is your biggest concern?
• What is the struggle you're having?
• Is there a problem geographically for you?
• What is different?
Help us to serve you!
Lo and behold, we helped give the answer to what they struggled with. Actually, the owner and I ended up developing a really good relationship, so I consulted him by saying, “You'd do really well to profit now and maybe sell this company.” So when the company was making quite a bit of money, that is exactly what they did and profited handsomely!
The Flesch-Kincaid score was a huge part of this campaign and it doesn't matter what you are selling.
There are people everywhere, and we can impact them by leading them with what they've already said, what they want, where they're at, and what concerns them.
[back to top] Chapter 14 Activate, Execute and Prosper Daily in Business
I’ve seen some of the greatest business relationships started with people who connected in our client base. It’s just amazing. Some people ask, “What do you do with a survey when you don’t have a list yet, but you’ve got people following you on social media?”
Create the survey in Survey Monkey and when you’re done creating the survey it says, “Here’s the link to send to people.”
You may just want to call it “Survey on ___” – Survey on Auto Responders, or survey on whatever people struggle with – and you can get some great data as well from your social media. As a matter of fact, that would build rapport with your social media people because it’s asking them questions.
I don’t call myself a social media marketer, however, an enormous amount of our profits – more than half – are due to social media. But remember, a lot of that has come through that media because I’ve directed people who are following us on our lists to social media. This is important. When I show up, I show up the same way. I don’t sound like a Harvard grad in my newsletter. I don’t sound like a goofball on my videos, even the one with the yoga ball, and I am bouncing up and down.
Regardless of where I show up, I’m consistent with my voice.
You may have to outsource your voice or have people who can help you. Just make sure they can mirror you. I’ve done that for clients before when I was copy writing. Before I had even gotten into social media with my business I would be them on social media. Their job was to tell me whatever they were doing throughout the day. I had never done anything on social media before and had maybe 25 followers on social media total, but I had a long track record of copy. So I basically went into social media like a copywriter and direct response marketer and it was just another platform.
Why the heck would I sound different?
I never really took on a social media persona. I never really took on, “I’ve become a part of social media,” but, instead, showed up as a direct response marketer and copywriter on social media… and it converted like crazy!
If somebody outsourced and I was their voice, I listened to them for hours. The same way I listen to you, the way I ask you questions.
Let’s say you hired me back when I was available as a copywriter to be your social media person, because you didn’t have time or desire to do it. I would ask first to have exposure to at least 12 hours of recordings of you – audios, DVDs, written books if you had them – whatever it was I would completely saturate myself with your tonality.
I actually had such a blast doing it because clients I worked with would say it was the weirdest thing when they got tweets from themselves and it sounded like them. Or they would say, “It sounds like the better version of me. It sounded like me where I want to be. You actually just spoke faith into me because you were being who I wanted to be.” It was fun.
So if you ever do have somebody who you outsource that to, make sure they can mirror you and your words. You want to ask a copywriter how they are at mirroring people. You also want to be ready to give them audios and stuff like that. People can’t mirror you if you don’t have anything to mirror yet.
If you don’t have a list and you’re building your list, you can do a survey through social media. Send out the survey on social media. You could actually even go into Facebook, create a note and write an email like you might have written to your list in a note.
Social media is a list anyway. That’s all it is. It’s just list building on a different platform, it’s no different.
Being able to speak to where they’re at, to what they’ve already said, and to things that concern them is important. It is all the same. That’s not just big, that’s not just huge, that’s ginormous.
You’ll never be able to do it:
• If it’s what you think they should be.
• If it’s what you think they want to be. • If it’s what you think would be in their best interest.
You want to speak life into your clients. Life begets life. Certainly we have to become aware of our sticking points and our struggles, but you want to speak to where they’re going, speak to their potential. It’s a whole lot easier for you as a servant and a leader to get them there if you do that.
It’s the wildest thing. Spiritually you will end up where you want to be if you will help lead others to where they want to be. This is a huge breakthrough that has happened to me in the last two years. I didn't focus and say, “I’m going to lead everybody to where they want to be.”
I had asked God for a word on January 1, 2010, and I really heard in my spirit, “If you teach people what I have taught you, and you help them to do what they want to do, you will not lack one good thing, Sandi.”
I can tell you that He has fulfilled that promise in my heart, and in so many areas of my life. I want to give that to you.
If you will teach people what you’ve learned, what you know and what you’ve experienced, you will help them get to where they want to be. You will not lack one good thing – not one!
So lead them to where they want to be.
This is obvious especially if you’re dealing with coaching or you’re dealing with fitness. I deal with copywriters who might be scared to death to write, but they want to make a lot of money writing. They truly believe they want to write, but then they’re afraid to write! There’s obviously a belief issue there.
They might say to me, “I want to make seven figures writing copy in the next year just like you did,” and I say, “I’m not quite sure where you heard that I made seven figures in my very first year ever of writing. Not true.” I wasn’t a writer in my kitchen business, although I’ve always written 100% of my own copy. I’ve never once hired somebody to write copy for me in all of my years of business.
So many times I have to say, “What are you currently making?” It’s always anywhere between $35,000 and $80,000.
“So if you were able to double what you’re making…” Let me give you this little reality check as a gift!
I also have people say, “I make $85,000 a year and I’m not willing to walk away from that; I really want to double that and I’m lacking time.” I say, “Let’s see how much you make,” and they repeat, “I bring home $85,000 a year.”
I say, “Yeah, but let’s see how much you make.” Then I ask them how much they’re paying for gas. Depending on where they live it’s $4.19/gal or $4.99/gal or maybe even more. We look at how much they are spending on wardrobe, repairing the car, childcare, convenience meals you buy because you work 40 hours a week and with your commute it’s 50 hours a week.
A lot of people who make $80,000 a year are actually making anywhere between $35,000 and $40,000, and they’re usually shocked.
Then I get out my calculator and I do $40,000 divided by 12 (which is $3,333), divided by 4, and I say, “So your goal to replace your current income without a lot of the expenses you currently have…” – let’s pause there. When you run a company out of your home, you’re still going to need some help with childcare. You’re probably just not going to have to pay for childcare for 40-50 hours.
So the total ends up at about $833 a week. You can hear the shock in their voices when they say, “I’m gone 50 hours a week for $833?”
I’m helping them not only get what they want, but to understand how realistic it is that they could get it more quickly. I have people who make $3,000 to $4,000 a month, and when the rubber hits the road they’re actually bringing home about $1,500.
I’ve got Ruby clients who realize, “That means I need to sign up two coaching students a week. Well, I’m already doing that.”
“Okay, so let’s just increase what you’re doing,” I say.
“Oh my gosh, so that’s all I’ve got to do to bring my wife home?” They respond in shock.
“Yeah,” I reply.
“Oh my gosh. And then I wouldn’t be also taking care of the baby or trying to find babysitters when I try to do some marketing, or if I’m traveling for some of the promotional DVDs.”
“Nope. It becomes a family affair. If you’ve got to travel for the promotional DVDs, pack that baby and your wife with you. Make it a 5-day trip when you’re only there for a day and a half. And make sure that you talk to people about your business all five days. Answer email. It’s a write-off, because you have to continue running your business while you’re there.”
Speak to people where they want to be. I always use the words of their subconscious mind because that is where the buying decision is anyway. Everyone, when all is said and done, purchases something because of the way it makes them feel. That’s it.
Every purchase is tied to an emotion, always. Your emotions might be different than mine. The reason you might buy a three-carat diamond that’s a D quality and gorgeous clarity and brilliant is because it makes sense and it’s smart and you’ve studied the marketplace and it’s a great return on your investment. Because the minute you walk out of the jeweler’s its worth is actually going to increase. I might do it because it’s a girlhood dream, and because of what the salesman said.
People say to me all the time, “Dang, that branding with the pink hair, that was brilliant! Did anybody coach you on that? You’re known all over the place for the pink hair!”
I had a client, Caroline, who was writing marketing copy for makeup, and I said, “We don’t reinvent the wheel. We go look at some of the best makeup companies in the world. My personal opinion is that MAC Cosmetics rock, so let’s go check out their website.” We did, and we got some great information, great words that they’re using and ideas based on how they’re talking to their clients.
Then we went over to YouTube, and something there in front of me made me say, “Oh my gosh!”
Caroline goes, “What? Tell me!”
I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. It doesn’t have anything to do with marketing.”
She said, “What is it?”
I said, “Check out that makeup artist!” Her hair was exactly like mine is now! It was brown in the back and all platinum blond with a streak of pink in it. I said, “I’ve got to have that!” It wasn’t because I was thinking it would be a great marketing thing. It’s just fun and it feels good. “Cool! I’m doing it!” The next day I was in the salon.
Some of the biggest reps in candle companies and makeup companies, by the way, are men, because they know how to listen to women. They know how to repeat back to women what they’ve said they want. Interesting, huh?
