Successthrulearning’s Weblog

The person who gets the farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.”
–Dale Carnegie

Honestly, how many of us can really admit that we love to do Sales? In a crowded room, I would definitely say only a small handful of people will say that they like sales. Majority would admit that if given a choice, they would not want to do sales. Why don’t we like to do Sales?

Many of us may have had the misfortune of meeting a pushy Sales person at least once in our lifetime. Let me ask you in all honesty, do you find that it was the Sales person who you didn’t like and not the product? There are quite a lot of pushy Sales people out there. These people are either not properly trained or they are what we call “product pushers”. They just want to push products out to fulfill their sales quota. And the harder people push, you notice that you either push back or you just walk away. Either way, it is a bad experience for both parties.

However, that Sales person could also have been you. Why? Perhaps you were either ill-equiped or not sufficiently trained. Or you have not yet realize that selling is more than pushing and forcing something on to the other person.

Selling is about listening, not about talking. Do you realize that when a good Sales Person approaches you, you (and not the Sales person) are the one who is doing most of the talking and sharing your pains. At  the end of the conversation, you would highly likely have bought whatever it was that the Sales person was selling. Yes, the product is important (for it must be something that is useful to you). However, I can confidently say that most of the time, the sale was successful because the Sales person listened to you and you felt good. So, do you think that you need to be an excellent speaker to be successful in sales? No, you need to be a excellent LISTENER!

In this time and age, successful selling is not about peddling products or services. Successful Sales people are selling relationships. Soft selling is the key. It is also about selling solutions and sometimes, it is also about selling a want and a dream. If you were to pick up 2 flayers in the street, both selling Laptops. One flayer from Laptop Company A listed down all the Laptop configurations in detail, the processing speed, the memory capacity and so on. What if the flayer for Laptop Company B only listed the basic configurations down, but had pictures of a young, successful man and lady holding the colorful laptops, with the words “Get a Laptop to Suit Your Style” or “Laptops that helps you achieve high goals or Success at Work!”.  Which laptop Company do you think will get more business?

Selling is definitely more than a product. Say for example in my case. I have subscribed to an eLearning Portal and in all honesty, that portal is fantastic. Actually, the product alone sells itself. It has got videos of successful speakers and mulit millionaires, it has got language courses, computer based training courses and a bit of everything for the entire family. Now, if I went around selling these benefits and wonderful products at the eLearning Portal, I am no better than Laptop Company A.  However, if I am going to sell this as a solution, as an opportunity to people who are either looking for a business with very little money down, low risk but high returns , or they could be looking to learn from already successful and wealthy people, or people who are wanting to learn and improve themselves with the latest computer softwares in town, this is just the place for them. It is about how one package the product as a solution to ease the other person’s pain or enhances his pleasure.

There are many other reasons why most people dislike doing sales. In a nutshell, it is about their perception of the Sales persons whom they have met in their lives. And more often then not, that has been what has stopped many people from being successful in their jobs as Sales people or in their business. In life and in all that we do, we have been unconsciously selling. Did we not have to sell ourselves to our boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses or they just decided to pick you up at random? Did we not have to sell ourselves to our potential bosses to get the job? But the minute you consciously think that you are selling, that is when you freeze up.

Finally, selling can also be looked as sharing. If you were to have enjoyed a wonderful meal at a restaurant or seen an exceptionally good movie, what is the first thing you will do the next morning at work? Or when you met a friend at lunch? You will share with him or her your wonderful experience. Similarly, if you were to have been given an opportunity which will likely springboard you to a means of owning your own business with very little money down, would you not want to share that with a friend. The best part of it, money to you aside, how would it feel if you had managed to help a friend find a means to earn a little bit of extra money at the start to afford to send his/her daughter to the ballet class she really wants, and perhaps to allow him to eventually achieve his financial freedom? Would that not make you feel like a FIRST CLASS Friend?

So, change your mindset. Help change your friends mindsets about Sales. Sales can be fun and exciting. Sales is crucial to success and make yourself like doing Sales. Why? When you enjoy or like doing something, you will end up doing it well!

