In case you haven’t noticed by now, I want you to succeed.

It is genuinely important to me to help you reach that place in your business where you can say, “Yes, I made it; I love my work and I love my life!”

But there is something else that is equally as compelling that I want for you:

I want you to enjoy the journey—the process of making it all happen.

If you’ve been with me for a while you know that I often talk about the kinds of strategies that have worked for me, that I know can work for you too. Things like building your email list early in the game, effective ways of using Facebook to engage with your audience, and the importance of having a marketing plan—knowing what you’re going to do before you set out to do it.

I stand behind all of these things 100%, but there is something else you need to know. Something so critical it can actually make or break your online business dreams.

I'm talking about what you believe regarding your ability to achieve success in your business.

Now before I dive into these 3 things that you have to believe in order to see the results you are yearning for, we need to dip a toe into psychology first.

The thing about belief is that it’s one of the few things that you can’t be taught to do. You and I both know that you don’t just flip a switch to believe something. That’s because belief is not an outward action that you take; instead, it’s a state of your inner being.

I can teach you how to do a lot of things, but I can’t teach you to believe.

Because belief is such an individual experience, it’s important from the outset to identify how you most often come to believe something for yourself.

Do you believe…

• Based on your own experience
• Based on the experience of others
• Just by acting “as if”
• Because it seems to make sense—logically or intuitively
• By trusting a mentor
• Having an “aha moment”
• The opposite hasn’t worked for you

It's okay if you need to think about this and can’t answer right away. Maybe there are even several answers to how you believe, not just one on the list. It’s just something to keep in mind as we continue talking about the three critical beliefs you need to have for success in your business.

The 3 Beliefs You Must Have to Achieve Success in Your Business

Belief #1 - I believe that one of the biggest strengths in my business is knowing my target market intimately. Knowing how they think, what they need, and what words and emotions they use to express themselves is crucial to my success.

Belief #2 - I believe that I am not alone, shipwrecked on a desert island needing to have all the answers myself. I thrive and my business thrives with a few core mentors that I trust and can turn to again and again.

Belief #3 - I believe I have a great idea (product/service) that will impact people’s lives, and that my idea needs a clear and easy-to-navigate system to generate sales.

Whew…how did that feel? Chances are that at least one of these beliefs…and maybe all three…felt like a big effort for you to even read, let alone internalize.

Maybe it felt too audacious, too daring, to really own those beliefs for yourself. “I’d like to believe those things, but I don’t know if I’m really the kind of entrepreneur she’s talking about here.”

Maybe you felt skeptical. “Yeah, down the road maybe I’ll believe those things, if things work out well…”

Maybe you’ve just lost so much confidence in the past few months that reading those beliefs made you even more hopeless. “I wish I believed those things—I used to believe them. It would be nice to think that something that simple could turn things around.”

Listen to Episode 57  for Amy's insights on how to restore your confidence and increase your sales.  

Understanding the Three Beliefs

Let’s examine each belief more closely and see what’s important about it.

#1 Knowing Your Audience

Would it benefit you if you could step into the minds of your readers and listeners and customers-to-be? You bet it would! This essential ingredient is so powerful because it allows you to create core messages that you know will instantly attract your perfect audience.

Knowing your target market takes time and strategy, but it will boost your confidence more than anything else. When you can speak to your audience like you’ve known them for years, and they feel that you “get them,” everything else you do to build your business is a cakewalk.

There’s another big advantage to understanding your audience intimately: you become congruent with your business. What this means is that your vision for your business and what is actually happening in it come into alignment. You get up close and personal with your mission—the reason you started your business in the first place.

#2 Finding Your Mentor

It is tempting to think that running an online business is a solo venture. After all, we sit for hours oftentimes by ourselves, building and communicating through a computer screen. It feels isolating, but at the same time, a lot of people think that it’s the only way…that being “self-employed” means spending most of your time by yourself.

I promise you, nothing could be further from the truth! “Self-employed” simply means being your own boss…and guess what? The best corporate bosses in the world actually seek out contact with others—their peers, colleagues and employees. That’s how they learn what’s working and what's not in the way they run their company.

The same goes for entrepreneurs like you and me. I know a lot of very successful entrepreneurs out there, and I don’t think I can name a single one that doesn’t have some assembly of mentors, advisors, and team members helping them sort through all the information and advice that’s out there, to find the best way to run their business.

I did the same thing, early on in my business—I chose a few people I could connect with and relate to, and made them my virtual mentors. I signed up for their courses, followed their blogs, listened to their podcasts, and basically became a mini-stalker online. I was their student and I trusted the road they set out for me when it came to building my business.

I can’t tell you what an amazing confidence boost it is when you know who to turn to, when things get rough. You immediately stop feeling overwhelmed and inadequate; over time, you actually start thinking like the expert you’ve been following. This is the turning point, where you know YOUR BUSINESS WILL WORK and you will succeed.