Have you ever noticed that women are not creating the best vacuums on the earth? I have a Dyson that’s about 5 years old. Confession: periodically I pray that it will die because I want the new one. Now, if my iPhone doesn’t die and the new one’s coming out, hands down, bar none, it is a write-off. I’m getting a new one. I guess I could write off the vacuum. I could give it to somebody in the neighborhood who needs one.
Anyway, men create the vacuums, and what happens when the vacuum breaks? We bring it to our guys and we’re saying, “We’ve got to replace the belt and the stinking bag, and I need an inhaler when done cleaning it out. I’m vacuuming and nothing feels clean, and I don’t even see the dirt.”
It’s a smart man who said, “Help these women feel gratification instantly. Show them the dirt.” I remember when I first got my Dyson. I wanted to vomit almost because I had just had our carpets cleaned a couple weeks before, and I vacuumed my living room and it filled the whole bucket. I said, “Oh my gosh! This is awesome!” I was looking for excuses to vacuum.
How many ladies have ever said, “I vacuum but I just don’t ever feel like my house is clean? I know it looks clean, but it just doesn’t feel clean.” So show them the dirt! It makes it feel clean.
Women are always talking about how they need a vacuum to get under the furniture, and they need a vacuum to go around the corner, and to go up the stairs… so they made it all easy, and the copy repeats back to us exactly what we said. It’s brilliant.
[back to top] Chapter 15 Talk Them Through Your Process
Speaking to the subconscious mind is nothing more than saying to people what they are already saying to themselves.
One of the biggest mistakes that I see CEOs make is to speak from the position of where they are at personally. When you’ve already overcome different things and you’ve already figured something out, it is going to be a big temptation to speak to people from where you’re at, because you know the whole road map.
I have talked to one of my other Ruby clients, Sharon, about this on our calls. She knows where people want to be – financially independent – and she knows what it takes to get there. A lot of people don’t want to deal with the steps; they only want to get there.
She not only has a road map for them, but she could probably tell them all the restaurants and pit stops, too, because she's taken the journey. It’s really easy to just want to say, “Here, this is how you get there.”
They come in with a ton of questions and just want to figure it out. They’re so grateful to have somebody answer their questions and we’re so excited to be connected. I say, “My job is to help you get there step-by-step-by-step, because if I tell you it all right away, you’re either going to choke or you’re going to vomit, because it’s way too much initially.”
I always have to ask myself, “Who am I talking to?” It’s not that I’m clueless about who I’m talking to, but maybe it’s just that, for example, a couple of minutes before a Diamond call, after just finishing with a Gold, I need to recalibrate. “Okay, what are their needs? What are they saying?” Otherwise I could come in and be all over the place, totally confusing people. I’m sure I occasionally do that anyways. Actually, I guarantee it. I confuse myself sometimes, but I work really, really hard to be where my clients need me.
Before we do any class, before we even do any PR, I know that we’re going to have follow-up. I know that people are going to ask questions. I put my server guy on high alert when I do a PR. I tell my staff, “This is going out. I’m getting ready to launch this. We’re going live with this,” because I know the questions are going to come in.
When I’ve accidentally forgotten, staff members will say, “Ok, I just went to lunch and what did you just release, because there’s 17 questions in the last nine minutes and 16 people who said they just bought something and they’re supposed to be added to a Facebook group.”
“Oh shoot, I forgot to tell you about that thing we were talking about last week, I just launched it.” A couple times during the month I regroup by asking, “OK, what is their next step? I need to remember where they’re going to be next. What are all the oppositions they’re going to encounter?”
Then when you hear me say, “By the way, you’re going to encounter this, you’re going to deal with this,” the exercise applies everywhere. I tell my higher level clients every year around May, “High alert! We are at the middle of the year point. Some of your customers are going to check out. They’re going to go on vacation. You’ve got teachers who are on vacation. You’ve got construction workers who are working 10 times more than they typically do. Some of the things that you normally did aren’t going to work. This is where you need to go get new clients to add to your database.”
Historically I have made more money during the winter and the summer when everybody else went on a siesta, because it’s a whole lot easier. There’s a whole lot less competition. So this is what you need to do…
Let’s use an example. When you do workouts, one of the things you have to tell people is, “By the way, after you work out for your first week or two your body’s going to swell. You will get inflammation. You will think, ‘What the heck is going on? I’ve been beating myself up in the gym and I’m now swollen. This is not working.’”
Underneath the initial inflammation is the lean fit body they want. Trust me. Just keep drinking water. Just keep working out, because right around day 21 you’re going to wake up one morning and say, “Whoa! How did that happen overnight?” It didn’t. It was just hiding under some of the inflammation.
I speak to my clients and I say to them, “By the way, your brain is getting a little inflammation about now because you’re trying to bring all these different things together. The fact of the matter is you’ve just got to stay focused. You’ve just got to keep moving forward. Trust me, within another couple weeks or within another couple months, if you keep moving you’re going to say, ‘Oh my gosh, that makes so much sense. Now I see why you said that. Oh, now I see why we do that.’”
I call that speaking to where they’re at. It’s what’s going on in their subconscious mind.
When Christine and Tara from www.OnlinePRMedia.com came into my life I asked them, “Where the heck have you been? Let’s compete with PRWeb.”
They said, “Oh my gosh, that’s our goal!” And off we went. They get copywriting, marketing, and social media. They were trying to market to people by giving away things really inexpensively and hadn't built a list. I thought, “No, just start publishing a newsletter, start getting out some of this information for free, and let’s start creating an opt-in.”
Within six to seven weeks, they built a list of almost 6,000 and are adding 100 new opt-ins a day. The girls said, “Listen, this is our last try. We know we can do this thing. Yeah, we’re making a great high six-figure income, but we know we’re capable of going to a million. Sandi, we took out a small business loan for your coaching.” That’s a lot of pressure!
I said, “First of all let me look at everything you’ve got.” I drilled them with questions. “I need the data, I need the data, I need the data. I need to see how many clients. I need to understand the prices. I’m going to be honest with you. I’m going to be straight with you. I’m going to tell you whether or not you need to stay in coaching or you need to get out of it and pay that loan back.”
I looked at what they had and thought, “They know how to talk to their clients.” It was just a matter of putting it out there. They even wondered, “Will our clients feel like we’re intruding by taking our information and sending it out to them?”
I said, “Are you kidding me? You will be their best friend if you tell them how to make money with PR. Help them get successful with your product or service. What do they come in with? Some of the free or low-cost PR, and then you offer them a newsletter where you give out free tips and information on how to profit with the PR that they’ve just hired you to do.” Pretty wild, eh?
They are not making it super-technical, and they are really, really smart, so one of my jobs is to help them keep it simple and in incremental steps. That’s a huge key for all of us, especially if you have such a big message. You have to keep it in small increments. Go make your first million with the small increments and get very stable customers and deep relationships, and then add more increments.
I only do my mastermind things once or twice a year, where I cocoon clients in a room for 10 hours with 10 other people. These are not people in my coaching programs. We’re in there and we dissect the heck out of your business and we fix whatever we can. We record the whole thing and we bring in food.
We only do that a couple times a year because it’s not for everybody. It’s not in a price range for everybody and it’s not for everybody’s business yet. If I was going to build my whole business around that I would think I was a loser, because only a small percentage of my client base is ready for that.
If I had a ton of people following me and a big list and wanted to build a seven- figure business on only doing those kinds of masterminds, I would be depressed because I can only serve a limited amount of people. Not everyone can pay for it or they’re not ready. That’s actually my higher level, and my whole business model is built on getting people through the steps.
Everybody has where they want to go, by the way. Not everyone wants to make seven figures and when all is said and done, really want to build a huge business with a bunch of staff or a bunch of virtual assistants. Some would love to even just make $1,000 a week, which is beautiful! You don’t have to pursue anybody else's dream. So as I create incremental steps along the way, I am being a good servant and a leader to you by helping you get to where you want to be. No one enjoys having more than they want forced on them.
Even if you have a seven-figure business potential, but deep inside there is no desire to build a million-dollar business, I am doing you a disservice to constantly drill you about building a seven-figure business. I need to create incremental steps where you can come through my funnel to achieve your goals. My question for you right now is, “What are your incremental steps?”
What are the steps you know will lead someone to the level of success you offer? For me, I know that when I take you through this, you may fall off. You'll reach the level you're comfortable with and be done. That's fine if it satisfies you.
On my end, I’m not only helping you achieve what you want, but I’m creating for myself a higher quality client at each level because there’s less confusion. We’ve seen experts build multimillion dollar businesses and then they host their first seminar and try to teach people what they did in a 23-hour weekend.
That doesn’t help anybody at all. Nobody is going to go back and take your five- year business plan and execute it with a 23hour CD. They’ll probably go get a job. But by offering incremental steps, you allow people to qualify themselves for the next set of steps. You are forcing more than they can handle and they can always get more.
