The best and brightest (whatever that means) of us spend the day wallowing in delusion. The brain is designed to function that way, and I don’t know why. A glitch? One such delusion is the brainwashing I’ve been affected by, which assures me I have to keep posting here once in a while.
What has REALLY worked in your life? What are the things you can look back on and say “I scored”?
And in what manner have you been banging your head against a wall, seemingly for centuries, for the stupidest of reasons, while your life runs out?
At this point in your life, it is time to cut the bullshit delusions of grandeur that have hypnotized you from every angle in today’s culture. Go ahead and fail for years, then you can succeed and join us in the top ranks. You are too good to have to work past the age of 45, you must become “special” (something we’ve all secretly believed about ourselves), you must show the world how special you are and let other people’s exhaltation and money wash over you.
Cut the crap, is all I’m saying. Don’t aim for a million dollars a month if that’s in defiance of your basic personality type – your brain will fight you and you’ll end up in your attic, crying, again. Don’t strain to find a freaking niche to bombard with another 100,000 auto-generated web pages. Go listen to a hundred hours of free audio from Adyashanti or Paul Hedderman, although I’m 90% sure that this isn’t the place to be talking of things like that.
Get a real paying gig – and I’m not necessarily talking about a “job” as such. You get to pre-determine how much effort you will expend for every $100 you make, and what you are and aren’t willing to sacrifice.
Meanwhile, work continues apace on two, soon to be three projects. And that is all I can handle. When you’re personally managing AdWords for more than two separate businesses, it screws with your mind.
This post was aimed at marketers, but if you’ve got a small business that you want to bring online, I’ve got about 70 people now on my “marketer looking to work with a business” list, so get in touch with me.
Update for Aug 29 2009 – I believe I am now involved in a project that will effectively take me out of the running, time-wise, when it comes to taking on any new businesses to work with directly (for the next few months). Don’t want to jinx it but I think this could be my most lucrative project yet. Thank God for automation. Sept 2 – this new project is still frightening me with its godawful big potential.
So I spent about 100 hours, I estimate, working on one project that now seems to be a no-go, for no apparent reason. It happens. Set up adwords with 10 adgroups, wrote copy, studied the industry, etc. Hmph.
Meanwhile – busy doing my small part helping to re-fashion the main business I’ve worked for since 2005. Web site, powerpoint, pdf’s, autoresponders, printing …
And a marble manufacturing company asked me how I might work with them. This kind of thing intrigues me. Especially since, last year, I almost ended up with an opportunity to help move millions of dollars worth of granite that’s been chopped into giant cubes and left sitting in a field for 20 years (Kingston, Ontario Canada, if you’re interested). What a “co-incidence”. Anyway this new company gets everything done overseas and shipped directly to their customers, who are bulk-buying granite countertops, tabletops and lots more stuff.
This is the kind of thing that interests me much more than finding a niche I know nothing about and then doing the ebook-hub-squidoo-affiliate-jv-facebook-youtube-salesletter-autoresponder-backend-split-test thing. How about you?
One guy’s blog I read, because it’s entertaining, keeps talking about how he’s making hubpages by the hundreds (I don’t know what they are) and the total income is only a few hundred dollars a month. All these people who think they have to do it all themselves, but they have nothing unique to offer the world, so they go out and play keyword games to the nth degree, daily. Thanks for all the useless Internet page bloat, folks.
If you’re like me and you have nothing unique to teach the world, why not work for a real company?
Or are you afraid of taking this route because you want to “own your own business”? Well, then think of it as “your own consulting business” – based on ongoing commissions instead of hourly fees. Yes, any company can screw you. And you could be hit by a Prius. You learn and keep going.
There are just as many ways for you to hurt yourself, as there are for another business to hurt you. People are banging their heads against the wall by the thousands. Jeff Paul made the sleaziest infomercial ever, about getting rich online – that’ll be good for yet another few thousand victims.
You’re either an obsessive lunatic or a failure in this game. Truth.
Meanwhile I continue my small part in revamping a huge business, while helping to build what I hope will be another, completely unrelated huge business. I am subject to the whim of the universe in this regard, just as I would be if I were denying my own personality and trying to “build my own empire” but with massively larger return on investment.
Mango and me. This'll bring my readership up!
Too busy right now to type for long, but I have to type SOMETHING or the search engines’ll never forgive me.
