My Note Taking Nerd » Notes and Posts From The Best Offline & Online Marketing Seminars – MyNoteTakingNerd

How To Read A Book In 15 Minutes

NoteTakingNerd2 — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

On the road to personal improvement we meet with the challenge of reading books. In Eben Pagan and Wyatt Woodsmall’s Advanced Learning & Teaching seminar they reveal how to tear through and get the meaningful meat out of books like a beast just like the pro’s do

It’s Lewis a.k.a. Nerd #2.

Do the opposite of what "they" taught you and read like the most interesting man in world does

If you hate reading, you’re gonna love what you see here.

If you love to read (like I do) and you’ve got 40 books laying around you have only read 1/3 of (like I do) you’re gonna love what you see here.

What Eben and Wyatt reveal here is how to take charge and ditch all the bullshit reading habits you’ve picked up over the years that have kept you in the slow reading lane.

Now let’s get this party started by answering the question of . . .

What Is Reading All About And How Do We Use It To Learn?

In the dis-educational world we’re given things called text books.

George Bernard Shaw was known for saying . . .

“I don’t want my work in text books because I don’t want to be hated.”

The dis-educational system has a hard time teaching reading because it doesn’t understand what reading is. They confuse two things – reading and pronouncing.Pronouncing is going from visual, digital external words on paper or auditory totally external – in other words reading is either out loud or reading in your head. And you’ll often see people reading to themselves mouthing the words.

If you learned to read this way, your reading ability has been limited because how fast you can read is restricted to how fast you can talk and this slows you down which is why it’s not the best way of reading.

What reading is really about is making a movie in your head about what you’re reading.

Think about if you’ve ever read a novel and how your eyes just breeze over the words and while you’re doing this, you’re using these words to breathe life into a movie you’re making in your mind and you’re essentially day-dreaming the novel.

You see the page but you don’t. What you really see if the movie. When you can do this with anything you read, then reading becomes fun, exciting and entertainment.

You want to practice dreaming the book. You want to directly translate the words into pictures, sounds, and other sensory experiences. This takes practice because we’ve been sub-vocalizing all of our lives.

When you read to learn you have to remember that you can’t know EVERYTHING.

Optimized learning is the process of figuring out what is important and what is NOT important and flat out ignoring what is NOT important.

And once again, the 80/20 rule rears it’s head. 80–95% or more of any book you read is a waste of time. And only 5-20% is what you’re actually looking for.

The secrets of the universe are available to everyone. In essence, there are no secrets to the extent you’re willing to trudge through a shit-ton of boring and long books to find the kernels of wisdom to be had.

Think of the wisdom trapped inside of books as being the needle in the haystack. Now imagine how much harder it’d be to find the needle in the haystack if you didn’t even know you were looking for a needle?

If you don’t want to waste the time you spend reading, you want to be crystal clear about what it is that you’re seeking and what should be the outcome of your reading.

Then the whole time spent with the book is looking for the things that will help you achieve those outcomes.

Everything needs to be screened by your outcomes. Your outcomes, a problem you’re trying to solve, or a purpose you’re trying to fulfill in your life, are what tell you how to separate the needle from the chaff and your mind will relate certain pieces of critical information that are important and unique to your life.

Two Thoughts That Stand Between You and Wisdom

If you hide all the secrets to the universe in big boring books, people are only gonna get halfway through (probably not even that far) and they never get to the needle.

Maybe you’re going into a brand new field and everything you read is brand new to you. That’s an instance where “I know this” won’t get in your way. But if you’re pretty well versed in a topic, telling yourself, “I know this” over and over again while reading is a sure way to make sure you never find the needle.

Another road block to you finding the needle is butting your head up against something you don’t agree with. You might come to the conclusion that since you believe the author is wrong on a few points that they can’t be right about anything and you toss the book.

So you have to . . .

1) Know you outcome – know what you’re looking for.

2) Believe this person can’t be wrong about everything.

Ken Wilbur talks about how he’s found that nobody is perfect and that nobody can be wrong 100% of the time. He’s yet to find someone who’s successfully pulled that off.

So the author may be 95% wrong but you want to be seeking the 5% that is a gem of wisdom.

3) Be attuned to . . . “I Didn’t Know That.”

You want to be conscious of the things that are new to you. You want to look for what’s different than the model of world you operate from.

4) Know that some things are more important than others

You want to start putting the information contained within a non-fiction book into categories

When reading, different people have different systems.

Wyatt Woodsmall keeps pens with him when he reads. When he gets to a part that he feels is important he puts a slash running one way at the beginning of the idea and a slash the other way at the end of that section.

He then uses check marks, one, two, or three, depending how important he deems it. This way when he goes back to review the book, he’s only seeking out the starred sections.

If there’s key words there he underlines them.

One of the structures of knowledge is concepts. There is THE concept which is the main idea that everything else hangs itself around at the level of the title of the book all the way down to the title for the chapter. This can be the bottom line. It can be the gist. This is part of what you’re seeking when you read.

Another thing you’re going to find is facts. They may interesting, they may or may not be relevant.

The vocabulary is something else to keep your eyes peeled for. This is especially important when you’re going into a field you’re unfamiliar with. Knowing the vocabulary is going to be what allows you to communicate with the field. If you want to fast forward your learning in a situation where you’re brand new you want to get a hold of charts or 4-6 page summations that give you the broad view of how this world is constructed by the way they’re chunking and sequencing their information.

Next, you want to be stalking the principles. What are the laws? These are the real values. Sometimes they’re overtly displayed, sometimes they’re hidden. Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” book is broken down by each chapter being a law/success principle. And then you have a book like, “The 48 Laws Of Power” book which, within the concept, is the implication you’re going to have the principles/laws laid out for you. You want to keep in mind that a law explains and a law allows you to predict. To teach is to explain and explain is to subsume under a general law.

Procedures are what you’re looking for next. You see these often in manuals or “How-To” books. You can think of ‘How-To’ books as procedural manuals – they teach you how to do stuff. These are some of the most popular books in the book store.

Something else along the line of procedures that you’re looking for is process. Process is how the procedures have changed over time. If you understand the process and the procedures change you can regenerate the process via procedures but if you don’t understand the process, then if the procedures change, you’ve got to re-learn everything. You want to be looking for flow charts or diagrams.

One the first categories to sift and sort out are definitions. You can write “Def” in the margin next to the copy so that you know this is where they’ve defined one of the key words that you can underline so that you can easily find it.

Knowledge Is Organized Information

You could say knowledge is data that is channeled towards reaching an outcome.

Mind-mapping a book is something he recommends and that I’ve found to be incredibly useful. It allows you to see all the concepts, definitions, laws, etc. at a glance.

You could take notes on the book like I am with this presentation. You could take notes in the book. Or you could take notes in the form of displayed thinking – or the mind map.

These are ways you can retain more of what you read.

Learning Is Behavior Change

Information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom are hierarchical. Each of these are a stair step level with wisdom being at the top.