Even at that, we still need to remind our clients how to avoid overload and the inaction it can create. I have been through courses where they told me, “I know going in your head’s going to hurt, Sandi. Just take one actionable step of it.”
Rich Schefren is an example of a complete genius who has programs that have taken me three to four years to get everything out of. I just love him. He’s an amazing man, very humble, a great dad and father. I said to him, “Rich, my head hurts!” and he replied, “Just take one actionable step.”
He said, “By the way, you’re not supposed to digest everything in 30 days.” So I’m saying that to you as well.
Our coaching and our products are not meant to be inhaled in a day, week, or month. Take each incremental, actionable step and be solid every step of the way. That’s the kind of business you want to build, too.
Now, to get your clients started down your step-by-step path, you need an entry door.
[back to top] Chapter 16
Let Me Show You My Entry Doors... FREE Offers
To get more clients in the door, we have our seven-part video series which is a free 30-day program, our WordPress mistake report, and several others that speak to different, specific interests. These are all where you enter, also known as an opt-in offer.
In fact, one of our opt-in offers is a report called, “How to Create a Radical Opt-In Offer.”
I started with the WordPress Mistake Report and it was great. We got over 20,000 opt-ins before I created the seven-part video series, which was phenomenal as well. The 30-day training has been my most robust offer, but we worked our way up to it. Don’t go to a 30-day offer as your first thing. Try seven days and work with it, because you might have to tweak it.
Now I use the various entry doors in magazine offers, banner ads, pay-per-click and every time I speak on a webinar. I’m just creating separate pages where I receive people for separate opt-in offers.
So everybody’s coming in here, but as you’re seeing, each one of these free offers is related the same general topic. It’s all going to take you into one specific need. From there you will spin off with another need like…
• Email marketing
• Social Media the Fun Way
• Online blueprint
• List building • Tracking, generating your own leads
More than 50% of my clients go through one of those programs. After that initial level, you start having the fall-off. That’s normal business. The ones who go through all of these or they go through a couple are ready for the next step.
But whether it’s a free call, videos, free webinars, free report, or free training, all of this leads again to another level. Which, for me, are some of my teleclasses and webinars. I’m bringing you through a process to try to get you to your goal.
You’re going to stop where you want to stop.
My goal is not to see how many of you I can get into my Diamond program; that’s a losing business model.
My goal is not to see how many of you I can get into my mastermind group. That’s a losing business model because not all of you want to get to that level.
Everyone might say they dream about that level, but when push comes to shove, their whole life would be changed if they made an additional $5,000 a month. For some, their whole life would be changed if they made $10,000 a year and were completely debt-free.
Your life might change if you’re just able to make money whenever the heck you feel like it, conduct four or five live events a year and all you do is newsletter publication for the rest of the year.
It’s not my job to tell you what you should be doing in your business. My job is to serve you and to help you get to where you want to go. Only after coming through the initial phase of specific interest products and programs do our coaching programs come in. That's important to note because people said to me, “Oh sure, you made seven figures in the last 14 years. Have you ever made any money without coaching?”
I only started coaching recently. Not more than one-third of our entire company profits come through coaching. We’re not built on a coaching basis. Phooey. That’s a losing business model.
My business is built on taking people through consumable products to get them to the next step, because not everybody’s going to go into my coaching.
I get into pay-per-click advertising a wee bit at the Gold level. My one-on-one clients, the Rubies and Diamonds, get into more pay-per-click advertising because a lot of people say they want to do pay-per-click, but their site is not ready to sell anything yet. Does that make sense?
Plus, as my mindset coach, PJ McClure, teaches; I build my business to support the kind of life I want to live. I'm very strict about the hours I work and don't want a coaching-heavy business. So I know my self-imposed limits to keep myself happy and healthy, and I listen to what my clients say.
One Diamond member begged me for a VIP level, where basically he wanted to only meet with me. He said, “Why don’t you create a team where only four or five people meet with you like four times a year for the weekend and that’s it?”
I said, “OK, the Diamond program is $1,297 a month.”
He fires back, “Shoot, I’d pay $20,000.”
I pay $40,000 to get Bill Glazer on the phone a half-hour three times a year and to meet with him three times a year with people who fly in from Israel, Iceland, and all over the place. He’s that valuable to me. One half-hour on the phone with that man and we sold over 2,500 copies of Social Media the Fun Way.
I couldn’t get into his Platinum level until I had a business at the seven-figure level. Each level of coaching is structured to serve who is ready for it.
My Diamonds want one-on-one with me. They have my cell phone and I probably have received six texts all year. That’s how busy they are. But they know what works best for their time and attention. If you don't offer what your clients tell you they want, someone else will.
We also have the Inner Circle, because I knew that there were some people who were happy with getting on the phone once a month so they could ask me a question. I'm there with them once a week with a video to help them take an actionable step that is related to their business and help them go to the next level.
For some of them it will be nothing more than a mastermind, because they need the people in that Facebook group to hang out with. They want to be with other people that understand. That’s why we made it a ridiculous $97/month. We’ve got a lot of people who are going into that and it helps them to pursue their next level.
Again, my whole business model is not to create Diamond clients. It’s not. My goal is to help you go through to where your next step is.
We have our coaching, and even below the coaching would be the masterminds. Then I also do a VIP day where I’ll fly into somebody’s location and spend an entire day with them. That’s $10,000, because of the time out of my schedule and because I only do maybe four or five every year.
Another word of encouragement
I started out wanting to run a business so I could make money and get what I want, and God, in His amazing wisdom, has brought me to the point of telling me, “You’ll never lack any good thing, but I want you to pay very close attention to what other people want. You have the power in you, Sandi, to help them get it.”
So do you.
This is something that I speak over my life every day, because I believe that the King of Kings not only dwells with me, He lives in me. He’s alive and well. Otherwise you would not see the brilliant woman I am. I would be a mess. Everything that I need is within me now. I don’t lack anything at all. Not because of who I am, but because of who He is.
I challenge you to say that before you start your day…
“Everything I need is within me now.”
God has given you everything you need, and the more that you come to know Him, the more you’ll become acutely aware that He’s given you everything you need.
He’s also the one who doesn’t say, “No, uh-uh!”
He’s constantly saying, “Ask! Ask! Ask!”
I’m an asking fool. If you have listened to my calls, you’ve heard me say, “OK God, we need a little help. Thank You.”
It’s nothing like, “Ok, let’s go into a solemn moment of prayer, and we’re going to ask God to enter.”
He’s on the coaching call with us the minute you dial in. I simply ask, “Hey! Hello! You said You search to and fro across the earth seeking whom You may show Yourself strong on their behalf. I’m right here! Over here! Do it over here!”
Is there something you want or need that will move you forward into serving your clients and building your business to support the life you want to live? Ask. [back to top] Chapter 17 Release The Gift That God Gave You
Roger Love is an amazing voice coach who has worked with me on speaking, but he is actually known as a voice coach for singing. You may not know how terrifying singing in public was for me until the night I sang on stage at one of my events.
I've had people tell me all kinds of different things. Some have had their gifts squashed because you made a big mistake with them. Maybe your gift threatened people, or maybe you thought, "Good God, what if I let this go? What am I going to do with it then? I don't have enough time for another gift."
I have a spiritual principle that I would like to tell you about. For the last several years I've had music playing in my office 24/7. It never stops. I believe angels go where there's worship for God. I don't know about you, but I want angels in my office. Don't you want a few angels in your office?
It's really kind of neat. I think the opposition has a really hard time hanging out where there is worship of God going on. My office is almost like a cocoon and it's the only place I had ever sung. It could be because at one point in my life I had esophageal erosions and I was constantly raspy.
Not only is it miraculous that I can hit any high note, but that my esophagus is completely healed. I had developed a fear of using it because I worked long and hard to baby it with different foods and not strain it in any way.
When I got back into fitness after not working out for 17 years, I encountered this drastic, horrific fear of the pain in my muscles. I hadn't felt that kind of pain in a long time. I worked out a couple days and all of a sudden I needed to talk to my muscles because they needed to be reminded that this is not systemic lupus. My whole body was hurting.
I realized how much I have held back because the pain reminded me of when I lived with massive pain. Back then, there were times when my whole body felt like it was on fire. If you were to try to hug me, it would feel like you had needles for fingers. Even being on a morphine drip did not help. The pain was massive.
You learn to do anything you can to protect your body from feeling pain. Now I'm working out, and I’m experiencing the inflammation and pain everyone gets when they begin working out.
When I sing, it really comes from way down there and drums up a lot of emotional stuff. I can't tell you how many things I have sung my way through in my office. When I don't know what to say, there's a song on my iPad and I can sing my way through. As God is my witness, that night of the live event was the first time I sang with a microphone in all these years. Sure, I sing in my office and stuff, but the minute someone gets in front of a microphone everything changes. My head had been telling me, “You need to protect this.”