Before one decides on what business to venture into, it is good to think about the type of business(es) that will lasts. There are also businesses which are very niched. The returns could be higher in niche market products but the risks could also be higher. Sometimes, these type of business lasts for a very short time but the business owners do get a chance to laugh all the way to the banks.

A safer business to venture into is perhaps those evergreen businesses. These are the sort of businesses that lasts through times, good as well as bad times. The world’s economic outlook does not appear encouraging. In my country, things are also not looking that great either. Impending recession has already been predicted. Now, during these jittery times, what are the businesses that are likely to still be able to weather these storms? Why, the evergreen businesses.

Evergreen businesses will normally include businesses that deals with one of the following :-

1. Food
2. Shelter
3. Health
4. Entertainment (to a certain degree)
5. Energy & Utilities
6. Education

Whether in good times or bad, humans will still need Food and Shelter. In good times, people will probably be more eat more and dine out. But during bad times, people will still have to eat, just to survive. However, you will then have to explore the type of food and the target market that you are aiming for.

It is the same for the rest of the Evergreen industries too. Personally, I feel that during bad times, people will turn to religion and superstitions, especially for the more desperate people. They are looking for a easy way out. Again, my 2 cents worth, never put yourself in that position in the first place. During good times, let your business make all the money in can. During the bad times, make sure the business you are in will still continue to thrive.

I recently picked up a copy of Justin Michie’s Traffic Tips Report (Free for a limited time from here). Let’s face it, getting traffic to your website or blog is a never ending challenge. But it’s a necessary challenge, because without traffic you can’t do much of anything. So you are probably – like me – always on the lookout for new traffic generation methods and as many good ways to do it as you possibly can.

The Traffic Tips Report claims to do just that. This is a recently released report from expert internet marketer Justin Michie. Being an internet marketer himself, Justin should have a good hold on traffic generation. But as with anything online I thought it was worth taking a closer look. And the results were actually quite impressive.

For starters, the report doesn’t just show you a few ways to generate website traffic, it delivers 247 unique ways to get traffic to your site. Right from the start that’s something that any website or blog owner can use. On top of that, the report is actually free! Justin is currently giving it away to anyone who wants it.

And even though it’s free, the methods outlined in this report should be able to increase your traffic significantly in just a matter of days. The great thing about this report is that it includes both free and paid traffic generation methods. So whether you are just starting out and you have time to invest but little money, or you’ve been making money online for awhile and have the money but not the time – there are plenty of ideas in here to up your traffic stats.

Just don’t let the amount of ideas in here overwhelm you – don’t try to do it all at once, pace yourself! Some of the methods will result in short term traffic and others will result in long term traffic. If you start with a few of short term and a few long term methods from this report you can give your site a quick burst of traffic right away while building long term traffic. This will help your traffic grow quickly and still sustain itself so you’ll be getting plenty of visitors month after month.

The report has been reviewed by some of the most successful and well known internet marketers. Joel Comm and Willie Crawford both highly recommended it, when Justin was charging money for it. (It had been selling at the discounted rate of $7 at http://www.TrafficTipsReport.com.) Joel calls it a “really valuable resource” that all internet marketers should have. And Willie “recommends it to all of his clients and subscribers.” When you have endorsements like these you really can’t go wrong!

Another great thing about this report is that it will work for any type of niche. It doesn’t matter if you have a website on puppies or a blog about day trading. There are traffic generation methods in it that will work for everyone and every niche.

As we all know the internet is constantly evolving. To be successful, you have got to stay ahead of your competition. You can easily do this by using some of these unique marketing methods Justin has outlined. If you use just one of these methods, you could easily double the amount of traffic you are receiving. Just imagine what could happen if you use ten, fifty or all 247? You would have a traffic explosion! All from one little report.

So if you are looking for unique ways to drive more traffic to your site, you really need to look no further than the Traffic Tips Report. If you want a copy (while it’s still free) you can download it from here. It’s a no brainer decision!

Many businesses have been started up by business-entrepreneur wannabes who have not fully equiped themselves with the necessary skills. People who want to drive on the roads need to go for driving lessons and these days classes on road signs and traffic laws too. And even then, there are still road accidents and mishap. Imagine the number of disasters on the roads if people were not equiped with the basic driving skills.