The clear understanding as to whether or not you’ve attained wisdom is if your behavior has changed. If this hasn’t happened, you know haven’t learned it.

So the first step to learning is purity of intent – knowing your outcome. Purity of intent wakes your brain up. It flips the power switch to ‘on’.

Most people have been trained in the passive manner to think they’re gonna read the words on a screen or a page and those words are just gonna go up into their head and this leads to learning. This is flawed model.

If you really want to learn you start with premise of, “If my behavior didn’t change, I didn’t learn anything and in order to learn I need to know the outcome so that as I’m looking at words my brain can take what it needs and ignore the bullshit.”

If you approach reading with the wrong mindset, you’ll keep on getting the results you’ve been getting and if that’s not what you want, you better change up.

Eben’s System of Reading A Book

The first thing you want to recognize is that book is at your service.

You don’t cater to the book – the book caters to you and does your bidding. Eben likes to think of the book as his little bitch and it’s gonna do whatever he wants it to.

Why look at it like this?

Because most people dread reading because they cower to the book. They start it at page one and think they have to read every single page of it to the very end. And then they feel weakened when they look at it sitting on the table and do their best to ignore it once they’ve got to the point where they know they aren’t going to be opening it again because they’ve now gotten all lathered up by another book they just bought.

This approach makes reading a painful experience.

This is no fun and how much do expect to get from a book you don’t really like it but you feel forced to finish it? Not much. When you can do whatever the fuck you want with a book, you get to feel empowered.

The Two Step Speed Reading Technique That Can’t Be Beat

Here’s the most important speed reading technique that you could ever learn . . .

Step 1: Skip 80% of the books that you were going to read.

He’s not kidding when he says this. Skip 80% of the books that you were going to read.

Well how do you know if you should skip a book? The Preview Technique. You should use the following preview technique with any book you consider reading . . .

Step 2: Spend 10-15 minutes reading the inside flaps or the back of the book, the table of contents, and then quickly flip through the book looking to see if the author has summarized and bulletized the important concepts.

You can compare this process with starting to build a puzzle and looking at the cover of the box to get an idea of where everything goes, finding the four corners, separating out the border, putting all the matching colors into piles, etc.

This step gives you the frame work for how it’s all put together. You’ve got the big picture and now you know whether you want to dive in, or not, and if you do, you’ve got the lay of the land so you have a better idea of where to find the most important concepts you seek.

Lots of non-fiction books will summarize chapters with bulleted lists of the highlights at the end of the chapter and some even summarize the entire end of the book at the end and you never even get there following the path the dis-educational system taught you to use.

The other cool thing that happens with this step is you can see if you already know most of what you see or . . . if it’s a book where you don’t know most of it.

If you know most of the book, you probably shouldn’t read it from front to back but rather you should skim for what’s going to add to your knowledge.

You now have permission to never read a book cover to cover again if you don’t want to

Most books are not written in a manner that allows for optimized learning.

This is why you can avoid deep sea diving on most books. If you do find an amazing book that is well organized feel free to read it cover to cover.

The gift you get from a book is your mind finding something you can go do a.k.a. behavior change that relates directly to you solving your problem or helping you fulfill your purpose you’re pursuing.

At this point when you find something actionable you can make a note in your journal, note pad, Evernote, etc. about what you discovered, write the page number, but most importantly you want to make a note of what you’re going to go do with what you’ve found.

When you you use the principle your mind goes into information orgasmic bliss – you know the warm fuzzy feeling that you get when you take action on something new and it actually works like the words said it would and the words become much more than words.

Another Non-System Approach To Speed Reading

Eben has found that reading faster is the key to reading faster.

Think of time when you were on a road trip and the speed limit was 75 and you were doing 81 and all of a sudden you hit the speed limit change asking you to slow down to 55, then 45, then 35 because you’ve come upon some little shit bird town out in the middle of nowhere.

When you slow down to 35 doesn’t it seem like you’re going 10 miles in hour? You adapted to flying at the velocity you were driving for that expanded period of time and now you feel like you’re going in slow motion.

When you practice reading faster you can start to read faster.

One of the mistakes that massively slows you down is when you read something, get confused and go back to the beginning and read it again. It’s much more efficient to keep reading and have faith that your mind will figure out what’s going on.

And if you get to the end of a chapter and you’re lost, jam through it again.

Here’s a technique to assist you in reading faster . . .

Run your finger down the left margin of the page and move your finger down the page as you readIf you do this for 5 minutes and then go back to reading normally for an hour you will have picked up your reading speed. And then if you do it again for 5 minutes at the beginning of your reading you’ll have increased your reading speed. Most people don’t experience how fast they can really read because they never challenge themselves. Here’s a technique that allows you absorb what you read . . .

Put it into practiceThere was a study that was done at Harvard with high income salespeople and out of all the traits they studied in these people the one they found that was the X factor they all had in common -the only thing they found they all had in common – was that when they learned something, they implemented it immediately. They heard it and put it into practice. So what Eben does is when he finds a golden nugget and then he looks for a way to take action on it. The other thing you can do is to teach someone what you’ve learned as soon as you possibly can. He has friends he calls at times to just to download on and he believes this is as selfish as it is generous. You want to teach what you discover and get into a discussion about it and talk about what it means to you and them.
And there you have it. You’re off the hook forever now from having to read a book like a turtle. You now have permission to pillage and plunder books and burn them to the ground when you’re done as you ride away with all their treasure. Did I just give you permission to be a Napoleonic thuggish ruggish book tyrant? I did! Now go out and make the most of of it! Talk soon,
Lewis LaLanne a.k.a. Note Taking Nerd #2 a.k.a. L.L. Cool Nerd
PS. And if your quest for personal improvement has you eager to implement more of what you read, you’ll definitely want to click here and check this out <—–

Part 2 of 2: Internet Marketing Experts Reveal 27 Ways To Monetize Social Media Marketing

NoteTakingNerd2 — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:05:00 +0000

Jason Van Orden, who spoke at Dan Kennedy’s social media money magnet internet marketing seminar reveals how to stop jerking your self esteem off with social media and actually start making some money with it

Hey you,

It’s Lewis a.k.a. Nerd #2.

As I mentioned in the Part 1 here of this series, Jason has spent 5 years figuring all 27 of these social media monetization strategies out and deploying them in his business.

This saves you a ton of time and money in that you don’t have to figure it out on your own but don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to eat this beast in one bite.

I believe this series will clear the confusion on how you can make money with social media and not come across as an annoying spam bot who’s so focused on getting leads that everyone ignores you.

These 27 strategies give you a reason to reach out to be cool and share awesomeness with your audience as well as offer them something they’ll be grateful to have been offered.

Now let’s proceed with . . .

Magnet #15: Streamline, Automate, Outsource

You want to spend time most of your day doing these three money making activities…

Creating content that you sell or give away – All he does is the outlining and recording and the rest of what you see in these 27 strategies is done for him.
Planning strategy to deploy
Making sales

Streamline the basic essence of what you’re trying to accomplish

You want to have procedures for everything – They record their show, upload it to their server and with one click of a button in their project manager software . . . they have a to-do list created of everything that needs to happen, from the editor being notified it’s ready to be worked to the transcriber getting alerted that it’s ready, to the writer getting notified that it’s ready to be turned into an article, and then another person is alerted to turn this into a video and put it onto YouTube.