Earlier in the day I heard God say to me, “You know what, you're going to squeak until you get there, and you're probably going to bawl your eyes out at some point. Until you can get past that, you will not get to where I want to use you." I would love to be able to speak and then sing something that I have a hard time saying to people. Maybe they will be able to receive it more easily.
I have just been purposefully vulnerable with you because you have to go do the same. It's possible that what you are going to do to prosper means that you are going to have to get sore. You might have to squeak. You might have to bawl your eyes out and flub up.
You just might have to have people who love you enough to say, “She certainly hasn't sung in 14 years, so I guess it wasn't that bad.” You're going to write something and they'll say, “Well, she certainly just started writing,” and you're just going to have to get past all of that and say, “Who cares. I have to do this.”
Here's the revelation I want to give you.
The amount of pain you experience keeping IT inside
is MUCH greater than
the amount of pain it's going to take to let IT out.
For the longest time, imagining the pain to let it out, to finally speak, to finally sing again felt like it was so much bigger than just singing. I thought to myself the other day, “I'll just start singing on YouTube. I'll just be in my office.” I could hear God say, “I don't think so. That's not going to work.”
Some of you are going to have to get past whatever IT is. Writing may not be it. Speaking may not be it. Singing may not be it.
Angela felt the same way with some of the things that she's done in writing and sharing her story. She shared with me a recommendation letter that somebody had sent in. It shocked her. The only thing she could say to me was, “They actually wrote that about me.”
She had some belief issues about staying small in a small town, her bloodlines, and what wouldn't threaten anybody. I remember when I said to her, “The pain of staying where you are at is going to get unbearable. You have to release it even if it doesn't produce anything. You've got to go do something with it.”
IT is going to go somewhere, my friend. IT is not going to disappear. For me, it was burning out my insides, and when I released IT and let it out, I was hoping to ignite a bunch of people. You have a gift – YOUR GIFT – and you must release that God-given gift. That was a huge breakthrough for me.
I remember when I realized that in order to be who I was designed to be, I needed to be different. As a young girl I was taught that being different was not a good thing. This is why I want to teach teenagers and college students.
If “do it, do it, do it” was something you were not raised with as a kid, and as soon as you hear that kind of thing something in you says, "Why bother. I'm going to fail. I'm going to fall on my face. It's going to get too hard. How am I going to do all this? I'm not going to be able to do it right!”
You just have to step out and do it.
There have been some things in me that I've just released, and they were not things I was supposed to do all the time. They were things that God just wanted to use to teach me about faith.
I went parasailing in Maui because they told me it's illegal to skydive there. That took huge faith for me, but I have a strong desire to jump out of a plane even though I'm terrified of the idea. I have a desire to look my fear in the face and say, "Aaggh!" as I jump out of a plane with a flag attached to my feet that says, “Freedom.” If we're going to do it, we've got to do it right!
Why it's illegal in Maui, I don't know. You can jump out of a plane in Indiana, but who the heck wants to do that? What glory is in that? I've got to jump out of that plane somewhere tropical. I hear there is little that you'll fear after doing that, even just once. I have also heard that I can do it in Fiji, so that's on my bucket list! Step out in faith and just do whatever IT is. Do whatever you must do to RELEASE the GIFT God gave you!
[back to top] Chapter 18 Activating, Executing, Prospering Daily and Weekly Action to Take In Your Business
You Must Blog Twice Per Week!
When I say “blog,” we know that I'm not talking about blogs that are used like a daily diary. Some people would do really well doing that, but for business what we're using is a blogging platform because of the way it populates Google and search engines.
When you put something in WordPress, Google looks for WordPress sites. It looks for those keywords. It's made to work that way, and I go into that in my WordPress class.
You should be blogging and writing twice a week. Once a week is not enough, but personally, I don't think you need to do it four times a week either. Direct response marketing companies have said Mondays and Thursdays.
I've actually seen some very large direct response marketing companies go to Friday and Sunday, and they're not getting the type of response they used to get. Create this content and then repurpose it into your digital newsletter. You basically just do it in your blog and cut and paste it into AWeber. In our newsletter class we talked about some of the different sections of it, but you can study my newsletter and you'll see what's in it every week. There's a schedule of activities. There's an offer on the bottom. There's a little editor's note in the beginning. The editor's note is building rapport.
I've been doing a newsletter for 14 years. MaryEllen Tribby came along last year and helped me put a couple different things together with her know-how of putting it through and what to offer in direct response marketing. I even did newsletters for my sales reps in direct sales. So when I was in network marketing I did a little newsletter, because what better way to keep up with everybody every week.
Even though I sent it out by email, people tended to read it more as a newsletter. It looked like a publication and that's why. If I send you an email, it looks like an ordinary email. If I send you a newsletter, it looks like a professional publication, so it takes on a higher level of value than what you usually read.
From there, you obviously send it out to your social media, and you need to be doing that twice a week. Personally I just program the whole thing. Right now it's programmed. Sharon is the author for tomorrow and it will go out onto the blog, onto the newsletter, and out to Facebook and Twitter automatically. It will go out in the morning and later in the afternoon. These are the activities you're doing twice a week. You want to build a list so that you have people to market to. The number one activity is to build a list. I've heard of people who come up with these courses to build a list without even having a website. Well, yes, you can do that with affiliate offers, but the business model I'm talking about is building a place where people come for your information regularly.
You're building a list of ideal clients where people come regularly. These are not just people you're hoping to sell something to on the fly. So building a list is your number one activity.
Everything that we've talked about so far in this book is what needs to give you the content for building your list. We talked about building a list in Social Media the Fun Way, and you can even get the digital version of the list-building course online. It’s all available to you when you go to my blog.
Building a list is critical. You don't own any of the traffic that's on social media. You don't own any of the traffic that comes through pay-per-click. The only time you own – meaning you can now strategically market whenever you want – is when you have the ability to get it in front of them through email.
Certainly there are deliverability issues these days. By the way, 47%-52% is pretty good email deliverability. Now, if you only have 1,000 people on your list and you're getting 73% deliverability, that’s terrific. However, as Hotmail, AOL, or SBC Global people start subscribing to your list, those numbers will change. Each one of those providers is known to have delivery issues.
For awhile I studied the delivery issues that copywriters have. The bottom line is that you're going to get to a certain point and that's what your deliverability is going to be. The way you increase deliverability is to have ideal clients reading what you're writing.
People tend to give fake emails with their opt-in. This is why it's so funny to me when people say, “I subscribed for the 30-Day Make More Money with Your Blog Training, but I've not gotten anything.” I'm thinking, “That's funny, because your email bounced and said the mailbox was full.” Or I got an auto response back from their opt-in address.
I usually scroll down and unsubscribe them if I see any of that. The reality is that's just normal online. You're going to have people who give you a fake email or one they don't answer, because they're still trying you out.
Then we get personal letters that I end up forwarding to Amity, and I hear, “I didn't get Day 1, and I really want that information.” So then she has an SOP that says, “It's possible that you gave us an email address that doesn't work. Everybody does this sometimes.” Using the language, “From time to time everybody does that. I'm sure if you had known the value of the 30-day course you probably wouldn't have done that. Here is where you can opt in again with a good email and here's your first day's content.”
Building a list is critical.
Once you have a list, then you can send out regular campaigns. You can send out regular email. You can send out regular updates. Something will happen and you'll want to send out an update about it and you'll have a list of clients to go to.
“But Sandi, I can do the same through Facebook and Twitter.” Yes but you can't guarantee they’re all going to be on there when you send it. By the time you do get onto social media, depending on how many friends you have and how many pages you follow, you may never even see it.
What's interesting is that our clients open up our emails and actually look forward to reading them. On my Facebook page they actually come there several times a day to see what our updates are. You can go to Facebook, by the way, and click on subscribe to SMS. It will text you every time I post something on my wall. Again, I am subjected to your decision to be live on social media, which determines whether or not you might see something I post or not.
Social media is an amazing platform. We've obviously had great results with it. But when I send you an email, it's going to sit in your hot little email box until you decide to open it. The only thing preventing me from getting it to you is if you gave me a poor email address, you don't take care of your email, or you don't clean out your cache or whatever. I've actually done my job.
I also recommend that you include in your marketing plan building an offline list within your first 6-12 months. You probably do not want to do this initially because it can be overwhelming and you may not know what you're going to market with it – but you want to build an offline list.
One of the easiest ways to do that is to give away a CD. If you're ready to give away a CD right now, do it.
When I say that to some people, it puts them into the same zone where I was with my singing. They actually don't have a CD yet. They have content and they need to work through it. They can write an e-book right now, but a CD is in their future.