However, when starting a business, there is no prerequisite courses or tests one has to take. It is mainly based on a personal belief that the business will succeed and also a lot of luck. However, that is NOT sufficient to ensure business success and continuity. There are some very basic fundamental skills that one must have.

1. Selling Skills
2. Marketing Skills
3. Leadership Skills
4. Team Building Skills
5. System Building Skills

Most of these skills are learnable. People are not born to be great salesmen or marketeers or leaders. They learn from successful people and most of the time, if we parrot these skills long enough, it becomes ingrained in us. Actions which are done repetitively are called habits.

There are many ways one can go about picking up such skills. One can attend seminars or trainings to fast track themselves and one very successful company that has been churning out successful entrepreneurs. They have a Yahoo Group of Graduates who many have started tripling the income even before even completing the course. This is none other than the Entrepreneurs Action Program Sdn Bhd.

One could invest in books on how to succeed in business and read biographies about people who are already successful. Many of these successful people have shared their knowledge and experiences on how they became successful.

Another way is to attend seminars conducted by successful people and motivational speakers. The only issue is that some of these speakers do not speak as often as we would like to listen to them and only at selected venues. However, there is an adult learning portal that makes these seminars easily accessible to us. There are at least 200 seminars stored as videos and are accessible to us any time we wish to view them.

Whichever way we choose to learn, there is no doubt that in order to succeed in business and to ensure business continuity, one has to be armed with the necessary skills.

There are things which are very simple in life but being very skeptical people, when something is too simple, we become very suspicious. Well, it is good to be a bit suspicious but do not let opportunities slip by you by being overly cautious.

Like this one website “SkyQuestCom Pre-Enroller“

This website gives you a lot of opportunities to check on them. You can start by checking out who SkyQuestCom is and what business they are in. They are basically a eLearning Portal and this company (Singapore owned) is so successful that they are ranked the 7th fastest growing IT company in Asia. The owner CEO of SkyquestCom is Mr Richard Tan and he is also the owner CEO of Success Resources, the largest seminar organizer in Asia.

There is a gentleman by the name of Mr Yeo Kee Huat and you can see his testimonial on the SkyQuestCom website. He is my mentor plus my personal friend. Today, Mr Yeo is already a millionaire (a few times over with 7 properties in Malaysia) and he has commitment his life to helping young entrepreneurs to success, just like him. He holds free seminars almost on a weekly basis in Sunway Mentari. He actually drives in to Malaysia every week just to do that. That is his commitment to helping those who were just like him, 8 years ago, struggling through life as an employee, with very little money and very little time. These days, he can take his wife for a 7-day Valentine celebration overseas (I think it was Phuket) whereas most of us would have make do with a nice candle light dinner at a hotel where we live.

Go have a look at the SkyQuestCom website here if you want to find out more, or you can check out the Pre-entroller’s site too.

Normal people will see a lot of obstacles preventing them from starting a business as real and unsurmountable obstacles. A successful person will look at it as just excuses which can easily be solved. Most of us, at one point in time, will have been approached before by friends and strangers alike as to whether we would like to invest in a business and more often than not, these are 5 reasons why we cannot.

• No Money – this is one of the most common reasons we can think of that prevents us from starting our own business. We truly believe that it takes money to make money. Hey? But is that a fact? If we believe that, we must believe that all the rich people today must have inherited their wealth. We believe only the wealthy becomes wealthy. Where does that leave the normal average people like Bill Gates, Li Kha Shing, Ananda Khrisnan, who did not come from wealthy backgrounds at all. Ananda Khrisnan of Malaysia is really a typical Rags to Riches Billionaire. He was born to a Railway Clerk, staying in a place called Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur and this place is definitely not known for any rich man’s housing area. There are many more self made billionaires and millionaires than we can name. So, these people are evidence that it is not true that billionaires and millionaires are born. And there are many ways that one can make money with little or no money down, provided one asks.

