This is the first chance I’ve had to get some laptop time in the past three days because I’ve attended a wedding of a high-school friend. What made the wedding unique is because it was an Indian wedding, which means it’s a big occasion, with over 250 people showing up at different ceremonies, held over three days.

Melbourne is a great city, my second favorite in Australia after my hometown of Brisbane. I love the trams, and although the weather is a bit unpredictable, I like how much cooler it is compared to Brisbane. It’s like Brisbane winter temperatures in summer at night in Melbourne – that means long pants and no sweating, a welcome relief from what has been a hot summer in Brisbane so far. Most of the biggest events come to Melbourne, including the Australian Open tennis, my favorite tournament of the year.

The wedding has been an amazing experience, with such a variety of ceremonies, including traditional Indian customs, food, dancing and clothing. I have a small family, so seeing such a massive group of people come together essentially just for two people, along with all the emotions involved, is at times overwhelming, yet an inspiring experience too.

If you want to see photos from the wedding I’ve tweeted a few of them, so just check out my Twitter profile for the links. And if you’re reading this – a big thank you to Venkatesh and Nishi for the invite to your wedding, and congratulations again.

The Year That Was

Now that the wedding is over I’m back to the real world, thinking about what’s coming next in my life. No doubt you’re thinking about what’s coming up for you in 2010 as well.

This is the last blog post I’m going to write this year, actually – this decade. That makes it a great time for reflection.

In 2009 I turned 30, and celebrated that milestone on this blog with a reflective blog post looking back over the last ten years of my life. You can read it here -

How To Become Comfortable With Yourself

Since I’ve already covered the highlights of the last decade, and this blog is a chronicle of the last five years of my life, I’m going to focus now only on the year that was and also what’s coming up next.

Looking at small time-frames works a lot better for me. I don’t make five year plans. I don’t even make one year plans. I do look to the past to help me frame my future intentions, however they serve more as learning tools and reference points for what I want now more than anything else.

2009 has been a particularly inspiring year for me because I realized how completely in control of my reality I am. Sure I’ve understood that idea long before this year, but it was more a concept to me, something that made sense but didn’t always manifest exactly how I would expect it to if I was in control. In 2009, especially now in December as I look back, I realize this year more than any other year, was a reflection of what I wanted to experience and thus made physical.

The Law Of Attraction

Earlier in the month I attended a live one day seminar by Jerry and Esther Hicks, who you may know as major players in the movement that is the law of attraction. The Secret DVD featured a lot of content from them, though I should clarify, it’s not specifically these two people who teach, it’s an entity named Abraham, who speaks through Esther, who does the teaching.

If you’re skeptical when you hear the idea of someone “channeling” another being, I don’t blame you, I’ve felt similar judgments in the past, although it’s not such a big deal for me any more. I don’t care where people say information comes from, we just put labels on things to give different meaning. Whether it’s experts, channeled entities, or even god who is speaking to you, it’s all the same thing. Listen to the message, not the messenger, and if it resonates, take it on board.

If you need the messenger to help lend credibility, that’s fine, just don’t be too quick to judge before you listen to the words. Far too many people miss out on potentially life changing insights because they refuse to take on ideas simply because of where the information is coming from. If something challenges your way of thinking, don’t reject it on principle, keep your eyes and mind open, listen to the words, see how what is being said can fit into your world view, and grow from there. You don’t have to like or even trust the messenger, to benefit from the message.

Setting Intentions

Seeing Abraham speak live on stage was a great experience. However it was the days that followed the event that I realized I had turned a corner in my ability to control what happens in my life.

What was interesting about this awareness was not that I suddenly could manifest whatever I wanted, it was that I had already done it – and in this case, manipulated aspects of my life that I previously struggled to change. I’m talking about aspects of my personality and life that had remained rigid for years, which in the space of months had completely changed, and it was all thanks to what I was thinking, the actions I was taking as a result and what thus manifested in my physical world.

Since we are reflecting, it’s worth taking a moment now to look back over the previous 12 months of your life and ask yourself these questions -

1. In January, what where your big goals, the big changes you wanted to experience in 2009?
2. Regarding the big changes, how did you think about them – what was your attitude and thought patterns about what you wanted, and how consistent was your thinking?
3. What actions did you take to realize these changes? Where your actions congruent with your thoughts and how resilient were you to perceived setbacks?
4. Did you get what you wanted by the end of the year? How quickly could you manifest what you wanted?

In previous years the gap of time between desiring something and experiencing it has been quite significant for me. It could take years to get what I wanted and it often wasn’t exactly how I expected it to be. Although you’re never sure what you are going to get, I’ve found lately, this year in particular, the speed of results and the accuracy of getting what I’ve wanted, has improved significantly.

What Made A Difference?

Below are adjustments to my life and my mindset that I made this year, which I consider most responsible for the significant shift in results I’ve experienced.

• Remove your roadblocks. By choice and often in full awareness, I’ve carried roadblocks with me for years, which stop me from moving forward. This year plenty of roadblocks were eliminated. These changes required instilling new behaviors that often required facing fears. Sometimes I had to make choices not to do something I would have previously done.

  The Theory of Constraints applies here. If you have something holding you back, you’re not going to move until you drop the baggage. Letting go of something is mandatory to make space for what you want.

• Solidify your belief in the power of intentions. Although I’m open minded enough to believe that I can get what I want and the universe will even conspire to help me, it has been more conceptual for me than practical.

  This year I started to believe, and I mean really believe. Consequently I started to see proof everywhere. Now I’m such a strong believer that I find myself just asking for how I want something to play out and everything unfolds pretty much that way. It’s not foolproof of course, the universe loves to remind you that mystery is still the guiding principle, but you have more power than you think you do, once you believe you do.

  There’s a sense of inevitability in believing in what you ask for you will get, but it has to be pure or you’re going to get results as wavering as your belief.

• Mystery is in control, so flow with it. Although you’re given power over your universe, the underlying force behind everything is too complex for us to understand given the limitations of our physical experience. In other words, your body and mind aren’t complete tools for interpreting the universe – most of what goes on is incomprehensible in physical form. As a result, it’s important that you surrender to the flow of events rather than try and control them.

  This might sound counter intuitive to what I’ve been saying. If setting intentions and believing in your power to control outcomes results in getting what you want, how can I now say that we are not in control? That’s one of those wonderful dichotomies we operate within.

  We have control in the sense that we can move towards what we want, but we have to understand that we can’t force it to come to us. Flow is absolutely critical. This is why it’s so important to live in the now, be content with what you have, work within your current reality and follow the natural pull of things. Acceptance is vital.

That last point is so critical I can’t emphasize it enough. As I’ve grown up I’ve often “fought” for what I thought I wanted. It has felt like a struggle, as if I’m in battle, beating away rejections until I find what I want. This is the wrong way to go about things because you can’t get what you want by fighting against the universe.

I used to hate the expression that you only get what you want when you stop looking so hard for it. I hated it because I knew it was true, but felt helpless in my ability not to respond emotionally to NOT having it. I was upset, depressed, sad, angry and above all else, frustrated, because I wanted something so badly, yet seemed unable to make it a reality.

Living with intention rather than fighting with life is the way to go. Let your life play out by following the sign-posts that flow to you when you’re open to seeing them, rather than fight and struggle only to find one frustration opening a door of more frustrations. If you’re not having fun, then you’re doing something wrong.

What Exactly Did I Want In 2009?

Some of this might sound a bit abstract to you since I haven’t been very specific with what exactly I wanted 2009 to be about for me.

At the start of the year you may recall I wrote how many of my financial goals were met. I spent the majority of 2008 traveling, so I felt that staying put in my home city was what I wanted to do this year. As much as I like traveling, I enjoy staying in one place more as I can focus my energy on doing exactly what I want and not be distracted by organizing the next hotel, flight, train-trip or site-seeing experience.

Sleeping in my own bed is also one of the most wonderful pleasures, so I was keen to make that the standard for the year, rather than the exception.

Many doors opened up to start new business projects during the first half of 2009, which were potentially very lucrative. The problem was that I didn’t want to focus on projects that while no doubt would be fun, were building upon an aspect of my life I felt was running quite smoothly.

I made choices this year to NOT do things that most people would think I was crazy to reject. I said no to doing a live event joint venture that would most likely have led to making multiple six figures – even a million dollars – from just one weekend.

I decided not to offer a high-end coaching program in 2009, which again was saying no to thousands of dollars of potential income. I will be offering elite coaching in 2010, now that I feel well and truly ready to focus on it, however it’s clear to me that in 2009 I made the right decision not to.

In short, 2009 in terms of business was sort of like a holiday, which is what I intended. I did go public with a new course, Membership Site Mastermind, which sold very well and is still the highest priced program I have out there. Blog Mastermind continued to sell well. Gideon and I had another very successful launch campaign for Become A Blogger Premium. My affiliate marketing efforts brought in more money in 2009 than all previous years, despite the so called global financial crisis, and of course my blog continued along a healthy growth curve.

This may sound like a lot of work, but it’s actually not. It’s incredibly easy, in fact 2009 was probably the easiest year of my life, the most fun year of my life and no doubt the most financially successful year of my life too. It was like this because I constructed it that way.

Most of the income I made in 2009 came from the money making machine I’ve built. I leveraged previous work to extract a high return from the assets I already own. Such a great return that I was able to purchase a new apartment and new BMW this year, despite working less.

So, if I was happy with my finances and business growth, what did I want to do with the rest of my time?

