6 Killer Strategies to Price Your Product Properly: Make Money Your Mindset

How Your Money Mindset is Affecting Your Bottom Line

You are a budding entrepreneur and just created your first product! This is great news! You break out the champagne, and you celebrate! This is a big deal! Now you are going to need some strategies to price your product properly.

Let’s begin.

How to Choose a Price You’re Really Worth

It’s time to put a price tag on your dear firstborn product baby. You don’t want your baby to be rejected, that would hurt too much. So you rationalize:

“Nobody knows who I am.”

“Why would anyone buy from me?”

“I don’t even have one lousy testimonial.”

“How will people know whether it works or not? They are taking a risk by buying this.”

“If I put a higher price tag on this, people will think I am full of myself and that I think I am all that.”

“Maybe I should put a small price tag on it, just to get people to buy it.”

“I could also offer some discounts.”

“Maybe I could send it to my friends for free just to get people to give me feedback.”

Sound familiar?

Many entrepreneurs go through this dance, and they all learn the hard way that the conversation you are having with yourself should have absolutely no bearing on how you price your product.

It is your product’s value to the customer that should dictate the price, not whether you feel you have enough experience or not, or whether you feel people are going to think you are full of yourself for charging a higher price.

These are natural feelings, and they all revolve around your money mindset.

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The Importance of Money Mindset

Money mindset is a set of beliefs we have about what money means to us, what it says about us, and who deserves to receive it.

To figure out whether you have a positive mindset about money, ask yourself a few questions:

  • When you charge money for a product, do you feel the urge to give that money back?
  • If you put a high price tag on your product, does it make you feel like it is really not worth that much?
  • Do you feel that people should keep their money in their pockets and just learn how to Google stuff so they don’t have to pay you for your product?
  • Do you feel better when you give free advice than when you charge for it? Like helping for free is the right thing to do, and charging for it is icky?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, you are in the same boat as a lot of other entrepreneurs are and you may have some trouble pricing your products correctly.

The Negative Consequences of Negative Money Mindset

An unintended consequence of this negative money mindset is that pricing your product too low will attract the kind of client who expects lower quality, but is willing to take the risk because it’s what they expect for a low price point.

This is because, as consumers, we all associate low prices with low value.

The truth is that the price of your product says more about your client than it does about you; you probably always thought it was the other way around.

It’s the same as when you give products away for free: their value diminishes to, well, nothing.

Raising your prices will start attracting clients who expect higher quality. These clients appreciate the value of what they just paid a premium for because people show up differently when they have skin in the game.

Don’t disappoint them, and they will keep coming back for more.

The 6 Strategies to Price Your Product Properly

Here are 5 strategies to get over your money mindset issues and start pricing your products what they are worth:

1.) Be aware of your money mindset hang-ups.

Start by asking yourself the questions above and be aware of the conversation going on in your head. Then do everything in your power to convince yourself that pricing your product should have nothing to do with your feelings. You may not cure your money mindset right away, but you will not let it sabotage the value you are putting of your product.

2.) Think of what you have to give to your audience in terms of abundance.

When you create your first product it is as if you have just created the one thing all your dreams were made of. You have put your heart and soul into the creation of this new product baby, and you want to make sure it is successful, happy and makes you proud.

The problem with that mentality is that it makes you believe that nothing you could ever create could ever compare to how you feel about this one.

Let it go. You have so much more to offer to your audience. When you have only one product, pricing seems like such a big deal; but when you think about all the other revenue streams you are planning on creating, this product is simply one piece of the puzzle.

Put a price on it, release it, and move on to the next one.

3.) Have a multi-tiered offering.

Take your abundance mindset and create products that satisfy different pricing points. If you are starting out, think about what your audience needs RIGHT NOW and start there, then build all your other products around that core value and create a value-packed product suite.

4.) Do your research.

How much are others charging for the similar products? What value are you providing that others are not? What is everyone else providing that you hadn’t thought of? Your price should be competitive in the marketplace, and the only way to find out is by knowing your competition inside and out.

5.) Remember that your pricing can (and will most likely) change.

It can be paralyzing to even think you could price your product wrong. The great news is that you have full control over it, and yes, you may botch it the first time, or the second time. But as your audience begins to use your product and starts providing you with feedback, you will learn how to find that sweet spot. Find a price you are comfortable with, one you can confidently explain to anyone who asks and prepare to learn from the experience.

6.(Bonus Tip): Stop trading time for money.

If you are a consultant or run an agency, you might be tempted to do ‘hourly pricing’ but I would advise against that. Many people generally think that if I charge x for this many hours, the buyer or client will know that I’m putting a lot of effort into it. But what you haven’t considered is that your hourly rate must always include your expertise, your years of experience, your energy — all the things you bring to the table.

Hourly pricing can also get you stuck in your business growth. How can you scale your efforts when there are only 24 hours in a day? You can’t.

A better way to think about pricing is ‘value pricing’ which comes back to our discussion again on money mindset. Think about the ‘value’ you offer your customers and clients. What is that worth? That’s up to you decide. Trading money for time is a mindset that you’ll need to break away from quickly if you want to scale, grow and become the business leader you are meant to be.

Some Final Thoughts — How to Make More Money Today

Understanding where you are in your money mindset journey will help you become increasingly more comfortable with pricing your products and with their value.

It’s time to let go of those negative thoughts about money, and start welcoming it into your life. Are you ready to start charging what you are worth?

Have you ever thought about your money mindset and how it affects your bottom line? Let us know in the comments section!

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Seth Godin Marketing: Are You Building Something Average or Magical?

Seth Godin is one of the most engaging speakers in the world. He takes the stage and quickly grabs your attention with stories that inspire you and ideas that jolt your worldview.

This talk is no different as he explores what leadership looks like today during a changing system today.

Where does the magic happen?

Most people think we need to address the external stuff, strategy, tactics, tips, if we do that enough it will be a lever to help people change their internal narrative. As people trying to make a difference we are addressing the internal and along the way, people become enrolled in getting the tactics and strategies.

The systems we are playing in are changing faster than anyone may realize. As we went from vinyl records to digital formats the system changed but there is more music than ever. Some will see this as a blank slate other will feel lost.

The Four Letter Word “More”

More market share, more sales, more revenue. The word “more” leads to mass marketing which means average stuff for average people. This is problematic. Most of the people you’re trying to reach don’t have the problem you’re trying to solve, or they don’t think they do. It has been stated that the average consumer today has the attention span of a goldfish. So we are treating people like goldfish so we dumb down our products and message. But these are human beings and we are just making the problem worse.

Sort By Price

Mass marketing means people will be hit over and over and interrupted by ads as products fight to stand out. But now, every digital good aimed at the masses will be subject to sort-by-price or distance…etc. They will choose the cheap one because they are all the same, they are all average. People no longer want to hear from the marketer anymore.

Compromise

As more clutter of average products saturate the market and fight for attention the desire for more or to see the line graph go “up and to the right” leads to compromise. The bad news is that you cannot interrupt yourself into success. This is a losing situation.

Normal Distribution

Everyone in the world can engage with you but at the same time, everyone in the world is your competitor.

But when you’re going to the market with your product you must understand that not everyone, the mass market, cares.

There is a law of distribution to consider.

Referencing distribution chart shown below there three key areas. This will apply to any population.

  1. The first part is a small percentage of early adopters who care.
  2. The middle is the average person who could care less.
  3. The final part is the people who are last to the party. As Godin states, they are the people with the “12” still flashing on their VCR.

“If you’re seduced by the mass-market mindset you’re going to be confused for a long time to come.” Seth Godin

Where Is The Magic?

Godin goes on to explain that he believes there are multiple steps of what we make when we make something important.

Those steps include:

  1. Transforms from the people you reach to create an identity and drive loyalty (loyalty means they would pay extra when they have a choice)
  2. Some of those people will tell friends
  3. You shift the culture of a group

Linkages and Storytelling: The Stories You Tell Matter

Understanding how things work together is essential for growing your movement or business. Godin shares a bowling analogy by explaining that when the pins are moved 1 inch farther apart from each other you will never roll a strike, but if you move the pins 1 inch closer to each other you will roll a strike every time.

So where does it all begin? When do people first engage? Well, it’s with the story you tell. Nobody knows and if they will personally be happy with a product until they try it. Whatever course, product or craft you make starts by engaging people with a story.

We all want to make something special but over time we start making things more normal based on feedback and other external forces. As we make things more average you will fight on Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Companies that prey on people making things average because then you have to fight for attention. People tend to lower price or even raise the price but sort-by-price is a game you will never win.

