Wednesday May 30th, 2007: Issue #806
How was your weekend? Whether you were busy or relaxed, I hope that you had a fulfilling one. It is always great to have an extra day to recharge the batteries.
Although the weather was filthy here, we had a splendid weekend. My Rotary Club hosted an exchange visit from our link club in Delft, in The Netherlands. We started out with a formal dinner for 128 people in a 1000 year-old castle on Friday evening, followed by a day of sightseeing on Saturday.
Saturday evening saw Delia and I hosting a dinner party for nine, including four of our Dutch visitors. Then on Sunday, over 90 people squeezed into our club President’s house for a lunchtime buffet before our visitors - who were, by now, our good friends - had to get a coach back to the airport.
Altogether a tiring, but very fulfilling weekend and Delia and I are delighted to have made new friends who we really hope to keep in contact with.
Isn’t International accord a wonderful thing!
Of course, it is also rather humbling because every single one of our Dutch visitors spoke English, whereas we all had difficulties even pronouncing their names!
Delia worked very hard and produced a magnificent meal that was as ‘English’ as possible, but sadly it was overshadowed by my Summer Pudding - a traditional English dessert that went down a treat! (I’m joking about overshadowing Delia. Her cooking is always superb.)
I’ve put my Summer Pudding recipe online at http://www.kickstartdaily.com/summerpuddingrecipe/ if you want to treat your tastebuds to the flavors of summer.
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I’m trying to change cellphone providers. Currently I’m with Orange, but have recently signed up with Virgin Mobile.
Virgin have sent me a new sim card with instructions to call my current provider (Orange) for a code number to unlock my handset to allow it work with other network’s sim cards.
The process sounded so easy. Just call up Orange, get the code, type it in and the job’s done.
Except that Orange don’t answer their phone.
Either the number you have to call rings and rings for eternity, or you get through to a recorded message that irritatingly keeps on repeating that ‘your call is valuable to us…please hold’. After 45 minutes of that I realized that my call had no value to them whatsoever.
At this stage, they don’t know I’m trying to change network. For all they know I could be new customer who needs help.
What a shambles!
Now I’m paying for two cell phone services but can only use one of them!
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Many times in the past I’ve written about how vital it is to learn the art and craft of copywriting.
Understanding how to put words together is probably the single skill that set me free. You see, before I became active online, while I was still employed in a job I didn’t much like, I started an aromatherapy oil business and was lucky enough to have a contact who offered me a small ad in a national Sunday newspaper’s magazine.
I’ve always been interested in copywriting and have studied many books on the subject, but had never before written a real live sales message.
Looking back I could have written a far better ad, but what I came up with was as good as I could make it then. Within three days of that ad appearing I had checks totalling over £16,000 ($32,000 at today’s exchange rate) land on my doorstep. But more importantly that the money, I had a the foundation of a business that served us well for five years.
Eventually Delia and I got sick of the smell of aromatherapy oils, and government legislation threatened to make life difficult for us, so we closed it down. But without my fledgling skills as a copywriter we would have missed out on some great vacations!
Then I came online and found that almost everything I did relied on my having the ability to write words that people would read and respond to.
In other words, copywriting.
Copywriting isn’t just about sales letters - although that is most people’s first thought. It is really about communication - empathizing with your reader and telling a story that they want to read. And the good news is that anyone can learn to do it.
That is, anyone can learn to write great copy IF they have the right teacher to guide them. There are a lot of great copywriters around, but there are only a few great teachers.
In a few weeks time there is an incredible opportunity to learn how to write brilliant copy with not one, but two of the world’s top masters.
Over the course of three-and-a-half days of intense training, you will be taught the skills that these two men have used to create billions of dollars of sales.
And at a price that is so low I’m sure there must be a mistake. One of these guys normally charges twice as much for a single day!
The two copywriting geniuses are the legendary Ted Nicholas and Trevor Crook, who, along with Peter Woodhead are putting on a one-off three-and-a-half day workshop for just 27 people at the end of June.
This will not be a seminar where someone stands up for an hour and then tries to sell you things you don’t want. This will be a personal, hands-on workshop where you will get individual coaching from Ted and Trevor that WILL result in you having a world-class sales latter of your own - and the skills to create them for yourself whenever you need to.
Ted, Trevor and Peter have already told their lists about this and have now allowed a few trusted friends to mention the workshop. But you can imagine, with strictly 27 places in total, this is an opportunity that won’t be around for long.
And I very much doubt it will ever be repeated. Certainly not at this price!
Wherever in the world you are, this is one workshop that it will be worth booking a flight for.
The ability to write copy is so important that I can’t emphasize it enough. The opportunity to learn to write copy under the direct tutelage of Ted Nicholas and Trevor Crook is, quite simply, unique.
http://www.urlnex.us/CopywritingWorkshop/
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I paid a check into my bank yesterday. It took my over 15 minutes to do so.