If someone opts in, I can actually give them a CD for free for less than $3. So for $3 a lead, I can mail a CD right to your house and you have a tangible product in your hands. Personally, I think a CD is a great giveaway.
I have been hearing that the Internet is going to go down, and they're going to charge you like a postage stamp per email. That was the rumor in the 1980s. The government's going to shut the Internet down. What are we doing to do? I'm sitting here thinking, “Are you freaking kidding me? Do you have any idea how much of our economy is dependent on the Internet?”
There may be regulations or whatever, but I’m not at all afraid of anybody shutting the Internet down. It would take far more for them to do that than to regulate things. You've seen the different things that have come up. People have been saying for years, “Build an offline list because the President might shut the Internet down.”
I've been hearing this kind of stuff since I first built my kitchenware, but it is wise for you to build an offline list for many reasons. Way too many companies depend on email for their profits. An offline list is a high touch, high-tech method that cannot be beat. I don't mean offline only. I mean online/offline. If you come to my website and opt-in for something and get an email from me, we're communicating via email because I don't want to wait to just send you something.
If you opt-in for my CD, I'm not going to risk that in a week you're still excited about getting it. I know you will be when I show up in your mailbox, because people love getting mail. They love getting something in the mail that has their name on it and it's not a bill. And, I'm going to have a follow-up series that prepares you for the CD.
Maybe it gives you a sneak-peek at a section. Maybe it gives you a study guide that's only for people who opted in. I'm also going to invite you to join me on Facebook and Twitter.
I'm going to have you go from that opt-in over to my social media pages. We can build a relationship so that when I show up in your mailbox you will be so excited that you just devour the CD. Having your clients devour and consume what you have is EXACTLY what you want to have happen.
It's interesting, when I sold liquid nutritionals years ago, the marketing that I used read, “Do you want to join a company where people not only purchase something that they want but something they cannot be without?” Preferably consumable, something they will run out of. Not that they want it, but that they have to have it.
When I market something, I want people to not only read my newsletter; I want them to consume it. I want them to read it until they can't read it anymore and they can't wait for another one to come out. When they get this book, I'm just going to ask God to bless it like crazy and do ridiculous stuff with it so people just devour the thing.
[back to top] Chapter 19 How To Write A Great Bio
Let me help you write a bio of what you do. You can use this on your blog or social media. You can use this as your bio with your guest blogging. You can use this when you offer something on your website. Here’s an example.
Number one; tell us what the problem is that you solve. If you've been following us for a while, you've seen these numbers climb all the time. I'm constantly changing the numbers as they grow. I want to be a back-to-basics, step-by-step business expert.
What does that mean?
Well, some of the things I teach are timeless, whether you do them on social media, on the Internet, or face-to-face. They're step-by-step things that will work in any business. So I'm a back-to-basics business expert.
Is there something that you do for which there is a unique way to describe it?
If you're in fitness, maybe you're an easy to get along with fitness coach, easy to understand. Be someone who takes something from complicated to simple. Be someone who takes things and puts them in simple actionable steps for long-term results.
Are you an expert who helps people go further than they ever could without great expense? Are you somebody who can help people go through elemental principles? That's another couple of words you want to use in a bio, elemental principals. Back- to-basic principles. Simple principles. Timeless principles. Useable principles.
You can tell I'm getting a God download…
these words are just coming out! You want something that is foundational. Something that is provable. Something that is actionable. Something that is tested. Something that's been tried and proven. Something that has stood the test of time. Something that brings clarity out of chaos. Something that brings hope out of despair. Something that puts wings on dreams.
Somebody who's hardcore but loved by many, because hardcore people are usually hated. Somebody who will get in your face and celebrate when you succeed. Somebody you want in your corner. Somebody who's on the inside of your ring. Somebody on your team.
You can say you currently serve people internationally on the Internet if you're still building your list, because the Internet is international. If you put Google Analytics in, you'll be shocked the minute somebody from another country goes to your website. It's like, “Woo hoo! I'm serving people internationally!”
We are obviously counting the kind of people that are on our house list, and then we go to Google Analytics and check out how many countries.
I tell people that my systems help the average business owner as well as big corporations get extraordinary results quickly. It’s your plan, your path, your system, your approach, your blueprint, your map, your compass.
What does my client want? They want extraordinary results, and they want them quickly. Help people weave their way through all the crap. Find your way through, make your way through… travel a path that makes sense.
It doesn't have to be perfect. Trust me. Most people won't read the whole thing. They're just going to see the name, the URL, and check a bunch of things. Better to be very clear with something specific than to be perfect.
I'm telling you, you're just so going to be unimpressed with the simplicity of the things I do in my business. I go into AWeber and do my newsletter and it's all formatted beautifully, including my bio.
Our events, promos, and client feedback are all found on the bottom. The main article goes in the middle. I have an editor's note at the top. At the end of the article is my bio, centered beautifully.
Every week, Mondays and Wednesdays, I just hit copy in AWeber and it creates a copy of what I just sent. I change the subject line, the editor's note, the date. Sometimes you can tell when I'm really tired – I've been known to send out the newsletter with the wrong date. But that's how I manage to keep it formatted when I edit it. It's got to be easy for me. There's too much going on.
Let's say that one of my clients, Theresa, is starting a new online business. She has been in physical therapy for 19 years. Even though she hasn’t necessarily been working on the brain, she’s been helping people reach their goals physically and mentally for 19 years.
Some of you might say, “Yeah, but that's in an offline career.” But you have a track record doing something. You seriously should consider using that in your bio.
One of my other clients, Jimmy Hays, is featured on the Insanity CD.
I said to him, “Dude, if I was on that CD I would be marketing that thing until I was blue in the face.” He said, “Aren't people going to feel like I'm way ahead of them or whatever?"
I said, “You tell them you're not only on the DVD but you lost 100 pounds.” He's a small guy when you see him. When you find out he lost 100 pounds, you say to yourself, “Holy cow! You lost half of you!”
[back to top] Chapter 20
Banner Ads, Mommy Blogs, And More List Building
As I’ve hopefully established, building your list is huge. We teach the detail of banner ads in Social Media and List Building trainings. Banner ads on mommy blogs are huge.
There are some marketers who have had $50,000 to $100,000 budgets, and they've now begun to do banner ads on tons of mommy blogs for $100 to $200 a pop. They're now spending $10,000 to $20,000 a month getting the same results that they were with $100,000.
Mommy blogs are a phenomenon. You basically just go to Google and type in fitness mommy blogs, workout mommy blogs, fitness for mommy’s blogs, top mommy blogs, and you start seeing all the fitness blogs. You find a couple to test out and put them into your marketing budget.
Start out with one or two. If you put an ad in and it costs you $100, you put in two of them and it costs you $200. As soon as you sell $200 worth of product, go buy two more. Now you have $400 in ads out there. As soon as you get $400 worth of sales come in, go buy two more. Your original investment is staying at $200. Now you can put $200 more out and you've got $600. You've got six blogs you're advertising on, and $600 starts coming in. Now go do two more.
I'm about saturation. Did you pick up on that? I like creating a tsunami. Words that ring in my ears when I go into a niche is when someone says, “Who the flip is that? She's everywhere.” Now I've done what I needed to do.
The tsunami builds and builds and she's all over the place. They have no idea who the heck that pink-haired woman is in whatever niche I go into. That's my challenge-driven nature kicking in. Another thing is pay-per-click. The best way to test pay-per-click is to do headlines on social media. Test your headlines on social media. Do a sales page. Do your free offer. Do your blog.
Here, let me show you something. I said I wasn't going to go into copywriting, and all my clients said, “Please.” I studied some of the ads that people had and I tested this on a headline.
I tested some articles – Make Money Writing Online.
I tested on social media – Work from Home or Anywhere. Copywriting Training Made Easy.
People said, "I love copywriting training, but it makes my head hurt.” So I tested it online. I put it through social media. As soon as I got great conversion, I put it on there.
If you want to write pay-per-click, use Ispionage.com to study some of the people who are in the niche that you want to go into. Many times, I run my pay-per-click right to the front of my site. Why? Because I want them to see that I'm a publication. You're going to get a whole lot better response doing that than putting it in an isolated capture page.
I get people following me through social media who came through pay-per-click. If they didn't opt-in, so what? If they follow me for a couple days in social media they're either going to love me or hate me.
Pay-per-click is very strategic. Guest blogging is really important. When you are doing research for your mommy blogs and things like that, and we talk about this as well in our List Building course, you’ll find sites that would be great for you to guest blog on.
By placing a banner ad many times on someone’s site, they're going to become aware of you. Then follow them on social media. Before you know it, they may ask you to guest blog or you may ask if they receive guest bloggers. Some websites actually say, “Looking for guest bloggers.” It's a great way to get in front of other people's customers, and it's mutually beneficial.