Smallest Possible Audience

The way to win is to target the smallest possible audience that you can live with. They will be ignored by competition and the bigger stuff takes care of itself.

Two questions you need to ask:

  1. Who’s it for
  2. what’s it for (change you’re seeking making)

This leads to how you tell your story.

Where to Begin

We have been taught to aim for the middle because that’s where most people are but those are people that don’t care. Today more than ever before, we can find the people on the edges. The people who care.

Always start at the edge with interesting people.

All the products you know so well today started on the edges because that’s where you begin, with the interesting people.

Average is nice but not beautiful – the edge is beautiful.

Final Words

Tribes share a vision and goals, way of being in the world. There is a role for each person in this world and we like being in sync with the people around us. But we have to stop doing what we were told and take a stand as a leader.

It is important to remember that if failure is not an option, neither is success. Innovation is failing over and over until something works.

While it might be scary you must leap into the void because that’s when you’re most alive. It always feels too soon, you will always want more proof, or to be more prepared.

Sure, you can be prepared but you can never be ready!

Will you choose to matter?

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Clickfunnels Review: Will This Tool Help Propel Your Business?

Clickfunnels is an all-in-one marketing software you can use to build your whole online business.

With Clickfunnels, you can:

  • Easily create your whole sales funnel.
  • Collect, manage and segment your leads and subscribers.
  • Run an email marketing campaign.
  • Automate your sales process
  • Avoid creating a ton of pages for funnels on your primary website domain

Literally, if you subscribe to Clickfunnels, you’ll never need anything else to run your online business again.

That’s because Clickfunnels is built for entrepreneurs who:

  1. Don’t know how to code
  2. Aren’t marketing experts
  3. Don’t want to spend thousands to build their website

If you fall into this category, Clickfunnels is the perfect software for you. And it isn’t a dumbed down version of other marketing tools. Clickfunnels offers the same, or even better functionality and a LOT more features in one single piece of software.

With that being said, let’s start exploring the many features of Clickfunnels, and see how you can use them to build your own sales funnels and successfully run your own online business.

Clickfunnels Features

What separates Clickfunnels is that it offers a lot of diverse features at an attractive price point.

The majority of marketing tools either:

a) Focus on one area of your business: For example, tools like MailChimp and Unbounce are good for only email marketing and building landing pages respectively.

b) Are too expensive: For example, all-in-one marketing tools like Hubspot and Marketo cost $800+ a month for their CRM, automation and lead gen features.

Clickfunnels offers its features including the CRM and email autoresponder for less than $300/month.

Here’s what you can get in Clickfunnels:

Awesome Feature # 1: Clickfunnels Funnel Builder

A sales funnel consists of many parts. There’s the main sales page, then the opt-in form, the checkout page, thank you page and so on…

In Clickfunnels, you get the whole sales funnel, with all of the pages, bundled in a complete package.

No other marketing tool gives you this.

Step 1 – Choose A Pre-Built Funnel

All you have to do is choose for what purpose you want to use your funnel for. It can be one of these three:

  • To collect leads
  • To sell a product
  • To run a webinar

Then, you simply choose what kind of funnel you want. It can be a product launch funnel, a sales letter funnel, a two-page opt-in funnel etc.

These funnels are further divided into templates for what kind of products you want to sell i.e an ebook, a course, a webinar, a physical product etc. This means if you want to build your funnel from scratch, you can still get templates for individual pages like an opt-in page, thank you page, checkout page etc.

Step 2 – Create / Edit Your Funnel

If you have knowledge of funnels, you can go ahead and edit the order of your funnel pages – and add/remove them as well. For example, if you want to add a squeeze page in your funnel, you can do that. If you want to remove the upsell page, you can do that as well.

This flexibility to add/remove and move around pages of the funnel is going to be very handy. That’s because, with Clickfunnels, you can create checkout forms and membership sites in your funnel as well.

This means the people can directly pay and get access to your content without leaving your funnel and you can, therefore, change when these pages appear inside your funnel. (Hint: You don’t want your membership page appearing before the checkout page!)

Awesome Feature # 2: Etison Web Builder

In the first feature, we learned how Clickfunnels gives you an awesome sales funnels and page templates that are ready to go.

But be that as it may, you still have to edit the pages inside your funnel and add your own text, images, and videos. That’s where the Etison Web Builder comes in.

With the web builder, you can customize every single aspect of your pages. Every single page is divided into sections. Each section has its own rows. And every row has elements.

The elements are the most important part of your funnel. Text, images, headline, forms, boxes and everything that’s on your page is an element.

Clickfunnels Editor

In the editor, there are 11 categories, each with its own kind of elements:

1. Text Elements: Text, Heading, Bullet Points etc.

2. Media Elements: Images, Audio, Video etc.

3. Form Elements: Buttons, Inputs, Text Box etc.

4. Advanced Form Elements: SMS Form, Billing Form, Survey Form

5. Countdown Elements: Countdown Timer etc.

6. Content Blocks: Icons, Dividers, Pricing Table etc.

7. Misc Elements: FB Share, FB comments, Custom Script etc.

8. Order Forms: 2-Step Order Form, Order Summary, Credit Card

9. Affiliate Links: User Login, Affiliate Links, Affiliate Stats etc.

10. Membership: User Login, Membership Content, Search etc.

11. Webinar: Webinar Form, Webinar Date, Add Event etc.

In addition to all these elements, you can also add your custom CSS code, change the background and colors with HEX codes and edit the mobile version of you funnel as well.

Awesome Feature # 3: Actionetics

So, now you’ve got your whole marketing funnel up and running. But that’s just the start. The next step is following up on the leads who’ve entered your funnel but haven’t become your customers.

Actionetics: Do you need this feature?

To do that, Clickfunnels offer an amazing feature called Actionetics.

But calling Actionetics a ‘feature’ can be a bit misleading. It’s not a single feature, but rather a set of multiple features. Here’s what you get in Actionetics:

1. Subscribers Info: You can see information and activity of your subscribers. Things like how many subscribers you have, how many unsubscribed etc. In addition, you can also see each subscriber’s individual activity like what funnel they’re in, what they’ve bought, how much they’ve spent, their social media profiles and more.

2. Email Lists: This is where you can create email lists. You can automate the whole process by adding subscribers to lists based on the funnels the join, the actions they take and the purchases they make. In addition, you can create ‘smart lists’ that allow you to create new lists based on data like where you subscribers live, how long they’ve been your customers, are they first-time visitors etc.

3. Email Broadcasts: Here, you can create new emails and email campaigns based on templates or completely from scratch and send them to your email lists. You can also automate the process so that when a customer takes an action like subscribing to your funnel, purchasing a product, opting in for a free ebook etc., they automatically get subscribed to certain email campaigns.

4. Follow up Funnels: This is a relatively new feature. It allows you to send your subscribers not just emails, but text messages, facebook messages, mobile and desktop notifications and more. It’s great for when you want to target your customers in places other than email.

5. Action Funnels: Action Funnels lets you combine your funnels and email campaigns. With this feature, you can automate the process so that any time a subscriber enters your specified funnel, the get a series of emails based on that funnel. And these emails can lead them to another funnel as well which can lead to another series of emails. It’s perfect for product launch campaigns or email courses which lead to upsells.

As you can see, within Actionetics, you get every single tool you need to manage the whole marketing of your online business. And this feature alone is why you should get Clickfunnels.

Awesome Feature # 4: Backpack

This is another feature most marketing tools don’t have – which is the ability to create your own affiliate center.

With a backpack, you can create affiliate links for the products you sell – so other people can sell your products for you in exchange for commissions. Clickfunnels puts it best when they say ‘it’s like having an army of your own salespeople’.

What makes the Backpack feature so amazing is this:

  • The commission links are ‘sticky’: Previously, affiliate IDs of your affiliates were stored in browser cookies. This means if customers cleared their browser history or purchased your product from another device, your affiliates commission would be lost since the browser cookie got lost. Now, the affiliate IDs are tied with customer emails. That way no matter what device they use, your affiliate commissions will be tracked because the customer email will remain the same.
  • The commission is for all products your customers buy: Suppose a customer came to the product page referred by one of your affiliates. But they also buy other products from you as well. Your affiliates will get the commission for every single product their referred customers buy from you.
  • You can create 2nd tier commissions: If you want, you can give a commission to your affiliates for every customer their referred customers bring.
  • You can run contests: You can create a competition among your affiliates so that the ones that sell the highest amount of your products, get a prize of your choosing (in the form of money).

With these features, you can be sure your army of salespeople will be motivated to sell your products, bringing you a higher amount of sales which in the end, will increase your revenue and profits.

