Here's an interesting notion from Dan Kennedy in his own words: “One of the lessons I learned slowly and painfully has to do with income versus wealth.”
So what's the difference? According to Dan, sales and profits are important, and they're what most entrepreneurs focus on. But they're not wealth and they don't produce wealth.
Wealth, he says, comes from creating valuable assets. You can either work all your life to create income, or you can focus on building assets and come to a place where you have so much wealth, the income takes care of itself.
For example, opening your own little cafe creates income. But creating a duplicate-able system – like McDonald's – creates wealth.
Now, let's take Dan's income versus wealth theory into the realm of internet marketing and see what happens:
Let's say you create an info product and sell it – that would be income. You can make a lot of money doing this, but it's always work. You're having to continuously plug along to make it happen. And it's different every time. You've got no real system, it's more of a seat of your pants kind of thing each time you create and launch a new product.
But if you were to develop a system for creating and selling profitable info products, that's wealth.
With your system, you can now plug writers into the process, tell them what to do, and then hand it over to your copywriter, webmaster and affiliate manager to make the profits.
With this system in place, you can launch a new product every month, every week or even every day if you scale it up.
Imagine that – being in 15 different niches, launching a product in each niche twice a month – could you create wealth that way?
And if you can systematize your process for picking product topics, you might even go to some island somewhere while you team does it for you.
It sort of boggles the mind, doesn't it?
Here's a challenge for you for the next month: See how many of your activities you can systematize. For example, checking your stats: If you do it whenever you think of it, it's not a system. If you do it at 9 a.m. Each Monday morning so you can compare it to the previous periods, you've now got a system.
The more systems you have in place, the easier your work will become. When you're ready, you'll be able to hand off work to a virtual assistant simply by showing him or her exactly how each system works and what to do. It's no different than training a new employee at McDonald's how to make a Big Mac. There is a system – the system works – and now you can outsource that work to someone else.
And when you decide to sell off some or all of your business assets, they will be worth far more because anyone, ANYONE, will be able to plug themselves into your systems and do exactly what you do with the same level of success.
Which will quadruple the value of your business.
Sort of like selling McDonald's franchises.