It wasn’t THAT big - a few thousand pounds - but it seemed to trigger some kind of security process. First the clerk had to go off and photocopy the check and my paying in book. Then she had to ask me security questions to prove who I was. And finally, she had to go off to get the manager’s authorization to accept the deposit!
What the …! I was paying money IN! It was a Sterling check and it wasn’t, in my view, particularly large!
And all that time I was left standing at the counter like a lemon, with everyone in line wondering what on Earth I had done to set off such a complicated security process.
I felt as if I’d done something wrong. Surely making your customers feel like that isn’t a good way to do business.
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We had a family cinema visit last night to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
It was a lot of fun (although not as funny as the earlier films) and the divine Kiera Knightly was as gorgeous as ever.
The only negative that we all agreed on was that it seemed to be about half an hour too long.
But an extra half an hour of fun in the company of Captain Jack Sparrow and his chums was a small price to pay.
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Many thanks to all the people who have sent me emails (some very long) detailing the things that either confuse them about Internet marketing or have done in the past.
It has all given me a great deal of food for thought.
If you have any ideas to add, I’d love to hear from you!
Ultimately I hope to turn it all into a multimedia CD product called something like ‘Internet Marketing: the basics demystified’. I’m still pondering the title!
And in case you’re wondering, yes this does have something to do with my forthcoming mentoring membership site.
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An Inspirational Thought
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A few years before his death in 1992, the composer John Cage was interviewed about his attitudes to life, his career and success.
In that interview he said something that we should all take heed of, especially as we enter the 21st Century which if nothing else appears to be an era of fast and accelerating change.
He said, “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”
John Cage was 76 when he said that - an age when people are ’supposed’ to hold on to the past and fear the future.
Look around you. The people who are forging forward in this life are the ones who don’t fear change - they embrace it.
Nowhere is this more obvious than online. If you think that changes happen fast in your industry, try working in the online world for a few weeks! Here, ‘old and worn out’ was ‘the latest and greatest’ just a day or two ago!
Whatever you do in life, learning to embrace and welcome change is just about the most useful skill you can learn in this day and age. But don’t be seduced into thinking that just because there are always new things to test and learn about that it means that the old ideas were based on faulty thinking.
The foundations don’t change, just the walls that are built upon them.
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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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Maya Angelou said:
“The most called-on prerequisite of a friend is an accessible ear.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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I’m as guilty of procrastination as anyone else. Maybe more so. There is always something ‘else’ that seems to be more interesting or exciting.
The question ‘How do you beat procrastination?’ popped into my mind, quickly followed by the question ‘How can you beat it if you don’t actually know what causes it?’
I’m no great deep thinker and the planet-sized brains of philosophers leave me feeling dizzy, so I have to see things simplistically. I boiled the question down to two choices: is procrastination something that is imposed on us from outside - in other words, is the world created in such a way that every new thing is by its nature more interesting than every old thing, or, is it an internal process?
It is important to make the distinction because one we can influence and the other we generally cannot. If procrastination is simply the way of the world, then there is no hope for us and we will be fighting against it forever.
However, if it just comes down to a choice that we make in our own minds, then there has to be a solution because our own personal freedom of choice guarantees that we can train our minds to do anything that we want badly enough.
So the more I thought about it the more I had to accept that I procrastinate because that little voice in my mind tells me to. Most of the time I tune its nagging out and simply do as it tells me. After all, when that voice tells you to do something, you FEEL bad if you don’t do it!
Don’t freak out on me here - I’m not schizophrenic. The ‘voice’ I’m referring to is in all of us! It is just our subconscious mind trying to protect us. But unfortunately, at some point in our human evolution, a few wires have ended up crossed and some of the things that our clever inner minds try to protect us from are no longer appropriate.
Having decided that procrastination is an internal issue caused by faulty wiring, it becomes easier to understand that we really can’t put the blame on other people and other things. And having accepted THAT we can begin to re-train our subconscious into more useful habits and behavior patterns.
To begin with, you can do what I have started to do - listen to yourself. Instead of letting the inner voice drone on and blindly follow its every nagging suggestion without really thinking, start to question it. When it ’suggests’ that some other activity will be more fun, more interesting and more exciting than the thing that you KNOW you should be doing, firmly tell yourself ‘no’.
You may have to ignore the feeling of petulant disappointment that the infantile voice will inevitably throw at you, but just like a child, it has to learn who is in charge.
Isn’t it about time that was you?
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Fascinating Facts
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There are believed to be 1000 times more living things in the sea than on land and …
… scientists estimate that there may be as many as 10 million species in the sea that we have not yet discovered.
It’s a fishy business alright!