US online retail sales this holiday season will reach $44 billion, a 12 percent increase over last year and the slowest growth rate to date, according to Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR). This year’s weakened growth is indicative of the difficult economic environment catching up with formerly resilient Web buyers.

Although US consumers are pessimistic about the health of the economy, they expressed a marked interest in the ability of the Web to save them money. Forty-eight percent of consumers surveyed, compared with 41 percent in 2007, said that they can find the best values and deals online. Additionally, 36 percent of consumers said that they would be more likely to shop online due to high gas prices, compared with 22 percent who expressed the same sentiment last year. Forrester expects that the majority of holiday online sales will be driven by shoppers who have previously purchased online, rather than first time online buyers.

“While eCommerce has traditionally been resistant to negative offline trends, growing concerns about the stability of the economy are finally affecting consumers’ online shopping decisions,” said Forrester Research Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. “This is going to be a very competitive online shopping season, so retailers should take immediate steps to bolster their customer retention strategies in order to ensure repeat purchases.”

More than two-thirds of consumers surveyed said that they are planning to spend more or about the same online as they did last year. Core holiday product categories such as clothing will remain top choices for online buyers, as well as books, DVDs/videos, music, gift certificates, and toys. Respondents also indicated that they will be seeking free shipping offers more often this year than last.

“A main attraction of the online shopping environment is the breadth of information that it offers,” said Patti Freeman Evans, Forrester Research Vice President and Research Director. “Retailers should expand their use of online marketing tactics on search engines and comparison-shopping sites since shoppers are likely to be researching the Web more thoroughly when deciding on this year’s holiday gifts.”

This year’s annual holiday forecast was a collaboration between Forrester Research and JupiterResearch, now a Forrester Research company. Two surveys were conducted to measure the attitudes and expectations of online consumers during the upcoming holiday shopping season, which was defined as the months of November and December. The first survey was fielded in September 2008 and received 2,153 individual responses. The second survey was fielded in early October 2008 and received 1,042 individual responses.

Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. www.forrester.com.

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

Since the thing that will ultimately decide the fate of your online business is the level of faith entrusted upon you by your customers, you need to do everything in your capacity to ensure that customer needs and requirements are met in the most rightful manner. One way of doing this is to start and operate a full-fledged customer support center. But, since small online business owners such as you, often do not have the requisite funds to do so, it makes sense to try out other affordable options that might be available.

If you really want to make it big in the world of online business, then the best you can do is opt for a support ticket system software that will automate all your customer support services. Once you install the software, you can allocate your precious time and effort for more productive purposes rather than waste it over mundane tasks, such as reading customer queries and complaints and writing appropriate replies.

You may be concerned about customer satisfaction. But, you need not worry, because your customers will in fact benefit from the software and not the other way round. In just a few clicks, the software will automatically lead customers to the answers that they might be looking for. They will thus be freed from the painstaking job of writing lengthy emails, explaining in detail their queries or problems and not to mention, the waiting period gets completely eliminated once you install the software on your website.

Apart from your customers, you too stand to benefit a lot from installing a support ticket system because it will allow you to streamline your customer support services. For example, with the help of the software, you will easily be able to classify customer queries or complaints into different categories, something that will save your time and effort. Then, you will not be required to write personalized mails to each and every customer query. You just need to create a single generalized mail, which can then be send over as a reply to all the queries in a particular group.

Installing a support ticket system on your website is certainly beneficial, but before you actually do so, you need to consider a few things, obviously because not all support ticket systems available online have the desired functionalities. You might have to spend some additional hours searching for the best available support ticket system, but believe me, your efforts will not go in vain because once you find the right software, you will automatically be on your road to success.

Author Description

by Jezorski Gary. Article source: ContentLog.com. Read the full Profit Lance and Ultimate Wealth Package reviews.

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

When I set up my first ecommerce website I found the information surrounding online credit card purchases to be more confusing than any other aspect of marketing on the Internet.

The reason as it turns out is that the various organizations offering to advise you on how to set online payment systems up have conflicting interests and, in some cases, no idea how the systems work together.

The other potentially confusing aspect of online payments is that the entire system involves a number of service suppliers each providing one element of the entire chain. The real trick is getting them all working together.

So let me outline the parts and then give you a couple of suggestions for how you might approach an ecommerce system for your business. (There are dozens of ways to get the same thing done!)

