Wednesday October 3rd, 2007: Issue #846
After last weekend’s seminar I have really hit the ground running this week. I’ve been fired up with a ton of new ideas to start building on, and, more importantly, a real urge to get cracking with them. Yesterday turned out to be a very productive day and I fully plan to make today as action-oriented.
Somehow things are appearing in a different focus for me and I must say I like it!
Of course, with another high quality seminar coming up this weekend (Robert Puddy’s BritPack Live Event) that I’m attending, who knows how buzzed I’m going to be next week!
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Yesterday evening I spent several hours booking flights and hotels for my upcoming business trip to Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. If you are from either of those great cities and fancy meeting up for a chat, I’ll be there the last week of this month.
I’m hoping Halloween in Las Vegas will be fun. Perhaps I should go and see the Penn and Teller show that night!
Drop me an email and let’s see if we can get something together.
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Thanks to everyone who has emailed me expressing concern and well wishes about my youngest daughter’s 6-week headache. The tests and brain scans she’s had have all come back negative, which is a good thing, but we still don’t have any conclusive diagnosis.
The wonderful and encouraging news today is that she woke up and declared that she is feeling a bit better. She says that the headache is a lot less severe this morning and she is feeling much better in herself. In fact, a hint of her bubbly personality, which understandably has been absent for 6 weeks, returned.
I keep telling her to repeat to herself, “Every day in every way I feel better and better.”. Let’s hope it comes true.
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Today’s power thought section is taken up by a special article that I’ve written about communicating with your subscriber list. The title is ‘The One Word You Must Know that Puts The Money in Your List’.
It is the first in a short series of themed articles and sets out my philosophy about writing to a subscriber list - that means you!
It is an article that I plan to promote around the Internet, but I wanted you to get the chance to read it here first.
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As the hotel that this coming weekend’s seminar is in is fully booked, I’m staying in its sister hotel a few miles away - the Windmill Village (Telephone 02476 404040).
If you are staying there too, please let me know and maybe we can chat over breakfast. I can even offer a few people a lift between hotels.
I know it is short notice now, but there are still a few places left if you’d like to attend. All the details are at http://www.urlnex.us/BritPackSeminar/
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I’ve just been watching the video of Mike Filsaime’s presentation from Sunday night. My sciatica got very painful and I had to leave before his talk, but I was really sorry to have missed it because I know he is always an excellent speaker.
It turns out I missed a really valuable presentation that was packed with usable facts and strategies that anyone can use.
I also missed Mike Filsaime mentioning me on stage!
How cool is that?
Next time I’m up on stage giving a talk, I’ll be sure to return the compliment! 
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Do you have a business that has a customer or client list of email addresses that you never send anything out to?
Have you collected names and email addresses but have no idea how or what to send to them?
There are a lot of businesses who don’t make use of their lists - even sending out a twice-monthly email to say hi and give them some valuable information can keep your company top of mind. But writing all that content every couple of weeks is hard work - and you have better ways to spend your business time.
Well think about this for an idea…
I can provide for you a set of 26 pre-written ezines in a similar format to Kickstart. They will be on general business and personal development themes, so will fit right in with just about any business. They will be formatted ready for you to send right out after adding a short personal introduction of your own.
You can send them once a week for 6 months, or every two weeks for a year.
You and your business will get all the benefits of maintaining great contact with your customers and clients with an absolute minimum of work.
This is neither the time or the place for a hard sell, and I wouldn’t do that to you anyway. If you are interested in talking about this idea further, drop me an email and we’ll see if it can work for you.
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An Inspirational Thought
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‘The most important moment in your life is this one - right now. Truly it’s the only moment that you have. All other moments are either over and are now just a memory or they are yet to be - a mere speculative thought about some future moment.’
From ‘Slowing Down To The Speed Of Life’ by Richard Carlson & Joseph Bailey
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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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William Bennett said,
“There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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The One Word You Must Know that Puts The Money in Your List.
There are a lot of books, reports, websites and courses devoted to teaching how to build a list. Quite right too - list building is one of the most important skills an Internet marketer can learn. But here’s the thing…barely one in a hundred people who bother to collect more than two emails together in an autoresponder have the first idea of what to do with them.
List building is only the beginning of a process that can bring you in a fortune, or can leave you frustrated and convinced that all Internet marketing is a waste of time.
This article is the first in a short series that gives my take on how to make sure the old saying ‘the money is in the list’ applies to you and your list.
What makes me so qualified to tell you my ideas?
I’ve been publishing my ezine, Kickstart - www.kickstartdaily.com - for over 845 issues at the time of writing, and it is AMAzingly responsive. Indeed, I make a good full-time living by writing to my little list of 5000 or so keen readers.
The secret to having a responsive, profitable list can be summed up in one word: PROSE.
Wikipedia defines prose like this: “Prose is writing distinguished from poetry by its greater variety of rhythm and its closer resemblance to the patterns of everyday speech. The word prose comes from the Latin prosa, meaning straightforward.”
It is a good definition, but writing an ezine or newsletter is concerned, it isn’t quite specific enough. I prefer to consider PROSE as a acronym:
P stands for personal. People like to read about people, so tell stories, engage with your readers by sharing details about your life. Of course your newsletter will, and should, have an underlying theme about whatever your specific niche subject is, but being too focused on topic can get dry and dull very fast.
R is for real. Way too many writers, especially those who are just starting out, write like English grammar teachers. They sound like textbooks, or worse, robots. School, and later business, teaches people to write in a strange formal, stilted form of language that’s quite hard to read and completely out of place when writing an ezine or newsletter.
Keep your words simple, your sentences short and your grammar loose. Just like real people talk.
O means often. New writers of newsletters and ezines fear they will overload their readers and so start out publishing once a month or less. That’s a big mistake. On the Internet a month might as well be forever. In a month your readers will have completely forgotten who you are and will have stopped caring about what you’ve got to say.
My newsletter, Kickstart, is published three times a week and the only complaints about frequency I get are when I have to skip an issue.
Follow my PROSE rules and your readers will look forward to hearing from you however often you send your ezine out.
S equals solo. Although your newsletter may have many subscribers - hundreds or even thousands of them - when you sit down to write, you only have one. If you speak to a crowd your tone will be very different to when you speak to one person. Your message may be the same, but the personal way you deliver it will change subtly.
The very best ezines are the ones where you feel the author is speaking directly to you. You connect.
When you write, picture one person who you are having a friendly chat with. Like I’m doing with you now.
E is the most important part of the formula. E stands for ethical. In the UK, where I live, advertising is judged by three words: legal, decent and honest. Your writing should meet up to those three requirements as well. Don’t ever lie to your readers - not just because you’ll one day get found out (you almost certainly will), but because that isn’t how a trusted friend behaves.
And that, my friend, is what you should be to your readers.
The moment you learn to write good prose, as a real trusted friend, the money really will be in the list.
The next article in this mini-series is called ‘Why You Can Go Broke by Selling, and How to Avoid the Trap.’ It will appear in the next edition of Kickstart, so make sure you look out for it!
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Fascinating Facts
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How can US$192 make you a millionaire?
Easy - take a trip to Turkmenistan and convert your $192 into the local currency, Manats.
At today’s exchange rate you’ll be a Manat millionaire.