New Wednesday Webinar Training Series

July 18th, 2010

Hello everyone! I’m excited to announce a new Webinar Series that I’m going to have each week on Wednesday at 8:00 CDT.

I know that there seems to be so many Webinars offered with what seems to be every night so this one will be a little bit different.

This is how.

1. This will be fast paced and will be limited to only 1 hour.
2. Each week will feature a colleague that I’ve met over the last 2 years who I consider to have some rock solid value to contribute to everyone on various topics for 1/2 hour and then myself for a 1/2 hour.
3. There will be a PDF link that will contain any of the links or resources mentioned in the Webinar.
4. An email address will be provided to ask questions. This will allow more content to be provided as well as allowing me and my guests to explain things in much more detail.

So this first inaugural week we are going to have:

Danielle Zach who is going to have a presentation about Business Mindset for Success.

You can register by clicking the link:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/984131465
or click the image below.

CLICK IMAGE BELOW to REGISTER

Come prepared to learn about Mindset and some Google secrets that will help you grow your business.

Life’s Passions and Monkey Business

May 6th, 2010

Intro
I’d like to tell a story that I think I first read in one of John C. Maxwell leadership books. It’s about 5 different monkeys, their names have been changed to protect the innocent. You will know who you are after your done reading this post.

Story
There was a large cage that had five monkeys in it. Well you know how much monkeys like bananas right? Someone tied a banana onto a piece of twine and hung it high in the center of the ceiling. It was hung so high that none of the monkeys could jump up and get it. The monkeys stood staring up at the bananas. The door to the cage was opened and a set of stairs were placed underneath the bananas so that it would allow a monkey to walk up and jump and get a banana.

After a while a monkey goes and starts climbing the stairs. When he reaches the second stair, all of the monkeys are sprayed with cold water. The monkeys retreat and stare once again. Another monkey decides he will try which resulted in all the monkeys getting sprayed. A strange thing occurs. When the next monkey tries to get a banana, the other four monkeys prevent him from trying by attacking him.

Multi-Purpose Your Content

May 1st, 2010

Content Strategies
Here’s really a great way to stretch and use your content by using multiple media formats. Think of it this way. After you’ve just got done writing a post for your Blog, while everything still is in your thoughts, click on your flip video camera and click the record button. Now I’m not saying to read it verbatim, but basically paraphrase what you just wrote. It only needs to be 3-4 minutes. This will allow you to emphasize and elaborate on some things contained in the written version. It will give the exact same content some life.

Discover How To Create Irresistible and Tempting Titles

September 25th, 2009

I had a few questions about titles this weekend. I’ll bring this old post out front and center once again in case you missed it.

What’s in a title?
How you title things make a tremendous impact on whether people will read or consider reading content. In this context, content is in the form of emails, blog posts, tweets, Ezine articles, and other forms of communication that you want others to read. In all cases the main goal is to get people to open, click, or otherwise save or bookmark for reading later. Let’s examine some of the forms of communication.

Email Subjects
The title is contained as what in email parlance as the subject. Subjects are treated a little bit differently based on who the email is coming from. The difference is based on one thing. That is trust. If the email is coming from someone they trust, friends and family for sure, they will open. But there is also information that was requested and comes in the form of newsletters, RSS feeds, and other aggregations of information. If someone doesn’t recognize the senders name they are typically going to look at the subject and make a determination as to what they are going to do. What the subject contains will determine the reader’s next actions. If it’s from you, you want to have as an inviting subject as possible.

Blog Post Titles
A blog post title works in the same way as a subject line in an email. Your objective is to get people to read your post. Hopefully, when your blog post is syndicated throughout the Internet via Twitter tweets, Facebook notes, blog backlinks, email bodies, and other forms of electronic communication it will compel people to open and read it. Another factor that has to be considered in blog post titles is the SEO factor. Your title should both contain a keyword or two and also be relevant to the content that is contained in it. If you have a title about cars, your content better not be about plants. I’ll talk about some of the psychological factors below.

Ezine Articles
Titles should work the same way as blog post titles but should probably have more of an emphasis on keywords than actions or questions contained in the title. Most people simply do not search Ezines. They use Google and Google recommends the Ezine articles to them. The more SEO friendly the title, the better the ranking and higher it’s possibility to be towards the top of the search. I also recommend your resource box contain a link to your blog.

Twitter Tweets
Now tweets per se don’t have the concept of a title but it should be contained some where in the 140 characters. Having important attention grabbing phrases that are contained in the actual article with the title in your tweets will help people feel compelled to click them and follow the link over to the source. Using certain psychological keywords will raise the probability of the tweet being opened. They will grab the attention of the readers.