The one big area of my life I felt that was lacking and needed development was my social life. I said no to starting many new business projects so I could spend my time figuring out exactly what I wanted outside of business.

I honestly believe that your personal development is the single most important goal you have as a human being, which is an incredibly holistic undertaken, given how many aspects make up our lives. We all know this and we all know we have areas that are weaker than others. If you’re not physically healthy, you know it. If you’re financially restricted, you definitely know it. If you’re not creatively inspired you know it.

Your spiritual development is perhaps the most important aspect, yet is often the area people are not aware they need to develop. In my case, that’s not an area I felt I was neglecting – it’s an ongoing life study for me, something I do every day.

The area I felt lacking the most was in relationships – of all kinds. This was the area that I wanted to focus on in 2009. This is the reason why I said no to projects. This is the part of my life that most of my new intentions focused on in 2009.

Constructing A Social Circle

I’m a reasonably content person when I’m by myself and as an introvert I crave alone time, but I’m human, so I need interaction with other humans too.

In 2009, although I didn’t exactly realize how it would unfold, I managed to create an entirely new social circle. I made more new friends, had more intimate relationships and most importantly – had more fun with other people – than ever before.

I started the year intending to have certain experiences and work on the aspects of my self that would lead to those experiences. Although I didn’t realize it always in the moment, when I look back, it’s amazing how the right people came along at the right time to give me the tools to achieve what I wanted.

Although I was frustrated many times during the year when I hit roadblocks and felt I was still experiencing the same lack of results in certain areas that I had throughout my life, or stopped myself because of the same fears, gradually things changed. This month, the last of the year, as I look back, I’m amazed that exactly what I wanted 2009 to be about – happened. I experienced what I wanted, and learned more things about myself than ever before.

Of course experiencing what I wanted inevitably led to changes to what I want. That’s the beautiful thing about taking action – you always learn something, often creating an awareness that what you thought you wanted is not what you wanted, or after experiencing something, realizing that you had made that experienced out to be something more than it actually is. The important thing is that growth occurs, and for me, 2009 was a mammoth year for personal growth.

Right now there are very few aspects of my life I feel insecure about. Yes there are challenges and the same old fears are present, but having faced these challenges and fears, they now have less power over me and have allowed me to “dream bigger” about what I want from life. You can’t ask for more than that, and I’m looking forward to more growth in the years to come.

Find Your Life Balance

For the first time in my life I feel well and truly balanced and content with who I am. It’s been a VERY long journey to get here, and finding the right mix of all the different elements is tough.

It’s so easy to keep doing what’s working for you, or what requires the least of you, but that’s rarely the path of satisfaction. Leaving your comfort zone is a required practice for growth, and as part of that growth process, you come to appreciate even more what you already know you like.

In a wonderful way, the experience of evolving and growing, makes you enjoy your existing passions even more, because you realize they are what matter most.

In 2009 I’ve loved music more than I have ever loved music before. I’ve enjoyed writing this blog and teaching other people more than ever before. I’ve enjoyed the people in our industry, and the gift of freedom as an Internet marketer we experience every day, more than ever before. I’ve enjoyed learning from other people, in particular spiritual insights, more than ever before. Everything has just become that much more fun, enlightening and special, because I’m not fighting to feel a certain way, or looking to find something I feel I am missing.

There’s much more to do yet, but what I do know for sure is that my future is about two things -

1. Enjoying more of who I am
2. Helping others to find enjoyment in who they are

And if you look closely, you realize these two things are actually the same thing.

Happy new year, and I’ll see you in 2010.

Yaro Starak
Actualizing

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The first big spike in growth occurred in 2007, which was the first launch I ever did of the Blog Mastermind coaching program. Every aspect of my business grew during that two week period. My email list tripled in size and my income increased by almost the same margin.

Going forward, each new spike came thanks to some kind of launch. Whether it was a new product, closing access to a product or reopening of a closed product, each time I did some kind of launch campaign, the growth numbers shot through the roof.

This is obviously an endorsement of the launch process, and we all owe Jeff Walker a debt of thanks for bringing this style of marketing to our industry, however it’s worth taking a closer look at why the launch works.

The 80/20 Rule Of Product Launches

The launch process is a complex and subtle beast, which on the surface appears relatively simple. You release some great free stuff, have your affiliates promote it like crazy, open the doors to your offer with some kind of limitation, sell heaps, make a ton of money, and bamb!… done.

Once you do a few launches you start to see how intricate the variables are, and how important the psychology behind the process is. Everything needs to connect, to be coherent, to reinforce the same message, create excitement and flow together.

As daunting as that might sound, the process is actually quite forgiving, as long as you get a few variables right. You can “stuff up” many aspects of the launch process and still succeed. You can forget to do things, use lazy copy in your emails, and even leave parts out altogether, as long as you have the most important variables.

So, what are the 20% or less of components that go into a launch that count for the 80% or more of results? Here’s how I see it…

• Your lead resource(s), or “money magnets” as Frank Kern calls them – whatever you give away for free that sets the tone and the main focus of your launch, and demonstrates your value. This part is absolutely critical if you want your message to spread since it is key to the viral aspect of your marketing. The more valuable your resource, the more people will share it and talk about it. Your affiliates also need your lead resource to promote your launch so they can give their people something valuable and not just force a direct sales pitch.
• A means of distribution is critical, which should be obvious since you can’t sell something when you don’t have an audience to sell it to. For most people distribution is a combination of your existing audience on your email list, who read your blog and subscribes to your RSS feed, your Facebook and Twitter followers, and any other people you can directly contact who are actively listening to your messages and are targeted to your offer.

That’s really all there is to it.

If you have a great free report, a great product, an email list of targeted prospects, and/or top affiliates ready to promote for you, everything else is simply the grease that keeps the machine running. Yes you need relationships with your prospects, but often you can build this during the launch – in fact your lead resource can be all you need to build the trust and authority required to make people feel safe buying from you.

Your copywriting, particularly in emails, is important, as is how you sell your final pitch (sales page or sales video), however you can screw up this part and still have a killer launch, if you just have something of value to give to people and a means to distribute that value.

Where People Go Wrong

Based on work with my members, the greatest challenge to having a successful product launch seems to come from the following areas -

• A lack of distribution. This is by far the biggest problem because most people don’t realize how many subscribers or the type of subscribers they need to succeed. That’s completely to be expected of course, you can’t know the answer to how much distribution you really need until you launch.

  I addressed this problem and offered some basic metrics to use as guidelines in this article, which is well worth a read if you’re getting close to launching your first product –

  When Is The Right Time To Launch Your Product?

• A mis-aligned offer. This is another challenging issue because you don’t really know for sure you have the right offer until you sell what you have to sell. Worse still, you might have a fantastic product, a great lead resource and then use just one or two phrases that aren’t what your audience wants to hear, and boom, launch failure.

  Understanding your audience and explicitly knowing what their core motivations are is absolutely critical. To help you become clearer about how well you need to know your audience, read this article –

  How Well Do You Know Your Customer?

Most people get hung up with what is in their product or how to deliver their product or how much to charge for it. All these things are important, but without an offer people actually want and a way to get in front of those people, all other variables are a moot point.

How To Generate Massive Growth

There are many ways to grow something online, and as successful bloggers do oh-so-well, the slow but sure path can take you to amazing places, given enough time and effort.

I’m all for that, however it’s nice to experience rapid growth spikes too, which is something successful Internet marketers really understand well.

As I discussed in – Who Makes More Money – Authors, Bloggers or Internet Marketers? – finding a synergistic approach that combines the advantages of blogging, with the leverage points of traditional Internet marketing, is a great formula. This is what I strive for.

Now, let’s answer that burning question – what is the key to rapid growth? The answer in my case lies within the launch process.

The “easy” part of doing a launch is all the variables you can control. I say it’s “easy” because it really isn’t – it’s hard work – however because you control it, you know you can get a result simply by just getting things done. I’m talking about the components of what is in your product, what you write in the emails you send out, what goes into your lead resource, what you write on your blog to market it, etc. These things take work, but they are a function of you and only you.

It’s clear how important distribution is. The launch process, when done completely, includes a vital variable – your affiliates. Your affiliates are the key to experience rapid growth, because it is your affiliates who give you access to new sources of distribution. Affiliates also happen to be the variable you have the least control over.

If you work hard, you can confidently execute all the variables under your control. You might even have a fat list or huge blog readership already established to market to, but if you’re just selling to the same people it can be difficult to grow your business quickly (you can certainly improve your average customer value though). That’s okay of course, you can make great money selling to your existing prospects and customers, and there are ways to grow profits quickly using your existing audience, but if you don’t have much of an existing audience, affiliates you get there much quicker.

If you’re just starting out affiliates can be the super-boost you need to grow your business rapidly. Even just one or two successful launches is enough to establish six or even seven figure businesses. What’s even better, once you’ve done some launches and built up your list, your reliance on affiliates decreases. You can run your business relying more on the variables you can control (your own list) and less on what you can’t (your affiliates).

How You Can Tap Into Affiliates As A Source Of Leverage

Let’s start with some basic techniques first. Here are some practical ways to find affiliates…

1. Write a blog post and email to your newsletter inviting people to join your affiliate program
2. Contact other bloggers and internet marketers in your niche and ask them to promote your product
3. Search forums for quality people who sound like they have a successful business and ask them to promote
4. Tap into networks like Clickbank, Commission Junction, PayDotCom, etc to either find affiliates or act as brokers to find affiliates for you
5. Ask your existing affiliates to introduce you to potential new affiliates

I could go on and on with little tips like these. These techniques work, but what I see over and over again is advice like this and people not getting results.