Internet Merchant Account – In order to take online payments, when you don’t physically swipe a credit card, you need an Internet merchant account. This account can be issued by your bank or by a host of companies, such as Merchant Warehouse, that offer Internet merchant accounts. It’s important to note that if you already have a merchant account for your store or business, you will need to get an Internet account as they are different. This account will include a set-up fee and some % per transaction fee.

Most banks only provide merchant accounts for Visa and MasterCard. It is a very good idea to offer American Express and Discover card payment options. In order to do this you need to contact American Express and Discover and activate accounts. Once you have this information you can provide it to your merchant account provider’s payment processor to process all four cards in the same account.

Virtual Terminal – A virtual terminal is an add-on service that comes with your Internet merchant account. This allows you to take phone orders or in-person workshop orders and then go to a secure Internet based site and process the orders into your account.

Secure Payment Gateway – Since Internet traffic is susceptible to eavesdropping you will need a secure payment gateway that allows your customer’s credit card data to be secure as they place orders. This is yet another service provider that specializes in secure transaction and takes the secure data and passes it through a secure gateway to your payment processor. You want to make sure that this part of the process works with your merchant account and your shopping cart. I would stick with one of the leading gateway providers. This would include Authorize.net, VeriSign and SkipJack There is a fee for this service as well. It is important that you communicate who your gateway provider is to your merchant account provider.

If you are selling goods that are available to download immediately you will also need what is known as real time processing from your secure processor. This is simply a connection that gets a credit card transaction approved or declined in real time as a customer places an order. There is an additional charge for this service.

Shopping Cart – shopping carts come in software and hosted service based versions that allow your customers to shop for multiple items and then pass the order to your payment system by way of checkout. This service is very important if you have multiple products available on your web site. There are some very stable, fully functioning shopping carts that are free or very low cost. Some leading cart systems include osCommerce, zencart, and 1ShoppingCart. I must repeat that you need to make sure that your shopping cart is supported by your payment gateway and vice versa – just ask.

Third Party Processing – There is an alternative solution to the entire puzzle known as a third party processor. In this approach, the third party provider may offer all of the processing and no merchant account is required. The drawback to this approach is that you generally pay a higher overall fee per transaction and have limited ability to customize your customer’s check out experience to match your website. PayPal, an eBay company, is the largest provider of this approach and is a very acceptable option.

A Few Words of Advice

Each piece of the ecommerce puzzle comes with a fee, either as a monthly set price or on a per transaction basis. Make sure that you understand what the fees are. Online merchant account providers are notorious for charging very high application and set-up fees. Start with your bank, but shop this aspect around. Most small business owners should be able to set-up a fully functioning, real time processed site with a shopping cart for less that $150/mo (not including per transaction fees)

Make sure that you find out which parts work well with each other. In other words, when you are looking for a shopping cart or payment processors make sure that they integrate with your real time payment gateway and vice versa. If you stick with the big names in each category you shouldn’t have any problems.

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

There are millions of retail websites on the Internet that use online shopping carts to enable customers to order products or services online. If you’ve ever shopped online, however, you know that all online shopping carts are not created equal. Some are confusing to use, don’t allow you to make changes as you progress through the ordering process or are limited in terms of payment options and other features.

Having a shopping cart system that doesn’t work well or is limited in functionality is often a mistake new websites make. They lavish lots of time and money on making the site appealing, showing off their products or services in the best possible light and even adding cool flash add-ons and other extras, but cut corners on the shopping cart because they see it as a mundane, boring feature that is strictly utilitarian. The problem that arises from that attitude is that shoppers can quickly lose their enthusiasm for purchasing a product or products if they become frustrated when going through the online checkout.

Online shopping carts should be customer friendly. People make mistakes; it’s a fact of life. If your website’s online shopping cart system is well-designed, it will allow for errors by having links on each page for going back and making corrections or enabling the shopper to change his mind on one item without losing his entire order in the process.

Internet shopping is only as convenient as the payment options for most people. If a retail website offers wonderful gifts, clothing or furniture but doesn’t accept credit cards, it will lose a hefty proportion of its customers. Conversely, if a variety of options such as major credit cards, PayPal and e-checks are available; shoppers will be more inclined to make purchases.

Shopping carts must also have back end flexibility. Of course, offering lots of different options and services through your online shopping cart system is great for your customers, but if it isn’t easy to use and adapt to your own company’s needs from the back end as well, it won’t help. If you have a flexible, intuitive back end design, however, you’ll find that a more complex shopping cart system can actually make your work easier.

