062: How Is Your Online Business (And Your Personal Life) Doing, on a Scale From One to Ten?

Are you scared? What if you became more aware of what made you anxious, scared, or nervous? Could you dissect those into smaller pieces? If you did, you'd be able to change and improve those small, manageable pieces...

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What if I asked you to write down a page of words to describe a "bad mood" such as: flustered, dejected, beat-down?
What if I asked you to then write a list of words describing a "good mood" such as: happy, energized, bubbly?

My guess is, that list of "bad mood" words would be longer than the "good mood" list. Let's change that for you.

To become more successful in both our personal lives and our businesses, we need to become more detailed about the positive things and less detailed about the negative. Whatever you apply more detail to is where your mind will focus.

What's the "trick" for overcoming that fear and thinking more positively and effectively?

Answer on a 1 to 10 Scale

When you go to the store, the clerk asks, "How are you?" Both of you are expecting your response to be a mono-syllabic "good" or maybe a "great."

Instead of doing that, ask yourself how you are on the 1-10 scale. Maybe you're having a "better than average" day, so you say 8.1.

Not only do you cause a "pattern interrupt" for the clerk, which might get you a nice laugh, but it will help you out by causing you to actually think about how you feel, instead of just replying generically with a word that has no real meaning.

Use the 1 to 10 Scale in Your Own Business

Okay, so we can see how evaluating yourself on a 1-10 scale can put you more ‘in touch' personally, but how does it help in your business? Here are a few examples:

Writing and Revising: The majority of people are not the greatest writers but if you are in internet marketing, you have to put out content. You need to be able to put out on okay first draft and for the most part a first draft is good enough. This isn't school and you're not going to triple your income by making some small edits to an email.

If you're writing a book, you might need to spend more time than on a blog post, but the principle is the same. We don't want to spend an hour writing 1 chapter of a book and then spend 5 hours doing edits.

How do you edit quickly so you don't consume all of your time? Again, the answer is scale from 1 to 10. Once the book is written (and it's been typed/spell-checked), you could just skim paragraphs and rate each one on a scale from 1 to 10 for substance.

Then, you quickly average those to get an "overall" rating. If you come up with an 8 or 9, great. But, if you come up with a 7.0 book, and you wanted an 8.0, your strategy would be to just go through and focus on fine-tuning the lower-rated paragraphs.

Overall Business Strategy: What if you're not making enough money from your online business? What if someone asked you, "How are you doing with Facebook ad campaigns?" If you answered with "good" or "okay", that's not going to help. "Good" is not measurable and it's an "automatic" response, instead of one that forces you to look for clarity.

Use that 1 to 10 scale to pinpoint issues. Rating gives you better accuracy about what/where the problem is and where you'll improve it.

Here are 10 areas that you could focus on and maximize to improve your business overall and make more money.

• Time management and Mindset
• Building the List
• Email Follow-up and Auto-responder sequences
• Membership Retention
• New Customers
• Joint Ventures
• Free Traffic
• Paid Traffic
• Info Products and Recurring Income
• Big-Ticket Sales and Coaching

Write a number next to each of those above items. Look at these factors individually and "score" them. This draws attention to areas where you'll capitalize to improve the overall picture.

For example, if a real problem that you have is not emailing, rate that lower. If you need more traffic, then you'd rate those lower.

Doing these one by one will help you think of solutions to improve that specific aspect of your business. Then, look at that average number. You'll see where you are and where you're headed.

Today's Winning Quotes

• "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, but small minds discuss people." (Eleanor Roosevelt)
• "I found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances, be more active and show up more often." (Brian Tracy)
• "1 in 160 are Millionaires in the U.S. 1 in 1460 are millionaires in the world." -- Dan Kennedy

Check out Robert's proven method for writing a winning e-book at Make a Product, his A-Z strategy for developing your own "free traffic-generating" podcast at Podcast Crusher, or his fun and easy course on creating your own graphics at Graphic Dashboard.

You can also get more personal guidance in his monthly mastermind at Double Agent Marketing.

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Filed in: Archive 1: 2012-2016 • Mindset • Personal • Podcast • Systems