I think part of the reason why is the hard work that is required to use these techniques. There can be a lot of manual labor involved, sending lots of emails, spending time in forums, and so on. However I think the real problem is an attitude that has come about because people believe in order to get the big affiliates to promote for you, you need to be a “big player” yourself. A catch-22 situation.

If you’re new to an industry and you email someone of significance in your market asking for a potential joint venture, chances are they won’t reply or will say no to promoting your product. If that happens often enough, you get jaded.

Let me state a fact, a hard truth that everyone has to accept when it comes to affiliates and joint ventures. If you want someone to promote your product you need to be deserving of that reward.

You need to ask yourself – why would this person want to promote your product in the first place?

Try and get in their shoes. You might offer hefty commissions, promise great conversion rates, offer prizes, incentives – but if you’re talking to the big players they don’t need these things. They’re already successful, they don’t use money or material items as their currency anymore, and they have their own stuff to promote, their own content to publish, and established agreements already in place to promote other products. You’re just an annoying distraction stopping them from getting what they want to get done, done.

Ok, it’s not quite that bad. I have some advice for you coming up next if you want the support of the “big player” affiliates, but as an introduction I really recommend you read this first – How Not To Approach A Potential Joint Venture Partner

How To Join The Inner Circle Of Top Affiliates

As I was growing up as a blogger and eventually released my own products I didn’t think twice about whether I could or could not convince people to promote for me.

I wasn’t oblivious to the effectiveness of affiliates, I simply knew that when it was time, the right relationships would be there. I was confident because I had already, and was continuing to demonstrate why a person would want to work with me.

This is like the difference between cold calling to get customers versus them coming to you already wanting to work with you because of your established reputation.

And there’s the answer… Did you miss it?

To gain access to top affiliates you need to do something to deserve it. Yes relationships are critical, but relationships at the top level often start first based on reputation.

Even if a potential partner has never heard of you before, having some form of demonstrable proof that you’re the real deal and not just looking to make a buck off of their list – in other words, it is worth knowing you beyond just the potential to profit from sales of your product – is the real secret.

So how can you obtain a reputation that opens doors to relationships to the best people in your industry? Here’s some ideas that have worked for me and many other people.

• Start a blog and grow it into something special. Just having a blog with a nice design, some good content and a small following is not enough. You need to be a trailblazer, a thought leader, a maven – someone with meaning and attention in the minds of a significant proportion of people.
• Capture a following and prove that you can move people to action. I know plenty of bloggers who appear on the surface to be significant players, speaking at events, maybe even publishing books and showing nice email subscriber, RSS and Twitter numbers, yet when push comes to shove – when it was time to deliver and demonstrate a result – they had very little power to actually move their audience to action. It’s great to have people who pay attention to your stuff, but if a significant proportion of them don’t respond to calls to action, then you can’t make an impression that counts.
• Publish a book or report and make it a hit. Writing a book today is easier than ever before and thus the mantle of “published author”, while definitely a credibility boost, is not as big a deal as it once was. Creating a free report is even easier. However, if your publication becomes a hit, if it dominates the conversation in your market for a period of time, or redefines how people look at an issue, or is referred to as fundamental study, then you’ve gained a reputation that can last a lifetime.
• Use the top-down method to become credible by association. What I mean by this is enter a market with completely new ideas based on your previous experience, then offer to teach your ideas to some of the heavy hitters in your industry. You don’t have to go straight to the mass market with your best stuff, just take a small group on, refine what you know and really blow them away, and then when it comes time to go mainstream your initial group of students will be more than happy to promote you and recommend you to other top affiliates. Presenting at an event and selling private coaching is a good method to attempt this technique, but bear in mind you do have to be the real deal – you better know something of ground breaking value.
• Leverage your past success stories. Can you imagine if the guy who started eBay, or Flikr, or Twitter, or any number of significant web presences came to you with a JV offer – you’d listen, because their previous success demands your attention. If you’ve had a past life where you have achieved something, use it as a leverage point to open doors.
• Locate your peers who show promise and start working with them before they become famous. This is a technique I benefited from tremendously with my own launch because I “grew up” as a blogger during the same time my fellow bloggers Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, John Chow, Jeremy Schoemaker and Daniel Scocco did. During the years that our market matured, our blogs matured and our relationships with each other matured. Even if we don’t communicate often, we all know each other, respect each others work and have a direct line of contact, so if we need to propose something we know it will at least be considered. This technique can be tricky and works best in emerging markets, but don’t let that stop you – even if you find one good person today, they might be your top affiliate next year as their reach expands.
• Be a good affiliate yourself. This solution is probably the hardest, since if you can make a lot of affiliate sales for someone else, you’re likely established already, however it is worth mentioning as you might find yourself knowing some solid techniques to make affiliate sales, but no one knows who you are…yet. James Schramko comes to mind as a great example of a guy who figured out some really clever ways to make a lot of affiliate product sales for other marketers, who instantly paid attention to him because of it, thus he had a door into the inner circle.

There are other methods to tap into the top echelon of affiliate marketing circles, but these ideas should get you started. None of these techniques are quick fixes. If you want a reputation, credibility, respect and the networking advantages that lead to top affiliates taking notice of you, you need to work at it to demonstrate your worthiness for these benefits.

Don’t Assume You Have Respect

One last very important point – you shouldn’t ever assume anything is a guarantee. Just because you’ve written a best seller, don’t email someone out of the blue and expect them to know who you are. Don’t push a free report, or your blog, or your new book, or access to your course and expect that person to instantly drop everything and check out your work, simply because you think it’s the greatest stuff since sliced bread.

If possible an introduction from a person who already knows the person you are looking to connect with is a much safer way in. I’ve found that people come to me through the natural course of networking. You tend to find the right people, especially after you set out an intention to do so, when the time is right.

It’s even better when some of your work ends up as the study materials, or even manages to help and inspire a person you want to connect with. In this case they may come to you first after being so impressed by your work. This is why the next point is absolutely critical – it’s the most important lesson in this whole article…

I hope this article has helped you feel a better sense of clarity about how affiliate marketing works at top levels. It’s not a cut and dry subject as you are dealing with the most varied variable of all – other people – which is why that last point on no expectations is so critical.

Good luck!

Yaro Starak
Inside The Circle

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I just finished reading Andre Agassi’s autobiography titled Open.

I LOVE tennis bios, they are possibly my favorite book genre because I love tennis, but more than playing it, I love following the professional tour and especially the people in the game. For me, it’s the personalities and the human stories that really inspire, hence I love it when the top players release books about their life playing the game.

Agassi’s bio was different to others I have read (I have Sampras, McEnroe, Newcombe and Scott Draper in my collection so far). Why it was different was because how much the book focused on Agassi and a few key people in his life and less specifically about the game of tennis, the matches he played and the people he played against.

Tennis tournaments and players certainly play a role in the book, but the focus is more on Agassi’s personal journey to discover himself. Reading the book felt a lot like reading what an angsty teenager goes through growing up. Lots of uncontrolled emotions from a person locked into doing things he doesn’t want to do.

Surprisingly, Agassi actually hates tennis and states so many times in the book, further demonstrating how bizarre a life can be for someone who is brought up to do one thing and one thing only, when he doesn’t actually want to. As Agassi grows up he gains control over his life, yet his hatred for the game he keeps playing remains, which makes the contrast even more bizarre, since he is choosing to continue to do something he doesn’t want to do.

Then of course, if you really think about it, Agassi is doing the same thing most people do today.

How many people continue working jobs they don’t want to every day because they feel they have to for whatever reason? Lots. Probably more people do this than people who actually enjoy and have passion for the job they do. This unique form of insanity is shared by many people on this planet, but the fact that Agassi excelled as he did, makes his story even more compelling.

Hard Work Pays Off

I took away a few key lessons from Agassi’s life as a tennis player that relate directly to all of us, no matter what we do.

Although Agassi had a unique talent, it’s pretty clear why he was as good as he was, is because of his work ethic and training regime.

It started with his father who made him hit a million balls a year as a kid to develop his strokes and reflexes. It continued as Agassi was molded into a super-athlete thanks to Gil, his trainer and bodyguard. Many times Agassi won matches because he had “more in the tank” than other players, playing just as fresh in the fifth set as the first.

You have to take this on board beyond just the physical advantage. It’s a huge mental advantage too, knowing you can outlast other players physically. This means you won’t give up mentally because you trust and believe in your abilities.

Knowing you can do something is often more important than actually being able to do it. Having the belief can make it true, and although you can never know what came first, the chicken or the egg, often it’s what you believe and thus act that makes things real.

I found Agassi’s book motivating because of how hard he worked. It made me want to work harder too.

One of the dangers in the lifestyle I lead, which you are likely striving for right now, is that you gain tremendous freedom. Once you meet your financial goals, set up some passive or near passive income streams, you find yourself with more time and too many options.

Some people become addicted to the rush of achievement and the thrill of making money, so they use all their time to grow an even bigger business. Others use their new found freedoms to do different things, to relax, have a holiday and indulge in leisure activities. Unfortunately most people tend to lose balance, either becoming workaholics, a slave to always wanting more, or they become lazy, and start to lose their passion altogether.

