Hey, E-com Insiders how you doing? It’s Another Mind Hack Monday. I’m Dr. Nic, big welcome and hello to everybody who’s new to the group in this last week. The reason for these videos is because I just want to say hello to everyone and get us all off to a great start because we’ve got some goals and some wins that we want to get this week. Every one of us here is so results orientated to get stuff done. Then what I also like to share is something that helps you think differently that helps you think well because the quality of our thinking determines the quality of our life and business. So, I want to share a little mind hack with you today but I need to set it up. So, I’m going to tell you a war story and I’ll keep it brief.
So, one of my first businesses online that I started back 2008 was an online education business. We essentially sold webinars in a big package and we do big launches like enrollments just like at university enroll the whole lot of students all at once. It was doing very well, but it was great. We had students from over 70 countries all credited and sort of stuff. I’d come across these things called ‘one-click up-sells’. Now they weren’t just happening with the cart they were much better than that because what happened you should go to a sales page, you’d read the sales page, you’d go to the cart the cart was beautifully designed and then you’d land on the next page that had these things across the top that said you know you are now at step two.
This up-sell page was designed perfectly to help with conversions. Of course all you had to do was click a button and your credit card because it had been kept in session then that order would just be added on to that that one transaction. The people didn’t have to go back and re-enter their credit card details in and make another purchase. The whole idea was that this reduced friction and to try and increase the average transaction value of the average order value.
Now, I was in a mastermind with Frank Kern. You may or may not have heard of him. He was doing that and he was using Infusionsoft to do it and so I tried to get my developers to do it and it was a pain to do. I mean it was hard it wasn’t something I could do and make work right because it had to be code that had to be passed through variables and script and JavaScript and all that sort of stuff. So, I was working with a developer of my own. We created a plug-in that made WordPress talk to Infusionsoft for our membership site. Back then there weren’t anything you can buy. It all had to be custom done and so I got hooked on this idea of one-click up-sells that didn’t happen in the cart that happened on my own website or page that I could control. We created this awesome feature where you could have a WordPress page you had a little plug-in that would you’d click a button it would say enter a button on the page. When you put that button on the page it would then pull in all the products that you had in Infusionsoft and you would select which product to associate with that button. Then you would just press enter and then you could type whatever you wanted to be on the button and the button would be on the page and that’s how the one-click up-sell would then happen. It was supposed to be dead easy so I didn’t have to deal with any scripts or any variables in the URL or anything like that. All I would have to do is insert the button on the page, associate it with a product and it would all just work in theory.
Nine months later I’d been up night after night till 2:00 and 3:00 AM talking with the developer one of them was in the Ukraine and trying to make this thing work. I could not believe that just how difficult this thing was. The reason was that when someone did the one-click up-sell and had to also make them a certain level in the WordPress membership area. All these things had to happen and it just was just so hard and I’d run a few promotions trying to use it. They hadn’t worked, caused people to get angry, we had refunds and we had people double charged for things or not charged. It was just a nightmare. Anyway nine months had gone by and my revenue for that business had just plummeted because we hadn’t been how to do promotions and offers like we were doing before. I was buying this new bit of software and it was a Jvzoo offer. I bought the offer I went through Jvzoo, I went to PayPal and then it brought me to their up-sell page. When I said yes I want the up-sell guess what I had to do? I had to go back to PayPal and I had to pay through PayPal again and I noticed that I was doing it. The reason I was doing that extra effort was because I wanted the up-sell; it was a good offer.
It just hit me I said, well I’m prepared to go through this friction to buy the up-sell and yet here I am laboring for nine months to try and remove that a little bit of friction to make the one-click up-sell without having to put details in again. Yet because of that I hadn’t even been doing promotions and making the money that I could have been making because of this one-click up-sell thing that I wanted. I just thought far-out if I’ve just been making offers and making people would having an up-sell, but people had to go and re-enter their details into the cart they probably would have bought it if the offer was good enough.
Not only had I spent a lot of money developing this thing, I had lost so much money from not doing promotions because it wasn’t ready to launch properly. And also the stress and the worry I was so angry because every night when my wife would go to bed, I’d still be on this laptop doing this stuff and I felt like I was in tech hell. I wasn’t able to get on with my business because I was solving tech problems instead of making money. So, that leads me to the mind hack for today. I preempted this in the group by putting a tease up with that scene from the notebook where Ryan Guzman I think it is the same “What do you want? What do you want?” That’s what I had to ask myself. That’s what I’m going to ask you and all of us to do this week is to get really clear on what we want.
If you don’t know what you want all you have to do is look at what you are getting to determine what it is that you want because you are getting pretty much what you want. Now there are some things that we’re getting that are out of our control, but what was I getting if you look at that my story. What was I getting? I was getting what I wanted. I wanted a one-click up-sell that’s what I wanted and so that’s what I was doing. If I’d wanted to make money I wouldn’t have been worried about the one-click up-sell. I would have continued to make money and make offers and develop this thing on the side instead of getting consumed with this desire to replicate what I’d seen someone else doing and ending up binning nine months of work losing that time and losing that revenue just so I could get the one-click up-sell.