They’ve taken all the best practices they’ve picked up and turned them into procedure lists.

And then they have specific instructions laid out for how this is all supposed to be executed. And as the final touch they have a VA create these procedures and put them into an operations manual.

Their operation manual is a WordPress blog with around 10 categories divided up by customer service, content management, traffic generation, accounting/financing, etc. and under those categories are a series of blog posts that serve as nothing but procedure lists.

They’re always looking for tools or people they can relegate or outsource stuff to.

Automate – Is there a tool that will do this for you automatically?

Traffic Geyser
Twitter app for Facebook – this lets you post whatever you put onto twitter, onto Facebook but you’ve got to be careful with this because Facebook might not like it if your volume is too high.
Notes app for Facebook,
www.tweetdeck.com This is what he uses to divide up all the people he follows, into priority groups. You can also send updates to twitter and Facebook from this or you can choose to only update one.
www.socialoomph.com – This service allows you to schedule out all of your twitter updates for the week or the month.

Surround yourself with a kick ass team that serves as your…

Audio editor – this guy fixes all the mess ups, turns the audio into an mp3, tags it correctly and uploads it our audio hosting and when he’s done, he shoots out an email saying it’s ready to roll to their transcriber.
Video editor
Transcriber –this person gets it into pixels and then sends to the VA who then puts it on the blog.
Writer – this person turns the transcriptions into free articles and blog posts.
Person to prep and post your content – They have 3 people working for them in the Philippines working for them full time doing this stuff and for all 3, it costs them $1,500 bucks.

These are all the people they have on their team.

Here’s some more places to find help at…

He loves hiring people in the Philippines.

They’re hardworking and eager to please and loyal. What he likes to do is either hire people full time or give them lots of part time work to keep them loyal so he can keep them around.

Onlinejobs.ph – This is headed up by a friend of his John Jonas who’s mastered this Filipino outsourcing process. You can go there and cruise resumes for whatever it is you need done, whether it be WordPress experts, transcriptionists, link builders, you name it. They hired a programmer, a project manager, and a designer this way.
Craigslist Manila
Elance.com – Don’t hire the cheapest person here. Go somewhere in the middle.
Odesk
99designs – If you need a logo, a twitter background, a layout for the cover and stuff for a special report, anything to do with graphics, you post a project and then it starts not a flood of bids that come in like on elance but instead it starts a contest and people start sending you what they’ve designed and then you get to pick from 20, 30, 40 different designs.

Magnet #16: Track Your Results

You want to track Affiliate system for your sales – They try to always track what channel sales are coming from and they’ve found the easiest way to do this is by using their affiliate system.

It’s built to track who sent them leads so that they can pay them.

So they go in and create a Facebook affiliate, a Twitter affiliate, and then when they log into their shopping cart, they’ll see where they came from. This reveals where people are buying from so that you can do more of whatever it is that is bringing in the money.

BudURL.com for your clicks – He doesn’t put any links out on twitter or facebook without using this. This lets you know how many clicks you got and how fast. This is a great way for testing what people like.

Your opt in conversions
Your replies and comments
Feedburner stats

Search engines are looking for to show you the most relevant content (this comes from something as simple as tagging your stuff right) from the most authoritative sources (This comes from backlinks).

When any new channel hits the scene you think like a search engine and ask yourself “How do I be relevant and authoritative here?”

In itunes he got people on his list to rate and comment on his stuff quickly and this skyrocketed his authority.

A third thing Google likes to see is real time traffic hitting a page.

Google bought feedburner because they have the best information in the galaxy on what people are interested in via their subscriptions to blogs and podcasts. If you have a feedburner account and you insert your feedburner redirect link into your emails, you’re piping a message directly to google letting them know that you’ve got activity RIGHT NOW.

Magnet #17: Wooing Partners

You comment on the blogs of people you’d like to partner with
You retweet their stuff – Guru’s really like this and notice it.
Talk to them on Facebook
Work all the levels – Don’t think you’re wasting your time if you’re a C lister and you’re networking with B listers. You’re not.

Every industry has it’s A listers. If you’re a C lister, it can seem hard to get them to mail to their list for you. When Jason started, he singled out the 2-3 people he wanted to work with and he credits this with him standing on the stage at that moment.

How do get on the superstars radar?

Twitter is a great place to start because sometimes people have their Facebook locked down but Twitter is wide open and it’s a place you can interact with them regularly. Another way to get on their radar is to go and comment on their blog regularly.

Take notes on their personal preferences (food, wine, women, etc. ) they write about and you can send them gifts.

Magnet #18: Live Show

Tag team Social Media & Ustream – This is a great way to coral people into one space at a certain time and get live interaction with your market to figure out what they want.

You can also use the feedback that comes from this show to refine your up coming launch process and re-tool your product. Ustream makes it very easy to broadcast yourself.

Then, a half hour before you air, you can put a message on Facebook and Twitter telling people you’re gonna be live in 30 minutes here… and then as you’re going live you can send the message that you’re live now.

You want to make sure your shows are 95% content/5% pitch – This could be split up into one broadcast or you could spread this 95/5 ratio throughout 4 shows where 3 are pure content and then the last one has 5% pitch at the end.

You could do a mini live cast and put this right on youtubez – if your show is 15 minutes and under, there’s a button you can click on Ustream that sends it directly to YouTube.

Magnet #19: Leverage Your Following

There are people who want access to your following – Joint venture opportunities
Speak from the stage and rock the mic
Book deals – these are a great way to reach a lot of people AND get credibility

You can wait for people to come to you, which they will, or you can go to them. Either way will make something happen for you.

Magnet #20: Barely Legal List Swipe

1) Find a following (who’s following them, not who they’re following) similar to yours on Twitter

2) Follow 100 of these people

3) 20-50% will come into your arms and follow you

4) Un-follow in 2-3 days anyone who didn’t want to put out – Twitter freaks out if you’re following way more people than are following you so this is a balancing act that you have to manage.

He keeps the number of people he’s following, slightly less than the people who are following him. And the key to this is un-following people who didn’t convert.

5) Get these peeps on your list – People fall in and out of love with Twitter and are new, shiny object oriented so you want to get them onto your mail list as soon as possible.

6) Rinse, repeat

Warning: this is controversial. Because all of your potential joint venture partners don’t know, like and trust you yet, they’re aren’t just gonna hand over their list to you.

Well on Twitter, someone’s following is right out in the open for you to see. People following a guru in your industry’s are gonna likely be interested in the same thing you offer. What’s laid out above is the way to legally swipe their list.

These tools speed along this process…

Twollow.com
Hummingbird.com
Socialtoo.com
or tweetadder.com

Magnet #21: Sell the Archives

If you’re using all these content creating strategies you’re gonna build some big archives.