I just wanted to say that …
I’ve never worked with a partner in a business that could be copied in 24 hours by anybody named Howie or Joel.
I’ve never worked in an Internet business where it was even remotely feasible for me to have articles outsourced, period, never mind to non-English speaking people. Or to have any document, never mind an entire ebook, outsourced.
I’ve never worked in an Internet business where my partner was just a guy looking for something to sell. They’ve all had expertise in some area, and I helped them use the Internet to sell it.
In fact, all this “create your product and web site in 24 hours” has created a rotting logjam of crap where information is supposed to be.
And this rotting logjam of crap is all search engine optimized, making it harder for real information, and real businesses, to bubble to the surface in the search results. Thanks!
Google is left with the hair-pulling job of dealing with well over a million web pages being auto-generated garbage every day, optimized for whatever is working for search ranking.
Good old 'hammock on the beach guy', mythically running his Internet empire.
And another thing …
If somebody just handed you and 30,000 other people a list of 35 nifty new niche markets and you pick one to market to, it may be time to stop and consider things a bit more. Or you could pick one of those niches and throw your back out trying to “Write your own ebook and start selling it in just 24 hours!”. Up to you.
If you’ve been struggling online and you can look at what you’re doing and honestly admit “This is not a real business”, maybe you should ditch it and go find a REAL business to work with/for.
Small business owners who need an experienced Internet marketer
So you’re an Internet Marketer who’s tired of trying to build your own empire, tired of reading 100 emails from gurus every day and doing more studying and planning than actually doing what it takes to make money.
Then you heard about my 12 years of experience working with “real” businesses, helping them get online, making them and me a lot of money in the process.
So now you’re thinking “Great, OK, enough already, it’s a good idea, but who do I partner with? What kind of business? How do I approach them?”
Super Tip Of The Day – Some Of The Businesses That MOST Need Your Help ALREADY Have Web Sites!
See below for more on that topic.
First make sure you have the Partnership Proposal.
What sort of business do you WANT to partner with? An alternative energy company? Software company? Consultant or consulting firm?
Remember, you can’t make this work if you partner with a company with tons of competition and low profit margins. Low average sale price is a killer too.
How to get ideas of businesses to work with …
Read the rest of this entry »
First, there’s the question of finding an experienced Internet marketer. Maybe you know somebody. You still need to get them to answer the quiz below, to make sure they’re qualified.
If you don’t know somebody who could take the helm and become your business’ all-in-one Internet marketing department, I’m working on building a list of suitable people. Also, you can ask around at local computer stores. You might stumble upon a marketing prodigy by posting a flyer in a local college. Better yet, put a classified ad in the local paper. If you know of a business with a good online marketing strategy, “borrow” their talent. Shouldn’t be hard to find candidates in this economy – but QUALIFIED candidates is another story.
Here’s the quiz. You can administer it in person or print out some version of it, or whatever you need to do.
Here goes:
Our business needs an Internet marketing expert. To see if you qualify to fill that role, please answer these questions:
- how many web sites have you created?
- have you used Google Adwords?
- how many Internet marketing ebooks do you have on your computer?
- how will you market the business so that we create an email list to send messages and offers to? Which autoresponder service will you use?
- do you prefer white hat or black hat marketing?
- are you experienced in SEO, or know what to do to bring yourself up-to-date on it asap to apply it to my business?
The answers should roughly be 3+, “yes”, “lots and lots” (or they’re really not a marketing enthusiast), “we’ll direct people to an opt-in/squeeze/landing page” (that just means a page specially designed to get people to give you their name and email address so that your business can stay in touch with prospects), “aweber” or “getresponse” or some other autoresponder company – their answer should be immediate, “white hat” (if they don’t know what white hat/black hat means, or say “black hat”, don’t partner with them). As for the SEO question – observe whether they know what SEO means first, then make a judgement call based on the rest of their response. If they already have web sites with good search engine ranking, ask them to show you the proof.
That’s the basics. Don’t just hire someone to make you a web site. If that’s your entire web marketing strategy, you might as well not bother.
Finding the right business owner to work with is half the battle
(This post is addressed to marketers. Business owners can read this to see how they may or may not fit into my partnership model).
Most businesses that could profit from some online marketing, are not suitable to the GYPO model.
