Welcome back to “The Five Stages Of The Buying Cycle” series. In the previous part we discussed the “Get Attention” part. Today we go one step further and discuss the “Grow Interest” part.

Now that you have your readers their attention, deepen their understanding of what your product does. A link to your created Video Tour is especially effective at this stage.

If you reach a “general audience,” encourage them to find the business that best fits their situation to see how your product can help them. On the other hand, if you reach a “specific target market” (ex., affiliates) or a “specific demographic” (ex., Work At Home Moms), send them to your specific landing pages.

If your visitors are retirees, Webmasters, real estate marketers, students, network marketers, auction sellers (eBay), and so on… create landing pages specific to their needs.

As always, mix and match links that best fit your approach and audience.

You can strike a positive chord with your visitors by showing how your product connects emotionally with its customers, the way Apple or Google does. That type of connection occurs for only one reason…

Your productis much more than “site-building” or “Web hosting”. It’s even more than about building successful businesses. It’s the end impact that is so important, creating lives of freedom and independence.

By the end of this stage, you should have some very interested pre-customers who want more information.

Next, move your visitors from “high interest/emotion” to logic and verification…

Previous parts:
1. Introduction
2. Get Attention

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The number one reason I chose to pursue Internet marketing as an online entrepreneur was the freedom it provides. Having an online business allows you to take your business with you wherever you go and work on it at whatever time suits your schedule. Now, that’s the kind of freedom I am after!

But, in order to make your work at home, online business a success, you must possess a certain amount of self discipline so that you can properly use your energy and time productively.

Here’s a few of the most important elements that I learned that will keep your confidence, focus and productivity strong as you pursue your own dream of working at home…and succeeding.

The most important thing I learned was what things produced money for me and what things didn’t. For me it was no question…article marketing and list-building were the two most important elements to pursue for my business.

In other words, they were the best use of turning my time into money as they provided the best results.

Hanging out in forums and chat rooms…although very entertaining, was simply not cutting it. Forums can be productive for you if you monitor the way you use them and don’t just hang out killing what could otherwise be productive time.

Another important step to take is to cut yourself off from the noise…cut off the world that takes you away from your focus.

For example:

1) unsubscribe from your thousands of mailings. That is a chore in itself, but if you don’t do this, you will continue to be bombarded with offers that will only distract you from your goals. Choose to follow 1, 2 or possibly 3 mentors at a time…and no more. Trust me, the others aren’t going anywhere and will still be around when you’re finished with your present ones!

If this idea scares you, then create a separate email account and resubscribe for those hundreds of promos you will be getting and check it occasionally.

2) Do those things that make money for you first such as sending an email to your list, writing articles for the directories, checking your support desk for any help needed etc.

3) Shut your computer down and accomplish any offline tasks that are nagging at you to complete. I have found that if there are things that I am not tending to in my offline life, they will continue to nag me and unconsciously I am not getting the most out of my mind energy because of this subtle disturbance to my peace.

Value your time: Learn to say “no.” Sounds easy enough doesn’t it and yet there are those that have trouble saying “no” to anyone or any offer that comes their way. You need to choose what and whom gets your valuable time…you only have so much of it. Use your time to enjoy your family or to benefit your business in some way.

Learn to say “no” to time wasters. Learn to say “yes” to your life (family and business)

Set up your work hours and stick to it. For me, this was early in the morning. I would get busy on my business…coffee in hand while most everyone else was sleeping.

If you’re busy writing an article or blog post, time yourself! That’s right, buy a typical timer and set the alarm for the amount of time it should take you to complete this task. This will keep you honest with yourself but more importantly it will keep you accountable for your time!

Don’t spend 3-4 hours on a short report or blog post that should be written within 20-30 minutes. After timing yourself for awhile you might be surprised at what you find. Use this information to improve your time management skills.

Create a daily action list. I create mine the night before so that it is ready and waiting for me when I sit down at my desk in the morning and I never have to guess at what needs accomplishing. It is simply a compilation of tasks that I want to accomplish that day. Better to keep it simple…especially at first until you get comfortable with your own time frames. Don’t make the list so long that you are defeated before you begin.

I move from one task to the other until I’ve completed them all. If I have miscalculated my timing and everything does not get done that day, whatever is left undone goes to the top of my “to do” list for the next day.

Don’t forget the breaks! We need to take 15 minute breaks to stretch our body and give our minds a rest. Ideally you should never work more than three hours straight without some sort of break. But, come right back after your break!

And, last but not least, take ACTION. This is the most important step of all. If you don’t take action, your dreams an ideas remain just that…dreams and ideas. Combine your dreams with action steps…persistently and consistently…and watch your dreams manifest before your eyes!

Becoming an online entrepreneur is one of the most exciting opportunities that has ever come along. Becoming a success at it, is all about your self discipline.