You can divvy these up into seasons and put them on discs or into books so that your fans have everything in one place.

Magnet #22: Product Slices

Spread the seed of your excerpts through social media channels –

They give away first 15 minutes of an interview they do with someone and share it everywhere and send it with an offer to get into their membership site.

Tell people they can have it all with a call to action

Magnet #23: Premium Podcast

Premiumcast.com is a resource to make this happen

If you do decide to do an audio or video show, you’ll always want to have a free version of it available. It kicks ass for generating leads for and all the SEO benefits you get from spinning the content is awesome.

Big mistake is to start free and then cut off the welfare and just go to pure paid.

Premiumcast.com is an easy to way start getting paid for your higher level content.

Magnet #24: Private Social Network

You can do this in WordPress –

Use “Wishlist Member” or “Infusion WP”
BuddyPress – This gives the social network ability to your site and increases the stickiness a ton.

Continuity income is nice so that’s why he structured his business around a membership site model but he wanted to make it feel more like a Facebook/Twitter kind of environment where his fans could not only interact with him but also with each other.

These applications allow you to drip content out to prevent the problem that traditional sites have where people raid the cupboard and bail after the first month. They have it set up to where people get 1 module a month.

You’ve gotta make sure this is connected to your shopping cart so that when someone stops paying, they lose access. Wishlist does this. He uses infusion WP because he’s using infusionsoft.

Magnet #25: Don’t Neglect Direct Response Doctrine

Internet marketing is direct mail on glass

Don’t be a wussy when it comes to selling – Be careful not to train people that they only get free stuff from you and that they buy from others.

Sell early in the process and there won’t be shock when two years down the road, you have the balls to ask them to buy something from you.

Once people get on your list, offer them something awesome to buy

Magnet #26: Be Deliberate

Get goals set
Track these goals

He won’t post anything to any kind of social media site unless it meets one of these three purposes…

1) Attracts new people into the tent

2) Bonds with people

3) Commands, uh, I mean, asks people to take an action that gets them one step closer to handing you money

Magnet #27: Be Consistent

Get on Twitter/Facebook everyday
Blog 3 times a week
Do video/audio content 3-4 times a month
Hit your email list up at least once a week
Do a launch (yours or someone else’s) every other month, monthly if you’ve got big balls and tons of awesomeness to share

Action Jackson Plan

Create your social media profiles you want to start with

With Facebook, do whatever you can to get 25 fans right away because then they let you claim a vanity URL like . . . www.facebook.com/internetbusinessmatery

Choose one channel to begin with
Set yourself a goal

Pick the habit you want to start with new channel (posting one a day, 3 times a week, whatever)

Make a target for 5 key actions in your first week
Plan so you can have consistency

Remember frequent, authoritative content, that people will be driven to drink if they don’t have, is what you want

When you start any of these channels, make sure to notify your list of this development.

Hacking the Overwhelm

Focus on only five key next actions to take.

You don’t have to do everything right away. He’s sharing where he’s at 5 years down the road. You may be where he was 5 years ago. Be OK with that. Start one channel at a time.

And remember that consistency wins the game. It takes 21 days to build a new habit. Build one at a time. Over a year you can have 15 new money making social media habits all driving leads and sales for your business.

We’re done for the day. Unless of course you’ve got an awesome way to monetize social media that you’d like to share here in the comments section below or if you have a question, please feel free to ask away below or in the orange feedback tab you see to the right or email me.

Talk soon,

Lewis LaLanne a.k.a. Note Taking Nerd #2 a.k.a. L.L. Cool Nerd

PS. PS. If you want to put your hands on every key insight revealed by all of the internet marketing experts at Dan Kennedy’s Social Media Money Magnet seminar click here now <—–

Eben Pagan On The Right Mindset To Have When Starting A Business From Scratch

NoteTakingNerd2 — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Internet marketing expert Eben Pagan reveals the 10 key beliefs that separate the winners from the losers when it comes to starting a business from scratch. How many of these beliefs are going to be new to you?

Hey You,

It’s Lewis a.k.a. Nerd #2.

What I’m sharing with you today are the notes on Session 1: “The Right Mindset” from Eben Pagan’s course titled, “How To Build A Profitable Business Starting From Scratch”.

In this course Eben lays out strategies, tactics, and lessons that he’s learned from building the several businesses that he has that have brought in more than $100 million dollars worth of sales of products and services.

What you’re seeing here comes from him learning what didn’t work and what does so that now most of the products he launches and most of the businesses he starts, succeed over a long period of time.

It’s a well documented fact that around 80% of businesses fail in the first five years and the 80% of those that do survive fail in the next five years which means that something like 19 out of 20 businesses started, fall flat on their face before they ever see their 10th birthday and you can bet your ass that of the 1 business of every 20 that does survive, 80-95% of them are barely making it.

With Eben’s businesses succeeding in the face of statistics like this, it seems to me that it’d be a good idea to sit your ass down, drop everything else you’re doing and pay very close attention to what he’s learned about having the right mindset when it comes to building a business.

The 7 Core Components You Need To Build a Profitable Business

1. The Proper Mindset

2. The Proper Niche

3. The Proper Product

4. The Proper Marketing

5. The Proper Focus

6. The Proper Actions

7. The Proper People

These are the ingredients that make a business strong enough to defend itself from the odds that are stacked against it. I’ve covered #2 The Proper Niche in this post here. Now we’ll get started with Session 1: The Proper Mindset

Profit Generating Mindset #1: Bootstrapping Is The Way To Go

Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is an old expression that means lifting yourself from nothing to something with your own effort, resources, and resourcefulness.

In this context of starting a business, Eben feels it’s better to bootstrap than to go out and borrow a bunch of money for a new untested idea. What most people don’t know or don’t like to acknowledge, is the reality that most businesses and products don’t work. Most of them die either quick or slow deaths.

So when you’re spending someone else’s money, you’re gambling and you don’t have the house odds unless you’ve proven your concept via your own research, sweat, and money.

Profit Generating Mindset #2: Make It Prove Itself Small Before You Ever Go Big

If you want the recipe for how most people get their ass handed to them when starting a business, here it is: Throw all the money you have, all the money you can get from anyone who will lend to you, and put it all on what you “feel” can’t possibly fail.

This is bass ackwards. This is gambling. This is the what 95% of people who start a business do.

The way you know a business works is to take one of your products and try to sell it to one customer and see if they buy it. If they do, sell another one to another customer. Then refine your strategy so that you put yourself in front of more of your perfect prospects and offer what you sell to them.

If you try to sell this product one on one to someone and they don’t buy, you’ll learn something. You’ll find you’ve got to change your approach and if that doesn’t work, you’ll have come to the conclusion that no one wants from you what you thought they would and you’ll only be out your effort and what little money you spent to test your concept.

The path to progress and profit is to make it work on a small scale consistently. And only after you’ve cracked the code is when you shove big money across the table at this venture.

