Monday Mar 26th, 2007: Issue #785
I’m not much of a reader of newsletters.
Over the years I’ve subscribed to hundreds of them - from all the big-name people and many of those nobody has ever heard of. Slowly it dawned on me that most people who write so-called newsletters (ezines) have little or no regard for their readers. Extracting the maximum amount of money from their lists is all that matters to most of these writers.
I don’t like, or want, to be fed a constant stream of undiluted pitches, and I’m sure you don’t either.
So it is that most of the newsletters I receive either get unsubscribed fairly quickly, or are filtered into a catch-all folder I’ve made called ‘guru crap’.
But there are a handful of newsletters that are different.
They are written by people who clearly love to communicate, who take the time to bother to write interesting and useful content and who connect with me, the reader.
I’ve found maybe six like that in all my years online.
Of course they still try to sell me stuff, but I’m happy that they do - because I know that the recommendations will be good and genuine.
One of my favorites, which comes out every Sunday, is a great example. When Dr Andy Williams sends out his ExSEO Newsletter - http://www.ezseonews.com/ - I make sure to read it.
When I opened this week’s edition I was in for a big surprise!
Dr Andy was recommending my new special report - ‘You CAN Write Articles’ - http://www.kickstartdaily.com/writearticles - to his readers and they were buying it in their droves.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I got quite a thrill out of that!
And if you are one of those people who bought my report over the weekend on Andy’s recommendation, and are receiving your first edition of Kickstart today, then you will know exactly what I mean.
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Delia and I have discovered Yo-Sushi. What a brilliant idea! I just love the concept - and the food.
In fact, we might just pop over to see what’s floating around the conveyor belt at lunchtime today.
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Our garden (backyard to my American friends) is boring. It’s basically a large, flat rectangle with grass in the middle and some trees round the edge. There are one or two nice shrubs but they don’t really add to the overall ambience.
Delia and I have neither the inclination or talent to design a beautiful garden, and so after four years little more than basic maintenance work has been done.
But that’s all about a change. Later this week our garden designer is due to report back to us with his blueprints for what we hope will be a transformation. We told him what we want and his job is to provide a plan that will see us achieve our goal.
As we plan to do the work ourselves (we might not be inspired horticulturists, but we do enjoy pottering in the garden) we fully accept, and expect that the work will take years. But, with a plan to work to, we now know that so long as we follow the blueprint, all the little steps we take, all the little jobs we do, will eventually come together and give us a unified result.
Does this sound familiar? It should. It’s the way that anything gets done. You start with a dream, develop a dream into a goal, break the goal down into individual steps that are manageable to you, and then start working through them. It’s the same way a novel gets written. It’s no different to how our website is built. It’s identical to the way a business grows and thrives.
Everything that is worth achieving starts with the dream, develops into a goal and is broken down into steps that you can do. And if it means asking someone else (or if necessary paying them) to help you get one of those stages right, then don’t hesitate.
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Every once in a while someone comes up with something that is just so … what’s the word … necessary … that you wonder why it hasn’t been done before.
My good friend, William Charlwood, has just launched a book that is so in tune with what is needed by thousands of people, right now, that it is just bound to be a huge seller.
William’s writing style is easy to read. He has that rare ability to make the complex easy to understand. But then, what else would you expect from a best-selling Internet author!
You can’t have missed the fact that $7 ebooks and reports are selling like wildfire all over the Internet. Thousands of people bought the original $7 scripts and are now producing reports of their own. And the beauty of the $7 method is that every purchaser of a $7 book or report automatically becomes an affiliate who earns 100% commission for every sale - and can easily make a tidy sum in promoting it for themselves.
But the big problem is that most people have no idea HOW to go about promoting the books they own. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a list of readers to recommend things to!
And that is where Williams excellent book comes in. It is called ‘$7 Dollar Selling’ and it explains in great detail how you can make money from selling $7 reports - either ones you’ve written, or that you have bought and are re-selling.
‘$7 Dollar Selling’ details 23 different ways that you can sell these books and reports - some of them even I hadn’t thought of! If you don’t have a list, or even a website, you’ll find ways that you can still sell $7 reports and rake in the profits.
If you have ever bought a $7 report, or plan to write one of your own, you absolutely need to read William’s book. Without it, you will leave money on the table - and that would be such a waste!
And guess what? It is only $7 - so grabbing your copy should a no-brainer!
http://www.urlnex.us/7dollarselling/
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My pleas for you to visit and post at the fledgling Kickstart forum were heeded. There have been lots of new signups and some really interesting posts.
Later this week I will choose a few people to receive free advertising on the forum - so if you’d like to be considered, all you have to do is make a post that I think is really interesting. Easy!
http://kickstarttodayforum.com/
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An Inspirational Thought
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It always seems to me that there are far more potentially successful people in the world than actually successful ones.
It’s very sad that millions of people go through their lives refusing to take the simple steps - another way of saying actions - that would transform their lives because something inside of them keeps saying that they’re not worthy, not good enough, and somehow, not destined for success.
What we do with our lives is very largely affected by what we expect to do with them. Change your expectations and your outcomes very often follow suit. Charles Baldwin put it very well:
“To be ambitious for wealth, and yet always expecting to be poor; to be always doubting your ability to get what you long for, is like trying to reach east by traveling west. There is no philosophy which will help a man to succeed when he is always doubting his ability to do so, and thus attracting failure. No matter how hard you work for success, if your thought is saturated with the fear of failure, it will kill your efforts, neutralize your endeavors and make success impossible.”