There are many companies today who offer custom designed online shopping carts as well as companies that offer several different software packages that you can tailor to fit your specific needs at a reasonable cost. Using these specialists to help you implement an online shopping cart experience for your website can improve everything from your customer service to your bookkeeping, since you can use these systems for not only placing orders, but for tracking inventory and assessing sales trends.

When researching online shopping cart options for your website, ask some serious questions about what the provider can offer you. Considerations on whether the software package will include the source code so that you can customize your online shopping cart as your needs change should be an option. Find out if there is technical support available if and when you need it. Research what types of payment options can be set up with the shopping cart program. And learn if the system is a dynamic one that can evolve and change, as shopper’s needs change.

Be sure when you’re looking for the right online shopping cart service or package that you really know what you’ll need. Whether you offer customized gifts or require drop-down menus for color, size and style choices, your decision will be based on your needs. Also, find out what the return policies are for the particular product you are interested in. Knowing as much as possible about what you want will ensure that you don’t fall short when you invest in your website’s online shopping cart system.

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AspDotNetStorefront is a premier “>storefront provider.

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

How many times have you gotten a holiday greeting card in the mail from a business and said (or thought) “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Christmas cards, even when signed by the whole office staff, look more like an obligation than a true wish for happiness.

So what can you do instead? How about a newsletter – even a mini-newsletter. Send them some holiday tips or a great old family recipe. In other words, something personal that you might not send at other times of the year. Even better if it’s something they can keep and use.

If you send a full newsletter, include something just for fun. A short holiday tale, a holiday-themed puzzle, or some holiday trivia. Make it something they’ll keep around for a day or two while they do the puzzle – or something they’ll share with someone because it was interesting.

You should send cards – but only to those customers and clients you feel closest to. And on those cards, add a hand-written, personal note. Say something that shows you know who they are – and care about their lives. For instance “Hope your “human family” and those “monster pups” have a great Christmas!” Or how about “Wishing you a wonderful trip to visit the kids…”

If you really want to do a mass-mailing and can’t find the writing time and courage for a newsletter, try a postcard with a beautiful photo – or a tasteful cartoon. It will still look like a mass mailing, but at least it will catch their attention. They’ll notice who had the good taste or good humor to send it.

What about your best or most recent customers and clients? How about buying a few mini trees, poinsettias, or wreaths and personally delivering them? THAT would be impressive, and it would show them you care!

I know there are concerns that Christmas will offend someone. I can’t confidently advise you on how to handle that, because I live in an area where lack of Christmas would offend everyone! You know your area, and know what you should do.

I personally feel honored any time anyone wishes me a happy day of any kind. If they’re sharing their special celebration with me, that’s as good as if they’re sharing mine. But I realize not everyone shares that opinion.

Perhaps you shouldn’t send anything in early December. Depending on your locale, you do run the risk of offending someone. Some will be offended if you say “Merry Christmas” and some might even boycott you if you do not!

In addition, some people are so busy trying to juggle work, family, and holiday responsibilities that they don’t have much time to peruse their mail. Your good wishes could be lost in the shuffle.

With that in mind, consider mailing during the last week of the month instead – and send a Happy New Year greeting.

Everyone has a new year – no matter what religion they follow. So if you live in an area where that’s a concern, it might even be a safer choice.

For your new year greeting you can include a small “gift.” How about a one page report on the ten most overlooked tax deductions. Perhaps you could send a reminder about a new deduction available just this year. Or maybe a checklist of expenditures to record over the coming year would be most helpful. Everyone loves a gift, and tax tips are always useful.

My bottom line advice is this: Sending gold-foil, imprinted Holiday cards could well be a waste of time and money. Be a little creative, spend less money, and show your customers and clients that you’re a real person – a person who cares about them.

Marte Cliff is a Freelance Copywriter and former real estate broker who specializes in writing for real estate and related industries. Marte’s e-book, Getting Clients, is a step by step guide to creating a marketing niche and developing it into a satisfying career. While written for real estate, the principles will work just as well for other sales careers. Learn more about Getting Clients at http://www.marte-cliff.com/career.html.
Her second e-book, The Land Buyer’s Survival Guide, is a resource for both land buyers and beginning real estate sales people – offering a guide to the questions that must be answered before it’s safe to close on a land purchase. Learn more about the Guide at http://www.marte-cliff.com/Survival.html

Marte offers a weekly ezine for real estate professionals and others with an interest in marketing. Subscribe when you visit her at http://www.marte-cliff.com

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

To build a strong brand with a loyal customer base, your business must create a complete chain of customer experiences with outcomes that your customers value and adore.

