I’m sure most of you would be familiar with the phrase “a Jack of all Trades but a Master of None”. This is a situation which happens all the time when we spread ourselves too thin and occurs all too often in our quest for Business Success. I know when I look at my Plan and see so many different tasks staring back at be I often think how am I going to get it all done?

Is it really necessary for me to do all this work? I mean, seriously, do you think all the successful marketers out there have to worry about article writing, creating web pages, installing blogs etc. The answer is no – of course not, it’s impossible for one person to become proficient enough in all those different areas and still have the time to run a successful business.

They chose their battles wisely. What I mean by this is they focus in on mastering the essential skills of business success which they leverage to make money, and surround themselves with a talented team of individuals who carry out the other day-to-day tasks.

The 4 Skills to Unlimited Business Success that they Master are:

  • Product Creation
  • Copywriting
  • Testing
  • Upscaling the whole process with JV Partners & Affiliates

That’s it, there’s no secret – it’s there in black and white. If you can focus in, learn and master these 4 skills you can write your own cheque. Think of all the time you’ve spent on SEO and forum posting and all the other mundane, time consuming tasks. Imagine where you would be right now if you devoted yourself to just those 4 Skills?

Lets now delve a little deeper and explore each of these individually.

Product Creation
We are all familiar with Affiliate Marketing whereby you promote someone else’s product in return for a commission on sales made. Now don’t get me wrong you can make good money through affiliate marketing but there is a far better way of making money online than this.

Create your own Product!! Everybody is capable of this and the only difference between those who do, and those who don’t is Belief. Start by researching the market, what’s hot right now? Where are your interests and experiences? It doesn’t have to lavish or outlandish – a short ebook on a specific niche is all you need to get going.

Write a few pages a day and in a week you have your very first front-end product. The goal here is that you will turn the tables and instead of promoting other peoples products you are going to recruit affiliates to promote yours! The idea of Leverage is very important here. You will be Leveraging the hard work of others who will drive traffic to your offer page in return for a commission on any conversions.

All of a sudden you have shifted your focus and can have other people – all over the world – promoting your creation on your behalf!

Copywriting
The second skill which you will want to learn is Copywriting. How good a Sales Letter you have will have a HUGE impact on your conversions. If you can master the Art of Copywriting you are on the fast track to Business Success. It’s paramount to any success you will have and that’s why some of the best copywriters command fee’s in excess of $10,000 per assignment.

Now I know most of us can’t invest that kind of money, especially in the beginning. So think outside the box and see what you CAN do! Go and research your competitors Sales Pages and take notes on whats good about their Copy. What is it about their Page that stands out to you?? All this will provide you with valuable information which you can use when you craft your own Sales Page.

Testing
Now that we have a Product and a Sales Page in place the next thing we must do is get our Numbers right. We are going to test our Page and tweak it over and over again until we get the maximum Conversion Rate possible.

This is a very important step so please don’t ignore it. For each % you increase your conversion rate you are potentially putting thousands of dollars in your bank account. This is also important for when we move on to recruiting Joint Venture Partners. We must be able to impress upon them the value of our offer. How we do that is by showing them our Conversion Rates.

If we can present them with numbers that show they will earn $2 Earnings Per Click they will be very excited to come on board. However if our offer isn’t converting well and EPC is only $0.20 then our chances of attracting JVPs and Affiliates are not good.

So get testing, drive some traffic with PPC or a Solo Ad and know your numbers. Keeping tweaking your Copy and/or selling price until you maximize your Conversion Rates and have a very attractive EPC to offer. Once that’s done you can move onto the last phase in the process….

Upscaling the whole process with JV Partners & Affiliates
By this stage we are really rocking as we have:

  1. our own Product
  2. an awesome Sales Page
  3. high Conversion Rates & attractive EPC’s

All we have to do now is get in contact with Joint Venture Partners and set our offer up on an Affiliate Program. This is a very exciting time because you’ve now everything in place and are looking forward to seeing the results of your labor in cold, hard cash!

You can even be proactive in this process and start to Head Hunt potential Affiliates and JVPs by searching for related sites/products in Google and getting in touch with the site owners. Send them a simple email asking would they be interested in getting more details about a joint venture proposal you have for them.

Now, this again is a numbers game as very few will reply. But say 10% of these contacts reply to you request more information. You can then wow them with your Conversion Rates and EPCs. Once these guys see the numbers it’ll be very easy to build a good relationship with them – which will ultimately lead to them driving targeted traffic to your offer.

You win on a number of fronts with this approach:

  • you get to have targeted traffic driven to your offer
  • this will build you a list of Buyers which you can begin email marketing to later
  • you will be building valuable relationships with JVPs which will make you money time and time again into the future

Can you see what a powerful system this can be for you? You can evolve and grow from someone who is struggling to build a profitable and sustainable business in a relatively short period of time.

Of course it’s not easy – if it was everybody would be doing it – but it is achievable!! Business Success can be just around the corner and it’s never too late to get started.

All you need is the self belief and determination to follow it through and execute your Plan for success. Sure, if you prefer building crappy adsense sites that make 50 bucks a month then good luck to you! But if you really want to make it BIG in this game then you could do a lot worse that following the path which I have written about today.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think this is a credible way of building a successful business or do you think I’m just talking nonsense? Let the discussion begin and see what everybody thinks.

Thanks for reading;)

Noel.


Noel
Noel

Easy going guy and founder of CunMark.com who enjoys traveling, live music and good coffee - as well as sharing tips and strategies on this blog to help others navigate the world of online marketing!