Profit Generating Mindset #3: “80+% of What I Try Will Fail”

At first glance that doesn’t seem like a very encouraging mantra to repeat to yourself, does it?

And the truth is, 80% is a generous number. It’s probably going to be higher than that. It will most definitely be higher if you don’t keep these mindsets here close to your heart.

Eben sees himself as an optimist in the long term. He believes that if he consistently keeps doing things that make him more valuable to his fellow man, building on what he’s learned from his mistakes, that more and more success will come to him.

But he sees himself as pessimist in the short term. He accepts the 80/20 universal law that dictates that most things, 9 out of 10, he tries out aren’t going to pan out the way he wanted them to.

He knows that if he keeps taking right action swings at the opportunity, the big money homeruns will accumulate based on what he continues to learn from the failures and carry him through all the strike outs. All the action he takes will allow him to crack the code on some crucial steps, systems, products, niches, and methodologies that prove to be profitable over the long haul that never would’ve been realized had he operated under the delusion that “If I do something it should work and if it doesn’t work I should quit because this business is bad, the economy is bad, the customers are bad, the money-grubbing corporations are bad, etc.”

Most people that make a living investing in the stock market are not winners. Of the people who are winners – the top 5-15% – they make all of their money on only a few of their trades. So out of a 100 trades they made for that year, the majority of their money will have come from 5-10 trades they made where they hit it out of the park. Most of their other trades will have lost them money .

Same thing holds true for poker – most of your winnings will have come from a few hands. Most of the hands you get will be shit. Most of the hands you play will actually lose you money.

This is the opposite of what your chimpanzee wiring wants you to do. You’re addicted to instant gratification because we live in an instant gratification driven society. When you smell pizza, you don’t go inside your mind and imagine how drained you’re going to feel 30-60 minutes from the time you shoveled the pizza into your pie hole. You don’t project 20 years ahead and imagine having 47 pounds of accumulated sludge that’s made up of old pizza, ice cream, potato chips, and gummy bears in your colon that’s lodged firmly in place making it all but impossible to take a nice healthy shit and that’s poisoning you from the inside. Nope.

What you do is imagine thing you want RIGHT NOW and then you run towards it. Thinking long term is something we don’t come wired with and have to train ourselves to do with mantras like, “80% of what I try is going to fail”.

This mindset gives you permission to be the perfect non-perfectionist. It makes it okay for you to shut down a project that’s not working and move on to the next experiment.

Profit Generating Mindset #4: “My business isn’t a job”

If you want to guarantee you fail in business, approach it the same way you’ve approached all the jobs you’ve ever had.

The difference between running a business and being employed is as vast as the difference between being a child and being a parent.

It’s very easy to think you understand what running a business is like because you’ve been employed by one. But if you want a business that makes more money than it spends, you’ve gotta ditch the idea that this gonna happen with the same paradigm you brought to your jobs.

Employees show up at work, sit there for a fixed amount of time and they get a pay check for doing so. They still get this pay check whether they do just okay work or if they do amazing work. Shit, employees even get paid if they don’t show up if they had “sick days” or “Vacation hours”.

A business owner only gets paid for creating value and getting results. The second they stop doing either of those, the ship sinks and if they’re really shitty at managing money, they not only have no money coming in anymore but they actually owe money for the business that they killed.

And this folds perfectly into the next mindset which says . . .

Profit Generating Mindset #5: “The amount of money I make is in proportion to how much value people believe I’m giving them”

Business usually offer either products or services.

This is different than being an employee because your take home pay isn’t dependent on the amount of hours you put in or how hard you worked.

There’s some carry over of how much effort you put into a project or how hard you worked but it’s not like at a job where you put in 40 hours and you get paid a set amount of money.

In a business you can work 22 hours of the day for 30 days and make ZERO dollars if you haven’t created value for a customer, found that customer, and explained your value proposition to them in a way that makes them want to give you money for it.

The value you create and market is the gauge of how much income you’ll haul in or not. Not hours supposedly worked. It’s about value.

Profit Generating Mindset #6: “I’m creating a system, not just trying to make sales”

Pretty much anytime we’re seeking instant gratification, we’re killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

An all consuming impulse to do something is more times than not, no good for us in the long term. Having a consuming impulse for a drink of water after having had slept for 8 hours and giving it to ourselves is an example of something that doesn’t hurt us. Passing by the ice cream parlor or some other junk food establishment and caving to that all consuming impulse for it kills more people in the United States than any other cause of death. It just doesn’t kill people immediately like the plague so everybody laughs it off thinking that acting on their impulses won’t ever catch up to them, but they’re wrong.

As much as don’t want to, if you want your business to kick ass you have to fight instant gratification. As contrary as is may seem, you’re not trying to make money first and foremost. Focusing on getting money is not going to bring you money over the long haul.

The place where the majority of people come at starting a business from is the desire to make money from it. They’ll plead their form of logic to you and say, “I need money. If I don’t get some money right now I’m not gonna be able to pay my bills and then I’ll be shit out of luck so what the hell are you talking about not going into business to just make money?!?”

The further ahead you can think and the more effort you put into activity now that’s going to make a difference further out, a few hours out, a few days out, a few weeks out, a few months out, a few years out, a few decades out, the more you can build the capacity to do now to build a better future, the more money you’re actually going to make.

This goes against all of your internal wiring that’s driven by the desire for fat to melt off your body and your penis to grow to your knee over night as a result of you slathering some magic potion on it.

Most people will say, “I don’t need money in a few years. I need the money now.” What Eben is saying is that if you don’t go to work on the three year, the six year, and the twelve year income, if you make it that far you’ll arrive in worse shape than when you started.

Power lies within enduring a little short term pain in order to build a better future.

The essence of a life well lived and that improves over time is all in creating a better future if you intend to live past today. By surrendering to instant gratification you’re making your future worse and worse and worse.

So in business you’re trying to develop a system where you’ve figured out what your customers want, build the products/services they want to buy, market and sell it in the sexiest way possible, and continually working to make this process better and better and better so this business becomes a salable asset that’s throwing off consistent profit.

Creating one product and putting it up for sale on your site and hoping you can just kick back and get wealthy from that is a far cry from creating a customer getting, customer satisfying, profitable system.

Once you have a system that gives you an advantage because you’ve targeted a group of customers that you understand better than anyone and you have a product/service that they find very unique and valuable and you’ve figured out how they like to be marketed and sold to, and you’ve built a machine that does this for you that runs independent of you, that’s when you’re gonna make some real fucking money. Hand over fist money.

Until you do this, you’re just playing “Business”.

Profit Generating Mindset #7: “I’ll succeed in business when I’m doing multiple things right all at once”

Think about your body and the concept of health.

A nice definition of health is the absence of dis-ease in your body and having an abundance of vitality, radiance, energy, feeling like you can move your body with ease.

Well all of this goes out the window with one little blockage to your heart. This and other any other major organ ailments wreak havoc on the entire system. So in essence, each of your organs being in good condition are building blocks that equal feeling healthy.