Repeat business is the most profitable business, and so all business should aspire to build customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is based on customer service experiences. These experiences are not merely at the point-of-sale or the exchange desk. Instead, they encompass the compete chain of customer experiences.

They start with the time when, where and how your customers hear about your brand, their first contact with your brand – which may be your website -. They extend all the way to a time that they receive a notification that their warranty is about to expire and that extended warranty is available to them. And beyond this, of course.

Strong branding is the result of this consistent delivery of customer experiences, through distribution and media channels. In these customer experiences, what is important is how your customer feels when they are in your brand presence. How do you manage this? What kind of service is needed?

There is my 4-part approach for loyalty- & brand-building by managing the complete customer experience:

1. Manage Brand Loyalty and Customer Experiences From The Top.
Senior management should be responsible, not a service rep nor middle management. By putting the management of customer experiences in the hands of top management, a bird’s eye view can be applied encompassing the complete set of customer experiences. Furthermore, it gives a clear message to all that your business takes satisfying customer experiences seriously.

2. Complete Measurements Go Beyond Metrics.
Management is to set explicit brand value propositions plus guidelines for employees and channels to bring these value propositions alive. Monitoring click-through rates, conversion ratios or phone-time-on-hold metrics should be complemented with complete customer interaction review.

3. Detail Key Customer Scenarios through Research. Market segmentation can help in pinpointing what customers consider important outcomes of key scenarios. After all, not all customers have the same needs and wants. Detailed market research reveals what customers consider to be key-scenarios and what factors to get right in each scenario. You will find that this kind of market research will give your business an edge over competition that is not necessarily transparent to your customers.

4. Put Complete Customer Experience Management Protocols In Place. When performance metrics and evaluation results are not reflecting your intended brand value proposition, a process should be in place for prompt corrective action.

In Conclusion

Once you and your company have established both the leadership for and the appropriate means of managing and evaluating your Complete Customer Service Experience, you’re ready to actually tune the experience and so create customer loyalty. Loyalty results when customers feel understood and cared for. A strong brand shows business choices that foster loyalty. This article offers a path to successfully strengthening your brand.

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

Website conversion is quite simply the conversion of the incoming traffic to sales. It is the crucial indicator of the success of your business. Your website might be receiving tons of traffic but if you’re not able to convert them into sales, it’s all effort gone to waste. You’d be surprised at how many businesses spends tons of money to divert traffic but do not invest the time and money to convert them into sales.

How to increase conversions? There are many ways you can turn that visitor into not just a customer but a repeat customer. That means he or she will not just love your site but tell others and they tell others about your site. Get the picture? And that’s just one customer we’re talking about. Imagine if you could do that with all the traffic that comes into your site? We’re talking exponential sales!

So now before you scratch your head and start day dreaming about your booming business, let’s get down to the basics. Here are a few simple tips to jumpstart your website conversion rate:

Shopping cart. As obvious as this seems, most people do have a shopping cart. But the thing they overlook is the ‘add’ button next to it. You need to mention something like ‘Ad to shopping cart’ or ‘Add to the shopping basket’ etc. This is also known as the call to action and plays a crucial role in getting your visitor to do what you want them to do – shop!

Be honest. Let’s face it – if you don’t have stock of some product, mention it upfront. Customers will respect you for it for having not wasted their time. That’ll also save them the hassle of digging through the online catalogue and adding it to the shopping cart – only to find it’s not in stock. What a waste!

Easy accessibility. It is essential to get your site visibility on the Internet. I mean, there are hordes of e-commerce sites out there literally waiting to get their customers’ business. What makes you think your website is so special?

- Therefore use appropriate keywords to get traffic to your site.

- Optimize your website to ensure better search ranking.

- Use persuasive articles that get the reader’s attention.

Selling the ‘right’ products. When it comes to selling you want your website to do well, right? Well that’s only going to happen if you sell products that customers want. Also important is ensuring you’re selling to the right audience. Imagine selling mascara to a baby! Unthinkable, right?