I personally strive for balance, but it’s not always easy. I’m lazier than I’d like to be, so I found Agassi’s story motivating. It made me want to achieve and do so on a grander scale each time. It’s made me want to turn 2010 into a big year, a bigger year than I may have otherwise if I didn’t read the book.

Giving Is the Purest Action

Although Agassi had a hate-love relationship with tennis, and you could say it continued beyond tennis – he had a love-hate relationship with life and he struggled to reconcile the two – there were some key moments in the book that stand out as beacons of clarity.

These moments focused on one very specific thing – helping others.

Agassi noted that he felt so right helping other people, whether it was the injured daughter of his trainer Gil, or starting a school for disadvantaged teens in his hometown of Las Vegas, or helping to save the life of a friend’s premature baby. There was no angst about these actions. It was just right, pure, what he – what all of us – are meant to do.

It appears to me that we are wired to find peace, enjoyment and contentment in helping other people. Whether it’s the smallest act of everyday kindness, up to grand gestures of giving or lifetime commitments to serving others. We’re meant to make other people feel safe, happy and find comfort, that in turn gifts us the gift of purpose and peace.

The wonderful thing about giving is that it’s not just about what you might term altruistic activities. Yes it’s a wonderful idea to be like Mother Theresa and spend your entire life helping those in dire need, but it doesn’t have to be as single-minded as that, if you don’t want it to be.

Giving has also emerged as the most powerful marketing technique available today. There’s nothing more satisfying in my life knowing I can write a blog post that has the potential to help thousands of people, and I can earn money doing so. It’s wonderful that you can write a report full of your best ideas, give it away so you can help lots of people without them spending a cent, and still make money when a tiny fraction of those people choose to give you money in exchange for more from you.

Helping others, giving of yourself and focusing on how you can deliver value, is the key to living a fulfilling life. However in yet another of life’s wonderful dichotomies, most of our focus is on what WE want. How we can get what WE desire, improve our OWN lives. When you realize what’s best for you is actually what is best for everyone else, you start to realize how connected we really are.

Life Is The Best Example

One thing I’ve noticed lately, since I’m more open to it than I have ever been before, is how life is one constant example.

Books, people, events, actions and consequences, whether it is your life or others, are all designed to help you discover what is your truth. Everything is a lesson, teaching you either what you want, or what you don’t want, creating clarity by simply showing you more about you.

The truth is already in you, but you need the stimulation of outside influences in order to crystallize it. Thankfully we can’t opt-out of this process, just by living you are participating. However you can choose to ignore it, which unfortunately leads more often to a focus on what you don’t like and choices made to perceive experiences in a way that doesn’t benefit you. That’s the only risk you face – choosing ignorance – of who you are and what everything around you means.

If you’re a tennis fan, or just enjoy a good character story, I recommend you check out Andre Agassi: Open.

Yaro Starak
Tennis Fan

P.S. In Agassi’s book he comes across as very different to the way I perceived him as a player, which I think except for those people close to him, is a statement many people will share. Agassi spent much of his career flat out lying to the media, saying what he thought people wanted to hear, rather than his truth, which was buried deep within layers of the angst, confusion and lack of identity he felt. The book feels very much like a decision to “wipe the slate clean” and come out with how it was really like for him as a person, rather than how the media portrayed him.

Consequently, due to the openness of the book, it’s garnered a lot of press coverage. Agassi did drugs. Agassi lied to the ATP about it. Agassi tanked in some big matches. Agassi is brutally honest about his opinion of other players, much of which is not friendly. The book is full of drama, and the media – and us – love drama. You could say it was a very smart marketing decision, given sensationalism spreads, but it was also a risky choice for Andre as he has damaged his reputation in the eyes of some people.

I like this book for its honesty, and as I said previously, it serves as a great example to come up with our own truths. Agassi is just as good of an example of what to do as he is an example of what NOT to do. I think the biggest example of what not to do in this book came from Agassi’s father, who didn’t let Andre grow up as a normal child and make the decision of what to do with his life for himself. Instead his father made the decision and then turned tennis into a jail for Andre. That’s not healthy, and it’s clear much of Agassi’s personal torments were born from this upbringing, even if his father was doing it out of love for his son.

Agassi made the choice to be honest with many things and he obviously prepared himself for the consequences, though he no doubt could never be truly ready for what was to come. I feel it’s more important to use his story as a tool to enhance your life, rather than simply a means to judge Agassi. Take Andre’s good traits and use them as inspiration in your life. Observe what you consider negative things that Andre did and make sure you don’t repeat his mistakes in your life.

It’s easy to label someone as good or bad based on their actions, but you should judge the actions and not the person. People are always a work in progress – life is a work in progress – and you’d have to agree you are too. It doesn’t matter how good or famous or gifted you are, we all are human.

Andre Agassi: Open

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In 2008 I returned from traveling around the world for eight months, visiting twenty-five amazing cities.

What made this trip particularly remarkable was that I came back with more money in my bank account than I left with, despite living in nice hotels and renting apartments during my travels.

I wasn’t backpacking or “roughing it”, this was a comfortable trip not hindered by budget, and I still came back wealthier than before my departure.

This year, 2009, I bought my second property, a fantastic apartment with an amazing view, huge deck, located in possibly the exact location on this planet I most want to live in.

Upon reflection after all of this, I realized that I’m pretty darn lucky. Lucky that I was born at a time when I could capitalize on the Internet and have this amazing medium to communicate with people, and make a living doing so.

Then I noticed something wasn’t right.

I stared at my bank balance and took stock of my material success. I had basically met all the goals I had as a twenty-something year old, in terms of monetary success, but there was a glaring issue that bothered me.

I like to give back and have supported charities that strike a cord with me. I noticed however that with my increase in income, how much I was giving back of my own money hadn’t increased proportionally.

Right then I committed to giving back more and earmarked some money that I would use to support causes during the next 12 months.

Then I had another idea regarding something different to do with my “charity money”.

I didn’t want to just give the money to support causes, which is good of course, but what I want to do is use the money to create a new business.

I’m an entrepreneur, so why not make giving back something greater by creating a new enterprise, which could potentially return much more to charity and be a heck of a lot of fun to build too.

I decided to start a charity that taps into the leverage points I have as a blogger and Internet marketer. However, I didn’t want to do it alone, I needed help.

Enter Chris Dowsett

I immediately thought of a friend, Chris Dowsett, who used to live in Brisbane. I met Chris through friends at university during my early twenties.

He had since moved to the UK and more recently was positioned in Singapore.

I thought of Chris because he has always been a giver, volunteering, working for charities, setting up websites to support causes and even going to Africa to establish a school.

I couldn’t think of a better person to partner with to start a new charity. In fact, I wanted Chris to be the head-honcho, the manager of the new project, while I provided the initial cash flow, the connections and help with ideas.

While I want to start a new charity, I still want to do what I do with my writing and training programs, so I don’t want to commit to leading a new project on my own, when my energy is elsewhere.

I knew Chris was keen to run a charity himself and if successful enough that it could pay him a salary to live off, so he could devote 100% of his time to it, that would be ideal.

I grabbed Chris on Skype, talked to him about the idea, and he quickly said “I’m in”. Fortuitously, Chris had recently left his job and was in between projects, so clearly he was meant for this.

That left us with only one problem left – we didn’t actually have an idea for a charity.

Brainstorming Ideas For A New Charity

Chris flew back to Brisbane for a few weeks to visit family and work with me to get our charity going, before heading off to the USA to visit his girlfriend.

We committed to come up with an idea and lay the foundation for our new business while Chris was in Brisbane, so he could go to work on the project while in the USA.

Although we didn’t have a concrete idea, I did know a few things. I wanted to follow a similar “ideal” model to what I had previously strived for in for-profit web businesses.

The project has to -

• Be scalable following the many-to-many model. In other words, we can grow the project using the power of our users without any limitations. The more people on board, the better.
• Leverage my existing strengths. I want something that bloggers and Internet marketers understand and are willing to use and share. This has to be something that taps into the community I have a presence in so I can use my connections to spread the idea.
• Tap into Chris’ existing networks and strengths. Chris is a statistician by trade and already has contacts and experience helping set-up and support projects focused on education in developing countries.
• Focus on education. As an information publisher I make my living through teaching. I’m also eternally grateful because of how much I have learned through studying other marketers, entrepreneurs and experts.

  Chris also shares this ideal and we both believe raising awareness through education is key to solving most of our world’s problems. Helping people who are hungry for education have access to it, is our goal.

• Have the potential to become something really big. Although I’d be happy to give $100,000 a year to our cause thanks to this project, I want the potential to be there to give millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars, if it takes off. Thinking and aiming big is how you achieve big, and this project has to have at least the potential and not be restrained by the model itself.

This criteria is tough, but not unrealistic. The next step was to gather a little mastermind group to come up with ideas.

I called up some of my local friends who all have a charity-related vocation or aspect to their persona, and who know the Internet well, and invited them to help brainstorm ideas. This group included Catherine, a consultant to not-for-profits, Mike, an experienced social media consultant and entrepreneur, Gideon, Chris and myself.

Sitting at a table outside on my deck, surrounded by some fantastic people, we shot ideas and discussed options. Clearly the causes we could support were many, as were the methods to support them, but I kept coming back to the core ideals I wanted the project to have.

Towards the end of the evening a simple idea struck me. I’m not sure where it came from, and I wasn’t even sure how good it was as I said it, but the more we talked about it, the better it sounded. It fit really well with all of the ideals set out, matched my strengths and Chris’ and had the potential to be huge, if enough people supported it.