Next, here you will find more tips on “How To Work From Home”… and then watch this FREE 26 Step-By-Step VIDEO course

First, let’s define the term Explosive Results for our usage.

A standard social media campaign helps spread the word about you and encourages other people to as well.

An explosive social media campaign has inherent viral exposure, inspires community driven communication, helps make the web a better place, and even brings joy to people, however fleeting.

When you share in social media, if your goal is just to get more people to see your links, you’re on the right track, but at the same time, you’re limiting your potential. You may think that getting explosive results from social media will take more time, energy and money, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

If you’re a business owner, you know that working harder doesn’t necessarily mean better results – what if you’re working hard on the wrong thing?

Sometimes the remedy is working smarter. Here are a few small changes you can make to your social media approach that can propel your social media results from lukewarm to smoking hot.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #1 – Hot Content

The cornerstone to any social media campaign is the content. If you get this component wrong, it doesn’t matter if all other elements are perfect. Study what’s going hot in your targeted topic and find a unique angle to fit your content into what people already like, without stealing their ideas.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #2 – Niched Network Nuances

The more tightly focused your submissions to social media sites are, the more likely they are to go viral, whether they are links you share by other people or your own. Here’s the logic.

People follow other people with similar interests. They’re on sites like Google, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg actively looking for new content. Put those two things together and you have a whirlwind of clicks happening. The only question is, will it be your link that gets clicked or passed over?

Having 5000 connections on Twitter or Facebook is useless if you are connected to people who don’t want your broadcasts, and you’re just as useless to them if you don’t want theirs. If my interest is in improving my existing business and you’re trying to get me to sell your network marketing products, it doesn’t matter how many times you ask me. If I’m not interested, your continued broadcasts will be ignored, or worse yet, blocked completely.

It’s about the perfect balance of quality AND quantity.

And if I’m not paying attention to you, I can’t and won’t spread your message. If you are in network marketing, why not go after people who love the network marketing concept but can’t seem to find the right company? That’s a perfect match, and can dramatically cut down your search for the right partners and prospects.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #3 – Simplify Sharing

It amazes me how many people miss this one.

You’ve got great content. You’ve got a massive, niched network.

Why feed them content that’s hard to share? Does that report have to be in PDF format? If so, does it have to be behind an opt-in wall if you’re spreading it among people who have Already opted in? Anyone connected to your business through its Facebook page, or your Twitter stream is also part of your opt-in list. Yes, it would be best if they were on your email newsletter list, but what faster way to get them there than to show them you don’t need to hold them prisoner there?

If your whitepaper is of such high value that you don’t Want it to spread, well, that’s something different. But if you’re sharing it so other people will spread it, make it easy for others to share.

• Send your su.pr link so all they have to do is click the Thumbs-Up button.
• Put a few sharing links on your page.
• Make it easy for them to Retweet.

The easier it is for them to share, the more likely they are to do it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #4 – Consistency

And now we come to the area I fail at the most. It’s one of the things I know I need to do, but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of how to brainstorm, create and distribute quality content consistency, and still give them best possible service and support to my customers and clients. I always err on serving people who have bought from me, figuring that next blog post can wait until tomorrow.

Then at some point, I noticed a decline in return traffic – people weren’t coming back because they’d already heard everything I had to say. The solution? I got help for my content creation process. The ideas are still mine, but I was able to barter help for research, transcribing, and editing. I am also able to get audio and video polished much less expensively than I thought, though I don’t always use this option due to time constraints.

The other thing that helped a lot was getting over my perfectionism complex. Release your content as soon as you can. I can’t tell you how much money I’ve left on the table from my old fear of the typo and grammar police. Not to mention the fact that I felt like I was leaving my audience hanging.

You subscribe to something because you want to get regular updates. If your favorite daily news show started coming on once a week, you’d probably switch channels. If you’re inconsistent without explanation, your audience numbers will drop and your network will fade.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #5 – Think Engagement

Measuring your results by page view alone is a thing of the past. When the web was mostly text and images, it made some sense that how many pages a visitor viewed at your site was a true measure of engagement.

Nowadays this isn’t the case. You want to look instead at how long people are at your site. The exception, of course, is when customers are coming to your site to buy, and the order processing system takes them off your page. But if people aren’t leaving your site because they’re ready to buy or subscribe, you truly must look at why they aren’t paying more attention to your content, and what changes you can make to get them to stay.

This is critically important in understanding which content will go viral naturally. What posts are people staying on your site to comment on? When do they take a few extra seconds to retweet? Are they watching your videos all the way through?

Once you know the content your audience is most connected to, and why, you can make more of it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #6 – Three-Way Connection and Communication

That’s not a typo. Three-way communication is when the way you conduct yourself online is observed to a third party, who is also indirectly being addressed by your manner or statement. I wish I could credit the proper author of this, but I just don’t remember who it was who first observed that three people are positively affected by an act of kindness – the person giving, the person receiving, and the person observing.

