Spend 80% of Your Time on This

Recently on my travels to NYC and Florida, I had a chance to sit down with the owner of a billion-dollar business.

Let’s call him “Tom” for the purposes of this email.

Tom’s a guy I’ve been learning from for almost a decade, and to be able to sit down and share have a conversation with him was incredible.

It felt like a reward for all the hard work of the past decade, and also like one journey had ended…but another one was just beginning.

More about that another day…

Back to our meeting. We met at a cigar bar of all places. Not my choice, but that’s his thing. Tom ordered an espresso, while my business partner Matt and I each settled on a bottle of water as an antidote to the Florida heat and humidity.

Our conversation was purposeful, as we were discussing a deal, but in the 90 minutes we sat there, I found myself writing down a couple of pieces of business wisdom I felt would be okay to share with you. (Always looking out for you when I’m on my trips.)

The first piece of advice Tom gave me was this:

1) 80% of your time should be spent on marketing your front end offer

In this day of the ADD-entrepreneur, there are too many website business owners who hop around from offer to offer, promoting a large variety of their own products – and affiliate products – to their list.

But not only can this lead to list burnout, it simply isn’t a sustainable way to build a business.

And every day you’ll wake up feeling you have to chase down a new deal. That’s no way to run a business.

Instead, you need to consistently work on creating a proven system that effectively markets your front end product so you get new sales each day.

Or to put it crudely, “you need to feed the beast”.

Your goal is to get as many people into your front end funnel as possible, without losing money, so that you can make profitable back-end offers that dramatically increase your bottom line.

So take a look at your business…are you “chasing” money everyday or are you dedicated to improving your front end offer each day?

No doubt about it, I’m guilty of this business sin myself.

And I also know that the most successful of my online business friends are the ones who have a proven system for getting large amounts of people into their front end offer every day.

Review the work you have planned for the next couple of months and see if you are spending enough time on your front end offer.

2) When starting out, you should contact 3-5 people that have similar size businesses and do list swaps, affiliate trades, etc.

This piece of advice came up when the conversation shifted to how Tom had been helping a personal friend of his get started selling products on the Internet.

Like most online beginners, Tom’s friend didn’t have a lot of contacts or massive credibility in his marketplace, so he didn’t stand a chance getting the “big whales” to promote his product.

Instead, he did something that I learned to do many years ago.

Tom’s friend simply went out and started contacting other websites that had similar sized followings – or perhaps a little larger – and they did email swaps, joint ventures, affiliates promotions, etc.

One thing that you could easily do with 2-3 “peers” in your industry is a free email swap. Everyone can contribute a bonus and create a free offer page on their site, and then you all mail to your lists about the free gifts available.

It’s a fantastic starting point…and everyone wins.

Going a step beyond that, you can find peer’s with products that you want to endorse and see if they’ll endorse you in return.

It never ever hurts to ask. You should be out there contacting at least one potential affiliate each day.

Never stop looking,

Craig Ballantyne

“Never give in, never give in, never; never; never; never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense”- Winston Churchill

(this quote was on plaque sitting on the billion-dollar business owner’s desk)