Monday October 8th, 2007: Issue #847
Another weekend, another seminar!
Late last might I got home from the excellent BritPack Seminar that was superbly run by Robert Puddy and Pat Lovell. The seminar was really called, to give it its correct title, the Internet Business Building Seminar and it really lived up to its name.
Everyone was encouraged to network like crazy and share business cards - but beyond that, to actually look for like-minded souls who could be their accountability partners. Many people really took that suggestion to heart and a lot of alliances were formed.
It was wonderful to see so many Kickstart readers there - if a little scary to realize that so many people in the room know so much about me!
At the dinner on Thursday evening, Robert Puddy sidled up to me and asked if I would mind doing a 90 minute presentation on Sunday morning. One of the scheduled speakers had called in sick and Bob knows from previous experience that I love to stand up and talk!
Because of that, I had to miss a couple of the sessions while I wrote a new presentation from scratch. I was sorry that I didn’t get to see their talks, but those that I did see were all very interesting and informative.
Happily, my ad-hoc presentation went down well and I basked in some very nice compliments at coffee afterwards! (And yes, I did remember to mention Mike Filsaime from the platform!)
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After such an intensive weekend (following right on from the equally intensive seminar that Frank Garon put on last weekend) I must admit to being rather tired today.
I really don’t have the energy to go testing new products or reading new ebooks, so I’m declaring today’s Kickstart a sales-free-zone. You can relax with me - there are no pitches and no recommendations today. Just a friendly chat and a few useful thoughts.
Enjoy!
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While I was away for the weekend, my wife, Delia, got busy with my electric saw.
A lovely tree that graced our garden is now no more. It is in pieces waiting to be burned.
The tree was dying. It was on its last legs and badly needed to be removed.
As you might realize, Delia is very much a ‘just go for it’ kind of person. Rather than ponder the fate of the tree for weeks, and wait for me to get around to it, she just got on and sorted out the problem.
Now we can concentrate of the positive - filling the gap with something beautiful, rather than be anchored by the negative - a constant reminder of our inaction and a view of a dying tree.
How many dying trees are spoiling your view?
My poor old cat is doesn’t quite see the metaphor for life though. He is distraught - he sat for hours under that tree, and now can’t work out where his place in the world is.
But he will adjust, as will we all when we take action to remove the dead wood from our lives.
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First past the post, or first out of the trap?
As an Internet marketer I deal with many affiliate programs. A lot of my income comes from recommending other people’s products and making an affiliate commission when a purchase is made.
All affiliate programs track the recommender and then whenever a purchase is made, they credit that affiliate’s account. But there are two ways that that the tracking is done: one that I like very much and one that I am a lot less enamored with.
The question boils down to this simplified situation:
Two affiliates both recommend a product to their readers. If I am on both affiliate’s lists, I’ll see the recommendation twice. Let’s assume I am very responsive and go off to the sale page both times to check out the product.
The first time I read about it in affiliate ‘A’s’ newsletter I’m a bit hesitant. His canned email isn’t all that persuasive, but I’m interested in new things so I visit the sales page, but I decide to ‘think about it’ - which as we all know, means forget about it.
When I get a newsletter the following week from affiliate ‘B’ he writes about the product in a lot more depth. For one thing he writes in his own words, not those of a pre-written message and he explains the benefits to me and reawakens my interest by telling me about his personal experience with the product. So I click on his link, go the the sales page again and without even bothering to read it, click on the buy button.
Who sold me the product? Affiliate A or affiliate B?
To my way of thinking, affiliate A alerted me to the new product but didn’t do enough to make me want to buy it, whereas affiliate B worked for his money. He drew me in and made me want to buy.
Who gets the commission on my sale?
If the product was sold through ClickBank, affiliate B would be credited. He was the last one to send me to the sales page and did so well enough to have convinced me to buy. ClickBank operate a first past the post system.
But, very wrongly in my view, many private affiliate programs for a lot of big name products work on a first out of the trap system and would reward affiliate A - no matter how many subsequent affiliates sent me to the sales page and irrespective of which of them triggered me to buy.
Who benefits from this strange situation?
The affiliates with the largest lists and the smallest ethics. That’s who.
When a new product comes out, have you ever wondered why it is that the big name people blast messages to their lists before the product is even on sale? Have you ever wondered why they so often send out the same pre-written emails that the product owner supplies? Have you ever thought that with the sheer number of products some of these people ‘recommend’ that they can’t possibly have tested them out for themselves every time?