We agreed that it was the best option and decided to run with it.

So What Is The Idea?

I can’t reveal exactly what our project is about just yet, but I can tell you we need your help. In fact the success of this project depends completely on whether Internet marketers grasp it, support it and use it.

I’m absolutely itching to launch this, but I don’t want to give away anything until we have a working model, so when I tell you what it is, you can use it immediately.

What I can tell you is that it’s going to be something you can plug right into what you do already if you are an Internet marketer. It will enable you to generate donations for the charity, which will be used directly to purchase education support services, items and infrastructure, starting in Africa where Chris has a team ready to start distributing, though we have plans to grow to other countries and provide other services as well.

My hope is that this service will become the de-facto method for Internet marketers to give back, leveraging what you do best and not requiring any work on your part beyond installing some simple code into your web pages.

Chris has been hard at work registering our charity and setting up our blog and logo. We brainstormed and did domain name research to come up with a company name and decided to run with MarkitUp.org (Mark It Up).

We are not 100% sure on the exact slogan to go with the name Mark It Up, but it means something along the lines of “Marketers using Information Technology to help people rise Up from poverty“.

Here Is What You Can Do Today

We’ve set up the MarkitUp.org email newsletter and we are ready to take subscribers who want to know exactly when our service is ready.

If you like the idea of giving back as a result of doing what you already do online, you’re keen to support this new charity and help Chris and I grow it into something significant, or you just want to know what I’m up to, please register here -

http://www.markitup.org

Thanks for your support and I look forward to seeing you put the first Mark It Up tool into action.

Yaro Starak
Entrepreneur

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I’m a fence sitter. This can at times be a hindrance, but if balanced well, it’s an advantage.

What I mean by this is I don’t 100% commit to a point of view. I have a point of view, but it’s not so rigid that I will default to it without being capable of seeing other points of view.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. No doubt thanks to learned behaviors and pure animal instinct, I do default to certain behaviors in given circumstances, but for the sake of this article let’s focus on issues that we can consciously make a decision about using our awareness. These are areas of our lives that are open to interpretation.

My fence sitting stems from an understanding that everyone sees the world through different glasses. We all perceive things differently, and in our own minds we make choices based on how we see things at the time. There is no right or wrong, only perception and choice, which is how we drive our entire lives.

Since you can’t share someone else’s physical experience (you can’t borrow their senses or mind and see what is it like to “be” them), you have to go with your own perception, which unfortunately can be very dangerous if you start to form rigid belief structures.

Are You Open Minded?

Most people, especially in liberal cultures gifted with plenty of freedom, like to think of themselves as open minded. You likely feel the same, saving your judgments until you’ve had a chance to weigh up the options, opinions and data until you feel comfortable enough to make a decision.

Open mindedness is good, however it can slow you down. If you’re willing to assess information before making a conclusion, you have to invest time and energy into the process. Sometimes there just isn’t enough time to do this and that’s when intuition and experience, or as Malcolm Gladwell calls it – a Blink moment – comes in handy.

A Blink moment refers to the ability of the mind to process data at instantaneous speed, forming an opinion and coming to a conclusion in a matter of seconds, if that. Malcolm Gladwell calls it rapid cognition.

The idea here is that the mind is capable of taking all kinds of inputs, including what data it is receiving from the body’s senses in the moment, plus previous experience, to decipher a conclusion. This is why your first answer is usually the right answer.

While you might think of yourself as open minded, if you’re human your response is instant judgment. We judge at the speed of blink, very quickly forming opinion based on what we see, hear or feel, using our own personal preferences to decide what we like and don’t like and how we respond to a situation.

There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s important you are aware of it. We like to bend the world into the frame that best matches our present state. Our snap judgments are reflections of how we choose to see situations at a given point in time. We want to make sure we are “right” in what we are doing and thinking based on our current opinion. If you aren’t aware of these tendencies, you can find yourself trapped into patterns that may make you blind to seeing things in a different, more beneficial light.

This is why fence sitting can be an advantage. Although you have to be careful not to sit on the fence permanently, as not making a decision can be detrimental, having a flexible world view gives you the power to adjust and respond to things as needed. It gives you control and thus freedom over your reality, as counter intuitive as that might sound (a dichotomy).

Your Patterns of Behavior Are Anchors

We are all creatures of habit. One of the greatest challenges to learning something new and growing is your capability to step out of your comfort zone.

Most of us are held back by the patterns we have developed and the comfort zone we live in. It’s natural for us to do this since we look for ways to make our lives more comfortable.

Most of modern society’s advances focus on improving the “quality” of our lives, which means faster, more convenient, less work and above all else – “better” than what has come before.

Unfortunately as is often the case, quicker and easier doesn’t mean better, and most things in life that give us real meaning and substance are not instant achievements.

We derive more satisfaction from what requires more of us. Usually it is our patterns of behavior that make us look for the easy way out. We are comfortable doing things the same way and uncomfortable doing things we have never done before. This unfortunately can blindside us from what is really worth doing.

Knowing and Then Doing What You Don’t Know

One of the most interesting concepts when it comes to learning something new is the idea of discovering what you don’t know that you don’t know.

It’s the “ah-ha” moment, when you come to an awareness you didn’t even realize a problem was there holding you back, or you have a behavior pattern consistently resulting in the same outcome, even though you want something different.

Uncovering what results you are reinforcing based on your current actions and what you need to know and then do to change this, is the first step towards creating what you want in life. Unless you are prepared to completely re-wire some of your belief structures and destroy your old patterns, once you find them, you won’t experience what you desire.

In other words, you first need the ingredients to enter your awareness as a possibility before you have even a hope of achieving what you want. Without tools and a map, you’re going to keep walking the same circles you have always walked, because you’ve programmed yourself to do so.

Are You Lying To Yourself?

If you’re new to self assessment, the process of discovering your patterns can be quite difficult. It literally takes an entirely new way of thinking. It’s like stepping out of your body and mind to watch what it does, then slap it into awareness whenever you notice something needs to change.

Why this is hard is because you are trying to change things you currently believe are true, based on your actions. Even if you consider yourself flexible and open minded, if your immediate response thought and your actions don’t reflect this (your snap judgments and actions repeat), then you’re not really changing.

It’s nice to think of yourself in a certain way, that you are capable of change, but if your real-world actions don’t reflect this, you are pandering to your own sense of self, your ego and belief structures about what kind of person you are.

You are basically believing what you think you are, even if you really aren’t there yet. This is natural of course, as we all operate within our own boundaries and thus justify why we do as the right choice for us right now.

If you want to change, you need to be harsh sometimes about what really is the truth regarding the choices you make. It’s seeing a new reality about yourself that you don’t like, which triggers the push to finally act to create change, rather than just be comfortable thinking you can make the change whenever you want to (and never do, or do so only when it is too late).

Examples Of Common Belief Patterns

Since you are reading this blog and have read this article up to this point, you are likely a practitioner of what I call “meta-thinking“.

Meta-Thinking is a phrase I coined (a language identifier), that describes the process of assessing what’s going on behind the scenes. I described this idea as it relates to analyzing the world around you, in particular business, in this article -

Are You a Master of Meta-Thinking?

The meta aspect of your own decision making process is vitally important to become aware of too. Watching how you see the world, especially your immediate judgments, can be a very eye-opening experience (or perhaps mind-opening is a better phrase).

To help you practice your study of self, here are some common situations we face as humans and some as Internet marketers. Starting today, if you don’t already, monitor how you react to these types of situations -

• When you first meet someone, how do you react to how they dress, the color of their skin, what accent they speak with, what country they come from and how attractive you find them (or not attractive)
• In your everyday life, do you tend to shop in the same places, hang out with the same people, eat the same food, wear the same clothes and stick to the same jobs
• In terms of online marketing, how do you first react to a sales page, or to a certain language style (corporate or sales or natural/blogging style), when you read a testimonial, or see pictures of proof elements like checks or cars
• What are your natural responses to making changes to your own blog or business, like how do you feel about asking for money, or using sales copy, or having to make a sale, or use marketing techniques like launches processes

A lot of people won’t buy products that are sold via long form sales page and consequently couldn’t imagine ever using them to sell their own products or services. Some people think that all testimonials are lies, and thus won’t use them (or now the FTC might stop you!).

You may have a blockage around creating your own product because you don’t see anything you can create as valuable enough for others to buy. Or you may believe that you have to basically lie and cheat and use all those horrible launch tricks in order to convince people to buy what you have, and you just don’t want to become another annoying marketer.

Right now you have a way of looking at everything around you. Your perception dictates what you do and don’t do. Unless you are willing to change how you see things, who you surround yourself with, how you do things and ultimately, how you think, you are going to repeat the same patterns and earn the same results.

The examples above don’t include a “correct” way to look at each situations, they are merely common scenarios we face. If you start to watch how you react you’ve taken the first step because you have opened a new window of awareness – you know what is true to you right now – which means it becomes a variable you can play with rather than just default to.

How To Break Patterns

Once you become aware of how you think, perceive and thus do, you have a starting point for breaking patterns and belief structures that are not beneficial to what you want to create in your life.

Next you need to assess what you want to change, discover the patterns that are holding you back or reinforcing what you don’t want, then find the behaviors that lead to what you do want, and start putting them into practice instead.