Clickfunnels: Pros and Cons

Based on the features we’ve listed, here’s what we think are the biggest pros and cons of a tool like Clickfunnels:

Pros:

You get prebuilt funnels: These are 100% tested and guaranteed to bring you the maximum conversions possible. This is a big deal since it means you don’t have to learn marketing (or at least, don’t need to be an expert at it).

You save money because of Actionetics: A CRM and Email Marketing service is nothing to scoff at. If you purchase these services for your running online business, they’ll easily set you back $300+ dollars.

You make more money because of Backpack: With affiliate marketing, you will get people who sell your products for you. And you don’t pay them a penny until their referred customer makes a purchase. It’s a safe way to make more money without spending time and money.

You save time: Integrating different services like CRMs, payment gateways, email autoresponders and landing page software is a big hassle. With Clickfunnels, everything is set up and ready to go.

Cons:

There’s a big learning curve: Learning Clickfunnels is going to take some time. That’s because there are so many features and so many things you can do to optimize your marketing funnel.

The basic plan has a lot of limits: The Clickfunnels basic plan (which costs $97) doesn’t have Actionetics and Backpack, only sales funnels. Plus, the number of funnels you can create and the subscribers and traffic you get is limited.

Its analytics aren’t very detailed: You don’t get a lot of info on how your funnels are performing except conversion rate, subscribers, and unsubscribers etc. To get more detailed data, you’ll have to integrate Google Analytics.

You can’t create content: While Clickfunnels does integrate with WordPress, there’s no feature in-the-box which lets you create blog posts and articles.

Final Verdict: Is Clickfunnels for You?

If you want an all-in-one software – just one – that can help you run your online business, Clickfunnels is meant for you. It’s a great sales funnel tools for beginners just starting their online business.

But even if you’re a power user or an expert marketer, with Clickfunnels, you can create a powerful funnel and integrate other services you might use.

Because while Clickfunnels is easy-to-use, it’s by no means a dumbed down or watered version of any software in the market. It has all the features you could possibly need to sell your new product or service.

It starts at $97 for the base subscription. But if you want to unlock Backpack and the Actionetics bundle, it’ll cost you $297 to get you started. If you are building your business online, I strongly recommend you unlock Backpack and Actionetics bundle. You just won’t get the analytics and metrics without it.

Leadpages vs. Unbounce vs. Clickfunnels: The Ultimate Battle

Leadpages vs. Unbounce vs. Clickfunnels: The Ultimate Battle

Most customers don’t whip out their credit card when they visit your website the first time. It takes a lot of convincing (and trust) to turn your visitors into customers.

And a sales funnel helps you do exactly that. It’s a marketing ‘process’ online businesses like yours can use to turn your visitors into buyers.

Here’s how it works:

A lot of visitors enter into your funnel through your sales page, blog or website. As they move further into the funnel, few and few visitors remain. But the ones that successfully reach the end of your funnel i.e. to your thank you / checkout page – become your customers.

Every online business, whether small or large, uses a sales funnel (whether knowingly or unknowingly) to get new customers.

But here’s the thing:

Creating a sales funnel wasn’t always an easy job. To create the necessary parts of the sales funnel i.e landing pages, sales pages, opt-in forms, checkout forms etc., companies had to hire web developers and designers.

But fortunately, new tools have emerged with which you can create complete sales funnels without any coding whatsoever.

There are hundreds of these tools out there, all of which let you build excellent sales funnels. But they can vary a lot in price, features, and functionality.

Which tools should you choose?

To make your job easier, we’re going to review three awesome tools that you can use to build your own sales funnel today. We’ll discuss the features, functionality, and prices of these three tools so you can find one that’s a winner for you.

Let’s get started.

Leadpages vs. Unbounce vs. Clickfunnels

These are the three tools we’ll be comparing in this article. First, let’s look at a brief overview of each of them:

 

Leadpages: Leadpages is the most basic, least expensive sales funnel tool on this list. You get page templates, a drag-and-drop web builder, analytics dashboard, A/B testing, pop-up builder, inbuilt payments, FB ad creator and the ability to integrate with other marketing tools. It’s enough to get you started if you’re going to build simple landing pages to collect emails.

Unbounce: You can call Unbounce the beefed-up version of Leadpages. Every feature you get in Leadpages i.e. the templates, A/B testing and the analytics dashboard – comes with Unbounce. And although you don’t get inbuilt payments or the FB ad creator, you get ‘Dynamic Text Replacement’ and the pop-up / sticky bar builder – which are more unique features Leadpages doesn’t have.

Clickfunnels: Of the three, Clickfunnels is in a class of its own. Because with Clickfunnels, you already get pre-built, 100% proven-to-convert sales funnels. All you have to do is add your own text and images. Plus, you also get a CRM, email marketing automation tool and an affiliate program creator, all which are complete marketing tools themselves. With Leadpages and Unbounce you’ll have to pay extra for different services to get all this functionality. But with Clickfunnels, all this comes right out of the box.

Now that you have a general idea about which tool stands where let’s compare these tools a little more in-depth. To do that, we’re going to compare how they stack up in these two areas:

  • Features & Functionality
  • Value for The Money

But before getting started, it’s important to make clear that none of these tools are ‘the perfect choice’. It all depends on what matters to you.

Is price a major deciding factor? Choose Leadpages. Don’t have experience choosing and integrating marketing tools yourself? Choose Clickfunnels. Want comprehensive data and prefer to pick your own marketing tools? Choose Unbounce.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide which tool is best for you based on your own unique situation.

With that being said, let the comparison begin!

Features and Functionality

In this section, we’ll compare the functionality of Leadpages, Unbounce, and Clickfunnel – and see which of the three offers the most comprehensive set of features.

Leadpages

Templates and Web Builder: Leadpages offers 130+ templates. You can use them to quickly build your sales funnel. There are landing pages for opt-in, ebooks, webinar, coming soon etc. Or you can build a landing page from scratch using the drag-and-drop builder. You can also integrate popup boxes and a payment system right within Leadpages so your customers can pay your right within your landing page.

Analytics and A/B Testing: Leadpages comes with a basic analytics tool which tracks four metrics: Total Views, Unique Views, Conversions, and Conversion Rate. If you want additional data, you’ll have to integrate it will Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel. Plus, you can A/B test different versions of landing pages and compare their performance.

FB Ads Creator: After you’ve built your landing page, you can integrate with with Facebook ads right within Leadpages. Not only can you create an ad, you can also choose your target audience as well. Plus, you also can put a Facebook pixel in your landing pages which allow you to retarget customers who visit your landing and track and measure the specific actions they perform.

Unbounce:

Templates and Web Builder: Unbounce also offers 100+ templates and similar to Leadpages, you can choose a template based on your business or marketing campaign. But where Unbounce differs is that you also get templates for popup boxes and sticky bars, which is a functionality that Leadpages does not have. But the integrated payments functionality of Leadpages is missing.

Analytics and A/B Testing: Similar to Leadpages, Unbounce comes with its own analytics and A/B testing tool, which to be honest, feels more robust than Leadpages even though the functionality is nearly identical.

Pop-ups and Sticky Bars: Pop-ups are small windows that literally pop up on your landing page. You can add opt-in forms in them and set them to trigger after a visitor performs a certain action like clicking on a button, spending a certain amount of time, starting to close your landing page etc. Sticky bars, on the other hand, are small bars at the top or bottom of your landing page that moves with the visitor as they scroll.

Dynamic Text Replacement: In Unbounce, you can mark certain high-value keywords to change their text to what users have typed on Google Search to search for your landing page. It’s a great way to increase the relevancy of your copy which can lead to increased conversions as well.

Clickfunnels

Pre-Built Sales Funnels: This is the highlight feature of Clickfunnels. With Leadpages and Unbounce, you have to build and organize different pages of the funnel yourself – and A/B test the pages to get max conversions. But Clickfunnels puts all the pages of a funnel in one package. For example, the webinar funnel will contain the landing page, an opt-in form and thank you page. Plus every single page is already designed to get the maximum conversions possible.

A/B Testing: Suppose you don’t want to use the existing funnels and want to create your own. If you do that, you’ll need to split test with different variations of your pages in order to get maximum conversions. Clickfunnels, like the Unbounce and Leadpages, lets you A/B test and compare the performance of different variations of your funnel pages.

Backpack: With Backpack, you can create your own affiliate program. So everytime someone sells your product or service for you, they get a commission and you get more sales. Both Unbounce and Leadpages don’t have this feature.