And just as the accumulation of all the systems in your body firing off right lead to you feeling awesome, business success is the result of several things going well simultaneously.

It’s not just one thing that makes a business successful. It’s a cluster of live giving functions. If one of these functions is out of whack or non-existent, it will be the equivalent of one of the major organs in your body shutting down – you’re in danger.

Most experts think that marketing and selling is beneath them. They believe they shouldn’t have to sell their thing because it’s so fuckin’ awesome that it sells itself. This is where experts usually tank when they start their own business. They depend solely on the product they created or the service they provide to pay the bills. And only when the harshness of reality that they need a top notch marketing and selling process kicks them in the chest do they ever see the light.

If you don’t know all the key pieces that make the system hum along, you’ll be winging it doing only 3 of the essential 7 things and you’re sentencing your business to it’s death by not supplying it with what it needs to survive and thrive.

Think about how complex your car is. All the components under the hood, in the dash, along the bottom and yet if there’s no battery in that car, it’s useless. This is the way your business works. It needs all the pieces present and this course covers each of these pieces.

Profit Generating Mindset #8: Revenue isn’t the same thing as profit

Most people brag about revenue; not profit.

Eben admits to doing this and acknowledges that it’s much more awe-inspiring for him to throw out the fact that he sold $1 million dollars worth of product during his last launch than it is to say he made $200,000 worth of profit.

The rude awakening people arise to when they start a business is that in order to have $1 dollar that they can spend however they please, they’ll probably have had to earn ten dollars in sales/revenue in order for that to happen.

Why is that? Because running the business costs you $5-7 of those $10 dollars in the form of investments, material, equipment, advertising, internet hosting, online tools, merchant accounts, all the different mouths that take a bite out the sale you made.

And after you pay those expenses, you have to take the money out of the business and pay income tax on it and a number of other little fees that sneak in and siphon off the money.

This is why it’s not unusual to only have a $1 or $2 left over from a $10 dollar sale.

So if you want to pocket a $100,000 dollars a year as an income, you’ll probably need a business that’s got revenue anywhere from $500,000 to a $1,000,000 dollars. When you get the pieces of the business kicking ass, this isn’t impossible to do.

Profit Generating Mindset #9: “It’s all my fault”

If you don’t take 100% responsibility for the success of your business, you probably won’t be in business very long.

When you were born, you weren’t responsible for anything because you couldn’t even fathom what responsibility was. And while you’re growing up under your parents’ roof, you don’t learn about being 100% responsible because they’re always acting as a kind of safety net for you. It might’ve been a real shitty safety net but it was something.

When you work for someone else, it never even crosses your mind that the owner(s) of the business are taking ALL of the responsibility for earning the revenue, taking the risk, taking on the responsibility of paying payroll, paying taxes, all of the stuff that goes into making the ten dollars that allows them to have $1 to feed themselves and managing this beast of a process. We don’t appreciate any of this, nor do we contemplate that they might be losing their ass and hanging on by the hairs on their chinny chin chin.

No one understands this at their core until they have to do all this math as the business owner themselves.

And the cold water splashes on many a people’s face when they spend a month building a pretty website that no one even shows up at. Or, they give $500 bucks on an ad in the paper and get ZERO sales from it and then comes the realization that there’s a lot more to making this whole business thing work than they’d previous thought there was and where they used to believe their employers are taking advantage of them, they now recognize they actually were taking advantage of the owners talent at running a business.

You’re 100% responsible now.

No one’s coming to save you or cover for you if you don’t feel like showing up. It’s all on you. You have to harness you mind’s amazing capacity to focus and make shit happen.

If you try to blame other people – the advertising media you used where your ad bombed, Wal-Mart for opening up around the corner, the cheap skate customers you attract with your marketing – that’s not gonna cut it. It’s all your fault because you’re the one making the decisions.

Profit Generating Mindset #10: Success Shows Up When I Get Off My Ass And Take Action

Running a business is all about taking the right actions.

It’s not about brainstorming, tinkering, or planning with perfection as the goal and being scared shitless to do something unless it’s fail-proof. It’s not about getting the approval and sanction from your peers before you make a move. It’s about taking a good idea and putting into play and then seeing what happens.

Learning happens when your behavior changes. Most of think we’ve learned something because we have a new idea inserted into our consciousness. This is only part of learning. An idea must be harnessed to action and ridden into battle where you see what takes place in the form of your results. This is true learning. This is when “get” it.

Most people operate from imaginary wisdom where they theorize about how the world works. But they back up their theories with action. Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors ever to invest (with $60 billion dollars in results to his name) points out that we always think we’re right. He doesn’t do this. He’s operates from the premise that he’s wrong and looks for ways to verify that he isn’t before making his decision to shove money at something.

When you’re running a business the way you verify whether you’re wrong or right is to go take action in the form of a small test. You put the bait out there in the wild and see how the animals respond to it. And if nothing happens you change your approach which may mean moving on to a completely different project.

Your success will show up only to the extent that you’re consistently willing to put yourself out there and test the waters on a long term basis.

This is opposite view of what you see sold online every day, “GET 20 FREE MONEY MAKING WEBSITES FOR ONLY $9.99!!!”

This approach gives anyone who’s teaching how to build an online business a bad rep. Eben says he doesn’t know anyone who’s consistently kicking ass over the long haul who isn’t taking innovative and consistent action.

And if you wish to pursue this mindset it’s going to take you overcoming your fear of failure. You must overcome yourself in order to get yourself to do what needs to be done and build a profitable business for yourself from scratch.

Your Action Steps:

Your mindset acts as the context for everything you create in a certain area of life. What is the key mindset shift that will allow you leap over your fear and competitors and create business success for yourself?

What part of your mindset has held you captive and stopped you from achieving business success? What’s the belief, the paradigm, the way you viewed the world that kept you on the outside looking in?

Which mindset shift of the ten laid out above will create the biggest shift for your future success?

How can you remind yourself of the mindset shift that you’re making so that you create the success that you want relevant to building a business? Note on your mirror? Reminder pop up in your digital calendar?

Answer these three questions or forever stay stay prisoner or to your limiting beliefs. And then once you have, proceed to the notes on Session 2: Finding The Proper Niche here <—-

Talk soon,

Lewis LaLanne a.k.a. Note Taking Nerd #2 a.k.a. L.L. Cool Nerd

PS. If you want to get your head on straight when it comes to building a business and becoming one of the internet marketing experts like Eben Pagan or an offline marketing expert like Dan Kennedy, you definitely want to put your hands all over the these notes right here if you haven’t already <—–

Part 1 of 2: Internet Marketing Experts Reveals 27 Ways To Monetize Social Media Marketing

NoteTakingNerd2 — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Hey You,

It’s Lewis a.k.a. Nerd #2.

Stop hoping that the time you’re putting into social media will pay off someday banking on the fact you’ve hopefully built up some good will and use what you see here to make your social media channels put money in your bank account as soon as today.

Today is the day you get yourself out of the “Friend Zone” 95% of the people using social media for their business languish in.