Easy payment. Customers today have little patience. And we don’t mean it in a bad sense. It’s only natural they are impatient – there’s loads to do and the Internet is just a speck in their lives. If they wish to purchase something they want it done fast, smooth and hassle free. If you want your website to convert more sales, you’ll need to ensure the payment gateway on your website is fast, secure and reliable. Most importantly there should be no slow pages. This can literally kill any sale. If the customer can’t shop fast and secure on your site he or she will go to some other site.

Search functionality. Our customers are patient too. Contradictory? Not really. Not if you consider that if they do not find what they’re looking for, they’ll try searching for it on your website. But you don’t have search functionality in your website? All hell breaks loose and the customer has vanished from your site in no time! Sounds familiar? It’s time to get a search box included in your website This is basic but still many businesses think they can get away without one. Big mistake!

Customer behavior. Analyzing backend search logs to analyze customer behavior can really pay rich dividends. Do customers visit a particular product only during holiday season or during sales? Make sure to keep enough stock handy during these times. Or do customers try downloading an e-book only to leave it midway? An analysis will tell you if the cause is a broken link or slow internet speeds.

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

Remember as these strategies unfold in your reading each month, I never said it would be easy, however I am saying, it “can” be done with ease AND velocity with the right energy going in the right direction.

And you must keep in mind that you will have to address what I call the “human condition.”

The thing that will come between you and success is the “human condition”; your self imposed barriers, road blocks, and what you think you already know. Be aware of the barriers and road blocks as you read these.

Yes, I’m repeating this each month intentionally. Why? The two most prominent reasons are: to shift how you think in a way that builds your muscles to understand the fundamentals of marketing AND to address the human condition that stops you from implementing them.

Keep in mind that Vision must be first… Another critical part of effective marketing is the “Client Referral Strategy”.

This strategy is simple, you create a process or system for having your clients refer business to you.

A client whom you are providing excellent service to will often see value in your services and will refer business to you.

Most people wish their clients would refer business. Some clients do and some don’t. I say, the reason clients aren’t doing so is because there’s not a process in place, however if you create a “client referral process” then clients would refer business more often.

Now, it is important to insert here that there is an assumption you acquired the client through the process of previous articles, which would mean they are your ideal client, one you chose to work with.

If that is the case, then the client referral process should include:

A Request – you must ask the client to refer business to you.

Commitment – a commitment from the client to refer business.

Inspiration – you must regularly inspire them to share your services or product with others. After all, they know best how valuable it is.

Motivation – you must regularly motivate them to do so by educating them on the benefits of others having it. Or motivate them in your own way.

Dedication and truth – you must dedicate and commit yourself to nurturing your authentic relationship with the client. This will also create a sense of loyalty and dedication to you as their service provider or retailer.

The last one is critical as you must bring authentic relationship to your client. Meaning you must be genuinely interested in your client and they too will most likely be genuinely interested in you.

There are many ways to create the process. The key is to have a process or system that keeps your clients actively pursuing new business with and for you.

Therefore, your system must also include a follow up processes as well. Some clients will forget that they are to refer business so you must remind them.

Create a Client Referral Process and your clients will always look for ways to refer business to you.

Critical points of this article!

• Know your vision

• Know your ideal client

• Build authentic relationships

• Create a Client Referral Process and System.

• Remember, you also must “implement” the strategies channeling the right energy in the right direction to have them be most effective and reflect success in your business.

You don’t have to be in business alone or struggle to make it successful.

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

The increasing availability of shopping cart software has lead to an increase in the number of people launching internet stores, many of these people are inexperience with advanced web design techniques and theories and many more purchase cheap design work that doesn’t focus on what the store customer’s wants and needs. What the customer wants from an online store is to be able to find and purchase the products that they want as easily and quickly as possible.

When a customer visits your site it is more than likely, if your marketing has been successful, that they wish to purchase a product from you. As a store owner you need to remove every possible barrier between them arriving to your site and completing your purchase, the more barriers you make your customers climb over the more likely they are to run off your competitors.

This article contains will focus on a number of areas of usability and how to apply them to your eCommerce store, there are many many areas of usability that need to be considered when designing an eCommerce store and this article could be multiple pages long but we are going to focus on four factors that we feel are the most important. These areas are navigation, searches, validation and checkout.