In order to help you do this, I’ve found the following set of principles extremely beneficial -

• The 80/20 Rule: Ascertain the few things that matter most and eliminate what doesn’t have impact.

  In most cases, getting the change you want actually requires a lot less “work” than what you do now, because you spend so much time repeating patterns that don’t give you your desires. Once you cut the waste and focus on the leverage points, life becomes a lot easier.

  For more on this, see: What Is The 80/20 Rule And Why It Will Change Your Life

• Theory of Constraints: You are only as strong as your weakest point.

  Identifying your immediate next step towards what you want is critical, and your immediate next step is always elimination of the constraint that is holding you back now. Getting what you want is a process; removing each constraint, which reveals another constraint to remove, and so on. Breaking things down into steps until you can assemble the entire picture is a sound practice, and makes things much less overwhelming.

• Operate with a malleable structure for decision making.

  Live within a fluid environment, but set within boundaries based on the goals you determine using the 80/20 rule and Theory of Constraints. In other words, focus on your goals and be open minded in how to meet them so you are not locked into set ways of doing things, yet you have parameters to work within and you know what your next step is.

• Monitor your decision making process and assess your own meta-game for flaws.

  If you can’t determine this yourself, ask for external input from mentors, coaches, peers or resources such as books, courses, blogs, websites and formal study.

• When speed is required, trust the power of “blink” decision making. Go with your gut instinct and focus more on taking action and less on deliberation.
• Don’t let yourself get too paralyzed. Permanent fence sitting is not good, so it’s important you balance your open awareness with a passion for just getting things done.

  Applying deadlines can really help this process, especially when the avenues for “study” are limitless, which in most circumstances, they are. There is always more you can learn and become aware of, but only so much time to experience it, at least within this lifetime.

Master of Your Universe

It’s a sobering idea that we are entirely responsible for everything we have and don’t have. If you truly grasp this idea it can be very empowering, but can easily depress you too, depending how you look at it.

As with everything in life, how you feel is dictated entirely by how you choose to see things. Opening your eyes to your own behaviors and seeing what doesn’t help you create the truth you want to experience, is an incredibly powerful insight. Knowing this idea alone is enough to start you down a path that could lead you to exactly what you think you want.

Yaro Starak
Pattern Interrupter

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Note this post contains affiliate links, so when you buy the Headway theme after clicking a link in this article, you are passing a commission on to us, so thank you. Joel of course remained as unbiased as possible while writing this review despite the potential to retire young thanks to massive affiliate payouts . Over to Joel…

What Is Headway?

Headway is the new kid on the block in the world of premium (aka paid-for) WordPress themes.

It’s different to a lot of other premium themes in that it attempts to do away with themes only being customizable by designers or coders, and provide a theme that can be altered quickly and easily by just about anyone.

Customizing Headway: The Visual Editor Makes It Easy

One of the “wow” factors of Headway is the real visual editor. That means “what you see” is really “what you get”. When you make a change, you see the change live on your page, no waiting to see what it will look like. It’s also drag and drop, so if you want to move something, just pick it up and move it. If you want to style the text differently, just change it there and then, or use the custom CSS if that’s more your thing.

It works nicely too. When you’re logged into WordPress and visit your site, there is a Visual Editor link in the top right that normal visitors don’t see. Clicking the link loads up the editing tools to the left of your site, right in front of you, with changes shown live on the right hand side of the screen. If you are a developer then there’s no need to worry, the theme has many “hooks” for faster custom coding.

Other Features

Like Thesis, there are some great built-in SEO features that reduce the need to use the All in One SEO plugin. While never a deal-breaker, it’s nice to reduce the number of plugins used and have it all built in. It does add some other nice advanced SEO features, such as controlling noindex and nofollow and separating post/page titles from their headlines which can be a nice SEO tactic.

One of the most frequent questions I get is “How do I change my header image on my blog?“.

You’ll be glad to know this is quick and easy in Headway. Not only that, but you can choose whether the header is fixed width or fluid, you can move the navigation above and below it by simply dragging, and you can change the contents and font color/size/type easily. I’m sure you get the picture, pretty much everything you would like to do is controllable!

They also have introduced the concept of “leafs” – yes, not leaves. According to their site this is correct, they looked it up! A leaf is simply a content box or section that you have on your page. You have almost total control over every leaf, from how many you have to what goes in each, where they go, what size they are, the background color, font type and so on. There are a large number of preset leafs which serve a variety of functions.

• Content leaf is self-explanatory, allowing you to show whatever content you decide
• Featured Post leaf allows for animated transitions between posts of your choosing
• Sidebar leaf provides a widget ready sidebar wherever you like
• Image rotator leaf provides a cool animated slideshow
• Photo Gallery leaf is a built in Photo Gallery display leaf – again, no need for extra plugins
• Plus there’s a Twitter leaf, an RSS leaf, and a few others

A particularly nice feature is the ability to allow different users of your WordPress blog different levels of access to various parts of the theme design editor or layout tools. This can be very useful in larger multi-author blogs where you want some users to have a certain amount of power, but not total control.

There are all sorts of neat touches to the theme that makes you think they’ve really taken care to listen to what people want, and need, from a theme.

Support for the theme is offered via an excellent series of tutorial videos, written documentation and a members forum.

Who Would Find Headway Useful?

You can create almost any site you can imagine in WordPress using this theme. Blogs, Corporate homepages, membership sites, landing pages, squeeze pages – they’re all possible in Headway. Not only possible, but easier than ever before, and I really mean that. Even if you still don’t like to do layout work or site design, your freelancer will be able to do things much more quickly than ever before.

There are many “tricks” and techniques that can be used to enhance your blog. Adding drop-down menus is easy, as is re-ordering your navigation. You can have different sidebars on different pages without having to use another plugin. I’m also sure some of my clients could sit for hours tweaking the color combination of their site instantly as they watch (you know who you are!), or arranging the post meta options to be optimal in their eyes.

What Can Be Improved?

I looked long and hard and only have some minor points.

First there is a learning curve. Like with anything new it takes a while to get used to. To begin with I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t move the navigation above the header, but I had to enable that feature and then move it. Not a problem, but perhaps reading the instructions may help! In fact, it’s highly recommended, there are so many features that it can become overwhelming, with so many windows open in the Visual Editor it can be hard to keep track of what you’re supposed to be doing.

I would have liked the Headway menu options in the dashboard to be in its own main menu section on the left. Perhaps because I’m very organized, or I’ve become used to it with other premium themes. However these options are used much less as the Visual Editor makes things simpler.

Previous versions insisted you had to have PHP 5 installed on your server, however the latest version now has support for PHP 4 inbuilt. If you’re worried, Headway even provide a free compatibility checker on the purchase page before you buy.

Installing was easy, no changing of file permissions on your web host, or anything like that. I have Headway running on WordPress 2.9 and it integrates with no problems at all.

So what does it cost?

Perhaps uncoincidentally (if that’s a word), Headway’s purchasing options are very similar to those of the Thesis premium theme. The Personal option is $87 for up to two sites that you own or develop (Thesis only allows this on one live server), and the Developer option is $164 that allows unlimited use on your own sites and removal of the footer attribution.

If you wish to develop a site for a client it’s an additional $40 per site (the same as Thesis, though they do offer bulk discounts for this).

Both versions offer free upgrades for life which is a great benefit to have.

Final thoughts

Headway’s visual editor will come as a welcome relief to the countless number of people who want to design their own site but don’t have the coding skills required. While Thesis provides a brilliant framework and I love working with the hooks and controls it gives me, an average WordPress user often struggles customizing it, even adding a header image is challenging.

Though the Thesis forums provide great support on how to do almost anything with the theme, it can often be bewildering to people who have no experience of doing anything like that before. Headway attempts to remove this barrier and while still offering the hooks and customizable features that developers like me love, it provides a visual platform that many WordPress users have been waiting for.

Other well known premium themes, such as Affiliate Theme and Squeeze Theme have specific purposes and requirements in mind, and while they allow you to control certain elements, they do so in a relatively controlled environment.

If you’re looking for a new way of having control over almost every element of your site, take a look at Headway.

Joel Williams

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Your list.

You probably know that already. Your email list or subscriber list or customer list – your means of staying in contact with your prospects and customers – is the most important asset to your business.

The problem you face is how to rapidly build your email list.

I’ve talked plenty about list building on this blog and in courses and free reports I’ve published, however there is one area I failed to cover extensively because it’s not something I’ve experimented with.

What am I talking about?

Building your list using YouTube video marketing.

Luckily for me a very close friend Gideon Shalwick, who is my partner in the Become A Blogger project, spent the last seven months building a completely new online business using just YouTube to build his list.

His new business has nothing to do with Internet marketing – it’s about street magic.

I get the benefit of Gideon’s knowledge and experience all the time, so I know how good he is at YouTube marketing.

Next week you have a chance to learn what Gideon knows. He is going to help a select group of people and share his tactics in a very special webinar, which you can join here -

This is a special link only for my readers and subscribers. Gideon is not promoting this webinar outside our subscribers, so you will only have the option to join the webinar live for the next few days.

How Good Is YouTube For List Building?

When I started my blog it took me a year to build up to 1,000 RSS subscribers. At the start of the second year I started an email list. At the end of two years I had 3,000 email subscribers and 3,000 RSS subscribers.

Gideon started a new business in April 2009 and began marketing with YouTube videos only. He had a blog, but all the traffic that went to the blog came after watching the videos on YouTube.