Etison Suite: This feature of Clickfunnel has multiple tools in it you can use to automate your funnel. Here’s what you get:

  • CRM: See the information of people in your funnel and their activity. View their email, location, social media profile, which funnel they’re in, what product they’ve bought and who much money they spent.

  • Email Autoresponder: Create awesome email marketing campaigns and automate them. Then send them to different email lists you’ve segmented based on demographics and activity.

  • Action Funnels: Automate your whole marketing process by automatically sending your customers emails and text messages based on the actions they take inside your funnel.

Verdict

In terms of functionality, Clickfunnels clearly wins because of the ‘Backpack’ and ‘Etison Suite’ features. That’s because you get a fully functioning CRM and Email Autoresponder service in addition to the sales funnel builder.

Value For The Money

Now that we know the features, which tool is the best choice? Which tool gives the best value for the money?

Of these three tools, our answer is Clickfunnels.

The main reason why is because, with Leadpages and Unbounce, you only get tools to build a funnel that captures leads. But even here, you have to build your sales funnel yourself. Clickfunnels gives you pre-built sales funnels to get you started.

If you want to learn more about Clickfunnels, check out our full Clickfunnels review.

But building a funnel is just the first step.

Where are you going to store those leads? How are you going to send them emails?

There’s no way to do these things in Leadpages and Unbounce. You have to subscribe to a 3rd party email marketing service and a CRM software. Both of this software start at an average of $30 per month and might be even free to get you started.

But as you get more subscribers, the price of these services will increase to up to $300+ per month and maybe, even more, depending on how many leads and visitors you have. This combined with your landing page tool i.e. Unbounce or Leadpages can add up to a cost of $500 per month.

Plus, you’ll have to set up each of these tools yourself, which takes time and effort.

But with Clickfunnels, you simply pay $297 per month and you get all features and everything is unlimited forever, which is why this is the best sales funnel tool if you’re just starting your online business.

I Want to Start My Own Business But Don’t Know What to Do

I want to start a busines

When I decided to take my life in a completely new direction that’s all I knew. The missing part was what direction I wanted to go. If you are thinking, “I want to start my own business but don’t know what to do” then this article is for you. This is my real deal life experience here, so keep reading.

I wanted to be my own boss. I wanted the work I spent my valuable time each day doing to actually matter. Not just to me but to the planet. I didn’t want my earnings capped by a salary anymore.

I wanted to start my own business but didn’t know what to do!

Now what?

At the time I was a heavy reader of magazines and books but also listened to podcasts. Always looking for inspiration and trends.

When I learned about the idea of social entrepreneurship I was all about it because it aligned with my values. Using business to tackle social problems. The activist in me said, yes please, that’s what I want to do!

Of course, at that time, there was very little information about pursuing that form of entrepreneurship. Not even one magazine. There was no Change Creator Magazine.

But I did find a book called Making Good by Billy Parishwhich became a bible for me. Parish’s story was inspiring. He hiked the Himalayan mountains and witnessed a melting glacier first hand. After that personal experience, he was so inspired that he dropped out of Yale and began his journey as a social entrepreneur and was very successful. He shared his ideas and perspectives which to me were of great value.

Paralyzed

I learned that there are tons of ideas out there. Broken systems that need fixing. Social problems that need to be solved. Local or global, it was endless. They are all business opportunities!

Did this help make it easier for me now? No, actually it was tougher because I had so many ways I could go but I couldn’t decide what was best for me to pursue.

After a while, I realized my hunt to pin down the right idea led me to become paralyzed. I had no progress. No new developments. Nothing.

Starting Without a Real Plan

It got to the point where I decided to just start something.

The first thing I pursued was plastic pollution. Plastic water bottles drive me freaking nuts! My thought was to create something that could replace the plastic bottle and that was a hemp water bottle. I found that other containers were made from hemp because it’s so versatile.

I spoke to hemp experts and found that while a bottle can be made the challenge is water absorption over time. I found a solution to that problem from an FDA approved food product designed by some folks at MIT that could coat the inside of the bottle. It would then prevent the water absorption like a repellent. But it wasn’t on market and had some years to go before it could ever be used in scale. Plus, nobody at MIT would return my emails.

In addition to that, I found out that manufacturing would be a huge cost. If you wanted a water bottle company to take on the task of using hemp, it would require a ton of different equipment for processing. This means big cash.

I decided this path wasn’t for me and crossed it off the list.

Because I cared about so many different topics I created a blog called The Blue Dot Post. I started waking up each day at 4 am and wrote articles, hundreds of articles! I got some other great people to work with me and contribute and after a year I didn’t really know what this thing was yet or how to monetize it.

I took audience development classes, writing classes, and learned a ton.

I knew I had to get more niche and decided to focus on deforestation. This led me to guest posting which was a great experience that taught me a lot as well.

During this time I also did volunteer work that gave me exposure to new things and helped me develop a lot of skills I use today as an entrepreneur.

But I never really created a business, just a hobby.

Finding Clarity

A combination of things led me to clarity.

  • Working for other people first for experience
  • Doing volunteer work
  • Just starting and trying things so I can cross them off the list if they didn’t
  • Ongoing education (reading, research, podcasts)
  • Self-inventory exercises

After two years of writing, reading, and learning I picked up a book called 6 Months to 6 Figures by Peter Voogd. I needed to figure out how to make money with my ideas but this actually gave me solutions to finding the right idea.

Peter does a great job of providing exercises I now call, self-inventory, to help you narrow down what is not only important to you but what would make the most sense for you to pursue. There’s a difference.

If something is important to you that does not mean you have the experience or skills in that space. You can pursue it and succeed but it might take much longer. If you have skills doing something specific that doesn’t mean you love doing it.

After going through the exercises I gained clarity on what was important to me and how to think about using the skills and experience I already have.

For example:

  • Your values
  • Past experiences
  • Skills
  • Gifts
  • Frustrations
  • Reasons for starting the business

This process is something we do in our mentorship program now because we found it to be so valuable.

Digging deep into your self-inventory is helpful in shaping your narrative. This means the business you create will have a story behind it which makes it an authentic reflection of you. That story is so important to the business and can be really tough for people to pin down. This process helps a lot.

I worked at WebMD for over 10 years which is a publishing and digital media monster. As Director of Strategic Marketing, I not only knew the media space but I was savvy in creating smart content marketing strategies.

If you can think of Venn-Diagram that highlights key information about yourself then you can imagine there is a point of connection for them in the middle.

Instead of becoming a social entrepreneur who makes a hemp water bottle or saves the rainforest I created a media company for purpose-driven entrepreneurs that would offer generation to generation learning and peer to peer learning. The best way to learn how to change the world is from those that already are!

That is when Change Creator was born. How I came up with the name is another story.

This media company, of course, included Change Creator Magazine, the first magazine app for purpose-driven entrepreneurs on iTunes and Google Play, because it’s something I always wish I had to when I was figuring things out.

Today, I have interviewed people like Tony Robbins, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, Arianna Huffington, Guy Kawasaki and many award-winning social entrepreneurs such as Taddy Blecher. They all provide strategic insights into building meaning businesses that matter to you and the world.

How to Manage the Risk (The Balancing Act)

Nobody wants to dump a ton of time or money into something and lose it all. Not when we have a boatload of student loan debt and other expenses.

The reality is that you probably will have to straddle two jobs for a while. The one that pays bills and gives you experience and the other that is your journey to be your own boss.

It’s really scary to start spending your money on software, conferences, and even classes. Thousands of dollars can go quickly. But here’s the thing. You have to be willing to invest in yourself to grow and change.

Here are a few things that really helped me cope with the fear and risk of taking a leap:

  • Get a financial advisor
  • Get an accountant
  • Learn how to organize, track and manage your money (I do this monthly and recommend reading Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Ecker)
  • Always have an active source of income
  • Have a plan
  • Find a mentor
  • Take risks but take calculated risks (if you don’t put money in the machine nothing will come out)

I recommend you read the article about getting unstuck as it offers some good input related to this. It’s called If You’re Feeling Stuck in Life Than This Will Help You.

Once you have a business concept that is a fit for you and there is a plan in place. I highly recommend you find a co-founder! This will greatly increase your chances of success but you must find the right person.

Here’s an example of the document I use to track my money. (These are not real numbers)

There is no Time Like Now

According to the 2017 GEM report, in the US, 27 million working-age Americans are starting or running new businesses. A 16-year record high!

There has never been a better time to take bold self-directed steps in creating your own impact lifestyle.

The activist spirit is infused in the new entrepreneur.

People today believe businesses have a moral obligation to prioritize social profit alongside of financial profit. This is a huge transition taking place right now.

