The most dangerous number in business

What time zone am I in?

Last week I was in three different time zones in one day. Today, I'm in Richmond, flying back to Atlanta, staying in a hotel by the airport and flying to LA bright and early tomorrow morning. On Thursday, I have a 5:30 am call with Dan Kennedy and then on Friday and Saturday I have a meeting with my elite mastermind group.

As Junie B. Jones would say, "Wowie, wow, wow."

I'm kinda fried and didn't feel like being very creative so I wrote you a meat and 'tators article that I think you'll get a lot out of.

Enjoy!

The most dangerous business is the number one and this is especially true when you count on one marketing method to generate leads for you. When you only use one or two strategies to bring new clients through the door, you have built your business on very shaky ground.

When, marketing guru Jay Abraham talks about building a business, he asks “Do you want to build your business like a Greek Parthenon or like a diving board?”

He then draws an illustration of a diving board that has one pillar holding up the board and asks, “What does a diving board do?” The answer is, it goes up and it goes down and if that one pillar is knocked out the whole diving board collapses.

Then he shows a picture of a Greek Parthenon that has a number of different pillars underneath it and if one of them gets knocked out the top of the Greek Parthenon does not fall, the business does not crumble.

The different pillars represent the marketing strategies you use to generate leads. The more pillars you can have profitably, the more stable your business is going to be.

You want to use every strategy – Online, Offline, and everything in between -- to generate leads and market your business.

If you just market online because its fast and, in some cases, inexpensive, you are setting yourself up for disaster.

I was speaking at an Internet marketing seminar about 3 years ago and I was one of the most unpopular speakers because I was talking about how you need to use direct mail! I said you need to use offline methods to build a stable business.

And people were saying no, no, no it’s too expensive, it’s too difficult, its too this and that. All we need to use is Google Adwords. I said, if all you’re doing is using Google Adwords to drive traffic to your website, your business is in a very precarious position.

One week later, Google changed some of the rules about what advertisers could do. This became know as the “Google slap.” People who had lucrative businesses making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month basically went out of business because using Adwords was the only way they had to drive people to their website.

Another person I know, who was a true wiz at search engine optimizations, had his BIG business humming along by being ranked high in the search engines – usually in the number one position. One night he went to bed and when he woke up in the morning, his websites were not even listed on the FIRST PAGE of any of the major search engines.

The rules changed overnight and his business was instantly cut in half –and that’s the good news because at least he had some other methods for generating traffic to his website or he could have lost his entire business.

Here is a check list of the different ways you can market your business. See how many of them you are utilizing right now.

• Direct Mail Letters
• Direct Mail Postcard
• Search Engine Optimization
• Pay Per Click
• Banner Ads
• Email
• Articles
• Newspaper Advertising
• Magazine Advertising
• Val Pak
• Radio
• Television
• Strategic Alliances
• Publicity

And that is just a partial list!

Again, the more methods you can profitably use to generate leads, the better off and safer you are.

This is important: Do NOT just choose one marketing method over another because one method produces leads at a lower cost. This is a huge error. Again, you want to use ALL the methods that you profitably can.

You take ALL of those methods add up the cost per lead from each method and then divide by the number of methods you are using to get your average cost per lead.

The bottom line is this:

By using multiple lead generation strategies you will have a business that you can count on, that your family can count on and that will put money in your pocket – regardless of what’s happening in the economy.

Okay, time to me to schedule a nap...

(As always, your comments are welcome and I really do read all of them.)

Kick butt, make mucho dee-nero!

~Dave Dee
Author of "How To Turn Your Passion Into Profits"

P.S. I know I keep teasing you about this "BIG THING" that's coming and how cool it's going to be. It is taking much longer than I anticipated to get off the ground and is a ton of work. I'm talking with my team today, and will get you a status report about when we are going to launch this thing. Believe me, it'll be worth the wait.