It’s taken Jason 5 years to collect all of these and to start using them in his bidniz. He’s already discovered them, tested them, and put them to work so you’re light years ahead of where he was when he started but don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to do all of them right away. Start with three of them and build out from there.

Now let’s get this show on the road . . .

Magnet #1: Your Money Map

Get attention
Get permission
Get engagement
Connect & build a relationship
Get Action

Keep this list in front of you, refer to it and remember all the things learned in this program that helped you with each of these steps.

Magnet #2: Media Money

Get more traffic from search engines
Increase the size of your list
Get higher open rates on your emails

They do this through consistent content distribution. People expect to hear from them.

Get higher opt-in conversions
Increase your sales conversions

Magnet #3: Webinars

You want to take baby steps

Sending people to a sales page directly off of Twitter isn’t the best strategy. But sending them from Twitter to a webinar registration works.

Use gotowebinar.com

Very easy to use. They give you an opt-in page where people can register by giving you their name and their email address and immediately after they get the email giving them the call-in information and then right before the call they get another one.

40-50% of people who actually registered, showing up on your webinar is a good percentage. These are hot leads.

Export your list

After the call you can go into go-to webinar and export only the contact info of people who showed up or, the whole list.

He likes using iContact for the auto-responder here

They don’t export this list to aweber because these people have already demonstrated they’re interested but aweber insists on automatically sending an email to people telling them they have

to opt into your list to actually be sent mail to them on their service, so you end up losing some of these names.

He figures they’ve already signed up for the webinar, that’s enough of an opt in for him so he goes to icontact.com, a email service that once you upload names into, it doesn’t ask you to make people re-opt in and then you can follow up with them.

Focus on urgency/time
Close the sale when done

Webinars solve a huge problem with social media marketing that’s anytime anywhere because they’re time specific. They force people to show up, and hopefully focus on one thing for that hour and warm them up to buying.

If you sold some people on your webinar, make sure you do a replay of it for the people who missed it.

Magnet #4: Cross Channel Promotion

You can do multi-part series

Maybe this is a 3-4 part series. Then put it out on your blog. Then tell people who watched that video that to get the second part, they can go over to your Facebook fan page and watch it there and then to twitter and then back to your email list where they can opt in if they haven’t already.

Magnet #5: Sales Syndication

Use all the channels you can for promotions and launches

Remember it takes 5-7 contacts to make a sale so hit people from all avenues to speed this process up.

Magnet #6: Launch Sequence

1. Kick ass headline

Grab their attention with a killer concept (his latest was “You don’t need a big list to make big money”). Flesh it out. And then tell them what they can expect to see in the next video

2. Show them results in advance

Take one of the challenges you know your market has and solve it for them now. Give them a checklist or a tool or an idea that will knock it out today so they will see results now, not some time in the future.

The barrier to entry in his prospects was the fact that they get all hung up on what niche to pursue. If their biggest concern is evaporated for them, it makes it that much easier for them to buy come launch day. So this video in their sequence showed them exactly what they needed to do in order to find their niche.

3. Use Q & A to kill objections

This is where you start mentioning that you’ve put together a product. Figure out any other excuses people will give you for not buying what you’re gonna offer and knock these out here.

4. Mafia offer too good to refuse

This video lays out what you have to offer. They send this out the day before they open their cart. They tell you they wanted to give you a sneak peek so that you had time to think about this.

But you always want to make sure that you have some kind of sense of urgency in the equation by limiting how many people you’ll work with or telling people the price goes up every X

number of sales, etc.

You can set this launch to automatically unfold for all the new people who opt into any part of your list, twitter, Facebook Fan or email, or you can do it once.

These lead to the biggest paydays for him. You want to tell people a story, while selling them. This ends up landing on people softly if you do it right.

With content videos you want to keep them to 3 minutes or so but your launch videos can be longer.

Magnet #7: Shoot Fish In a Barrel

Use surveys – they like www.surveygizmo.com
Use Twitter replies

People respond quickly to survey questions posed to them here.

You could ask one question or you could have a link there that sends them to 4 questions. The feedback you’re gonna get is gold because they tell you in their language and from their perspective what their problems are.

Use Facebook commenting platform

Questions to ask…

How experienced are they…

When he started his show, they assumed they were speaking to intermediate people and it turned out they were speaking to mostly beginners and this caused them to shift what they talked about and what they offered.

What’s your biggest question/fear/frustration about X?

Open ended questions are powerful for marketing because people have to pull their thoughts out of their mind and tell them to you.

What do you want and why?

People don’t want products. They want freedom, respect, security.

This question gives you the picture of what each of these look like to your specific prospects.

Ask them for any other comments or questions they have for you

Too many times in business, we make assumptions about what people want instead of figuring out what they really want. People don’t want psychoanalysis; they want to be rid of their anxiety. It’s the same as Mike Stewart figuring out he was saying the wrong shit and was losing sales because of it.

Magnet #8: Mind Reading

Enter the conversation going on in the minds of your customers

This is where you can use search.twitter to go an lurk in the conversation threads people are having about your niche. People are always asking questions, making statements or blowing off steam and this lets you get inside their minds.

Resonate with them right away

When you parrot back everything you learned, people will be able to go inside themselves and say, “This guy gets it.”

Magnet #9: Affiliate Sales Booster

Share and relate your experience with a service or product

Talk about them in all of your social media channels.

Share your results
Transfer trust to you

When people do this they transfer the trust their list has in them, to you.

Give links to affiliate content

You can link to their content on their launch blog or other content they’ve built for the launch.

Use the interview strategy

They interviewed Jeff Walker and introduced them to their list before they ever asked you to buy from him.

Promoting people this is way is their #3 income stream.

Magnet #10: Affiliate Tutorials

Pick a solution to a painful problem

If you don’t have a guru product you’re selling as an affiliate, you can do the same for a tool like web hosting.

Join an affiliate program
Syndicate a direct and to the point tutorial

Send this out to all your channels and even insert it into your auto responder sequence.

Lead people to your product or service through your affiliate link

Once again, share your experience with the service/product. He starts everything with a tutorial, then refers and like magic, every month he gets a four-figure check from the hosting company.

Where to Find Affiliate Products

Stuff that you use

What key services do you use or do your clients need that you can refer? And you can get them to buy all while creating content that you get to distribute out to your channels which helps bolster your expert position.

Peep your niche’s affiliate program

You can go to google and type in “name-of-your-niche affiliate program”

CommissionJunction.com

Clickbank.com

This is a way you can start making money with social media even if you don’t have your own products.

Magnet #11: Rolodex Link Sharing

Add resource tab to your blog
Send helpful tips to your social media channels

www.crazyegg.com is a heat map service they use to track where people are clicking on your site. The tab called “Toolbox” is one of the most clicked areas on their site. When you click there, you see all the services they recommend and every link is an affiliate link.

Once a week you can put out a recommendation to your following across all channels that brings them back to this page.

Magnet #12: Use Testimonials as Content

Your top success stories
Specific results
Answer primary questions of your audience
Help people overcome their fears.