#3 Having a System

In order for you to stand out amid all the noise of the internet, to be noticed and taken seriously, you need a system to keep you from getting off course. You can think of this as a roadmap that makes it absolutely clear and easy to navigate your message into the minds and hands of your customers.

Maybe you feel like your business is too small to really get a sales system in gear—your product is still new, your website isn’t very fancy, you want to “clean house” (so to speak) before you put together a powerful marketing system. Think again! EVERY BUSINESS, no matter what stage you are in, needs a sales system.

Here’s the thing: powerful doesn’t mean complicated. A sales system can be incredibly simple, run on its own steam, and produce revenue daily. You set it up and boom—your business is moving forward. From there, you can add the bells and whistles of advanced sales strategies to gain momentum in your already thriving revenue stream.

In fact, simplicity is the key when it comes to your roadmap for taking effective action. Once you have the system and understand how it works, you can take your business as fast and as far as you want!

Get more of Amy's secrets for how to keep your sales strategy simple and stress-free.  Listen to the full episode.

The Consequences of Not Having the 3 Beliefs

Okay, now you understand what these beliefs are for.

Let's talk about what happens when you don't have them.

If you don’t believe it’s that important to identify your ideal customer on a deeper level, your attempts to engage leads will miss the mark. It may be subtle at first, but you will be wondering why that spark just isn’t there. You don’t want to go down that road because this lack of deeper connection will keep you desperately striving while keeping your pockets empty.

If you believe that you must figure everything out yourself, or that your business is better off without the input of mentors, you will lack the connection you need for your business to thrive. You’ll keep trying every new thing that comes along in hopes that it will bring you success, and never gain momentum.

This one hits close to home for me, because I’m remembering what my own business was like, before I had a sales system in place. Let me tell you from experience that this foundation is not only critical to your success—it is mandatory. If you don’t believe that a sales system is important for you, or if you believe that it’s too early for you to implement, there’s a good chance that your wonderful idea, product, or service has a good chance of never seeing the light of day.

I want you to have a System in place for your business, because I know you need one. Which is exactly why I created this FREE Master Class to walk you through the steps you need to take to get a simple system up and running in your business, quickly. Just click below to join!

Why You Need These 3 Beliefs

I said at the beginning that belief is a tricky concept, because it’s not something I can teach you. I can only tell you, and back it up with my story and many others. But at the end of the day, the best proof of a belief is to look at your own situation.

If you don’t have these beliefs, how are things going for you? Is your business on track with your vision? Are your sales what you want them to be?

And if they’re not, isn’t it time to change your beliefs?

I know it isn’t easy at first. It’s scary to change, to risk spending money or time on learning to do things in a new way. Don’t let fear hold you back.

The purpose of belief is to shape the actions we take. And as soon as you begin taking action on these beliefs, you already have them. You will feel the difference inside you—you’ll feel your confidence growing, and your sense of purpose will feel more grounded than ever.

Before long, you’ll also be seeing the difference on the outside—more email subscribers, greater audience engagement, and an increase in sales.
I want all of that for you, from the bottom of my heart.
I would love to hear your experiences in the comments below. Have you tried a system that has worked well for you? How are you getting to know your audience? Do you have the kind of mentorship you need to succeed? Keep moving forward and know you are not alone!

Don't forget to join me on my FREE, Master Class where I'm revealing the EXACT marketing system I use (and where Facebook fits into it to!) generate multiple sales every single day.

*The master class registration has passed, but be sure to stay on the list for future webinars! Subscribe to my list, or check out one of my free cheat sheets here.

There are two kinds of content in this world: content that attracts and content that sells.

It's easy to spend all your time and effort focusing on the second part. Eyes on the prize, right? And believe me, I want you focused on that end result.

But it's crucial to remember that the end result needs a strong beginning. In other words, you'll never get to that sale if you haven't attracted the people who want to buy your product!

Today is all about the first half of the sales equation.

The more you craft content geared toward your ideal customer, the more sales you'll make. And these won't just be one-time sales. You'll be talking to people who want to buy from you over and over, because they feel connected to you and your product. When you create content that makes them feel understood, that communicates an empathy for their situation and an excitement about helping them with your product, they are going to be watching their inboxes for your emails and jumping up and down each time you launch something new.

These are the people you want to find, right?

So let's talk about how you can reach them.

First, the Good News...

When you know your target market really well, creating content for them becomes incredibly easy. We talked last week about creating a survey that helps you get inside the heads of your target market. Once you're there, you'll be able to instantly rattle off ten things they need...

Which then become the topics of each piece of content you create.