There are new models for business and life taking shape while technology is creating opportunities that never existed before.

More people are saying, “I can help change the world too!” But they don’t know how to navigate these new uncharted opportunities.

It takes effort and discipline to create a new life.

The true purpose of life is whatever you make it!

I hope sharing my experiences has helped you in some way. If you know someone that could benefit from this info please pay it forward.

Related: How Can I Matter?

The Best Ways to Persuade an Audience: 17 Quick Tips to Get Audiences to Love You

Audiences forget most of what you communicate. But how can you persuade an audience when they hardly remember you? What are the correct strategies to persuade an audience that only retains a fraction of what you say? How do you stay in their minds long enough for them to take action?

These quick tips put the power of persuasion at your fingertips. From one-on-one persuasion situations to present complex topics to a large audience. These proven persuasion techniques will help you develop and deliver strong arguments. Pick up some tips from the world’s best speakers.

Five Tips to Improve the Content of Your Next Speech

1. The deliberate error.

Encourage conversations when you are going to speak to an audience. Make your speech stand out by throwing in a deliberate error. It should not be something that damages your credibility on the topic of your speech. But, it should be something that will attract critical chatter. This will also encourage people to find you for conversation after your presentation.

For example, you could include a typo in one of your slides to activate grammar totalitarians. Replacing your with you’re is especially effective at emboldening people to come and speak with you after a talk. Other deliberate errors could be slips of the tongue such as saying ‘it’s great to be you all this evening’. The point is to make calculated mistakes that make you more approachable post-speech.

2. Be direct.

If you have something to sell, and you have made your case, ask for the sale. Being upfront and direct is persuasive.

When you are in front of an audience, directness can be a great technique for getting the audience on your side. Don’t be afraid to tell them what you are there to do.

Get the 7 deadly sins of public speaking in this Ted Talk video:

3. Be brief.

You want your audience to engage with your content on an emotional level. So, cut out anything that is not critical. Audiences are always looking for a chance to say “this is not for me”, so keep your content lean. Leave enough space for your audience to fill the gaps themselves and make your message their own.

4. Embrace conflict.

Contrast is more memorable than plain facts. Find areas in your presentation where you can use contrast to make your point.

If you are presenting the results of a project to a group of colleagues, create contrast by comparing the results to a worse case alternative. If you are presenting a solution to a consulting client, compare it to another solution that could be effective. Then use show how the two approaches are different and justify why you selected one approach over another.

5. Be simple.

Simple explanations are easier for the brain to process. And so they are accepted more readily than complex ones. This is cognitive fluency. Increasing cognitive fluency makes your message easier to understand, remember, and share. This is why simple ideas can spread virally.

Four Tips to Improve the Delivery of Your Next Speech

1. Show confidence in front of audience members.

A display of confidence is key to a persuasive speech. There is no room to show stage fright. A strong belief in yourself increases your appeal and credibility with each person.

Keep your back straight. Keep your shoulders behind your chest. And make sure the underside of your chin is parallel to the floor. Combine this will meaningful eye contact and you will project confidence to your audience.

Imagine this amazing Ted Talk without confidence?

2. Use cold reading.

As you speak, make attempts to guess what your audience is experiencing on an emotional level. You’ll get the best clues by making meaningful eye contact. If you voice an emotion your audience is feeling, this will drive home your point better than facts alone.

Imagine you are giving a presentation to members of a teacher’s union. You want to convince them to incorporate your new learning management system and you’ve just laid out the features and benefits. A suitable cold read could be “Right now you are a little confused, but probably not as confused as when you mark a test from that one kid and you wonder, how is he getting this question wrong?” You can then make a point about how your LMS gives teachers a better understanding of each student.

3. Be certain (even if you have to fake it).

People find certainty persuasive. Even if you’re only 80% confident about a certain point stand behind it 100% and your audience will join you.

4. Be repetitive.

Repetition is memorable. When people hear something again the brain flags it as important. This is why repetition is memorable. As you deliver your next speech, remember repetition is memorable, especially in threes.

Tell people what you want them to know.

Tell them again.

Tell them again.

Repetition is a great technique to get people to see your side of things.

Four Tips to Increase Your Emotional Appeal as a Speaker

1. Trigger reciprocation before making your argument.

Find out what your target audience values and find a way to give it to them before you make rhetorical appeals. This will dispose people to be more open to your ideas.

For example, before delivering a presentation to an audience you may send them all a short guide that solves a common problem for them. If you were speaking to plumbers, you may send them a guide on generating plumbing leads. Or, if you were speaking to schoolteachers, you may send them a guide on dealing with unruly students.

2. Speak directionally.

Sometimes you need to persuade a group of negative people. Maintain your confidence. Remember that people respond more to the direction of events. Don’t allow yourself to be trapped in current reality. Show your audience positive movement.

For example, if you may be speaking to a group of employees after a round of layoffs. Instead of dwelling on past conditions and the current dire situation, focus your presentation on the brighter future that the organization is heading towards.

3. Boost your credibility.

People are most easily persuaded by a credible messenger. Seek to understand your audience. And do everything you can to increase your credibility with them.

If you are speaking with business people, establish your entrepreneurial experience. If you are speaking with parents, talk about your kids or kids you have responsibility for. If you are speaking with airline pilots, talk about that time you went skydiving. The things that lend credibility are not always logical and linear. Proximity is often enough.

4. Use visuals.

Visuals are more emotive than words. So, there should always be a visual component to any presentation you make. In fact, if you are using powerpoints, each slide should be 80-100% visual.

Here is a short talk with great use of visuals:

Four Tips to Persuade That One, Single Person in Your Audience

1. Give them a “reason line”.

Sometimes you are 90% of the way to convincing someone but they are holding back. This is usually because they have not yet heard enough reasons to feel safe. Everyone has a different number of reasons they need to hear before saying yes. Don’t let them drown in doubt, throw them a reason line.

Here are some example reason lines:

  • ‘Everyone will love you for this’.
  • ‘Because you’re the most important person at this company’.
  • ‘You’ll be much happier’.
  • ‘Now you’ll know everything’.
  • ‘Your doctor will wonder what happened to you’.

2. Offer two paths to victory.

Frame your solution as two ways to a great result with no road to disaster. Most people will agree if they find you credible.

Imagine you are selling a continuous glucose monitor to a diabetic. You can explain to them that the monitor helps them see when they are making good dietary choices. And even when they occasionally fall off the wagon, they’ll be able to see the damage up front and fix things independently. So you see, even when the person fails, they win.

3. Paint mental pictures.

In a one on one presentation, you do not usually have the luxury of visual aids like powerpoint slides. However, you don’t need a visual slide if you can guide a person’s imagination

This is especially helpful when you need to persuade people during lunch or dinner meetings. Instead of asking them if they ‘understand’, ask if they ‘see’. Instead of asking them to ‘think about this…’, ask them to ‘look at it this way…’. The best way to communicate visually is to first put a picture in your mind and then describe that picture to the people you are speaking with so they can see what you see.

4. Verbal mirroring

Match the speaking style of the other person. When they believe you are like them, it will be easier for them to accept your argument. Of course, this can’t be done in a pompous, or disingenuous way. Use empathy to see if you can verbally mirror how the other person feels.

Conclusion: Why Persuasion is so Vital

Whether we like it or not, knowing how to persuade an audience — or the best way to persuade an audience is a vital skill as an entrepreneur. This kind of skill does not come naturally to most of us. It has to be honed, practiced, and practiced some more.

Knowing some ‘go-to’ ways that can help you — in any situation — get an audience on your side is vital to long-term success. Whether you are pitching your company, or yourself.

How to Hire a Great Leader: 4 Things You Must Always Do

When it comes to your business vision, hiring a great leader should be at the top of your list. While many ‘appear’ to be great leaders, we have to dig deeper to find someone that can propel your company to another level. Additionally, it’s important to remember that as you grow your team, great leaders tend to hire other great leaders.

If you want your business to grow, you are going to have to know how to hire a leader. Here are 4 tips on how to hire a great leader:

1. Hire someone who is curious.

Being a leader is more than just having that vision for your company; you have to be curious. One of the ways you can differentiate a great leader, from a manager is how this person connects with people. Do they ask questions? Are they genuinely interested in getting to know their team? Finding out what makes other people tick?

That’s just what Millennial attorney, author of Motivating Millennials, James Goodnow thinks:

“The skills required to be a good leader probably start with vision, integrity, innovation – and the curiosity necessary to look at problems with ‘new eyes,’ which hopefully leads to creative solutions. Along with self-motivation and critical thinking abilities, you also need grit, humor and an unparalleled work ethic in order to truly inspire and motivate others.”