After only seven months of using YouTube, Gideon had grown his list to 13,000 subscribers – an incredibly rapid growth rate.

It took me almost three years to match that and he did it in just over half a year.

And remember, this is not in the “make money” niche like me, this is in teaching people how to perform magic tricks.

I’m very impressed by the potential YouTube presents as a list building tool, and let’s face it – we need as many marketing techniques as we can get when it comes to building your lists.

It’s tough to generate a quality email database, especially when you start from scratch with no existing contacts. You need something extra today, you need to know what is current and powerful, and that is what YouTube marketing is all about.

Gideon started this new business from absolutely nothing. There was no profile, no online contacts, just him, his business partner Jay Jay, a blog and a YouTube account.

Gideon is going to explain the exact steps he went through to build his list using YouTube, so if you want in on all his best tactics and strategies, make sure you sign up here –

If you can’t make the live call, Gideon will provide a recording and transcript you can listen to or read after.

Gideon is also including five special bonuses, if you join him before the live call takes place on December 8th at 8PM EST US Time. You have to watch the video on the sign-up page to see what the bonuses are.

Don’t Like Writing? Need New Marketing Ideas?

This is a great opportunity for you if you don’t like writing, and like the idea of using video content to grow your list. Or you might be looking for another marketing channel to expand your business and generate new leads.

Your next step is to go and watch the short video on this page from Gideon, and then join him on his very special training webinar next week –

www.killeryoutubestrategies.com

You have until Tuesday to qualify for the bonuses and make the live call.

I’ll be on the call too, so I look forward to seeing you there.

Yaro Starak

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"How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online"
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If you’re looking to create the perception in your market that you are an expert at what you do, one of the key techniques you can apply is to create what I call a Language Identifier.

I’ll explain exactly what this is and how to create one in a moment, but first I want to clarify some key traits of your modern day expert, or maven, a term brought back into popularity thanks to the proliferation of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point book.

There Is No True Expert

I have to begin by clarifying that there really is no such thing as a true expert.

Every person on this planet is in a constant state of change and will spend their entire life learning new things. It’s impossible to ever repeat the exact same experience, hence everything is new in the moment that you experience it. In a sense we are all students, not experts, and always will be.

Certainly some people know more than others, but even a person who knows more than anyone else on the planet about a certain subject, only knows a teeny-tiny percentage of the total knowledge they could accumulate.

You could say it’s impossible to ever become a true expert unless you can accumulate infinite knowledge. Infinite knowledge is not something generally experienced in the physically realm, so as we tend to do in our world of relativity, we use a method of comparison and say someone is an expert, in relation to someone else.

Expertise Is A Perception

The key to establishing expertise is to create the perception in a large enough group of people that you know what they don’t, and in particular your knowledge resulted in you experiencing or having something that they recognize as relevant or important to them.

The point here is that truth really doesn’t matter. Of course you don’t want to falsely project you know something you don’t, and then find yourself in a situation where you have to demonstrate your knowledge. This could lead to you being labeled a fraud, and it’s a lot harder to rid yourself of a bad reputation than it is to establish a good one.

The “truth” that matters is how other people perceive you. Every person who comes into contact with you will look at you through their own set of glasses. You have the power to influence those glasses using the power of persuasion.

What Is A Language Identifier?

The Language Identifier technique is a way to influence people in a certain group by creating common language.

Common language are phrases and terms shared by a collective or community, but are usually not known to people outside the group.

For example, in our world of Internet marketing and business, common language terms include -

• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Squeeze Pages
• Return on Investment (ROI)
• Conversion Rate
• Open Rate
• Move the Freeline

The Language Identifier technique is about creating a common language term for your industry, with one very important key aspect – it becomes associated with you.

Common Language spreads very far. Often the entire population of an industry will know the most important common language phrases. If you can associate your name as the creator of one of the terms, you gain instant credibility, fame and notoriety.

Creating just one phrase or term that takes off and spreads within an entire group of people can be enough to cement your place as one of the pioneers and leaders in your industry. This means people will talk about you, your work will be cited as authoritative, and every person new to the industry will become exposed to your name as they learn the key terms.

This is an extremely powerful tool for persuasion.

Two Language Identifier Examples

The list above of common language is mostly made up of terms that you can’t specifically associate with anyone.

Google is associated with PPC, because their AdWords system is the leading PPC platform. They no doubt benefit from association with that term. This is not the best example though as we’re talking about a company and a software platform, rather than just one expert and one phrase.

Move The Freeline is a phrase that may not be known by everyone in the Internet marketing and business industry, but it is known by many people, especially those who actively study our craft. If you review the content from the leaders of Internet marketing, or pop into an Internet marketing forum like the Warrior Forum, you will see this phrase repeated.

If I asked you who came up with the term “Move The Freeline” would you know the answer?

It’s Eben Pagan, one of the leading Internet marketing and business trainers teaching today.

As far as I know, he coined the term and it has spread widely as a great overall philosophy about how to dominate a marketplace. I could be wrong and he may not have been the first to use the phrase, and he definitely wasn’t the first to think of the idea of giving away free stuff to capture attention, but it’s his name that I have associated with that phrase. He get’s the credibility in my book.

If you have never heard of the phrase “Move The Freeline” I explained the principle in some detail in this article – Moving The Free Line.

As further evidence that the Language Identifier technique is powerful, see this article you are reading right now as an example. I’ve just introduced a whole group of people to Eben Pagan and enhanced his reputation by writing about him as the creator of a key term in our industry.

The other example I have for you is the best case of a Language Identifier that I personally created. What’s great about this example is that I was completely oblivious to what I was doing when I did it. After the fact I recognized what I had done, but at the time I was just trying to teach something using as simple language.

So do you know what term I’m best known for in the blogging industry?

Yep, the Pillar Article.

Pillar Article or Pillar Content are phrases I created to sum up what I consider the ingredients of good content. You can read about the history of this phrase and exactly what it means here -

How To Write Great Blog Content – The Pillar Article

The Pillar Article term circulated quite extensively in the blogging world, at least within the meta-blogging (blogging about blogging) and blogging for money industries. Each time another blogger introduced the phrase, they almost always tagged my name as the creator. I also introduce the term in my very popular free report, The Blog Profits Blueprint. This established my expertise as a blog trainer and continues to do so today.

How To Create A Language Identifier For Your Market

A Language Identifier is made up of two key ingredients -

1. An idea that is powerful and relevant to a group of people, enough so that they share it with others after benefiting from it themselves
2. A short and catchy name you come up with to describe it

There really isn’t much to it. The great thing about this is you can create Language Identifiers anytime you have a good idea, even if it’s not your own idea.

Do you think I was the first to see that coming up with common phrases and associating your name with them as the creator is a good marketing technique?

Of course not.

No doubt thousands of marketers have taught this technique. I know from my own experience I remember quite clearly Rich Schefren talked about this idea in his materials.

The great thing about the technique is you can use your own understanding to describe your Language Identifier. There’s no such thing as an original idea, but your interpretation is always original and unique to you.

Most bloggers who teach have the potential to create Language Identifiers all the time because they are so good at sharing ideas using their own words. However most don’t, they just use generic words or phrases, or instead enhance the reputation of other experts by repeating their key terms.

I know this is true because I do it all the time with my blog. I’ve written many articles and taught many ideas that I could have coined unique phrases around but didn’t.

One of the best examples I can think of from recent memory is Frank Kern’s term – money magnet.

Frank created this phrase to describe what is essentially something you give away for free as part of a process you go through to launch a product, which he teaches inside his Mass Control course. I teach this same technique but call it the generic phrase, “lead resource”. Jeff Walker also teaches this technique in his Product Launch Formula. The concept also fits nicely into the overall strategy of Moving The Freeline.

Because Frank has significant distribution for what he teaches, he’s charismatic when he teaches it and he’s smart enough to come up with catchy phrases to encapsulate his ideas, he enjoys preeminence as a result. If you’ve ever studied his Mass Control course you will see the program is littered with his own “Language Identifiers”, phrases he came up with to label his techniques.

That really is all there is to this technique. Describe an idea or concept and use a catchy label for it, then do what you can to distribute it and hope it catches on.

When you get distribution of an idea, and your name becomes synonymous with it, it leads to true maven status in your market. Do it often enough and you can become one of the very top leaders of your market.

Leading By Example

By now you’ve probably guessed that my use of the phrase Language Identifier is in fact an attempt to implement the technique. In other words, Language Identifier is a Language Identifier, or at least it could be if enough people implement the technique.

I’ve had the idea for this article for a long time and only last weekend decided to come up with a catch phrase to describe it. I figured it would be wrong to not demonstrate the technique using the technique itself.

After about an hour of brainstorming I didn’t have a good phrase to describe the term, but when I went to write the title of this blog post the phrase Language Identifier just popped out. I liked it and decided to run with it.

Whether or not I get credit for this technique and people identify my personal brand as an Internet marketing expert with it, isn’t too important to me, however the concept is sound. Creating your own common language is a great idea for virtually any niche.

As humans we like to belong to communities and the common language that makes up part of that community helps keep it together. You may start as a participant in the community and a user of its common language, but if you want to stand out and become a leader you need to get creative and stamp your authority by adding your own new ideas as well.

The Language Identifier technique is a very simple way to do this, which is why it has the potential to be so effective – simple has a way of spreading.

Yaro Starak
Common Language Creator

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I don’t know the exact amount, but I’m confident I’ve generated over $100,000 in sales (probably closer to $150K) of just this one product through each incarnation its creator, Jeff Walker, has released.