Now you might say, “Mommy blogging? But Sandi, you're not really building your business with just mommies, obviously.” As you can tell, my client base is not all mommies. However, mommy blog sites have the most amazing reach.
I have an ad on a website that costs me $100 every two weeks, and on average we get from 73 to 150 opt-ins per ad. That's ridiculous. That's like a dollar or less. Then they follow me on social media. I love it when I hear, “I have no idea how I landed on your site. I'm reading your newsletter and I'm watching you on ____. Where the heck have you been all my life?” Or, “I found you on social media, and I subscribed to your newsletter. Oh my gosh, you're actually on that blog that I read! I saw you on all these other mommy blogs. You're on Google too. How did you get here?” That's like music to my ears.
Webinars are a great way to build your list. I built the first 5,000 on our list fast with that. Have a webinar that people need to opt-in to attend. Give it away. Do a teleclass that's live and not recorded. Spend an hour with people and give away information that they would typically pay you for. An example is our Monday night call. Tons of opt-ins came from that and still do. Do people turn around and share the phone number? Sure.
I even post it on social media. Do you have to opt-in to get the phone number? No, but I make it look like you do. I have so many free offers all over the place.
You'll get to the point where momentum builds. Each thing builds on the other, and before you know it – and many of you have experienced this – you get to this place where it's a well-oiled wheel. People are starting to come in and people are following you. People are commenting, and you start developing your first info product. You start doing a few ads and it continues growing.
Before you know it you're no longer obsessing about how many are coming in per day, because you're working so hard on all the other different activities. Charlotte is right at that point. She's right on the edge of a Diamond level where she's gone from, “Will they really buy my e-book for that much?” to getting ready for Diamond level.
She's now at the point where she will know how many are coming in, but she's not obsessing every day about how many are opting in. She has so many other different things to do in her allotted time for running her company. She's actually just hired her second assistant. She has somebody in graphics and video and now someone is managing the books.
Let me digress for just a quick moment. You've heard that I absolutely love the Bible, and I love studying the Greek and the history and all that. When you look at Jewish culture and look at different Middle Eastern cultures and all that, women never did everything all by themselves. Never. They constantly had people around them helping. This is how younger women were groomed to be good women in the home all over different cultures.
The industrial revolution came in, men went off to war, and before you knew it women were doing everything at home. What happens is you've got this superwoman thing where you are a good woman in the home even without help.
That's a bunch of poop. You know what I'm saying? Do you have to have help in all that to be successful? No. I've written blog posts about that, too. My thing is – and you know how much I can't stand the religious spirit –there are women who believe it's a godly thing to be the keeper at home and doing everything by themselves.
First of all, that's not even Biblical. The Biblical woman had many people helping her. She owned real estate, businesses, and had people she was accounting to. She was increasing the economy of everybody. It's so cool.
It doesn't say her husband rose up and was jealous of her. It says her husband rose up and called her blessed. He didn’t have a nasty word to say about her. He was encouraging.
Hiring help creates less drama-mama syndrome. You cannot have drama in business and make a lot of money. It's not going to last very long. People will be like, “Forget it. Go get some therapy. I'm going to this other website.” Hiring help is going to help you to become more of what you should be without a lot of drama.
One of the first things moms should do is save $100 a week. Work for that budget and get some help at home. Get somebody else cleaning the toilet. Get somebody else folding the laundry or whatever it is.
Now I'm weird, because I love to clean. I ran a cleaning business. I love keeping all that stuff, but the fact of the matter is I can't do what I do and keep my house clean. So I have a great woman who went to get her master's degree in teaching, and now there are no teaching jobs.
I pay her a nice salary and she's in my house. She’s got a great personality and does anything for me. She cleans, does all the laundry, and runs errands. When we went to Maui, she house sat and took care of my four-legged babies.
A lot of women are asking, “How am I going to do all this?”
You are not going to do it all.
And guys, just because you come home to work or run your own business, and you have that responsibility that God put in you to provide for your wife and your family (even if you're not married), you have that thing in you that's designed to be a warrior, too. To hunt and come back with what you've hunted – that does not mean you have to do everything all by yourself. Just because you may not have had any staff helping you in your corporate job, does not mean you're supposed to do everything by yourself or that you're less of a provider by getting help.
Ladies, you might think that sounds silly, just like the guys might think it’s silly that women don't get any help. There are guys who are in corporate America for 10, 20, 30 years, and they don't have a secretary. They don't have any assistants. They've been going out to war daily and coming back, bringing home the bacon. They come and try to start a business at home, and they're trying to do everything. They're still trying to cut the lawn, do the hedges, wash the car, change the oil, and fix the dang refrigerator when it's broken. They're still trying to do the painting and all that. Why?
Get some help from some young guys who need your mentoring. You'll have situations just as I do where some of the ladies who work with me will come to me for help with things that have nothing to do with business. What an honor being a mentor and serving like that is for me. Amy, the gal who cleans for me, came to me and said, “I'm just blown away at the relationship you have with God.”
She just graduated with a degree from a Christian college and she said to me, “I don't mean this in a judgmental way, but, man, there are a lot of people reading that book, claiming to be a Christian, but – "
I said, "Do you mean they've been baptized in pickle juice rather than fire, happiness, and freedom?”
“Yeah. I know I'm here to work, but seriously, can you just share with me? Like, how did that happen?”
I bought her first journal for her. I said, “So what's your reading plan?”
“I don't really have one,” she said.
“Ask Him what to read that day. I've read the Book of Proverbs, one proverb a day, for over 20 years.”
It is the book of wisdom, by the way. Here she is cleaning, and she asked for some help. How fun is that? She had no idea how to clean all the different things in a house. My own anal-retentive way would have said, “Oh phooey, nobody can clean this house like I clean this house.”
When you're a mom and you live in the house, you see everything. When somebody comes and cleans for you and they don't live there, they don't see it. So we have to train people to clean our homes. I've trained Amy to find things that she would have never even thought of.
She's come to me and said, “This is like, completely frustrating to me. It's not coming clean. Do you have a remedy for shower doors?” I do, lemon oil works well. So here I am helping a young lady who will one day be a mom.
I would love to change the economy of a lot of families because you've got women who are not married or who are young and don't have kids. If they learn to do a skill online, when they get pregnant and have a baby, they can continue to do what they do, take some time off, and still make money. They don't have to go through this gut-wrenching decision of choosing between being with their kids or a career that they love. In the course of her day she could drop her kids off at school, work from the comfort of her home office, and pick her kids up at the end of the day. When an illness or opportunity pops up, she is able to do what needs to be done.
This is the flexibility you can have from being able to work from the comfort of her home. That's the kind of stuff I want to see women and men stepping into.
Our nation was built on the entrepreneurial spirit. I'm not saying corporations are wrong. Obviously, I'm running one. I'm not saying the industrial revolution was bad. I'm just saying a lot of people adapted to a mindset of being able to just find a job to make money. Making money became their goal.
An entrepreneur’s goal has always been to fix something that didn't have a solution. An entrepreneur's goal is to have a challenge that they can chase and to impact people.
You'll never have an entrepreneur who just wants just one regular customer per week. The goal of entrepreneurship is to serve and impact many.
I want to make it very clear to you that I could not do what I do without the team I have behind me supporting me every day. More importantly, I cannot do what I do without YOU; our amazing, worldwide FAMILY of faithful readers, subscribers and clients. I am so blessed and so honored to have the privilege of serving you. Thank YOU!
Much love to you and your family!