Not only does James believe in ‘daily touchpoints’ with his teams, he makes it his mission to stop relying on texts and emails and actually connect, in-person with everyone on his team.

 

2. Don’t hire yourself.

We get it. You are a leader. You are probably really great at what you do, but if you want to hire a leader, don’t duplicate your strengths; find someone to challenge you.

Wences Garcia, CEO of MarketGoo, a DIY SEO company says it best:

“You want someone who can compliment you, challenge your ideas and collaborate on strategy and projects, not a clone of yourself. Clones can end up being a nightmare (remember Multiplicity?) even if you’re a great leader who possesses a strong skill set.”

3. Hire someone who’ll create change.

Leaders are change agents. If you want to hire the best leaders for your business, you have to be willing to take a risk on someone who’s going to shake things up in your business. This is not the time to hire a worker-bee.

Dr. Ty Belknap, author of Leadership for Introverts says it best:

“Leaders are thought of as many things, but one of the main tasks of a leader is to be a change-agent. Businesses must change at times or risk becoming extinct, and it is up to leaders to show the positive benefits of those changes.

There is one big difference between leaders and managers: Managers enforce change from above, leaders enact change from below. Bring the needed change to those it will affect the most and ask them for tips on how to best enact those changes. This gets the team to feel ownership in the change.”

 

4. Find someone who’ll color outside the lines.

You might think you know your business inside and out, but hiring a great leader means giving someone the freedom to create a more powerful role in your company.

Faizun Kamal. As the CEO/Founder of The Franchise Pros agrees:

“The best leaders that I have worked with have a history of “coloring outside the lines”. They start a job with a specific job description and by the time they leave, they have created an entirely new job for themselves. They willingly take on new responsibilities.

They take on projects that stretch their comfort zones. They are not afraid to fall or fail. Coloring outside the lines that is an inherently entrepreneurial trait and is one of the most common markers of clients who go on to become very successful franchise owners.”

That’s it. Four tips to help you propel your business to new heights by finding the best leaders out there.

This article can be found in full, in Change Creator magazine. Start your free trial today, and get full access to hundreds of exclusive interviews, insights, and business strategies for social impact you won’t get anywhere else.

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Thrive Themes vs Clickfunnels: Which Sales Funnel Builder is Best?

Growing your business means doing online marketing right. Sales funnels (done right) can be an awesome way to generate more leads, more clients, and more revenue. In this review, we’ll compare two awesome sales funnel building software: Thrive Themes vs Clickfunnels.

First, let’s start with a brief intro of both these tools to get a general idea about them.

What is ClickFunnels?

Clickfunnels is a sales funnel builder. A sales funnel has a series of webpages (such as landing page, opt-in forms, checkout pages etc.) that guides your visitors and turns them into paying customers. Clickfunnels gives you pre-built funnels for selling anything you want and tools to measure the performance of your funnels. Plus, with the pro version of Clickfunnels, you also get a CRM system and an email autoresponder tool.

Thrive

Thrive Membership is a collection of tools and plugins designed to be used with WordPress. You can use these tools to build sales funnels (and other kinds of websites) and measure their performance. Also, it has pre-built landing page templates and a website builder you can use to create complete sales funnels. Plus it has plugins like quizzes, testimonials and countdown timers you can add to your sales funnel or website.

Then here’s a short summary of Clickfunnels and Thrive Themes based on the above description:

  • Clickfunnels is an all-in-one solution for building sales funnels to sell your products and services.
  • Thrive Themes is a website building tool you can use to create all kinds of websites, including sales funnels.

Now that we know a bit about these tools, let’s dive in and see exactly what features these tools have.

Thrive Themes: An Awesome Suite of WordPress Tools & Plugins

The highlight of Thrive Themes is its diverse suite of WordPress tools and plugins you can use to build sales funnels.

Here’s the full list of tools and plugins Thrive offers:

1. Thrive Themes: Thrives Themes are a collection of WordPress Themes you can use to get started building your website.

2. Thrive Leads: This is a robust tool for creating opt-in forms on your website. You can create pop-up forms, slider forms, in-line forms, sticky forms and more that you can add to your website. In addition, you can also set when you want these forms to show such as when a person is exiting your website or scrolls half-way through. Plus, you can also see which forms are converting best with the inbuilt analytics tools.

3. Thrive Architect: This is the Thrive website building tool. You can use it to build homepages, landing pages, sales pages, blog posts and more. Plus, you can use it to add buttons, pricing sections, videos and other elements to your web pages.

4. Landing Pages: Thrives gives you templates for building your sales funnel. There are pre-built pages for everything from landing pages, opt-in pages to webinar pages and sales pages. Whatever you need to build your sales funnel, you’ll find it in here.

5. Clever Widgets: If your website has a lot of content, you can show relevant posts in the widget sidebar based on what someone is reading instead of the same posts every time.

6. Headline Optimizer: Headlines make your posts a success or failure. The headline optimizer allows you to create multiple headlines for a post and then A/B test it. The optimizer then picks the most clicked headline and makes it the default for that post.

7. Thrive Ultimatum: Thrive Ultimatum lets you add a countdown timer to any offer you present on your website or sales page. When the timer runs out, the offer will automatically end.

8. Thrive Ovation: This excellent feature lets you collect testimonials from your customers and followers either through a submission form or social media networks. Then, using the many beautiful design templates, you can display these testimonials on your sales pages, increasing your conversion rates.

9. Thrive Quiz Builder: A quiz builder is an excellent tool you can use to build quizzes on your website. You can A/B test quizzes, tie them to your offers and use the answers to segment your users and uncover valuable data.

10. Thrive Comments: This plugin gives your website visitors the ability to comment on your posts and create more engagement.

11. Thrive Optimize: With this tool, you can A/B test the pages in your sales funnel or website with different variations – and the pick the one that gets the most clicks or sales as the default.

Clickfunnels: An All-in-One Sales Funnel Building System

The highlight of Clickfunnels is that it offers the quickest and simplest way for entrepreneurs and marketers to build effective sales funnels.

Let’s look at ClickFunnels features in a bit more detail…

1. Clickfunnels: A Fast Sales Funnel Builder

The main feature of Clickfunnels is, well… Clickfunnels.

What this means is you get ready-to-use funnels for selling products, collecting emails and even hosting webinars that you can create in one click.

As an example, suppose you want to get leads for your new digital course on training dogs.

For that, your funnel needs to have 3 pages: 1) The sales page with an opt-in form. 2) Checkout page. 3) The Thank You Page

In Thrive, you’d have to make these pages separately using the free templates. But in Clickfunnels, you’ll automatically get the sales funnel pages created in this order.

All you now have to do it edit the content and add your digital course – or whatever you’re selling.

2. Backpack: Run Your Own Affiliate Programs

With Clickfunnels, you don’t have to sell your products alone. You can get others to sell for you as well.

How?

With the backpack feature – which lets you run affiliate programs and offer people commission in exchange for selling your products

This is a great way to get your very own salespeople for free and get them to sell your products for you!

3. Actionetics: Run An Automated Marketing Campaign

Like we said, Clickfunnels is not just a tool, but a whole system for creating sales funnels.

So if you subscribe to the pro version of Clickfunnels, you unlock a whole new set of tools called Actionetics.

In this tool, you can manage your leads, divide them into segments, send them targeted emails and text messages (with their permission) and see your whole marketing campaign in a glance which you can then edit with additional funnels and emails.

This means that with the addition of just one more feature, you get your very own robust CRM system and email autoresponder tool as well!

Which Tool Is Better For Creating Sales Funnels?

To be fair, both these tools have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Let’s start this discussion with the price:

Clickfunnels Pricing:

It costs $97 per month to get Clickfunnels basic plan. And if you want all its features such as the email autoresponder, CRM, and affiliate system, you need to get the advanced plan called the Etison Suite. This costs $297 per month.

Thrive Membership Pricing:

It costs $30 per month (paid quarterly) to get a Thrive Membership. In this membership, you get all of the tools and plugins they have. The only limit is you can use them in up to 25 websites. If you’re an agency and need to work on 25+ websites, you’ll have to get the agency membership which costs $69 a month (paid quarterly).

On the surface, Thrive Themes is the significantly cheaper option.

If you compare Thrive Membership with the Clickfunnels basic plan, Clickfunnels is 5 times more expensive and compare it with the Clickfunnels premium plan (the Etison Suite), Clickfunnels is 10 times more expensive.

But there’s another side to the story.