This is a real testament to the quality, relevance and power of the strategies and tactics Jeff has taught us over the years. I personally have benefited directly and indirectly more from this one system than anything else I’ve ever studied in Internet marketing. I’ve applied the launch formula to every release of every product of my own, and learned a tremendous amount from other marketers using the techniques. It’s truly life changing stuff, when you apply it.

Simply put – if you’re selling something online you are CRAZY if you don’t know and apply what Product Launch Formula teaches. It’s fundamental training in online selling psychology, which I suspect is a very good reason why it’s sold so well for me as an affiliate product.

The End Of Case Studies

One thing I can unequivocally state is that my blog readers LOVE case studies.

Some of the most popular blog posts I publish are the podcast interviews I do with people who started with nothing, went to work to build an online business, and ended up making big money. These stories are inspiring, educational, and of course great marketing materials too when you use them as part of a lead-in to releasing a product.

This is a tactic taught inside Product Launch Formula, which makes sense, since Jeff uses lots of case studies to promote his own product.

Unfortunately due to the new rulings by the Federal Trade Commission in the USA regarding case study testimonials, Jeff’s decided to be extra cautious and remove the case studies from the web.

Before he does this there’s one particular case study you HAVE to listen to if you haven’t already before Jeff takes it down.

It’s called the Food Stamps to Six Figures case study, or sometimes the Horizontal Helix case study, but I prefer to call it –

The $9000 A Month From A Board Game Case Study

Just enter your email on that page and you will have access to stream or download the case study immediately.

I also did a write up after listening to the case study myself, which you can read here – $9000 A Month From A Board Game?

Product Launch Formula 2.3+ Opens One Last Time Next Sunday

On Sunday and Monday, the final days before December 1st when the new FTC rulings come in that are forcing Jeff to take down his case studies, Jeff is opening up the doors to his Product Launch Formula 2.3+ version of his course (that just means it’s the newest version, lol).

I’m not going to push this too hard as many have already purchased this course. If you have the money for it, it’s a must-have training program, if you don’t, at least listen to the case studies Jeff is giving away before he pulls them down next month – they are free.

I’ll have some bonuses for those of you who order the course through my affiliate link, which I’ll tell you about via email before it opens on Sunday.

In the meantime, go listen to the $9,000 Herb Board Game Case Study before it’s taken offline –

http://www.productlaunchformula.com/

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Squeeze Theme is a premium theme for the WordPress blogging platform. Its purpose is to add significant additional functionality and scope beyond what the basic WordPress install includes. Here’s a video that explains the key features –

In Squeeze Theme’s case, its purpose is to augment WordPress so you can use it as a tool to create “squeeze pages” (or namesqueeze pages), which are pages that focus on capturing an email address of the visitor so you can build your email list. You can also use Squeeze Theme to create sales pages, and standard blog and blog magazine layouts.

Bear in mind Squeeze Theme is not a custom theme in the sense that you buy a certain blog layout style which you can then change or use as is. In this case you’re getting a tool to create lots of different types of websites more easily using the tools that Squeeze Theme provides.

The idea is if you are not a coder or designer you can buy a premium theme like Squeeze Theme and it makes it easier for you to create all the different pages your online business needs. Instead of having to play with the code, you get an easier to use back-end interface to control all the different elements like style, color, layout and design.

How Much Easier To Use Is It?

I spent a couple of hours playing with a demo version of Squeeze Theme so I could get my head around how it worked.

Previously I’ve also tested other premium themes like Affiliate Theme (also from Unique Blog Designs) and Joel wrote a review for this blog of the Thesis Theme.

My first impression, which has been a consistent experience for me with every premium theme I have ever played with, was one of confusion.

In order to offer lots of customization power you have to offer lots of options. This is why when you first log into the Squeeze Theme control panel you are overwhelmed. Expect to feel lost and not sure what to do next.

I immediately started to play with all the options to see what changes what, but if you’re not the type who likes to tinker to learn, you can follow the many how-to videos provided by the Squeeze Theme team to show you how to use their latest platform.

There’s a members resources area with the help videos, a support forum and more tools to help you get the most from the theme. There’s also a quick start guide to help you take the first steps to begin using the theme immediately, and a course called SqueezeCamp, which is a 12 week training program you can optionally purchase (available to the first 150 people only) to learn how to really get the most out of the theme, build an email list and make money from your blog.

I’m going to be completely honest with you though – you’re not going to instantly be able to understand how to use this theme. You will need to learn through studying the videos and playing with the options until you understand what controls what. I’d say you would need to commit to at least a few hours of practice before you will feel even basically comfortable with how it works.

It also depends how comfortable you are with control panels as to how quickly you become accustomed to the theme. If you play around with the WordPress control panel already, have some basic HTML or CSS skills, then the Squeeze Theme options will not take long to grasp. If you’re advanced, you will enjoy the high level of customization options Squeeze Theme provides, so this is definitely a theme that’s accessible and relevant to all user groups, except absolute technophobes.

The only group of people I caution is if you are completely computer illiterate. If you don’t know how to use something like Gmail effectively, buying Squeeze Theme is not going to suddenly allow you to build a perfect blog or squeeze page. There’s a learning curve here and for some people you’re just not meant to be a blog designer, no matter how good the tool is. If that’s you, hire someone to do your blog and squeeze pages for you, and if necessary, they can use Squeeze Theme for you, to get things done quickly.

Why Would You Buy This Theme?

Here’s why I really like Squeeze Theme.

My business currently consists of three types of web sites -

1. A blog, like you are reading now
2. A squeeze page like what I offer at http://www.blogmastermind.com
3. And a sales page, like what I offer at http://www.blogmastermind.com/coaching/

You can use Squeeze Theme with WordPress to construct all three of these pages and run them off a single domain name and one installation of the theme.

It will take some time to build all three sites of course, but management of all the different elements will be under the one control panel. You never need to use FTP, code HTML or CSS or do any programming if you don’t want to.

If you like the sound of that and you’re prepared to go through the learning curve, Squeeze Theme is a great choice.

Ultimately though, what Squeeze Theme does best is allow you to create small pages that are designed to capture an email address.

You might use video like this example page that was created using Squeeze Theme -

Or a page like this demo -

Or you can use it for a sales page like this demo –

All of these sites would need content added, but you can get a feel for the versatility. Each of these layouts are completely customizable. You can add an ebook cover graphic, a video, align the opt-in box to the left or the right, include the opt-in box in a blog design on the top, bottom, left or right or do basically whatever you want.

It’s a very versatile theme, which makes WordPress into a complete content management system to create sites you can use to build email lists and sell products with.

What Else Do You Need?

Since we are talking about email list building (one of my favorite subjects), you’re going to need an email autoresponder system.

I recommend AWeber, as do the guys at Squeeze Theme, and many other top bloggers use it as well. Integrating your opt-in code that you get from AWeber to create the forms to capture a name and email, is a simple copy and paste operation with Squeeze Theme.

You can read my review of AWeber here – AWeber Review

You’re going to need WordPress, which you can get for free from WordPress.org, and you will need a place to host your sites too. I recommend HostGator as a good introductory web host.

If you don’t have a domain name, you will need one. You can try NameCheap for this.

If you’re not able to install WordPress and the Squeeze Theme, there is a service provided by the Squeeze Theme team where they will set-up and configure the theme for you for an extra one-time $97 fee, or you can buy one of the bundles that includes the installation. This is a good option if you’re not good with playing around with servers and just want theme installed ready to use.

How Much Is Squeeze Theme?

As I write this review Squeeze Theme has just launched and they are offering a 10% to 34% off promo.

Prices range from $97 to $274.30 depending what bundles you take. I expect these prices to increase once the opening promo is over.

SqueezeCamp, a 12 week bootcamp training program on how to get the most out of using Squeeze Theme to build your email list and blog, and make money from both of them, is available as long as you are one of the first 150 students (the camps closes on the 1st December 2009).

If you want all the details on the different bundles and the current pricing offers, check out order page -

Do You Really Need This?

There is a certain type of person who stands to benefit from a premium theme.

In my case I don’t need them because I have other people who do my blog design work. These people might choose to use a premium theme to make the work they do for me easier, but it’s not something I personally need to make use of.

If however I was just starting out and didn’t have the funds to have people do all my tech work for me, and I was prepared to take the time to learn how to use a premium theme’s features, they make a great choice.

WordPress itself is a great tool, but as soon as you want to make use of it for anything other than a blog, things are limited unless you add clever plug-ins or purchase premium themes.

Squeeze Theme is a great choice if you want to build squeeze pages and use the same system to manage your blog and sales page.

Affiliate Theme is a great choice if you want to create mini-sites and landing pages that direct people straight to an affiliate offer.

Thesis Theme is a good compromise between the two, having the power to do it all, however there is a learning curve here too and it’s not as focused on a particular type of website (affiliate sites or squeeze pages) as the other themes.

All these themes are great choices, supported by excellent developers and I would recommend you investigate them all.

In my opinion, email list building is the most important thing you will ever do online for your business. If that’s an area you are currently working on, Squeeze Theme is a good choice to help you build the pages you need easily, once you figure out how to use the tool.

You can buy Squeeze Theme here -

Yaro Starak
WordPress Blogger

P.S. Gideon Shalwick did a great little video to show you how he put together a quick squeeze page using the theme.

Check it out below -

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