Sandi Krakowski
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http://www.facebook.com/SandiKrakowskiBiz http://www.Twitter.com/SandiKrakowski Website: http://www.arealchange.com/blog The Accolades Continue For Sandi Krakowski’s “Read Their Mind”
“Working with Sandi has helped me in many ways but finding my ideal client has always been a challenge up until recently. I am thankful I have invested myself into learning from her wisdom and experience” Carol Giambri www.CarolGiambri.com
“I went to the Read Their Mind book tour event in Chicago and since then joined Sandi’s Inner Circle and although I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing, my mind and confidence have been lifted up to do something in business. I’m sure that working with Sandi and the team at A Real Change will be key in guiding me towards fulfilling my potential”. Josephine Hermans
“Sandi’s couching has brought me all the way through from scratch. I am now ready to start making money, with a positive mindset, how to read my ideal client, and with gods finger prints, I know I will make it. Her client base is awe-inspiring all on its own.” Brittany Huisman www.HappyDaysCopyWriting.com
“Sandi to me is a real dynamic down to earth Business and Life Coach, sharing her wisdom with people from different backgrounds. Her honesty and integrity speak for themselves. Her inspirations surpass all expectation. I feel very privileged and honored to be a part of her Coaching Family.” LaJanna Waddles
“In coaching with Sandi, I have learned what a direct response marketing business is. Sandi’s knowledge has given me the skills to discover many marketing strategies. Because of her keyword research training, two of my keywords have been on the first page of Google in first, second, and third positions consistently. Sandi’s trainings have also taught me how to monetize my professional expertise and create profits.” Rose Kirkland www.RoseKirkland.com
“Since starting work with Sand in June 2010, my dream of working for myself from home has not only come true, but I am now writing blogs for two of the biggest magazines in my niche AND working for the most amazing clients I could ever imagine. Sandi is by far the most passionate, focused, encouraging and inspiring business person and coach, I've ever had the pleasure of working with. I can’t thank her enough for everything that working with her has brought to my life.” Victoria Gazeley www.ModernHomesteading.ca
"Amazing! Sandi, your "Read Their Mind" book tour and "Social Media the Fun Way" program was so timely for where I am and helped me learn the social media strategies needed as I launch NICE - The National Institute for Career Empowerment where we provide tools and resources to break barriers for the entrepreneurial journey. I was able to implement your research and social media strategies immediately." Dr. Sarah David www.NiceAlliance.com
“I've always enjoyed the subject of marketing, and now I understand marketing on a whole new level because of Sandi's teachings! I am very excited to continue learning and implementing!! Sandi is an extraordinary teacher and mentor with an enormous heart for people.” Jill Taylor www.TimelesswithJill.com
“(Sandi’s) instructions are step-by-step. They work WHEN you implement! The best part is the new friendships I have found within Sandi's coaching program. She has a heart for each and every client which is genuine. By being a part of this coaching program, I have become part of a very special community where everyone works together to make a difference, each with our own dream! I'm very thankful to have found Sandi!” Sue Graber www.SueGraber.com
“In less than two months after starting Sandi's coaching my Alexa score dropped from 24 million down to 470,000 worldwide and 48,000 in the US. I have also written my first eBook which began to sell well right from the beginning. I don't believe I ever would have come this far, this fast without Sandi's coaching. ” Robert Seth www.ComplicatedtoSimple.com
“Sandi, you are an amazing leader, teacher, and cheerleader. I was the typical entrepreneur going in many different directions, thinking I could create multiple businesses, for everything I like to do…but all I did - was run myself into the ground. Julie Barnes www.OneWhoWrites.com
“I was at the brim of giving up my dream of my online venture and “she showed up” saying YOU CAN DO IT! don’t give up! I am right here next to you and will help you accomplish that for which you were created!!! Meeting her in person at the “Read Their Mind Book” event in Chicago this month was an experience like never before in my life. I saw her and “the family” that she has developed, where support, friendship, selflessness were totally alive.” Maria Delmy Vialpando www.internationallivingcoach.com
“The amazing discovery I've learned from Sandi is the power of asking questions on social media. From basic getting-to-know-you questions to tips on improving sewing skills, I've tripled my followers in three short months. Recently I asked the valuable question "What's most frustrating for you" and am now developing a 12- part training video series all based on their specific responses and "reading their mind." Jennifer Rosbrugh www.HistoricalSewing.com
“Sandi is a master communicator/marketer. While everyone else out there is confusing the heck out of entrepreneurs and business owners over tactics that seem to change overnight, Sandi teaches back-to-the-basics skills that deliver no matter what the medium. Even if she never produced another class, [this book] is sufficient for you to build a remarkable business of cult-like fans.” Nicole Gebhardt www.NicoleGebhardt.com
“To say thank you to Sandi doesn’t seem to convey the depth of my gratitude for the impact she has had on my life. But I do…every day when I log on to my website or open up my in-box and see the comments and responses from parents who have been helped by my work, I silently acknowledge with heartfelt gratitude Sandi’s hand in it. Bless you Sandi!” Denny Hagel www.MissingSecretToParenting.com
“I started out with no focus or purpose in business, spending time on Facebook and email just to chat, to now putting up a website, starting a business and writing my story. I have learned from Sandi about wordpress and I'm gaining skill by taking classes from her like copywriting, autoresponders, list building and Social Media the Fun Way. Thank you Sandi for impacting my life and my family's. You have brought a real change to my life!” Scarlett Von Gunten www.iWomanMag.com
“Attending Sandi's Chicago event renewed my energy and faith in my divine purpose to serve the aging. Keeping in Touch Solutions.com. is what I have been called to do. I am so thankful that I was able to hear Sandi's words of faith, hope and courage... the very words I needed to hear. A call to action to reaffirm my duty to serve and advocate for the many lonely and alone elderly Moms, Grandma's and frail elderly loved ones. To know that one of our cheerful Care Callers is calling your loved one every day (on your behalf) to check in and to offer words of encouragement and hope...to ask if they have taken their medications is our way to serve. Thank you Sandi for your inspiration, prayers of hope, and encouragement.” Diana Beam www.KeepingInTouchSolutions.com
“Sandi Krakowski took me by the hand, brought me to the path and shone the light on which way to go. I started in January 2011 with no clue what to market let alone how. With her coaching I now am building a business I am passionate about. I wrote my first book and am working on a video organizing course. I am so grateful I listened to my gut, and not to the gurus, and joined her Gold Program. I am not walking in the dark anymore, thanks to Sandi.” Elvie Look www.ElvieEssentials.com
“You would think that learning the ins and outs of business through blogging, though essential, could be somewhat boring. But Sandi's teaching is nothing short of engaging, compelling, and downright entertaining! I learned more during a weekend with Sandi than I have in any other business training. Maybe it's because she is a "No B.S., down-to-business-but-do-it-with-a-smile" kind of girl.” Lainna Dobosz www.LainnaDobosz.com
“I started in the Gold program 2 months ago and have already started blogging twice a week, something I never thought I would do. I gained the courage to quit my day job and follow my passion to build my business online. I am in the process of creating a video coaching series and writing an ebook. I guarantee that I would not be where I am without Sandi's support, encouragement and spirit. God also used Sandi to bring me back into a relationship with Him. Sandi is my sister in Christ and my mentor in business and I will be forever grateful to her and her work! Thank you, Sandi.” Randi Munns www.peakability.com
“Sandi Krakowski has literally been a Godsend. I prayed for a way to move my business forward through the internet. Sandi’s teaching and inspiration has made all that possible. Not only has she given me the tools to use, but she also gave me the faith and support to go beyond the initial idea of my website. Thank you, Sandi, for changing my life.” Barbara Falkenberg www.babytravelsite.com www.makewayforyourdreams.com
“Sandi’s passion, humor, transparency and powerful leadership as a business woman, wife and mother have rocked my world. She says it how it is from a place of huge compassion for ‘the human condition’ because she alone has faced her own limitations and resistance full on. She oozes love freedom fun and prosperity and believes in us to do the same. She calls a spade a spade and I love it … she truly is living a whole new way to do business and make this world a better place for all children.” Sandy Leathem www.SandyLeathem.com
“My work can be found all over the world including United States, Belize and New Zealand. I am working with Sandi to gain mastery in copywriting skills. I can’t wait to serve my clients with killer sales copies that converts and helps them achieve massive results. The step by step strategic coaching that Sandi provided in the last few months has created results in my business. I am learning and implementing.” Claudia Looi www.uncommongeneration.com
“Prior to meeting Sandi, I was just about ready to abandon my dream of ever creating a profitable home-based business online. Since working with Sandi, I have finally been able to create a real business that allows me to do what I love and do best.” Rose Mis www.RoseMis.com
“I have been blessed greatly because of Sandi Krakowski and her amazing team. In a few short months, I am being coached out of my “comfort zone” toward my dream of becoming a professional speaker on Hope, Enthusiasm, Patriotism, Freedom and God. I now have a blog and I am building a worldwide organization with my business opportunity. God Bless you and your family Sandi. Who you are truly makes a loving difference.” Bill Fleischhauer www.livingoutloudwithbill.com
“For the past few years, I have felt scattered in the direction I should take my business. This road block weighed on me heavily and stressed me out. Sandi helped me clear the confusion so I could get unstuck and gracefully integrate my ideas and passions in a matter of minutes on the “Miracle Couch” during the Read Their Mind Book Tour.” Jen Springer www.naturalanxietytherapy.com
“I have read more, done more, tried more, and tweaked more than I ever would have in my business and personal life. I've met so many great people as a result of my connection with A Real Change. You are such a blessing, much love” Tiffany Johnson www.virtualhiredhand.com
