Earlier today I listened in on an Interview between Vince Reed and Tim Erway, one of the people who I’ve learned the most from. It’s an awesome interview, and if you want to check it out, click right here now.

During the Interview Tim discussed his “7 Pillars Of A 6 And Multiple 6 Figure Business”, and dug in to why each component is important, and what role they play in your business.

I found it extremely valuable, so I figured I share the value with you, as I’m sure you’ll feel the same way.

1. Target Market

You must completely and totally understand who you’re targeting with your Marketing before setting up any campaigns, driving any traffic, or generating any leads. By knowing you your target market or customer avatar is clearly, you’ll know where they hang out, what emotions they feel, what their aspirations are, what there pains are, and most importantly how to tailor your Marketing message to match your target market correctly. In knowing these things, your ads will be more effective, you capture page and sales conversions will be increased, and your ability to build a relationship with your list amplified, as you’ll know the exact pains and struggles there having, and will be able to help them solve them.

As Tim would say, “start with the who”.

2. A Compelling Offer That Solves Your Target Markets Problems

Your offer needs to be congruent with who your targeting, and solve the problems that your customer avatar is facing. If you’re in the fitness industry, and you’re targeting skinny guys who want to build muscle, you’re offer needs to provide value and solve the problem that your customer avatar is experiencing. It needs to show them how to effectively build muscle, and give them a clear step by step action plan on how to do it.

As a rule of thumb, follow the 10x rule and always make your products 10x more valuable than what you charge for them.

3. A Lead Capture Machine

You’ve heard it a thousands times, “the money is in the list, the money is in the list, the money is in the list”, but there couldn’t be anything MORE TRUE. On average the best Direct Response Marketers in the world will only ever get a 3% conversion rate from cold traffic to sale on the first point of contact. That means that 97% of the people who see your sales message won’t take action and buy the first time around. This should illustrate to you the importance of having a lead capture mechanism that allows you to followup with, build a relationship with, and then monetize those 97% of leads who don’t buy.

If you’re not capturing leads and building your list daily, you’re leaving almost all of your profits on the table.

Build your list daily, and e-mail your list daily.

4. A Sales Conversion Process

Now that you’re building your e-mail list and have a lead conversion process in place, you now need a sales conversion process in order to turn your leads into sales. In the Online world your sales conversion process should include a capture page (for lead generation), a thank you page (if you’re selling affiliate products), a sales page, an e-mail followup campaign that gets dripped to your new subscribers and creates a return path to your sales page, and then continual value based communication (blog posts, youtube videos, podcast episodes ect.) with your leads that don’t buy in order to warm them up, build a relationship, and turn them into someone open to buy something from you in the future.

If you really want to boost your sales conversions as an affiliate, create a bonus for people who purchase your offer. In creating a bonus you take over more control in the selling process, as you can add more value, scarcity, and urgency… all of which are powerful sales triggers.

In creating your bonus, try and figure out what’s missing in your offer, and try to fill the void with your bonus. If your offer is a “just add traffic” type system, give some additional training in regards to how you drive traffic, interview a traffic expert, and maybe even give some free traffic (an e-mail broadcast maybe) to your new customers.

A one on one consultation never hurts either, and will build goodwill with your new customers if you can help guide them down the correct path and give them value.

5. A Process To Increase Your Customer Value Over Time

If you’re a Network Marketer, providing training, systems, and marketing plans that keep team members around and create duplication within your organization is good way to go. If you’re selling affiliate products, make sure that the products you’re promoting have a strong ascending sales funnels and higher ticket backend offers that you’ll earn commissions on. If you’re selling your own products, again make sure that you have higher ticket backend offers that create larger profit margins and increase the value of all of your customers over an extended period of time.

If the only offer you have to sell your new prospects is a $27 e-book, it’s going to take you selling a HELL OF A LOT of ebooks in order to hit a goal of lets say $10k a month. If however you have a $97 offer, a $297 offer, and a $2,000 offer in your sales funnel, and a small percentage of people make it all the way through your pipeline and purchase everything you have to offer, you’ll earn 10x more per the same amount of customers than you would if you only offered the $27 ebook.

Make sure you have ascension built into your business.

6. A Specific Source Of Targeted Prospects

This circles back to #1, and knowing your customer avatar. When you know who your customer avatar is, you’ll most likely also know where they hang out, and where you should put your marketing message. You can have every other aspect that we’ve discussed in place, but if you don’t know exactly where your ideal prospect hangs out, chances are you won’t be putting your marketing message in front of the right crowd, which in turn will kill lead capture page conversions, sales conversions, and overall numbers.

The good news is that in todays world with Facebook being the behemoth that it is, chances are that your target market is on Facebook, and its just up to you to learn how to target them with your ads. Checkout Vince’s training products for more info on how to target efficiently using Facebook.

7. Continual testing, tracking, and optimization

At first you’ll always be worrying about acquiring new customers and making sales, but in the long run if you really want to stay at the top of your game, you need to always be testing, tracking and optimizing your sales funnels, traffic campaigns, followup campaigns, up-sell process’s and anything else that can be tested and optimized.