    12 replies to "4 Skills for Business Success"

    • Wendy Owen

      Hi Noel

      I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Master the important skills and outsource the rest. However this can be challenging. First hurdle is picking an outsourcer. It takes time to chose a good outsourcer and train them to do things the way you want them done. Sometimes in just easier to do things yourself!

      The other thing is product creation. My chief roadblock here is fear. Fear that the product will not be good enough, that no-one will buy it etc. I have a great idea for a product, but can’t seem to get started.

      However, reading your post has given me some motivation. I might just go and make a start today.

      Thanks
      Wendy

      • Noel

        Hey Wendy,

        You’ve raised some good points here – outsourcing can be difficult and from my experience it takes time to get everything running smoothly. There is always a lag because you’ll probably have to teach your outsourcer all the different tasks that you want them to perform. I think this can be challenging but given a little time can be very reward for you in the medium/long term!

        I can relate to your feelings about Product Creation and the only advice I could give you is – JUST DO IT!! I’m sure you’d be very surprised by how much you can offer and when you plan everything out and put it together in a product there will be no holding your back:)

        Keep in touch and let me know how you going, ok?

        Thanks – Noel.

    • Christine Brady

      Hi Noel,

      Yes, mastering these four skills will have your business absolutely rocking!

      Copywriting is a huge struggle for a lot of people though – it’s unlike blogging or article writing or any other form of content generation. Your tip on checking out other sales pages is key though!

      Like they say, don’t reinvent the wheel – look at their sales pages and study what they do.

      Unfortunately, even the best eBook or course may never sell if the copy is poor –

      Study the successful ones!

      *Can you tell, I’m working on copywriting right now 🙂

      Thanks for the great tips Noel!

      • Noel

        Yup, Copywriting is a BIG Deal!

        I wish I was better at it but it’s something I know I must work at…

        Glad you like it;)

    • Dee Kumar

      Whilst I like what you are saying in theory, I’m going to play devils advocate here and suggest it is impractical to learn everything to a good enough standard.

      A better solution perhaps is to master ONE area really well and outsource all the rest.

      Of course we could learn to be good enough with all four areas but it will mean investing a lot of time and energy, which we could be using instead on our strengths and thus providing better gains.

      I now only focus on managing my team of entrepreneurs and guiding them in new ideas. I no longer get involved in website creation, design, copywriting or even managing members unless I want to. It is not someone else’s job and it leave me free to work on what I am good at rather then using my time on things that others could do much quicker (and perhaps even to a better quality).

      I agree product creation is a must, but the testing, copyrighting and affiliate recruitment can be outsourced inexpensively and save you tons of time.

      When I first started out I did not have the money to outsource everything so I create teams of people who helped each other. One would be a JV expert and teach us tools and tips to make things easy. The copywriter would very quickly improve our text (thus saving us lots of money) and we had a guy who was an optimisation expert wh would help set up split tests and analyse them for us too.

      I like to have my hand in everything in my business, but I don;t want to work for my business, I want to run it.

      • Noel

        Great points Dee – I think your last sentence sums it up beautifully…”I don’t want to work for my business, I want to run it”
        The ideal scenario would be for one to surround themselves with a team of people who are proficient in these Key Areas.
        By giving individual experts a specific task e.g. writing your Sales Copy you will see far, far greater results than if you tried to do it all alone!
        I guess, personally I’m at the stage whereby I’m focusing in on these 4 Areas but I haven’t yet outsourced them to the experts yet (except JV recruitment) – that’s my next challenge…

        Thanks for sharing this with us – Noel.

    • Allan Devlin

      Hi Noel
      What a cool site..and a great article. I am an Alex Jefferys student like you and was checking you out on the accountability area in the forum…just exposed myself on there too…!!! Looks like you are well on your way. Look forward to our paths crossing regularly. Cheers…Allan

      • Noel

        Hey Allan,
        Cool, I’ll look you up in the forum later on. Ya, that Accountability area is saving my bacon really – I’m sure I would have fallen away by now only for it!
        Glad to see your “taking action”, I think everyone who follows AJs teaching can only good things ahead:)
        Talk soon mate – Noel.

    • Paul

      Hey Noel,

      You made a lot of really great points in this post, I definitely think there are a few things that we should add in there… In my opinion, they are:

      Time Management: You hear so many people who say “I just don’t have time, or I just can’t find the time”… This makes me insane – we all have the same amount of time everyday, so how is it that some people can run multiples things successfully while some cannot even get a single thing accomplished? If you don’t work on developing time management skills then you can kiss all hopes of success goodbye.

      Delegation: This probably falls into the upscaling section, but being able to delegate isn’t something everyone can do, even I’m guilty of not doing it well. But I know that there are some things I simply shouldn’t be doing and can’t afford to waste time doing.

      That’s what comes to mind immediately, hopefully others will chime in with some good ones, but thanks for sharing such great info with us!

      Paul

      • Noel

        This is an excellent addition to the discussion – Cheers Pauly;)

        Delegation is something I need to watch because I’m the kind of guy who thinks I should be in control of everything….but lately I’m trying to let go of work that I know I shouldn’t be doing and I’m already seeing the benefits of that.

        Thanks for that mate!

    • […] couple of posts back I spoke about the 4 Skills for Business Success and I thought I’d follow that up today with a little look at The Numbers Game – more […]

    • […] 4 Skills for Business Success […]

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