With Clickfunnels, here’s what you’re getting:

1. Free Hosting: Clickfunnels hosts your website so you don’t have to pay for hosting. Thrive Themes does not. However, with Clickfunnels, you only own your web pages as long as you’re a subscriber. With Thrive Themes, you own them even if you are not.

2. Inbuilt Payment Integrations: You can set up payments for your customers inside ClickFunnels without going for a 3rd party solution. With Thrive Themes, you can add payment integration only with a 3rd part solution.

3. CRM System: Thrive Themes lets you collect leads via opt-in but has no option for you to store leads. But Clickfunnels also lets you store leads and segment them into lists based on the actions they take. Again, you have to integrate Thrive with a 3rd party CRM to get this functionality.

4. Email Autoresponder: In Clickfunnels, you can send automated emails to your leads after they opt-in to your funnel. In Thrive Themes, you cannot and need to connect to a 3rd party email autoresponder.

5. One-Click Upsell or Downsell: After customers buy (or don’t buy) your product, you can also promote other products after the checkout page in Clickfunnels. You can’t do this and need a 3rd party tool in Thrive Themes to do this.

As you can see, with Thrive Themes, you only get tools to build your sales funnel. For hosting, adding a payment system and managing and marketing your leads, you need 3rd party solutions.

While you can get many of the tools for free, tools like CRM systems, hosting and email autoresponders certainly aren’t free – and also requires you to pay additional dollars monthly to use them, adding up to a significant amount.

However, it is true the Thrive Themes offers many unique tools to create a business website focused on conversions.

Instead of just an opt-in form on your page, you can add a slider opt-in form, a ribbon opt-in form, a form that pops up when the visitor is about to close the website and more. In addition, you can add things like blog posts, comments, headline analyzer and more. For building a proper website, Thrive Themes is a good choice.

The Final Verdict

Thrive Themes is definitely the cheapest way to build your funnel – but that’s only what it can do. For more functionality in managing your sales funnel (which you’ll definitely need), you’ll have to integrate other services.

And while many marketers and entrepreneurs will like this freedom of choosing their own tools and services for managing their funnel, others will find that signing up and paying for additional 3rd party tools and extensions too much of a hassle.

If you’re one of the latter – and are looking for a complete all in one sales funnel solution for one fixed price, Clickfunnels is the way to go. Click here for a Free 14-day ClickFunnels Trial!

It has everything you need to create your funnel, manage your leads and tools automate your whole marketing process under one roof, that is what it was designed for after all.

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Transformational Leadership That Gets Big Results

Exclusive interview with Art Barter. 

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As the CEO and cultural architect of Datron World Communications, Art Barter transformed the organization from a $10 million company to a $200 million company in just six years after taking ownership of the company and converting the leadership style to servant leadership.

He says servant leadership is powerful because it leverages influence rather than fear to accomplish a company’s goals. Art believes the word ‘servant’ implies action. And action is what is needed in leadership today–action that puts others first, not ourselves going beyond the effort of making money in order to make a greater impact in the lives and communities around us.

He believes when leaders shift their mindset and serve first, they unlock purpose and ingenuity in those around them. Resulting in higher performance with engaged, fulfilled employees and overall strong relationships and compassion for one another at every level in the workplace.

Today, Art helps others discover and benefit from the power of servant leadership through the Servant Leadership Institute.

Some of the questions and topics we discuss:

  1. Where did he start and how did he get where his is today? (from janitor to leading a $200m company)
  2. What is servant leadership?
  3. What is the power model?
  4. What was the big change he made and how did employees take it?
  5. How is his impact model structured and how does it motivate people? (They have given $16m to causes)
  6. What factors contributed to his success in scaling the company from $10m company to a $200m company?
  7. How do you balance serving people and making money?
  8. What does a good leader to manage people effectively and get them to do their best?
  9. How do you start creating a mission-focused culture from the start?

That just scratches the surface!

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Ontraport vs Clickfunnels: Which is Right for You?

How do you run your online business? How big is your sales team? How many marketing campaigns do you run?

These are important questions you need to answer so you can make the right choice between Ontraport and Clickfunnels.

First, let’s start by briefly seeing what each of these tools are made for.

Ontraport:

Ontraport is the swiss army knife for automating your online business. It has lots and lots of tools to manage all parts of your business such as campaigns, sales, finances and more.

Clickfunnels:

Clickfunnels and all its accompanying features revolve around doing one thing only: helping you create functional, attractive sales funnels that successfully get people to buy your products and services.

Which Tool Should I Get For My Online Business?

None of these tools is a one-size-fits-all solution. Both of them cater to different businesses with different needs.

That being said, your decision on what tool to get depends on exactly how complex the inner workings of your online business is.

If it’s just you – or a small team that’s going to be selling products, services or memberships, and you need a no-nonsense tool that’s powerful, yet simple and easy to use, Clickfunnels is the ideal choice.

But, if your online business is really big and complex, plus you have an army of marketers and salespeople on payroll who manage your customers and your many marketing campaigns, then Ontraport is a much better fit.

You now probably have an inkling of which tool you need to run your online business.

But hang on…

Let’s first look at the features each tool has to offer. Then, we’ll look at the pricing followed by our final verdict. And then you can decide which tool you should choose.

So let’s get started…

Ontraport: The Swiss Army Knife For Running An Online Business

If you had to choose one word to describe Ontraport, it would have to be ‘automation’.

Why?

Because even though it’s a platform where you can create sales pages, manage your leads and send them emails; going through the software, you can’t help but notice Ontraport’s strong emphasis on automating each and every part of running your business – not just your campaigns.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a bad thing.

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This can prove to be extremely useful for big businesses. But if you’re a small team or a solo entrepreneur, you might find these extensive automation features to be overwhelming.

But we’ll let you decide what you feel about this tool yourself.

Here’s a rundown of the major features Ontraport offers.

1. Business Automation

The highlight feature of Ontraport is business automation.

What this means is you can automate each and every little activity that happens within your business.

Here’s an example of what automation within Ontraport looks like:

Suppose you are running three sales funnels at the same time. One that collects emails of people interested in seeing your software demo. One that gets people to buy your ebook. And one that gets people to subscribe to your newsletter.

Now each of these are different audiences.

With Ontraport, you can automatically assign tags to different audiences, assign salespeople to follow up on the people interested in your demo, send an email campaign to people who subscribe to your newsletter.

And that’s just one example.

With Ontraport, you can automate tasks associated with your CRM, your marketing campaign, your sales processes, your billings, your email marketing and more.

And that’s barely scratching the surface.

Remember when the app store was booming, we used to say ‘there’s an app for that’? Now with Ontraport, you can say ‘there’s an automation for that’.

2. Campaign Builder

This is where the automation part of Ontraport really shines.

In the campaign builder, you can visually map out the whole process of your company’s marketing campaigns.

Here’s what the process of building a marketing campaign with the Ontraport campaign builder looks like:

1. Select a trigger or activity: This can be any activity or event that happens within your business. For example, a person opts-in to receive a demo. A customer purchases a product. Your salespeople initiate a follow-up call. You sell 10 products…

2. Select an action after said activity happens: What do you want to do after your desired activity happens? For example, your action after a customer opts-in to receive a demo could be to a) assign them the tag ‘high-priority’, b) add them to an email list c) assign them to a salesperson for a follow-up call.

3. Rinse and Repeat: After this happens, you can add another trigger and another action based on the outcome of the previous action… and on and on it goes, until you’ve built out your fully automated marketing campaign.

3. CRM:

Ontraport CRM is feature-packed, powerful and extremely sophisticated.

To start, you can add custom fields, view the behavior of your customers and see the communication history of your contacts.

Then, based on the above metrics, you can divide your contacts into different groups and segment them into different lists.

And finally, you can use these lists in your automation processes within the campaign builder, email marketing tool or for any purpose within your online business.

Other Notable Features

All these fancy automation features, marketing campaign builders, and CRM tools are well and good – but none of this matters if you can’t build a solid sales funnel to get started.

So, for that, Ontraport provides:

1. Landing Pages: There are templates you can use to quickly build landing pages, test them and modify according to your preferences. Plus, you can add opt-in forms too to collect emails.

2. Email Marketing: With the powerful CRM behind you, you can create emails and send them to your segmented lists based on their identities or behaviors to create highly personalized marketing campaigns.

3. Send SMS, Letters, and Postcards: You can integrate Ontraport to services that let you send personalized greeting cards, letters and SMS to your audiences.

4. Create an E-commerce or Membership Site: With Ontraport, you can also create an e-commerce site or connect with WordPress to create a membership site.

5. Dashboard: You can create custom metrics and display them in a single dashboard. For example, you can see metrics for products sold, the conversion rate for a form, number of users in your email list etc.

