Learn Internet Marketing Strategies For Your Business

Want to know how you can speed up your success with your business? Get together with 5-7 other people who all want to help each other grow their businesses. This is called a mastermind team, and it’s like hiring a handful of mentors but usually doesn’t cost anything.

There are several keys to success with a mastermind.

1. Meet on a regular basis
2. Have a clear agenda
3. Help each other between meetings
4. Collaborate on mutually beneficial projects

Let me give you some tips on each of these areas.

Frequent And Consistent Mastermind Meetings

Whether you meet in person or on the phone, it’s important that you do so consistently and on a frequent basis. Some mastermind teams meet once per month, others once per week. Pick a schedule that’s perfect for your group, where attendance will always be high.

The schedule should be known well in advance, and that time slot should be considered a top priority for all members.

You can meet in person at a local restaurant, or on the phone with people around the world.

Have A Clear Agenda

Masterminds that fall apart usually do so because there’s little perceived benefit for the members. And this is typically caused by a lack of structure in the meetings. Without an agenda, the mastermind session turns into a meandering conversation. And those typically result in little actually being achieved.

Set an agenda and make sure that agenda is known either a day or so before, or presented as the very first item of business.

I was taught this agenda by my own mentors Donna Fox and Paulie Sabol:

1. Say what you’re grateful for from the previous week
2. Tell the group a very brief success story from the week before, or follow up from last week’s step 5 (see below).
3. Identify a trouble area you’d like specific help with
4. Shut up and listen to your mastermind team give you their feedback
5. Announce one major action step you are going to take between this and the next mastermind meeting.

Each person takes turns with this agenda for about 7 minutes. With a group of 6, this will take most of an hour long meeting.

The remaining time in the hour can be a specific business tip on a topic that you identified the week before.
For example, during the last 10 minutes of a session, each person could identify their favorite traffic source, or a golden nugget they picked up in a book their reading, etc.

The gold in the mastermind team is not what’s specifically being said during the meeting, but the accountability of being there, saying what you’re going to do, and then doing it or face the group the next time feeling guilty. Peer pressure in its most profitable form!

Help A Mastermind Partner Between Meetings

The third secret to a good mastermind team is to connect with one or more of the other members between meetings. Just a quick phone call or email to see how they’re coming along on their action step can be a great movitator. Or perhaps something comes up that is a more urgent issue that can’t wait until the next meeting. Just getting some quick feedback on an idea can save a lot of time, money, and unnecessary headaches.

I often find just hearing myself explain an issue makes the solution appear right in front of my face.
Be careful not to abuse your mastermind partners with too many requests for help, though. They have a business to run, just like you. So be sure to use your mastermind “lifelines” sparingly. But do use them – a good mastermind team wants to help.

Collaborate On Mutually Beneficial Projects

One of the best ways for a mastermind team to elevate each other’s businesses is to work on a joint project together. This can take the form of a joint venture product, a co-sponsored advertisement, or a series of teleseminars interviewing each other in the area of expertise.

When you work on something together, you multiply your efforts. And usually the result is greater than 1 + 1 = 2. It’s more like 1 + 1 = 11.

In the internet marketing world, this can also take the form of thank you page ad swaps, where you put each other’s information products as recommended resources.

You can also get more traffic to your web properties (like your blog, Squidoo lenses, etc.), by having each member in your group use social bookmarking, RSS, blog comments and other Web 2.0 strategies to multiply the visibility of what you collectively offer.

Get Started With Your Own Mastermind

Now the question remains, where do you find such a mastermind team. I’ll save that for another post, but the short answer is for you to look where you already are:

• Who else attended the same seminar you did that seemed to just “click” with you? My own mastermind team started out of a seminar in Baltimore in September, 2006.
• Who else is in your local chamber of commerce or networking/referral groups?
• Who do you talk to all the time on Twitter and Facebook, or in particular forums?
• Who else bought the same coaching program or learning product? For example, I encourage my Teleseminar Formula and Gold Inner Circle members to form mastermind teams. And my mastermind team met at the seminar after being part of the same $500/month coaching program.

You can also use Meetup.com to find a group in your local area to meet with in person.  I have a local Wilmington area mastermind group from this.

Wherever you find them, give masterminding a try for 3 months before you bring your verdict. It will likely take you about 6 meetings before your team really gets into its groove.

If you’re like me, you’ll quickly find them to be an instrumental part of your business. In fact, your mastermind team should be as essential as the computer you’re reading this message on.

Bob Jenkins

p.s. Want to learn more about how to mastermind? Check out my quick-start guide at DiscoverMasterminds.com.

p.p.s. Feel free to share your thoughts on this topic with a comment below. And if you’d like to me to create a more in-depth training on this topic, please let me know that too.

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