“Sandi, you have changed my life, given me hope and the tools to begin to implement what has been in my heart for such a long time. The business tools you teach and the integrity you teach is phenomenal.” Shahina Lakhani www.throughlifeanddeath.com
“Sandi has inspired me to dig deeper, reach higher and go further in finding online business solutions than I thought possible.” Bret Thayer www.thayerism.com
“Sandi has really helped me understand how I can better serve and connect with my clients. I have lots of great tips to start implementing immediately.” Lori Thayer www.LoriThayer.com
“Prior to connecting with Sandi, I knew nothing about setting up a website, WordPress or writing a blog. Sandi makes something that seems so complicated and scary easy to understand, fun rewarding and very do-able. Hey philosophy of “Ready-Fire-Aim” has been great for me, encouraging me to take action and implement what I’m learning while I’m learning instead of waiting until I know it all.” Jandi Theis www.EverydayEncouragement.com
“I have wanted a blog/website for over a year. Since my husband and I started with Sandi’s calls and courses a few months ago, I could see the possibility clearer and know that whatever tools I need, I can find. Last week I purchased my domain and am beginning my dream!” Margie Fleischhauer www.dreamboardworld.com
“I have wanted a blog/website for over a year. Since my husband and I started with Sandi’s calls and courses a few months ago, I could see the possibility clearer and know that whatever tools I need, I can find. Last week I purchased my domain and am beginning my dream!” Kris Taylor www.ktaylorandassoc.com
“I am a social entrepreneur where we use the home business model and the company uses part of the profits to send the nutrient dense technology that we have to orphanages around the world. What I have learned from Sandi has taken me from a grandma afraid of the computer to having an online business. I am so grateful for her step by step system and coaching that got me started and guided me along the way.” Pat Cruickshank www.passionatewellnessentrepreneur.com
“The first program of Sandi’s that I followed was on copywriting. As a “process- oriented” person, I had no idea where she was headed each session, and it frustrated me. Then one day I saw my writing shift from technical writing – my professional background – to heart-based writing – my greatest tool today to fulfill my life passion. If I learned nothing else from all the other programs, including her high- level coaching, I would still be in her debt. The gift she released in me is invaluable and that was just the beginning.” Sharon O’Day www.sharonoday.com
“The “Read Their Minds” Live Tour has changed the way I serve others in mighty and powerful ways! Through Sandi’s passion for helping other succeed, I’ve been inspired to listen not only with my ears, but also my heart, equipped to focus more clearly on helping my clients dream big, follow their passion and shine! Thank you Sandi for “keeping it real” and helping us soar with you to new heights!” Mary Kate Evans www.beacontopurpose.com
“The Live Book Tour is a key foundational piece to the start of a new Christian Counseling practice my husband and I just started. It has given me such revelation of the steps we need to take to build our business into what we dream of it becoming. I particularly have a flow of new ideas of how to use our website to not only advertise our services but to also reach our clientele through videos and virtual newsletters. I am so excited to implement the tools and strategies Sandi has given us through keywords, phrases, and “mind reading” tactics. I can’t wait to start writing.” Marla Castrilli www.trinityescape.net
“The most important information I learned was that building relationships is what will keep your business building. Also, asking questions and listening. You could say that when someone complains they are requesting something.” Linda Venters www.beyondthez.com
“My first introduction to Sandi was through her 30 day FREE blogging course, which blew me away and caused me to re-think and redo my own web-site. Attending her event in Chicago reminded me once again 1. to listen to what my clients are saying 2. serve all with a grateful heart and 3. all things are possible to those who believe.” Linda Brett-Kell www.AttractDeliberately.com
“After Sandi’s 30 Day Free course I felt empowered to make huge changes on my blog. Just by following this advice, my visitors doubled. After Sandi’s Newsletter and List Building classes I developed an opt in, lowered my Alexa rating, tripled my social network members and quadrupled my list members. But, this information in “Read Their Mind” has transformed my ability to serve my clients. I am empowered to connect with my clients where they are, speaking to their deepest desires so I can help them get where they want to go. Thank you Sandi!” Elise Adams www.adamsorganizing.com
“Sandi’s business coaching has helped me – spirit, mind, body. She gives practical doable steps and beings together the best resources if extra help is needed.” Lizabet Nix
“I was ready to throw in the towel, because I was exhausted! What she has taught me so far in 90 days, I have spent the last 4 years looking for! What I have learned is the strategy is connecting well with people, not slamming them with the next bright idea! Sandi has taught me what she knows and practices, that in business and in life, it's not about you!!! It's about them. Her new book is a must read for anyone in business and life!” Paul Crowson www.PaulCrowson.com
“Since working with Sandi, my list has more than tripled, and my income has increased exponentially. I have learned a tremendous amount of information, but the best benefit has been that my life has changed. With an all-new mindset and increased faith, my life is moving towards my goals and vision.” Charlotte Siems www.CharlotteSiems.com
“Sandi’s teaching has helped me find the why of my business. She also has taught me how to use social media effectively.” Phil Holleman www.aboldnewlife.com
“ I am continually amazed at the sheer volume of excellent information and advice she gives, and have been greatly blessed by her faith and encouragement. If you want to make a real change in your business, and are willing to do the work, Sandi will help put you on the path to financial freedom!” Pamela Otten www.kingdomadvisors.org
“By combining all the skills Sandi helped me develop, I was able to generate my own leads for my offline auto transport business. The marketing skills I learned raised my awareness to the marketplace and making a few changes – product and company – I took a no sales network marketing business to a flourishing business. Now I know how to lead others to success, who to point them to for any WordPress or e-commerce marketing expertise – Sandi Krakowski.” Carla Gardiner www.carlastransportservices.com
“Since starting my coaching with Sandi I have gone from complete overwhelm to complete excitement about the endless possibilities for the growth of my business.” Jennifer Ledford www.JenniferLedford.com
“Sandi has helped us take our mission to the next level, we are so excited! We love the way Sandi teaches because she's down to earth and her teaching comes from the heart. Our business has seen tremendous growth and we owe it all to "A Real Change"...because a real change is what we've seen! Thank you, Sandi & A Real Change Team!” Vivian Salas and Jaclyn Ray www.Joyful-Noise-Daycare.com
“After fumbling with another company for over 3 years to barely cover business costs each month, I changed companies and became the #1 in the company’s group 4 out of 5 months. After 5 months, I became executive director. I have a book releasing soon with more stories of the adventures of a mental health nurse. I did not want to coach – I wanted to lead nurses. I was offered the job to lead the education training at my job. Thank you Sandi! Angela Brooks www.AngelaBrook.com
“Moving my “offline” business “online” is for me like landing in a foreign country, not speaking the language. I wanted to work with someone who honors people, is adventurous, and works with excellence. Sandi and her team have proven to be the right, fun choice, equipping me with actionable, skillful steps. Thank you Sandi!” Steve Carter www.calebworks.com
“Sandi begins with helping you get very clear about who you are and the gifts you have to share. Without that clarity, there is only confusion. Out of that clarity, your business unfolds. I can't believe how much my business has unfolded in just a few short months. I'm having a blast and my results are soaring. Thank you for clearing the path Sandi. I'm drafting behind you!” Renee McLaughlin www.healthcoachforsuccess.com
“ I started with Sandi “the FREE 7-Day Blastoff for radical internet profits” and then “the 30 Days To Making More With Your Blog Free Training”! Right now I am in the Gold Group where she coaches me through the process and keeps me on the right track. She has taught me so many keys and principles that only can come from an expert who has gone through it herself. I am very thankful that she came into my life and I give her more than a 2 thumbs up; it has been one of my best choices that I have ever made in my life.” Olga Hermans www.thechoicedrivenlife.com
“After only 6 months of coaching with Sandi and learning how to speak to my clients, my new website is on page 1 of Google for many of my keywords, my list is growing, and all the fuzziness is way more clear! Thank you Sandi for bringing a real change to my business and my life!” Mandy Anderson www.mandybanderson.com
“Sandi is a true online marketing rockstar!” Christine O’Kelly and Tara Geissinger www.onlineprmedia.com
“In the first 2 months under Sandi’s coaching, I was more productive, more successful and I made more money than I had in the 2 years previous. Her passions is contagious and her step-by-step coaching has made a huge difference in my business and in my life!!” Dr. Peggy Malone www.drpeggymalone.com
“Through Sandi's training I went from working hard promoting products for other companies, to creating my own products and running my own company from the comfort of my own home all while homeschooling my children.” Caroline Lynn www.inspirerevolution.com
“I was frustrated and spending way too many hours trying to figure it all out while trying to create the lifestyle my kids and I deserved. I discovered Sandi and took a few of her online classes on Wordpress and realized she was sent to me straight from the Lord above! Not only does she tell ALL and what exactly to do to make things happen with the ‘technical steps’ of my business but she revealed the missing links that caused my cash-flow to triple and helped me make more money in one month then did as a teacher working all year long!” Crystal O’Connor www.moxiemompreneur.com
“I was frustrated and spending way too many hours trying to figure it all out while trying to create the lifestyle my kids and I deserved. I discovered Sandi and took a few of her online classes on Wordpress and realized she was sent to me straight from the Lord above! Not only does she tell ALL and what exactly to do to make things happen with the ‘technical steps’ of my business but she revealed the missing links that caused my cash-flow to triple and helped me make more money in one month then did as a teacher working all year long!” Alexandra McAllister www.wow101.com