Now let’s get sensible here. Nobody is saying that if you firmly and categorically believe that you’ll be a billionaire by Christmas it’s bound to come true! Reality doesn’t work that way. But, let’s say that your personal self-belief meter is currently pointing at number three then it’s likely that only 30% of the things that you try to do will have a positive outcome. Over time, the 70% failure rate that this implies will grind you down and make you fearful of taking the risk.
The answer is to believe that you can turn up that meter. At first, moving the pointer from three to 5 - so that your mind will come to expect half of your efforts to be successful - will do wonders for your sense of anticipation. Then of course it isn’t too hard to expect even better from yourself.
My own personal expectation meter is probably set at around eight or nine, and I’m working to get to 10.
There’s no magic involved, and you don’t have to learn any deep psychological tricks. Affirmations are unnecessary. All that is needed is a willingness on your part to put aside that little voice in your head that tells you you can’t do something and, one day at a time, to replace it with the voice of an eager, excited child who just knows that you can.
Make a start today on turning up the dial on your personal self-belief meter and while I won’t promise you $1 billion by Christmas, I will promise you a much more fulfilled and successful life.
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Who do you know who would love Kickstart Today?
Don’t keep it to yourself - send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
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The Quote of the Day
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Harold B. Walker said,
“When you worry, you go over the same ground endlessly and come out the same place you started. Thinking, on the other hand, makes progress from one place to another… the problem of life is to change worry into thinking, and anxiety into creative action.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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There is a major misconception that blights Internet marketing. It is that with just a computer and a modem anyone can succeed.
And by success, we are seduced into thinking that the only measure is the almost instant generation of bucket loads of money.
One part of the myth is true: anyone can start up online for a very small outlay. But (and I’m sorry if this bursts your bubble) that’s the extent of it.
Starting up is the really easy part. Making it work … now that’s where 99% of people fall down.
I’ve been at both ends of the spectrum so am well qualified to talk about this. There were times when the only activity that my bank account saw as a result of my ‘Internet marketing’ was the regular payments to my hosting company. Business shouldn’t be about negative cash flow, should it?
Then things began to happen. An odd ten dollars here or there would come my way. My income slowly began to outgrow my outgoings. The first time I realized that had happened I felt as if a huge lid had been lifted off my mind. Nothing would stop me now!
There is nothing special about me. I’m not one of those brightly shining stars who go from zero to millionaire in a couple of weeks (yes, they do exist, but frankly they are the sort of people who would make it big whatever they went into … and visible as they are, they are RARE!). I really struggle to understand the latest ideas and strategies.
But that struggle pays off.
You see, Internet marketing is in many ways just like a real-life business. Apart from the cost of entry, you have to have the self-same personal attributes to make your business work:
* Persistence. Your overnight success might happen in a few months. But be prepared for it to take a lot longer. I know people who have taken years to become overnight successes. You must be prepared to hang in there for the long term.
* Continuous Education. The Internet is built on shifting sands. What works today might not work tomorrow. New ideas are being tried out all the time and some of them will make a vast difference to your business. But unless you are at least trying to keep up with the latest strategies, you will surely fall by the wayside.
* Investment. It doesn’t cost much to buy a domain name and hosting, but that is just the start. If you really are treating your online activities as a real business, you will gladly invest in yourself. Not everything you buy will suit your ’style’ and not everything will give you new knowledge that you earn from right away. But if a new ebook gives you one new strategy, or even sends your mind down a road that it hadn’t thought of before, your business will almost certainly benefit.
* Patience. Are you the kind of person who can work full out on a business for six months without let-up before seeing a single penny in return? You may not have to, but many a potential success story has given up before his business has had a chance to take off. If you don’t go in the front door prepared to give it a long-term shot, you might as well stay outside. It will be less stressful for you.
* Curiosity. The one over-riding attribute that Internet marketers have is curiosity. We all want to know what will happen if we do this, and how our sales will be affected if we do that. It is called testing, and it is something that successful online people do as naturally as breathing. Curiosity drives us to ask questions. Only by continually asking questions can we find the right answers for ourselves.
* Sheer hard work. Don’t be fooled by the ads. Sure it is ‘possible’ to sit on a beach somewhere and tap away on your laptop, but whether you are on a beach or in Starbucks, or in your back bedroom or home office, you still need to put in the hours. Most Internet folks that I know spend far longer working on their online businesses than they’d ever be prepared to put in in a real world business. There are a lot of aspects that can be automated, but all that automation does is free your time up to devote to the parts that can’t be automated. For most of us, putting in 14 hours a day in front of our computers is fun. It is more like a hobby that a business and so we put in the hours willingly (and would do so even if it wasn’t making us money).
If you want to be the next online success, you will need all of those character traits and more.
Is it easy? Not really.
Is it hard? Sometimes it is like hitting your head against the wall, but hard? No. You don’t hear about too many industrial accidents building a website!
Is it worthwhile? You bet. Even when you have it all working down pat, you might still get the odd day when no money comes your way, but you will also see occasional days or weeks when thousands of dollars flood into your hands. And believe me, when you stroll into your bank with a couple of thousand dollars in checks for a week’s work, you soon figure that all the hard work is well worth the effort.
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Fascinating Facts
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It’s easy to see how Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of President Abraham Lincoln, could have developed something of a complex.
He was present at the assassinations of three presidents — his own father’s, President Garfield’s and President McKinley’s. So certain was he that he was a jinx, that he refused to attend any state occasion ever again.
A few weeks before his father’s death, Robert Lincoln had been traveling home from Harvard University where he was studying to visit his parents at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. At Jersey City Station he slipped and fell between two railroad cars. An actor, who was en route to visit his sister in Philadelphia, rescued a young Lincoln.
The actor’s name was Edwin Booth, and by massive coincidence he was the brother of the man who would very soon murder the President.