Now, I couldn’t also get angry at myself. I had to basically say well Nic you welcomed this into your life when you decided that you wanted one click up cells and that you wanted the software to do it seamlessly. That’s what you welcomed into your life. That’s what you wanted and that’s what you’ve now been getting. So, you’ve been getting what you want. If you wanted money you would have stopped much quicker and realized it was costing you money, just going ahead and made offers anyway and done up-sells that require people to go back into the cart again.
So, it’s this element of taking responsibility for what is going on in your business, by asking yourself what you want and then measuring your actions against what it is that you say that you want. I was so frustrated at not making money, but clearly I didn’t want money. I wanted a one-click up-sell plug-in and they weren’t congruent. Those two things were not congruent. That’s why you have to ask yourself what you want, seriously. If you don’t know what you want then just look at what you are getting because chances are you are getting what you want. So, therefore if you also aren’t getting what you want that helps to flip the switch for you. It helps you to think, hang on what do I really want and are my actions in alignment with that or am I just non-consciously almost on autopilot going after some other thing that is on a tangent that actually isn’t in full alignment with what I deeply truly want for my future.
What do you want for your business? If you want to make money in your business, then you need to be making offers to the marketplace that is how you make money. If you’re not making enough money then you need to be going back and asking yourself that fundamental question; am I making enough offers to the marketplace or am I ‘faffing’ about with something. I’ll give you another really good example. A friend of mine runs a really great boutique power-lifting gym and I was speaking to him. It is the nicest power-lifting gym there is in the whole of Sydney where I live. Guess what? He got what he wanted a beautiful-looking power-lifting gym, but what he didn’t get was all the revenue. He got himself in a lot of debt to have them beautiful-looking power-lifting gym in the city. Now he was in a cash flow problem, why? Because he got what he wanted he got a beautiful-looking gym. He didn’t get revenue or profit. He didn’t get big stores of cash saved up. Why? It’s because he spent it all on getting the most beautiful looking gym. So, it depends what you want. Let’s talk about design on websites and designs on themes and that sort of stuff. If what you want is a beautiful pretty looking site then by all means go and get that but you might not get conversions. So, that’s why you have to ask what you want. If you want conversions, you’ll do things that help convert. If you want things that look beautiful that you’ll do things that look beautiful the two often don’t match up all. So, this is the same looking at the staff you have or looking at the boyfriend or girlfriend or wife or husband or child that you’ve got and the relationship we have with them. What do you want? Ask yourself that question. Check in with what you are doing and measure the two together. Do they make sense? What are you spending your time on?
Here’s another one positioning; so positioning your put yourself in the marketplace. If you want your brand to be positioned in a certain way and so you’re spending all this time on that positioning it might not be that that positioning actually relates to you making more money, in which case that’s fine. Maybe you just want to have a brand that’s positioned in a certain way, but that might not be congruent with making money. You have to decide what you want.
If making money is what you want then choose things that actually make money. If having beautiful things is what you want then choose things that have beautiful websites do that and have a beautiful design. But it might not be aligned with making money. Same with the ad creative you use and the products that you choose to have. It’s the same with everything. So, again the mind hack to check in on this week because it’s something that you need to let kind of wash over you as you begin to apply this is ask yourself what you want and measure your activities and behaviors. What are you doing? Because what you do is really telling the story of what you want. If you want to change that you’ve got to change that behavior to be in alignment with your long-term goals and visions. Get really clear about it because if you don’t know what you want you’ll end up getting something else on autopilot and it might not be what you actually really want long-term. This sounds a bit convoluted, but I’m sure you get the gist of it. So, what do you want? Answer that question.
Then if we roll back to the last couple of mind hacks right we talked about CVS to BVS. Look at the current version of your situation. Understand what the better version of the situation is because that’s what you want. Then you have to align your behavior, the actions you take to get what you want. But you’ll only be able to do that if you know what you actually want and you measure the activities that you’re doing each day.
That’s it. That’s my story. That’s my Mind Hack Monday for you. Let me know in the comments below if this resonates with you. The other thing I want to do is get some engagement is tell me what you want this week. Put down what your goals are for this week and I want you to turn that goal into a commitment. Then I want you to measure the actions that you take every single day toward hitting that commitment that you make by putting it in the comments down below.
So, let’s make this some kind of declaration of what we’re going to achieve this week something that you want something that you’re going to do. Put it in the post below and then I can like it. I can’t hold you accountable, only you can hold yourself accountable to it. So, you go for it. Put it down below. Have a fantastic week and we’ll catch you again soon.