The Navigation that you implement on your site is probably the most important aspect of usability, if your visitors cannot find their way around your site your dead in the water. It is imperative that you make sure your navigation is clear, simple and in a prominent place on your pages. Although navigation is an area that is normally implement quit well in eCommerce solutions where they normally fall down is their user of markers to make sure the user knows where about in the store they are, if they get lost and cannot find their way out they are going to get frustrated. There is a number of very well tested web design standard to get round this issue. Category tabs, dynamic menus and breadcrumb trails all help your customer find their way around your site.

If a customer lands on your front page and cannot immediately see where the product they want will be more surfers initial actions it to reach for the search box so make sure that your search box is obvious and easily accessible. The other area of your sites search facility you need to pay attention to is the results it is important to make sure that your customers are getting the right results when they do find the search box. It is normally a good idea to ’adjust’ the search results on internet stores to allow customer to be presented with the products they’re looking for.

Making sure your site validates against the W3C Standards is important. Making sure your site follows CSS and XHTML/HTML guidelines will make sure your sites appearance is replicated accurately across different types of web browsers, non-valid pages have their errors corrected by the browser, how this works varies radically across different browsers (and even different version of the same browser).

In order to minimise shopping cart abandonment the usability of the Checkout component of your shopping cart software is important. There are a number of important steps to take to make sure your checkout process is as usable as possible.

- Make sure your checkout is as short as possible, people get bored quickly on the internet
- Don’t ask for any information you don’t need, people are weary of giving away personal information
- Remove all distraction from the checkout, if they click away from the purchase they might never come back. This includes removing any unnecessary internal site navigation

There are many more aspects of usability you will need to consider when looking for shopping cart software but these should get you started in the right direction.

Article source: ContentLog.com

Author Description
Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software is a one stop shop for all the information you need about shopping cart software and ecommerce solutions

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

There are two crucial ingredients in order to have phenomenal success in the direct sales marketing industry.

Most people who try their hand at network marketing fail because they lack the knowledge of two crucial and necessary ingredients to guarantee unbelievable success.

Two Crucial Ingredients That Guarantee Network Marketing Success:

1. Communication

2. Leads

Effective communication and leads will guarantee your success.

If you do not know how to generate an endless supply of people interested in what you are selling you will fail every single time. And if you do not know how to effectively communicate what problem your product solves you will fail every single time.

First let me talk about how to effectively communicate. Good communication really is not as difficult as a lot of so-called gurus make it seem to be. That is because a lot of people who call themselves experts use all types of psychological tricks and gimmicks to make a consumer buy. But tricks and gimmicks only create a buyer, not a business partner.

All you really need to effectively communicate is honesty. If you look around at the truly successful people in sales you will see they are all very honest people.

I have personally lost sales from telling people the truth. But as many sales as I have lost by being honest with someone, I have gained far more awesome business partners because I simply gained their trust with my honesty.

If you truly want to become wealthy, be honest with people when you are communicating. If you lose some sales because you are truthful that is not your problem.

Another reason why people have a hard time communicating their product is because the product is lacking somewhere. Either the product really is not that great or it is great but you are targeting the wrong market. So be sure that when you start a direct sales business that the product is something a lot of people really need.

Second, I will talk about the ability to generate an endless supply of leads. There are three ways you can generate endless leads. Buy leads, create leads, or talking to people you already know.

Well, unless you are already rich, buying leads is out of the question. And after you talk to all the people you know, you will eventually run out of people to talk to. So your best option is to gain an education of how to create an endless supply of your own leads.

In order to do this you need to gain an education in marketing by leveraging various lead generation resources. The biggest lead generation resource today is the Internet. Once you understand how to leverage the automated power of the Internet, there is nothing that will be able to stop you from getting all the leads you want.

The catch is that it does take time and practice to perfect the skill of marketing on the Internet to generate all the leads you want. But once you have your leads, all you need to do is be honest with your prospects and a certain number will always join your business if you are able to solve their problems.

Well, I did say that there are two crucial ingredients needed to be successful but in all actuality there are actually three.

The third crucial ingredient needed is the ability to never quit, never give up. You need to think like a champion, work like a champion, act like a champion.

No matter how honest you are in your communication, no matter how great your ability to create your own leads, there will still be periods of failure along your quest to achieve financial freedom. So never quit and you will be victorious. You will achieve greatness and nothing in the world can take your greatness away from you.

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.