Take for example a hair salon. You negotiate a hefty 15% commission on all new business brought in over the Internet, and the owner tells you that they could not possibly handle
any more than an additional $10,000 worth of business every month. Therefore your maximum monthly income from the project is $1500 minus any costs and advertising.
The GOOD thing about that, is if it worked you could easily take the same site, ads etc. you’ve created them and use them for other hair salons in neighboring towns. Don’t
compete against yourself within the same geographic range as an existing client, cause that’d be slimy.
And there are a lot of businesses that could do very well with online marketing, roi-wise, and make you even less money on commission. In other words, things might work out quite well for THEM, but the potential commissions that YOU could earn would be small.
The ideal type of business you want to work for has 4 things:
- healthy profit margins (so you can more easily negotiate your 5 – 25% commission)
- ability to expand substantially – if a business can quickly ramp up to handle hundreds of thousands of dollars of new business every month, you’re possibly looking at some awesome paydays
- an honest, ambitious owner (or marketing manager) that’s easy to work with and pays on time
- a solid future
Next post: What businesses should look for in an Internet marketer.
You may be tired of discussions about goals, but take heart ...
This post is for marketers AND business owners.
You need to see this video.
What you’ll see in that video is just a hint of what’s coming. In some ways it’s the same as a lot of Amway-type videos you’ve already seen online for years. But in another way, it’s different … or at least, it has the potential to be.
They’re actually GIVING AWAY 6 pre-made (not customized for you, which would be ideal) “Mind Movies”. THE KEY IS … this will be many many times more effective for you if your Mind Movies are designed by YOU. Generic solutions won’t be widely effective, but they may have some impact on a few people.
Customized Mind Movie creation will become a big fad, quickly, then it will become big business. Scientific research will be used to figure out the best ways to do this.
You know those science fiction movies where people lay in a chair and jack in to some form of virtual reality, something better or just more interesting than their “real life”? That concept is going to become real, but you won’t need electrodes rammed into your brain, and you won’t need to go to a big silvery corporate building to do it. And it won’t be about distraction or jumping into cyberspace to solve a cybercrime – it’ll be about making real and lasting change in real life.
Everybody dreams about stuff they want, all the time.
What’s the difference between what actually happens, and what stays “just a dream”?
It’s the difference between ENTERTAINING an idea, and MAKING a decision. There’s only so many hours in the day (and years in your life), so you end up with way more dreams than decisions. Most of the time you throw a dream up into the air, one of your subconscious court jesters smacks it right back down. For some people, this makes life truly painful, but overall it lets us all function together as a society, so that everybody “stays still”, instead of running off to fulfill their true dreams. We can’t have everyone running off all at once.
How can YOU be the exception?
Here’s my belief, and you can call me crazy, you wouldn’t be the first: When you fully experience (really suspend your disbelief) a possible future reality, for a protracted period of time, with all your senses, you go BEYOND dreaming. In fact, you turn the dream into a decison.
Dreams don’t just “become reality”. They have to graduate to “clear image” (pictures, sound, emotion, etc.) first, then they have to become a DECISION. Only then can they become a reality.
You’re not allowed to skip the clear image and the decision parts.
Warning – those with a constant negative analytical internal monologue will find it difficult to benefit much from a customized Mind Movie, or anything else for that matter. I wish I knew how to help with that, but I don’t.
My expectation for truly useful Mind Movies:
- cheesy music will not be helpful; music (if any) will be chosen by the user
- simple USB biofeedback devices that plug into your computer may provide guidance as to what sounds, words and pictures should be in a Mind Movie – they will honestly measure your emotional reaction – thereby helping to create more hypnotic movies
- stock pictures and footage that many people will associate with years of failure (people laying in piles of money, etc.), will have to be replaced with … well, some other type of photos or graphics
- movies may be more effective in the “You” mode, not “I”. Eg., “You are successful”, not “I am successful”. And it’ll probably be best to have human narration, but I’m not sure if your own voice is the best solution or not – I guess that depends partly on how much can you stand your own voice.
Content added July 25 2009 …
Every blog post comes with a 100% money-back guarantee.
This post is aimed at BOTH small business owners AND Internet marketing veterans.