One example of this in action is having a conversation with a peer about their new product on a social media site. Your friend is probably Dying to tell someone about the testimonial they just got, but don’t want to be rude or are too humble to brag. Ask them in front of your audience, and the conversation is exposed to your connections and re-exposed to theirs.

Connection is just as important – if communication is the conveyance of information, connection is doing so in a way that bonds. A several hundred closely bonded contacts will spread your message faster and farther than several thousand distant aquaintances.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #7 – What’s In It for All?

In the 80s, we all thought about what was in it for ourselves. In the 90s we decided to focus on others, hence, what’s in it for them. Today, we’re in the age of the win-win-win situation. Tell them how you benefit and tie it to their benefit.

Want someone to help you spread your stories? Make sure they know how important it is to you, why you came to them for help, and how they’ll be perceived for being the bearer of your good news.

You may look at the list above and feel that it’s intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Focus on doing just one of these things better each day for a few weeks, and before you know it, you’ll be doing them habitually. The results you’ll get will help these new habits stick.

Next, learn even more social media tactics for Explosive Results …
… and then watch this 26 Step-By-Step VIDEO course – yours FREE!

Article Marketing can be extremely rewarding to anyone who consistently submits quality articles over the long term. The most challenging part of Article Marketing is getting the articles written, but there are many things you can do to make the writing process easier.

Do you want to write your articles faster and more efficiently and capitalize on a momentum of creativity? If so, then I encourage you to try batch processing.

Batch processing is a productivity technique where you deal with several of the same type of task at one sitting, rather than doing one isolated task at a time. A great example of batch processing would be emails:

Scenario #1: You can either handle each email one at a time as it comes in, which would cause your workday to be interrupted every few minutes. Or…

Scenario #2: You can check your email only at designated times, say once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and at those scheduled email checking times deal with many emails at one sitting. This would free up your attention throughout the rest of your workday, and also allow you to process the emails faster because you’re doing several at one sitting, rather than one here and one there.

Scenario #2 is batch processing–you save time by doing several of the same task at one time. It works with email, and it also works with articles!

WRITING MORE EFFICIENTLY

For articles, batch processing in involves writing multiple articles at one sitting. So, rather than sitting down 8 separate times to write 8 different articles, you might have 2 scheduled writing times a month, and at each writing time you would write 4 articles.

Writing articles successively allows your mind to get into a writing groove, and helps build creative momentum. After you get used to batch processing articles, you should be writing each article faster, accomplishing more writing in less time.

Also, a major part of writing an article is the warm-up–when you sit down to write it takes a while for your mind to get into ‘writing mode’. When you write articles in batches, you eliminate much of this warm-up time. If you’re writing one article at a time, your mind needs to warm up each time you sit down to write, but if you’re writing in batches, your mind only needs to warm up before the first article–the other articles don’t need a warm up time because your mind is on a roll.

HOW TO BATCH PROCESS YOUR ARTICLES

1. Determine which days you’ll be writing. If you’re submitting 8 articles a month, then you’ll only need to schedule a couple writing days!
2. Schedule a block of time to focus on writing–4 hours or so.
3. Eliminate online distractions–turn off email, twitter, IMs and the like. You will need your full concentration for your writing session.
4. Brainstorm article topics before your writing session, then use the ideas you’ve generated to write your articles.
5. It may help to first create an informal outline for each article–jot down the major points you’d like to cover, and then flesh out the details.
6. Set a word count limit. Aim for 400-600 word articles, or at the longer end maybe 600-800 word articles. Setting word count limits puts boundaries on your article so that you’re not spending all 4 hours writing one really long article!

ADDITIONAL PERKS TO BATCH PROCESSING

• One research session can result in several articles.
• If you get on a roll in one article and find that you actually have enough content for 2 or 3 articles, you can write the other articles while your mind is still on that topic.
• Writing one article often spawns ideas for other articles–this is creative momentum at work.
• Eliminate procrastination: It’s easier to get yourself to your writing desk one time to write four articles than four times to write one article.
• And not to mention, it is very gratifying to get a major chunk of your writing out of the way in one day! This takes a lot of stress out of the need to write articles every month–you have your scheduled writing days, and you know you will be writing several on each day to meet your goals.

YOUR HOMEWORK

• Try batch processing your articles this month.
• Set a goal of getting 4 articles written in one writing session.

Will you try this? I think you will find that this productivity technique helps you write quality article faster and more consistently and eliminates a lot of writing stress from your life!

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Online Business Coach and Internet Marketing Strategist Chris Farrell helps baby boomers create profitable online businesses that they love. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by claiming your FREE gifts at ==> www.createyourfirstsite.com