If you’ve been feeling stuck at a certain income level in your business (maybe even at zero) and you look around at others that don’t seem as talented, or smart or hard working as you… Yet they seem to be getting ahead while you flatline… Then know that there’s wrong or broken with you.
The difference is likely just a few key skills that are 100% learnable.
Here are the exact skills I recommend you build to 2x, 3x, or 10x your take-home:
- Learn how to solve growth-related pain points for the businesses you work with. These growth problems include: getting more customers, raising average order value, getting repeat business.
- Learn how to write longer-form sales letters. Sales letters are the sales assets that are closest to a sales transaction, and they pay the best of any form of copywriting. (If sales letters aren’t really a thing in your industry, focus on point 1 and always try to work on being involved in the negotiations that lead directly to a sale).
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Learn how to create winning offers. This skill is often the simple difference between ~$150k/year and ~$500k+/year).
If you want to go deeper into the details of these 3 skills, re-read my emails from this week.
I can tell you right now that if you spend some time each day working on the above skills, results will come quicker than you expect. Often switching your focus away from low value copywriting, to high value copywriting like sales letters can trigger massive jumps in income.
The most dramatic leaps will happen at the higher levels where you start helping clients craft and build their offers from the ground up. You become more of a partner than an employee at that stage.
For the solopreneurs, obviously adding better, winning offers to your business is game-changing.
Okay, so those are the 3 skills you need to build to raise your income, and they make up the "P" & "S" part of my "PSRB Method" for boosting income.
But the tricky part is that you’ll never actually be able to raise your income in real life until you learn about "R".
Remember my story about the client who fought me in every way possible to limit our growth?
Well, in that story, the client was my "R".
"R" stands for "Remove Roadblocks".
You must remove roadblocks if you want to grow. If you’re constantly battling someone, something, or yourself, no amount skill acquisition will do you any good.
Have you ever driven a golf cart with a speed limiter? You can press down as hard as you want on the pedal, but as long as there’s a limiter, you’ll never go over 15 miles per hour.
Roadblocks are anything standing in your way acting as a limiter stopping you from applying your skills to their full potential. Roadblocks are things that put a ceiling on your income.
There are 2 types of blocks to pay attention to and to remove:
- External roadblocks.
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Internal roadblocks.
How To Remove External Roadblocks
External roadblocks are roadblocks created by others – including clients, organizations, cultures, and even governments.
The list could go on, but let’s keep it simple: the most common external roadblocks will be bad clients or bad customers (which is a problem with your market).
External roadblocks are therefore best overcome by "firing" your clients or customers.
People don’t really change all that often or all that easily. If a client is clearly holding you back from unleashing your skills on their business, the faster you ditch them the better. The best clients will often push you – not the other way around – and unlock your potential in their business.
How To Remove Internal Roadblocks
Internal roadblocks are blocks you set for yourself. They’re hard to identify, and they’re hard to get rid of.
The way you start removing internal roadblocks holding your income down is through belief.
What I mean by "belief" is that you know, deep down inside without a doubt, that you could make as much money as any market will allow if you wanted to.
This doesn’t mean that you believe in miracles and believe $100mm is coming your way to tomorrow.
True belief is when your own mind doesn’t impose any sort of limitations on your income. Your mind doesn’t have an imaginary ceiling of any kind.
You attain this level of true belief through experience (seeing it happen for yourself or someone close to you) or by hiring a coach you trust who has been there and achieved the results you want.
You can also remove internal blocks with things like meditation and therapy.
You’ll know that you’ve done enough work on removing your internal blocks when you believe me fully when I say that doubling your income is easy, or that making $1mm+/year is possible (if that’s your goal).
Now, this is not an overnight journey. You can’t just remove every single roadblock you have overnight. External roadblocks can be dealt with swiftly, but internal roadblocks might take years to work through (especially if you go at it alone) and that’s normal.
But when you know you’ve got the 3 skills mentioned above and when your roadblocks have been dismantled… you’ll want to learn about the "B" part of the "PSRB Method".
"B" is when things get really fun – and when you’ll make even bigger & faster leaps in income.
I’ll wrap up this series with that discussion tomorrow.
Talk then!
– Derek