In a recent post I referenced Mind Movies. I have some constructive criticisms of the approach they recommend. For starters, go to google and use this as your search phrase: +affirmations +”you instead of i”
In all humility (and I’m still researching this myself, and am about to make some Mind Movies, and will keep you updated on the results), I offer some suggestions:
- use “you” instead of “I” – ie. “You are consistent” not “I am consistent”
- try to use the truth – ie. “You are often happy” not “You are always happy” … and “You are losing fat daily” not “You are 80 pounds lighter”
- if the message is going to be completely subliminal, it may be better to say “I” than “you” – assuming your subconscious mind does not resist or fight the message. If this is true, it (unfortunately) suggests you should either 1) use the “you” approach in your Mind Movies and only watch them full-on with no distraction or 2) use the “I” approach and only watch them subliminally, using the Mind Movies team’s SSA tool, or 3) make 2 versions of each of your movies.
- whether you watch the movies directly or subliminally, I assume you’ll be wide awake – research into what works best for different brain waves (theta, beta, alpha, delta, ?) complicates things greatly and I am NOT going to investigate how different states affect how you should word your commands and affirmations
Example affirmations for an Internet marketer who wants to partner with a business …
“You will find an excellent business to partner with”
“Your business partners will be friendly and honest”
“You find businesses with great growth potential and uniqueness”
Example affirmations for a small business that could expand online …
“You will find an Internet marketing expert to increase your sales”
“The Internet will account for 30% of your sales within a year”
If you’re going to be putting these into a Mind Movie, they may need to be shortened, or broken into segments, or you need to keep them on the screen longer than short phrases. But if you’re just reading them out loud to yourself or recording them onto something for you to listen to, length shouldn’t be a problem.
Good tips on affirmation writing: tarotaffirmations.com
Idea: Make Mind Movies where you and your spouse read each others affirmations out loud – use them as the audio track instead of music. Outside of Mind Movies, you could also put it on your iPod and other mp3 playlists.
Another idea: use computer-generated speech for a Mind Movie track, and see what happens.
If you believe Mind Movies can literally work magic (affect your external reality), then your affirmations might as well be accordingly specific and detailed …
- “X will pay me/you the money he owes me/you”
- “X will quit by [date] and I/you will be promoted to his position”
- “My/your next mate will be faithful, tall and happy”
- “Your favorite band’s next CD will kick ass”
- “My upcoming court case will turn out well”
But if you want to keep it down to Earth, then all of your affirmations, commands and suggestions should be believable, honorable, and easy for your brain to accept.
If it’s true that most internet marketers fail because of not taking action, then the G.Y.P.O. method (working with a “real” business) might make the most sense of any strategy you’ve ever considered.
Maybe a person doesn’t take action because there are infinite possible things to do all day, and the boss (you) is a bit of a wimp. The boss (you) is not cracking the whip, in terms of a schedule and a list of specific things that lead to income.
But wait, you say, I AM taking action. LOTS of it!
What was I just going to do?
Sure, but are you really? Every day your in-box tells you a way to improve adwords 20%, get 10% more visitors to your blog, increase landing page conversions 38%, and so on. It turns into a comical wild goose chase. Pretty hard to get focussed, when you allow yourself to change products and strategies every day!
Have you ever had a boss that let you engage in a continuous stream of so-called business
activities and studies that don’t actually pay off? Well, when YOU are your own boss, that’s what you might be doing. Maybe. Who am I to say? Just saying.
When you have a business partner, a partner running a real business in the real world, you sort of have a boss, and he has some specific products or services to sell. YOU have a very specific job, and he’s counting on you.
In other words, things get really real, really fast. And you get to use what you’ve learned about Internet marketing in a very satisfying, efficient, and likely far more profitable way. Suddenly, it’s easier to hit the delete key and throw away scribbled sticky notes with various “business ideas”, most of which would take 100 hours to test. (Hold on a second – where’s that ebook I bought about how to test any business idea in 2 hours?)
That changes the dynamic. It’s more suited to most people’s personality. Programming, work ethic, call it what you will.
So that’s my blog post for today – I HAD to post one, because all the experts told me I should be posting every day, and I’m not even close.
MORE RANDOM STUFF
Is this kind of thing still legal?
Huh?
This is the kind of noise that gets tons of eyeballs – sad.
On the other hand …
Yanik’s 34 rules for maverick business success – really good stuff.
Now go write a 500-word response to this post and have it on my desk by 5 p m.
This blog started off as an attempt to attract new business partners who would hire me to be their entire Internet marketing department, me being paid a percentage of new sales.