• No Time – This is another very real obstacle for many of us. We are so caught up with our work, cooking, running around and coming home to watch television with the family (we need to bond with our family) that we don’t really have any more time left. Let us pause for a minute there and consider how much time successful people have in a day? Do these people have families? Do these people not have to bring bread to the table to? No time is really a poor excuse for poor time management. If we can manage our time better and for a start, just put aside an hour a day for our business, that should not be that difficult.

• No Knowledge – admittedly this could be a real obstacle, if one has to learn how to put a rocket up into space, build an electric train. However, when we start a business, normally it would be something which we are already familiar with or at least will not take much to read up or learn from others in the same business already. Businesses can be started up as a partnership, where we can leverage on the knowledge of others before we learn up the ropes.

• No Network or Connection – Birds of a Feather, All Flock Together. There are lots of places where you can meet people and these days, we can also meet people virtually. The internet allows us to go into the relevant forums and meet like-minded people, who are perhaps looking for the same things in life. Hence, today, it is harder to keep one in isolation as we are being bombarded by people every which way.

• No Idea – of all the obstacles, this must be one of the lamest one. The minute we open our eyes, ideas should be flashing in our minds. The alarm clock that gets us up, the breakfast on our table, the transport that takes us to work…..the list goes on. The newspapers with all its advertisements, the internet with endless websites. It is how we choose to look at a thing to see the opportunities that springs up from it. A person without ideas is a dead person.

After going through with this short list, are we still going to tell the next person who approaches us with a business opportunity the same excuses we’ve been giving all this while. Of course not. We will look at them in the eye and say,

“It does not take much money to start a business and setting aside an hour a day is not a problem. If you are willing to teach me, I am willing to learn. When do we go for our first seminar/meeting and I am already thinking of ideas how to move this business.”

Road to Wealth & Your Own Business

There are many reasons why people want to start their own business(es). The most obviously reason is about making money, which is translated into making a better life for himself/herself and also the family. However, studies have shown that some people start their own businesses for other reasons as well.

Some do it for the time that they will have to share with those closest to them. If one is an employee, his time is controlled and dictated by this job. There are times when his child is sick, or he needs to send his wife for a medical checkup. Unless he takes a day off, and provided that his boss approves his day off, he is stuck. However, having one’s own business, he is also the boss. So, who is the boss to say he cannot take 2 hours off to run a family errand.

People like to be recognized for their achievements. But by who’s standard? In an organization (it is even worse when the organization is big), many employees’ achievements are overlooked and made to look like as if they are something employees were paid to do anywhere. However, when  a mistake is done, the repercussions are big. Have you heard the saying that “Being an employee is a thankless job. When you do right, your boss does not see. When you do wrong, the entire organization talks about it”.

With businesses, there are opportunities to grow, to broaden the mind, to meet more people. Do you know why so many people meet and marry their spouses from the organization? That is because they never get to meet anybody else outside the organization. At times, these may not be the best match, but there is very limited choice. Employees’ circles of friends seemed to be limited people at work and maybe people from church. After a while, the circles may even shrink. Why? Well, people move on, especially those who have started owning their own business.

Now, I do believe that it is a basic human desire to be able to help others, whether financially or otherwise. That is why those in need of financial assistance will always make a plea via the  public media as the donations just keeps pouring in. Have you ever felt frustrated that you are not able to chip in more because your own finances are not much better, perhaps. That is why many people have started their business based on this purpose and desire to help others.

Free Brian Tracy Video

There are perhaps a lot of other reasons why people want to start their own businesses. Wanting to start is a common desire but knowing how to do it is a whole new ball game. Then comes the obstacles of starting a business so of which are:-

1. No Time
2. No Money
3. No Network
4. No Product
5. And the list goes on.

Yeah, there are many businesses out there where it does take a lot of time to start, heavy financial investments, no special unique products which are not already sold in the market and nobody to sell it to. Would you be interested if there was a business out there where you choose the amount of time you want to put into the business, very little money down, excellent products and a mentor who will guide you to building the network that you want and need for your business?

If you are, then this is just the business for you. This is the perfect business to start you on your dream of owning your own business. Give yourself this one chance.. go and have a look at this opportunity.