Let me jump ahead really quick to tell you that our free giveaway for this week is a list of inspiration boosters for creating magnetic, empathetic content that your audience can't resist. Click here to get it now.

What Counts as Content?

Ready for some more good news? Everything you do online is content.

A Facebook post counts as a content piece, whether it's video or words or simply an image. So does a tweet. An email (whether to your whole list or just a segment of it), the text and imagery on your landing page, a free giveaway, a podcast, a thirty-minute webinar...

You get the idea.

We all have our favorite places to post content. Maybe you're Twitter-happy and can post 140-character quips all day long. Or maybe you love doing quick video updates from wherever you happen to find yourself.

So don't worry if you're not the world's most prolific blogger. If you're making your voice heard online, you're creating and posting content, and you are ahead of the game.

Consistency Is Key

This is one thing I have learned from all of my mentors: the people that are most consistent in terms of posting content beat out the competition in reaching any given market.

This is because consistency is one of the primary ways you earn the trust and respect of your target market. They come to rely on hearing from you every two days, or every other Thursday, or whenever it is that your regular updates take place. It's less important how often it is, and more important that it happens on a regular basis. I'll say it again: Consistency is Key.

Believe me, I know how hard this can be. It seems like every time I get on a roll with posting content regularly, a product launch derails my schedule and all of a sudden I'm scrambling to come up with new content.

For me, the key to being consistent is batching. For instance, with this podcast, I come up with lots of topics in advance, and get started right away with creating and scheduling episodes, coming up with images, queuing the social media updates...the whole nine yards. This way, I don't find myself scrambling (as often!) on Wednesday afternoon for something to post the next morning.

Simplify by Diversifying

Okay, so say you have a lot of fun within creating short Facebook videos, but your brain dries up the second you sit down to write a blog. Does that mean you should abandon writing and just rely on Facebook videos to communicate with your audience?

Definitely not. First of all, you're going to miss a huge segment of your potential customers by relying on only one form of content. Second, there are just things that a blog can communicate that videos can't...and vice versa! You don't have to do all kinds of content in equal measure, but if you want to reach as many people as possible, you're going to want to use as many different kinds of content to catch their attention in all the places they might be hanging out.

Fortunately, every idea you come up with for one kind of content can be easily translated into a totally different piece of content. Your videos can be turned into a blog post. Your blog post can be turned into a slide deck. Your slide deck can be turned into a series of Twitter images.

In other words, creating different content pieces just got a lot simpler.

Open the Conversation

Obviously, even with all these ways to repurpose your existing content, you're going to have to create new original pieces sometimes...you know, so that you can repurpose them later!

This is where you really tap into the insights about your ideal customer that you learn through sending the kind of survey we talked about last week. These insights help you spark a conversation that surprises your customer with how well you understand them, how "heard" they feel.

Here are some prompts to initiate the conversation with your audience:

• Identify the #1 question you get asked all the time…and answer it.
• What should your ideal customer be asking you that they are not asking yet?
• What are your top three posts on Facebook in the last six months?
• Which experts does your ideal customer find valuable, or who do they really value the opinion of?
• What could your ideal customer talk about all day long?
• What is your ideal customer most afraid of?
• What does your ideal customer need to know about you?
• What is your ideal customer posting on Pinterest/watching on YouTube?
• What is your ideal customer’s “want” and what’s the Trojan horse you use to deliver it to them?
• What could help your ideal customer right now?

Get more of Amy's insights on creating content, including an interview with social media maven Donna Mortiz. Listen to Episode 56 in full. 

Our free giveaway this week has even more of these inspiration boosters for helping you create content. It also has a list of 20 specific ways you can repurpose your existing content in fresh new pieces. Click here to get it right now.

In the last several weeks, I’ve been getting a product ready for launch. It’s called the Profit Lab…or, if you want the full title,

The Profit Lab:  How to Create Marketing Systems In Your Business So That You Can Find Your Target Market, Grow Your Email List and Sell More Products

I launch this product twice a year, and every year, I recreate it so that it stays fresh and valuable, even for people who have gone through it before. I make new videos, I rewrite the worksheets, all that good stuff.

This year, as I’ve been getting this product ready for launch, I wanted to make sure I was truly connecting with my target audience. After you’ve had some success with a product, it’s easy to start coasting on that success, which means you stay the same while your audience continues to grow and change and develop new needs. Not my style.  ;-)

To find out more about my target market, I needed to find out:

• Where they are at, in terms of their business goals and growth.
• What they needed from me
• Where they were struggling, not just in their business as a whole but with the versions of the Profit Lab I’d released before.

Knowing all this was going to help me tailor this new version of the Profit Lab into exactly what my target audience desperately needs right now.

So I put together a survey. And the responses knocked my socks off!