Of course they haven’t. The game is to get as many people to the sales page as fast as possible so that they are logged as the first referrer. And then, weeks down the line when a more ethical marketer sends out a real hands-on review that persuades his reader that this product is worth checking out again, the commission from that customer is already flagged as ‘belonging’ to the first referrer.
The customer doesn’t care, but the effect is to incentivize unethical promotion that makes the biggest players get richer while the honest joes struggle for the crumbs. Or worse, act as unpaid shills for the big guns.
Knowing all that doesn’t make me stop promoting ‘first out of the trap’ affiliate programs. If I was that sensitive I would struggle to find much to write about! Nor does it make me particularly bitter. It is the nature of the business I chose to operate in. But it does make me sad that a system that has the effect of lowering ethics is so prevalent.
I doubt very much that many of the people who do operate such systems have really thought through the ramifications.
Perhaps an open debate is called for?
I’ve put this on the forum at http://kickstarttodayforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=644
Come and tell me if I’m wrong or right.
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An Inspirational Thought
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We live in a world that is obsessed with putting people in boxes. We have tests, questionnaires and examinations for everything.
Yet what do all those tests actually prove?
Do those boxes we are shoved into really define who we are?
David Ogilvy, an advertising copywriter who was universally regarded as a genius at what he did was once asked to take an intelligence test.
He was a bit surprised to find that he wasn’t a genius after all. In fact, according to the test, he was barely able to think at all!
If he had been asked to take this test at the beginning of his career, he would have had no career. A great talent would have been stifled.
There must be many of us who have been told categorically that we can’t do something because we fell short on someone else’s scale, yet know in our hearts that we CAN and MUST do it anyway.
When I was eleven years old I had to take an exam that here in the UK is called the ‘11-Plus’. It’s purpose is to identify kids who are ‘intelligent’ enough to go to a special type of high school called a ‘grammar school’ - where the supposedly cleverest kids attend.
I failed my 11-Plus (75% of children who take it fail) and I can still remember my headmaster telling my parents that my downfall was that I was terrible at English.
Frankly, even at that tender age, I was suprised at that because I had always enjoyed writing stories and my teachers had never told me I had a problem. I didn’t argue though because I didn’t want to go to the grammar school - all my friends were going to the local high school and I wanted to go there too!
From the first day at high school, English was my best subject and now I make my living writing. But if I’d believed the results of my 11-Plus ‘failure’, or the negative words of a headmaster who only knew me through third-party reports, I might never have strung two words together again.
When you KNOW who you are - when your heart is telling you that your destiny lies in a certain direction - don’t let anyone else shove you in a box that doesn’t fit.
Like a jack-in-the-box, your spring will simply wind tighter and tighter until it either snaps or you burst through the lid.
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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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Lao-tzu said,
“Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is enlightenment.”
…and a Spanish proverb adds,
“Self-knowledge is the beginning of self-improvement.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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The promised article on ‘Why You Can Go Broke by Selling, and How to Avoid the Trap.’ will appear in Wednesday’s Kickstart, so make sure you look out for it!
After the two intense seminars and talking to an awful lot of people who are on the verge of getting started in Internet marketing I though it may be useful to reprint something I wrote a while ago,and which I tend to use as my own personal mantra:
In Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll wrote “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Today, I don’t know if you’ve had your breakfast or not yet, but I certainly don’t want you to believe six impossible things. Just one will do to start with.
The one impossible thing that I want you to believe today - and I really mean BELIEVE it with every ounce of your being - is that you CAN.
You CAN achieve success.
You CAN do anything that you WANT to do.
You CAN … fill in your own blank!
With that fundamental belief, anything that is physically possible is within your range. At at times, even disability isn’t a barrier if you have sufficient belief.
I read just this morning about a young man who was a successful mountain climber. He had a fall and trapped his arm between two rocks. He had a choice that most of us couldn’t imagine having to take - he could hang there until he died, or he could cut off his own arm. He chose to live. But that horrific tale isn’t the end of it.
He could easily have decided that without an arm, his mountain climbing days were over, but not this guy. He has the fire of ‘I Can’ burning like a torch inside of him.
He now has a prosthetic arm, shaped like a pirate’s hook and he is back climbing mountains like he never left off.
You don’t need to cut off your own arm to prove that you can climb mountains - and we all have different mountains to tackle in any case. What you do need is an absolute, unshakeable certainty that you CAN climb it.
When you KNOW that you CAN, actually doing it doesn’t seem so hard after all.
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Fascinating Facts
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They say that more people are frightened of snakes than any other phobia.
It probably isn’t on the researcher’s list, but I would have thought that fear of success was even more commonplace.