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Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

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It All Goes Back In The Box

Posted: 24 Apr 2015 06:58 AM PDT

Many years ago my grandfather and I would play monopoly.  It started with him whooping me but eventually I got really good at it.  I was a greedy tycoon and dominated not only him but also any challengers

My grandfather was a very humble and hard working man. He grew up during the great depression and served in World War 2.

While I would be cocky after my Monopoly board game victories he would say, “Relax there. It all goes back in the box in the end and we start over next game“.

Now that happened when I was around 10-12 years old. I have never forgotten it for some reason. It wasn’t until recently I realized how important that statement would be to me.

Those of you who have been on my newsletter for months know my what has all happened to me since I turned 40 and had a pretty big awakening business wise on what I was doing and the changes I have made.

The most highlighted line from my book is “Having money isn’t everything, not having it is“. I have been on both sides of that. When I turned 30 I was unemployed and over 50k in debt.

Then one day I made a dollar on the Internet. For me, making my dollar on the Internet was one of the most thrilling and exciting things.

Just like in Monopoly I became obsessive. I got greedy.

By the time I turned 31 I had over a million dollars in the bank.

Over the next 9 years I expanded my skillset and had an amazing journey, earning over 10 million dollars from making money on the Internet.

Right before I turned 40, my wife and I had met with or accountant who told us we could easily never work again and maintain our current lifestyle.

As I said, when I turned 40 it was a huge awakening for me – After examining my current lifestyle both professionally and business wise and realized I wasn’t happy. I closed my downtown office and stopped doing the things that I didn’t like to do (long story short).

Then that saying my grandfather said 30 years ago – “it all goes back in the box” became clear to me.

When we die we are all equal. Whether we have 100 million dollars or nothing. We all are buried in a box (or an urn or whatever your belief)  and all is reset.

I know what some of you are thinking, you can leave it to your kids and they will be set.

I have some personal experience with this. On my fathers side of the family – when my aunt died of cancer (I was like 14) she left her money to her children,  in a trust. They fought over it for years and eventually it got very bitter and to this day they don’t talk.

On my mother's side of the family – when my great grand father passed, he left my grandmother and her sister his land and money. This was before I was born but I was told it was a vicious dispute over who got what and they became enemies. It wasn’t until my grandmother died, a few months ago, that for the first time I met my great aunt.  I got to spend some time with her and she is a very nice woman.  I am bummed I never met her before.

Everyone seems to be so focused on making money. No matter what financial position they are in.

I fully understand that when you are barely getting by and all of your financial decisions on everything from going out to eat to if you can take a vacation are based primarily on money.

Then money is everything.

But when you have enough money to never have to work again then what really matters?

I have 2 daughters (6 and 8 as of now) and I wouldn’t say I have neglected them at all – but my work, at times, has taken priority on some extra curricular stuff. And I wasn’t even happy with what I was doing working wise.

The primary reason I moved back into my house from my downtown office was because it's only a few blocks from my kid's school. I get to go to lunch with them, take them to school, and do a ton of daytime activities with them. It's pretty awesome.

I also changed a lot of what I do professionally focusing back on what I love doing and an ironic side effect of that is that I have profited more since working out of my basement in the last six months than I had in the last 3 years combined.

So with all of this said I would like to leave you with the following and I say it violating one of my primary beliefs (never tell people what to do, instead share your experiences and let them take from it what they will).

Take a look at yourself and see if what you are doing really matters. We have such a short life span and no matter how much money we have, in the end, it all goes back in the box.
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Make More Sales by Tracking your Leads - DailyBlogTips

Make More Sales by Tracking your Leads - DailyBlogTips

Make More Sales by Tracking your Leads

Posted: 16 Sep 2015 05:15 AM PDT

Most businesses have very little idea where their leads and sales come from, simply taking the natural highs and lows in their stride and continuing with the same strategy they outlined from the get-go.

Making sales is the ultimate goal of any business, but if you're not tracking where your leads and sales come from you're missing a big opportunity. If you can find out from that new customer exactly what led them to you, you can proactively tailor your marketing strategy to do more of what's been proven to work.

By focusing more on data analysis and measuring your marketing efforts, you'll be able allocate your marketing budget based on true performance – spending more on what works and less on what doesn't – in order to improve the quantity and quality of your sales leads.

Where do leads come from?

Inbound leads will mostly come to you via telephone or website visits, but there are many sources that drive customers to make that original contact.

To start evaluating the source of leads it's common to code them, which allows you to track your marketing and PR activity more effectively. Inbound leads are a direct result of your promotional efforts and without tracking your inbound leads, you won't be able to tell which source has performed best.

Monitoring your inbound leads is simple. In this article we look at five sources you can track and how to do it.

1. The online search journey

Customers begin the decision-making journey long before they ever arrive with you, and you can effectively track this path to purchase by monitoring the keywords and phrases customers are using.

Depending on where they are in the search journey, the terms customers use will differ. Customers mostly begin searching with a wide net using broad search terms, and gradually become more specific as they refine what they're looking for.

By evaluating the search journey paths from your marketing reports you can understand which keywords are most relevant to your business and how you can be using them more effectively.

2. Page tracking

Page tracking allows you to monitor which lead sources have directly resulted in an action being performed on your website, such as entering contact details or making an enquiry.

By placing code on a landing page that only reveals itself once the user has completed a business-valuable action (submitting contact details; making payment, and so on), you can then determine your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).

Google Analytics Acquisition Reports is a great tool for tracking the keywords and channels that are most valuable to your business, allowing you to focus your marketing efforts on the sources that are driving ROI.

3. Click tracking

One step up from page tracking is click tracking, or event tracking. This allows you to measure actions on your site that don't lead to specific pages, such as watching an embedded video.

Click tracking, like page tracking, allows you to measure the journey users take before performing your chosen actions, showing where they came from and which search terms they used. This can be done using Google Analytics Tracking Codes, by installing codes on the pages you want to monitor.

By identifying which search terms drove positive actions on your site, you can refine your content strategy to convert more customers.

4. E-Commerce CPA

If you're an e-commerce business, you can embed an e-commerce tracking code to monitor how customers are interacting with your products online. This way, you can see exactly what it's costing you to make each sale and which traffic and keyword sources led the sale in the first place. Using Google Analytics, you can determine what your revenue is per traffic source and which keywords are the most valuable to your business.

Tracking CPA in this way allows you to refine your marketing strategy to bring cost down and adjust your prices to increase your profit margin.

5. Call tracking

All this online tracking is well and good, I hear you say, but what about the leads that don't come through your website? Although you're likely to see far fewer leads offline than online, the sales leads you get via phone are often the most valuable for your business.

Once upon a time, the only real method for tracking telephone leads was to ask customers when they called in where they heard about the business. Nowadays, the technology we have to track offline leads is much more sophisticated.

Businesses such as Mediahawk have created powerful call tracking software that every self-respecting marketer makes use of, allowing businesses not only to track offline traffic sources but to provide valuable data on each call.

Conclusion

By tracking your sales leads effectively from source to sale you get a comprehensive picture of how your marketing spend is driving performance, allowing you to refine your marketing strategy in line with your results. In short, effectively measuring your sales leads will allow you to drive increased ROI, cut unnecessary spend on underperforming channels and ultimately, make more sales. And that's the ultimate goal of any business, right?

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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