Lunch time at work or even if you are at home is a great way to surf the internet and learn from successful people how they made their millions. Do you know who Brian Tracy is? He is a very popular speaker on leadership skills, sales, business development amongst other interesting topics. Today, there is a free Brian Tracy video on the internet where Brian shares his secret game plan to achieve his massive success. Go have a look and you’ve be inspired by this man.

Brian Tracy’s Video on Success

I have recently attended a short presentation where this person was sharing some secrets to wealth generation. The one thing that totally stuck to my mind was “Riding the Trends”. I reckon that it is very true. Whatever the trend is, that is a sure quick way of making some quick money. But of course it also depend on whether the trend was going to be a short term one or a relatively long term one. For example, you will notice that each time after a movie is released by Pixar or Disney, all the toy shops in town will be flooded with the cartoon figurines from these movies. Even the biggest toyseller in the world like McDonalds will also be distributing it. Now that is a trend, albeit a relatively short one. In the fashion world, similarly, the local fashion houses will always wait for the Summer or Fall Fashion Shows in Milan or Europe before they set their seamstress copying those latest trends.

In business today, one great business option open to us is the online network marketing business. This type of business is one great way of building passive incomes. This is really about making money work for you, rather than the other way around. This is also about leveraging, having a team of individuals with common goals working with you to help the business grow.

I reckon that apart from those who inherited millions, there are also many who created those millions of dollars through hard work. However, it would be hard to believe that any one individual can generate those millions on their own. Leveraging on a team of people allows one to become experts at building multiple income streams of which many of them are passive income. Within a team, there will be mentors who are very crucial in helping the rest achieve their dreams and potentials in creating wealth through passive income.

Passive income allows one to really have the financial freedom he has always dreamed about. Can you imagine a situation where you can go away for an long holiday, and coming home after that, not having to worry about how you are going to pay those Credit Card bills you have chalked up during the holiday, but instead, checking your bank balance to find that the money you have earn during the week that you were away, was much more than you have spent during the holiday. Now that is Passive Income. That is Financial Freedom.

Passive income is the kind of money that comes without one having to work extra to get it. And it is possible. And the trend now is through Internet Network Marketing. I have started exploring more on this since a few weeks ago and what I have found is really incredible. People have been earning as little as $300 a week as a start to more than several thousands a week, and most of them is at the comfort of their own homes, during their lunch time at work or even whilst they were outside, as long as they have a laptop and internet connections. Now wouldn’t that something you would like to do to? Bookmark this blog as I am coming back soon to share with you what I have been researching on.

Many of us have been in the workforce for a long time and have yet to realize it that all this while, we have been exchanging our time for money. Each day when we get up to go to work, our opportunity cost is time. We are in fact exchanging time with money. What is even more obvious would be in the case of those who are self-employed, who are their own bosses. People who provide services like a piano teacher, a cab driver, a seamstress, these are the people who are directly giving up their time in exchange for money. When they get up one day and decide that they are not going to work on that day, it would literally mean that there is no money earned on that day.

Now, think about it.

Is it not a better decision to let money work for you? Would you want to be better able to control your time and money? And have the peace of mind that you will still be able to continue comfortably in life even if your company is facing a financial uncertainty with imminent retrenchment of staff, or the country is facing a economic downturn and instead of feeling jittery, is actually looking forward to opportunities during those times?

There are many options available to us today and the only barrier is ourselves. The gatekeeper that keeps us from opening that gate and crossing over to the other side is ourselves. Once you come to realize this, the next step is of course to “TAKE ACTION”. We have heard often enough to never forget to dream, to not let others take away our dreams. But we forget one very important bit to this whole story, and that is to wake up from that dream and make it a reality. Only taking action will help you realize your dream.

Basically, this is where I would like to share my personal journey to letting money start working for me. And for those of you who are interested to join me in my journey, I welcome you with open arms. For those of you who would just like to read and watch by the side, please also feel free to do so. Maybe one day soon, you will be ready to “TAKE ACTION” too and start your own personal journey in making money work for you .

Hope to see all off you realize your dreams.