ClickFunnels: The Sales Funnel Builder That Does One Job… But Does It Well

Reading our intro and the review of Ontraport, you might get an impression that Clickfunnels is the ‘weaker’ of the two.

Nothing can be further from the truth.

Clickfunnels offers the same features as Ontraport does, but it isn’t focused on automating every single tiny thing that goes on in your business.

No, it’s focused on doing one job: Helping you successfully sell your products and services to your customers – and it makes this process quick, easy and painless for you.

To do that, Clickfunnels offers ready-made sales funnels for:

1. Collecting Emails

2. Selling products and services

3. Hosting webinars

All you really have to do is edit the funnels a bit, move them around to create a personalized sales funnel and automate the process so that everything runs by itself.

Let’s see in detail how this works.

Ready-To-Use Sales Funnels

The biggest selling point of Clickfunnels is that it gives you ready-to-use funnels for selling ebooks, services, products, webinars, memberships and more. And what’s more? All these funnels are scientifically tested to convert.

This is a huge factor you need to keep in mind.

With other tools, you need to be an expert in building funnels and campaigns in order to take full advantage. But Clickfunnels does the whole job for you.

Its funnels are designed to get the highest number of sales possible and you can see exactly what pages your funnel has. For example, a funnel for selling an ebook might have the following pages:

1. The sales page with an opt-in form.

2. The checkout page.

3. The thank you page.

All these pages can be easily modified with Clickfunnel page editor which, to be honest, is much better than Ontraport’s website editor.

That’s because everything feels more flexible and less confined. You aren’t just working with boxes and templates. You can change and move individual elements more easily.

Actionetics: Contact Profiles, Email Lists & Broadcasts

Clickfunnel’s CRM shows you in a glance the information about your leads and subscribers.

A cool thing to note is that once you click on the lead to get more detailed information, Clickfunnels pulls that lead’s social media profiles as well, which you can visit with a single click to get more in-depth information.

In addition, you can see all other relevant information like what was their last purchases, which email list they’re in, what campaigns are they currently a part of etc.

Plus, based on their activity, demographics or other info, you can quickly segment your leads into different groups so you can send them personalized emails or put them in your automations.

For that, Clickfunnels has a whole email marketing tool where you can create emails and whole email campaigns and send them to your desired audiences based on different identity and behavior related metrics.

Actionetics: Action Funnels

Actionetics is where all the automation inside Clickfunnels happens.

Here, like Ontraport, you can create funnels – and if someone interacts with it, you can assign different actions based on their previous action.

The biggest difference between the two is this:

Clickfunnel’s automation tool is focused on getting users through funnels and getting you sales. Ontraport’s automation tools are focused on managing all aspects of your business, not just funnels.

What’s The Cost?

Clickfunnels Offers Two Plans:

1. Basic Plan

This costs $97 per month which includes everything you need to build your sales funnels. But the number of funnels, traffic, and emails you can create is limited.

2. Etison Suite

This costs $297 per month in which you unlock the actionetics bundle, which has the CRM, email marketing, and automation tools as. Plus the number of emails, traffic, and funnels you can create is unlimited.

Ontraport Offers Four Plans:

1. Basic

This costs $79 in which you get to store 1000 contacts and unlimited emails.

2. Plus

This costs $147 in which you get to store 2500 contacts and unlimited emails.

3. Pro

This cost $297 in which you get to store 10,000 contacts and unlimited emails.

4. Enterprise

This costs $497 in which you get to store 20,000 contacts and 200,000 emails.

Note: The basic plan severely limits the capabilities of both Clickfunnels and Ontraport. That’s why it’s recommended that no matter what tool you choose, you subscribe to the Etison Suite for Clickfunnels and the Pro Plan for Ontraport, which unlocks all the features of both tools respectively.

Our Final Pick

The importance of automation for big companies cannot be understated.

That’s why if you have expert marketers and salespeople at your service, and want a solution that can provide data and tools for both your sales team and marketing team, plus help you automate the tedious, repetitive tasks in every area of your business, Ontraport is the way to go.

If you don’t need (or want) to automate each and every process of your business, and want to focus on selling your products and services, Clickfunnels is a great choice.

It offers sales funnels so that even a newbie can start selling online like a pro. Plus, it offers powerful, yet easy to use CRM, email marketing, and automation tools to run your funnel and your online business, all the while remaining easy to use.

How to Quiet the Mind: 4 Unusual Ways that Really Work

As work stress increases each year, more people are asking: is there any way to quiet the mind? Here are some quick tips to help you figure out how to quiet the mind.

Four Unusual Mindfulness Meditation Exercises

A well-established way to quiet your mind is by developing a mindfulness practice. Here are five meditations you can incorporate into your day-to-day life.

1. The Leaf Meditation

One way of overcoming the egoic mind is to focus on the complexity of something outside of yourself. Take a leaf and hold it in your hand, set a timer for five minutes and give the leaf your full attention. This will help to slow down your racing thoughts.

2. Five minutes of mindful eating

Your lunch break at work can be an ideal opportunity to practice mindfulness. Mindful eating helps strengthen the mind-body connection and take your mind off negative thoughts. All you need to do is train your brain to pay full attention to your eating experience. Concentrate your focus on what you are eating and the sensations you notice. Pay attention to where your mind wanders from moment to moment.

3. Short breath break

This is an effective way to settle mind chatter, especially when you do not have the time for a full meditation practice. If you are having a busy day at work and feel yourself becoming overwhelmed by stress, this could help with quieting your mind. You can take a short breath anytime you feel the need to take your awareness away from stressful thoughts. You just need to bring your attention to your breathing and noting how it affects the rest of your body.

4. Five Senses Exercise

This is another exercise that allows you to quiet the mind chatter that could be diverting your focus at work. You do not have to go anywhere special for this meditation practice. Just take a moment to notice three things you are currently experiencing through each of your five senses.

Four Quick Breathing Exercises

1. Abdominal Breathing

This is an excellent exercise for introverts. Try this before heading into a meeting or social event to keep your mind peaceful. Set a timer for ten minutes. Sit comfortably and place your right hand over your chest and your left on your belly. Take deep breaths inflating from your diaphragm. You’ll know you’re doing it correctly when only your left-hand moves with your breath.

2. Alternate Nostril Breathing

If you practice yoga, this exercise will be familiar to you. This is a way to calm and balance both sides of your brain. Sit comfortably and press your right thumb against your right nostril and take a deep inhale through your left. When your lungs are full, press your right ring finger against your left nostril and gently exhale through your right nostril. For the next breath, reverse the pattern and inhale through your right nostril and exhaling through the left. Keep alternating like this for five minutes of deep breathing.

3. Balanced Breathing

This balanced breathing exercise can help reduce anxiety and tame the monkey mind. You can start by inhaling for a five count, then exhaling for a five count. Make sure you are breathing through your nose. As you become more adept at this breathing practice, you can build up to a 12 count. As you progress in your balanced breathing practice, you will notice an increased focus, reduced stress, and peace of thought that extends to your day-to-day life.

4. Progressive Relaxation

This exercise is ideal after a high-stress day. It helps you to reestablish a strong mind-body connection by aligning what you’re thinking and feeling. Close your eyes and sit comfortably. Progressively turn your attention to each muscle group, starting with your forehead and working down to your toes. Focus on each muscle group for five seconds before moving down to the next. Keep your breathing slow and deep as you feel for stress in different parts of your body. When you find a particularly tight muscle group, take a deep breath while paying attention to the tension and then gently exhale as you relax.

Ten Tips for Your Pre-bed Routines

For most people, a quiet mind is most critical just before bedtime. Improving the quality of your sleep is one of the best things you can do for your health and well-being. Will your thoughts be focused at work? Will you stick to your diet? Will you maintain your calm under stress? All these things are influenced by sleep quality. So how do you quiet your mind for sleep?

  1. Avoid electronic screens after sunset.
  2. Create a to-do list for the next day.
  3. Take a mindful bath.
  4. Read fiction (but not in bed).
  5. Live by candlelight in the evenings.
  6. Sleep in a dark, cool room.
  7. Set an alarm based on sleeping in 90-minute cycles.
  8. Try to sleep and wake at the same time each day.
  9. Place your alarm somewhere far from the bed.
  10. Do not lie awake in bed for more than 20 minutes.

Why a Quiet Mind Works for Entrepreneurs

While many of us embrace our busy minds, full of ideas, and strategies, quieting your mind can be good at times to be able to focus. Stepping away from your daily schedule and busy mind can really help you propel your personal and business growth.

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