The thing is, I knew who my target audience was, but I didn’t really know them the way I thought I did. The survey gave me a chance to understand how they think, what kind of language they use, what keeps them up at night, and why they come to me as opposed to anybody else in the online marketing world.

I learned so much from this experience of surveying my audience that I wanted to share some of those insights with you…how to create a survey that gets you into the minds and hearts of your target audience, so you design, redesign or market your products in direct response to their needs.

The result of this will be that you sell more of your products to them.

And don’t worry if you’re just starting out and your list isn’t that big yet. You can still design a survey that gets you these answers and helps you build your list...and I’ll tell you how.

I've also got a great freebie for you to download this week, which will give you lots more insight on creating a survey, as well as how to use the information it yields. Click here to download it now!

First Step: Design Your Questions

Remember, your survey isn’t a Gallup poll. You’re probably not trying to find out whether your audience is in their 20s or their 50s, if they are male or female, or other information like that. So before you start drafting questions, take a minute to think about what your survey is really trying to find out about your target market.

We all know that endless surveys with loads of questions get really, really boring. And you want to steer clear of that with your survey. So make sure that your questions are all focused on the goal of learning something specific about your target market that relates to the product you’re offering them.

You want to include bigger picture questions that give you a clearer picture of who they are and how they define success, as well as more focused questions, such as what products/services in your niche they're already using, and what specific needs do they have that aren't being fulfilled?

To get more in-depth guidance on how to design your survey questions, click here for the full episode.

Second Step: Get People Engaged

Obviously, the first step in the survey process is putting together something that they will agree to participate in.

While it never hurts to offer an incentive to entice people to take your survey, it’s a lot more effective to create a survey that is as painless as possible.

Contrary to popular opinion, a survey doesn’t have to be dull or dry. You can create a survey that is quick, enjoyable, and creates excitement around your upcoming product. Simply take the same approach you would with designing a product, answering a complaint, or anything else that involves interacting with your client: offer them a great experience.

Here’s how:

• Give the survey your personal touch. Write it the way you’d write your blog, your emails, or anything else. This actually increases your rate of answers.
• Make the experience as user-friendly and smooth as possible. Use a platform that you’ve vetted for bugs.  (My favorites includes Survey Monkey and Pop Survey.)  Make sure it’s very mobile friendly, so that people can complete your survey while they’re waiting at the doctor’s office or sitting on the subway.
• Skip the long intro whenever possible. The people who receive your survey already follow you on social media or are on your email list...so they already know who you are and what you’re about. No need to announce your survey with anything more than a subject line that conveys the survey’s purpose. (“Help Me Improve My Product with Your Feedback” or “Tell Me About Your Fitness Goals.”)
• Keep in mind that answers are for action. When creating questions on your survey, ask yourself this: “What kind of action will I take with the answer to this?” If the answer is “Nothing,” or you simply don’t know, don’t ask that question. There’s no purpose. You should limit your time (and the survey taker’s time) to questions that have a tangible purpose.

Want more specifics on how to make your survey fun and informative? Click here for the full episode.

Third Step: Getting Your Survey Out There

• Email to your list. Studies have found the highest survey open and click-through rates occurred on Monday, Friday and Sunday respectively.
• Promote online. Several survey programs (like Survey Monkey and Poll Daddy) have an option that helps you with this.
• Embed in a post on your own blog and as a guest blogger
• Link to your survey on social media. Again, some survey programs have a code that lets you embed the survey easily into Facebook.  (Make sure to click the “Like” button after you post because this will allow it to go viral faster.)
• Post your survey on LinkedIn
• Post a short video on YouTube explaining why you created the survey and encouraging your audience to take a few minutes to complete it. Give your viewers the URL and also post a link under your video on YouTube.

What if My List Isn’t Big Enough?

You don’t need hundreds of responses for a survey to be valuable. If you’re still working to build up your list, create your survey and reach out to ten friends or colleagues that you think would be your ideal customer. Ask them to fill out the survey, and also to pass it on to just one other person they know like themselves. You can learn about who your audience is from just a few people filling out these questions.

In addition, you can use Facebook Ads to promote your survey. Or you can put links to your survey in your blog post and guest blog posts. When you’re getting ready to make your blog post live, make your opt-in the survey. Offer readers an incentive in exchange for taking your survey--a chance to win something, a link to premium content, a limited-time membership to your service, something like that.

There are tons more suggestions on how to design your survey in this week's free download. Click here to get it!

The Bottom Line

Sending out a survey is kind of like going on a first date. If you spend the whole evening trying to make sure the other person understands you, you’re probably not going to get to see them again. But if you spend the whole time asking them questions about themselves, you’ll come away with a really good understanding of who they are, and whether you have what they need.

When you’re creating this survey, don’t think so hard about what you’re trying to accomplish in your business. Think about getting to know your target market, and the goals of your business will fall into line.