But successful offline businesses are not out there, in droves, using specific search phrases on google, looking for someone to expand their business online. It’s not an “open market”, I guess is one way of saying it. You’ve gotta go find those people, and convince them. Luckily, you are (I am) offering to do close to 100% of the work, and for free, no less.
So this blog turned into more of a resource to bring real-world successful businesses together with frustrated Internet marketers.
If you’re an experienced IM-er, you know all about CJ, aweber, ClickBank, minisites, and a zillion other things. No point “teaching” that stuff here. Instead, I’m trying to convince some people to try a new approach – working with existing businesses. You’ve already got all the tools.
Some teachers STILL exclusively preach the info-product marketing method, as if it were the only Internet marketing game in town. It consists of specific steps, and it’s been done and done by so many thousands of people that the Internet is now awash in ebooks (and now DVDs, webinars, MP3s and free reports) about everything. The steps are – write the product, make the web site, test conversions, establish success or dump the product and write a new one, set up affiliate program, set up back end products, repeat. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that someone’s created a 3-d interactive MindMap about how to attract hummingbirds to your garden.
I’m sure some of you feel like you’d rather stick a fork in your eye than entertain the idea of creating your first or twentieth info-product. Download the pdf “Partnering With Businesses” I put up a few days ago, and shine some new light on your REAL options for success.
Read Jonathan Leger’s article about reselling physical products for local companies who have a crappy or nonexistent Internet process. NOT the same process I’m teaching at this web site, but in the same neighborhood.
Read Terry Dean’s article “Why Some Succeed Where Others Fail”.
Read Allan Gardyne’s June 23 article at AssociatePrograms.com – “The Twitter Trap”. I’ve known him for over a decade, and he’s gone through health problems I believe were related to online marketing stress. He’s so down to earth it’s pretty impressive, for his type of business.
I’m going to do another post, soon, about how things are changing in guruville.
A lot of the “gurus” are now admitting that in the past, when they said “do this, try that, implement software package X”, what they REALLY were doing was handing these tasks off to one of their 20 employees or nickel-an-hour overseas contractors.
At least they’re now ADMITTING that the stuff they’ve been telling you to do, amounts to a zillion tasks that you can never pull off by yourself.
The lesson – keep it very small and focussed and prepare to invest a lot of time – OR – learn how to hire and manage people. There is no third choice.
But remember, the more things change in guruville, the more they stay the same. The market has FORCED them to change tactics somewhat.
They are doing what works, and what works right now is to totally bombard your email, every day, with the stuff you’re all familiar with. There’s no Earthly reason they’ll stop doing that as long as it works.
But where does that leave YOU? If you need something new EVERY DAY to be able to succeed – then how will you succeed? They’ve spent 10 years teaching you the basics, now they’re teaching more psychological and process-oriented stuff.
This is like the old question of whether pharmaceutical companies want people to become healthier – if they did, their very business model would bring about their own doom.
Even keeping up with all the (sometimes fantastic) free content created for product launches, can be EXHAUSTING – not to mention distracting to the real work that you should be doing. I fall prey to this DAILY.
OK, enough rambling. I think you know what I’m saying. If they keep telling you you’re not ready to graduate, then you’ll keep paying tuition – instead of going out into the working world.
Coming soon – more about feedback loops, IM gurus, the fast food industry, Krishnamurti, Jed McKenna, and the power of your unconscious competence. I’ll tie it all together, just wait and see.
Marketers - Use this letter to partner with small businesses
and would like someone to step in and create an entire Internet
marketing system for you, click the “PARTNER WITH US” tab above.
Otherwise, if you are an experienced marketer but not making (enough) money, here is a “partnering with small business” tool you might like …
Use this free 2-page acrobat file to become the all-in-one Internet marketing department for just about any business or professional practice.
If you’ve located a business you really want to work with, but you have to approach them cold, this is a good introductory tool to use in convincing them. It solves their problem (no Internet sales) – and doesn’t give them any added expense (beyond adwords testing) or problems.
And they’ll never know it only took you 20 minutes to create the whole thing.
Just copy the text into Word or whatever you’re using, and modify it for your situation.
Then print out some basic Google keyword research, a page of Google search results, and a couple of competing home pages (along with some notes about why you think there is a big opportunity – and why you think you can do as good as or better than the competition). Staple it all together and approach them with it, or cram it all into a single pdf and send it to the business you would like to partner with. Or fax it to them.