In all these examples, if you understand underlying psychological impulses and urges you can use them to your advantage. So if we ask the question, what do people want?, what do people respond to?, what do people have an interest in?, and are people interested in?, this should provide us with some clues to help formulate a title. Here are some different types of titles that you should strive for?

Types of Titles

Tell them something true about them and then tell them to take action.
Create compelling curiosity.
Make claims that are almost unbelievable. (Be able to back them up)
Create something of high interest to target direct interests.
Use humor. If you can make them laugh they will click.
Inspire and motivate them. If they feel good about themselves and they will act.
Make them mysterious. People like mysteries.
Appeal to their logic. Restate something they believe strongly.

So these are the categories or types of possible titles or subjects that can be used. Now that we know what it is we need to formulate what words can we use that will compel people to act. We need to use words that influence, persuade, and motivate people to act, (click, read, signup, etc…). This can be accomplished by using words that can help people image something. They are words that describe things in ways that make them bigger than life. They are words that evoke emotion. Here are some words that will practically compel people to their natural predispositions to investigate things that are curious, humorous, mysterious, logical, interesting, and bold. This of course is not an exhaustible list. They contain:

Words to Use

irresistible	untold	boggle	double
triple	quadruple	unstoppable	potent
banned	phenomenal	willing	calculated
psychological	seduce	spell binding	unable
magnet	effortless	insatiable	secret
record-breaking	amazing	cutting edge	incalculable
absolute	thrilled	legendary	boost
enhance	improve	benefits	enjoy
reduce	release	loosen	combat
discover	achieve	counter	increase
how-to	discover	master	create
generate	optimize	enliven	improve
advanced	cultivate	progress	revamp
refine	upgrade	align	balance
cheerful	enthusiastic	inclined	zealous
attract	allure	induce	invite
tempting	follow	substitute	uncomplicated
simple	agile	knowing	powerful
able	clever	straightforward	intricate

Conclusion

The list could go on and on. Using these words in your titles and subjects along with a keyword will work wonders for your traffic. Take the time to craft titles that will draw people into your world, get them to click it, and then read it. Spend more time on this aspect of your writing and you will be guaranteed to see results.

What other words do you like to use?
What are some titles that you’ve used that have worked for you?

If you enjoyed this article I would appreciate if you click the link below to tweet this post. I’ll use these concepts as examples to craft the tweets for this post.

CLICK HERE PLEASE TO TWEET WITH A CUSTOM MESSAGE

Thank you.

Vilfredo Pareto

June 29th, 2009

When starting an internet business one of the things that I think we all struggled with to some extent, is where to spend the majority of our time. There were so many things that we had to figure out. We had products or opportunities, market demographics, determining niches, marketing strategies, auto-responders, capture pages, sales pages, web sites, blogs, social media, fulfillment, phones, fax, etc… to worry about. Then to make things worse, while doing research to find information and recommendations on all of those things, we ended up finding that there are a thousand other choices we had to make. We started wondering if it is all worth it and saw other opportunities that somehow seemed a little bit easier than what our original choice had been. Bottom line, it’s was and still is easy to get distracted.

Another factor that we end up with is having to deal with the 80-20 rule otherwise known as the Pareto Principal. Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist who observed that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the population. This later was expanded and is true for many things. A popular business axiom is that 80% of our sales come from 20% of the business. The one we (especially new entrepreneurs) have to worry about is that we ended up spending 80% of our time on things that don’t contribute to the bottom line. We need to concentrate on the 20% and refine it as much as possible. So how do we go about that?

The first things that that we need to do is prioritize our tasks and spend 80% of our time on the top 20% of that pile. I literally used to have a boss who taught me to take my “in basket”, back when email wasn’t as prevalent, sort it by importance with the most important on top and work from the top. There were items that never got attended to. The people requesting things figured out where to get their answers from someone else or they did their own research. The long term consequences were that people started relying on me for important items because I gave them the attention they needed and the minutia of the daily grind went somewhere else. I ended up getting higher visibility in management’s eyes, got noticed and was handsomely rewarded come review time.

You can do the same thing managing your own business. You may not have the luxury of ridding yourself of the daily minutia, but you can automate it, pay someone to automate it, pay someone to deal with it, or even, getting rid of it altogether. You need to be spending as much time as possible on those actions that give you 80% of your income. You need to outsource or automate as many routine or mundane tasks that you have to perform. By practicing these principals and understanding Pareto’s Law, the bottom line on your balance sheet at the end of the year will reward you.