They used to only interview gurus on their show/podcast and once they started interviewing users just like the other people listening to the show, their sales to their membership site started going up.

They’ve inserted a survey into their auto-repsonder series that goes out to all of their academy members that encourages them to share their success stories with them.

If you do video, do them like 3-4 minutes. If you do audio, you can do them like 20-30 minutes because people will listen to doing other stuff like driving.

Make sure to ask them how they overcame some huge obstacle your audience has. When they see Joe Six Pack who sounds like a half retarded overcoming this challenge, and they can go see their site and see this idiot actually got something off the ground, the people listening get a boost in their belief that they can do it too and it boosts your credibility.

Out of the 3 shows they do every month, they make sure one of them is a success story from one of their members.

Magnet #13: Twitter Testimonials

These can be powerful social proof
Snap screen shots of these
Favorite these posts and link to them

When people say awesome stuff about you on twitter, you can use these. It’s a totally different impression someone gets when they you type out someone’s testimonial vs. seeing it in the raw form via screen shot.

If you “favorite” these posts in twitter, they’ll stay around.

Magnet #14: “Send me an email” offer

This is smooth
Give incentives
Give preview of the product
Send people to Aweber opt-in e-mail

You’ve got people following you on all your channels and you want to get them onto your email list, and it’s hard to get opt-ins directly from these sources.

So, if you offer some kind of awesomeness, like, “If you want to preview the first two chapters of my book, just shoot me an email here at…”

It’s really easy for anyone to reply to this wherever they are.

Aweber has encrypted email lists set up to where if someone replies to that certain list, they automatically opt them into your list and send them what you promised and you’ve captured the lead.

You want to create an email for your site, freereport@yourbusiness.com. Then let people know that they can send an email to you and you’ll automatically whisk what you

promised back to them.

All you end up doing is forwarding these emails to the cryptic aweber list and this gets them into your aweber stream.

That’s it for Part 1. Make sure you mosey your ass on over to here to get in on all the awesomeness Part 2 has in store.

Talk soon,

Lewis LaLanne a.k.a. Note Taking Nerd #2 a.k.a. L.L. Cool Nerd

PS. If you want to put your hands on every key insight revealed by all of the internet marketing experts at Dan Kennedy’s Social Media Money Magnet seminar click here now <—–

If You Don’t Think, You Don’t Grow Rich

NoteTakingNerd2 — Mon, 07 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Personal improvement notes on THE single surefire way to avoid being seen as a bum in the eyes of your peers, your family and your friends

Hey You,

It’s Lewis a.k.a. Nerd #2.

I imagine you’ve heard the passage “Leaders are readers,” before and the speakers who say this usually back this statement up with data like this that I found and revealed here . . .

A study by the American Book Sellers Association said that the average business person reads .7 professional books every 5 years. No, that’s not a typo that’s .7 – there are so many people who don’t read that the national average is less than one book. Wow.
People perceive reading to be hard and they don’t do it because they don’t have to. There’s no bitch of nun beating them in school for not having the right answers and there’s no douche canoe father indirectly threatening to leave them out of the will and his good graces if they don’t graduate from the school he wants them to so they can work in the profession he wants them to.
On the flip side, the average Fortune 1,000 CEO reads six books every year.
Tim Sanders rolled this stat out to make the point that “leaders are readers” but I’m not all that impressed by this number and it doesn’t bring that point home to me.
This number speaks volumes about the 95% majority of these CEO’s who are dragging this average to the paltry number of six books by reading nothing at all while the 5% at the top are probably reading a book every week or two.
So what this stat clearly states is that you be ahead relevance wise of 95% of Fortune 1,000 if you can muster up the eye strength and will power to read one book every nine weeks. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

What I want to share with today are four key compelling reasons Dan Kennedy gave in one of his Gold Plus faxes 7 or 8 years ago that puts some some actual muscle behind the blanket statement of “leaders are readers”.

I’ll give you his reason first and then I’ll give you my take on it. Here we go . . .

Why You Must Read A Lot To Succeed

Incredibly Important Reason #1: Varied, diverse input of ideas, viewpoints, life stories, examples, all the essential raw material poured into your subconscious mind, for it to sift sort, try matching up with other puzzle pieces it already has, so it can occasionally yell “Eureka!” and hand you something profitable or life changing. Without the new stuff it just sleeps an you wander aimlessly through life. Wealth Secret: You can’t manufacture anything without raw material.

I would be hopelessly paralyzed when it comes to writing posts for this site if I didn’t embrace this reason.

And it’s not because I’m stupid and the brain tank is on “E”. What happens for me while hearing different takes on ideas I know or entirely new ones is that it makes me remember what I’ve already learned.

How does it do this? Well, for learning to happen we have to link the new information coming in to something we’re already familiar with.

Tony Robbins talked about how if he was talking with a physicist who was trying to explain something very complicated to him, he would stop the person ask them to explain how what they’re trying to teach him is like making a sandwich – or some other thing every one knows how to do. This is linking new ideas to familiarity so the new knowledge can be absorbed rather than rejected.

Well something special happens when your mind is exposed to something you read year ago. Take for example these four reasons. I see these and they’ve triggered a flood of memories of things I’ve learned since the last time I’d read them, memories I hadn’t brought to surface in years. And now I’ve got a blog post out it.

And none of this would’ve happened had I not valued the idea of loading up the subconscious mind over the years with high octane knowledge and instead choose to fill my mind with useless trivia that allowed me to have the answer to the question of, “Who was the first person to ever win American Idol?” on the tip of my tongue.

We’re all loading the subconscious. The question is, with what are we loading it with and what are the consequences of stock piling away all that we did? Are you gonna have the straw house mind that caves at the first opposition of it’s feeble structure . . . or will you have the brick house mind that can’t be blown down by the big bad wolf that consists of the inevitable failures, assholes, and challenges you’ll meet in the future?

The choice is up to you. Choose wisely.

Incredibly Important Reason #2: Without exposure to others’ thinking your own range of thought shrinks. Soon, you’re a mental midget. Your range of thought narrows, like your range of motion shrinks if you don’t move and stretch.

In Renegade Millionaire, Dan declares that 95% of people are mental midgets – not by capacity, but by their own decision to be so.

I can’t imagine how big of a retard I’d be if was still on the same plane of thinking I’d been on when I was 15 years old.

Can you believe that some people actually think that just because you’ve gotten older, you know more?

But I have evidence to the contrary – acquaintances I’ve re-connected with on Facebook from that era of my life who are just as back asswards now as they were back then. Shit, I don’t even have to extend to acquaintances on Facebook because I’ve got family like that. You probably do too.

All that has expanded in their mind is bullshit – sports trivia, TV show trivia, music trivia, and movie trivia. What the majority has accumulated in reference to something that actually can make them healthier, wealthier, and wiser pales in comparison to all of the above.

Now some of your old acquaintances might not have been raised in single parent homes in the projects or gone to jail multiple times or had 4 kids with 3 different dad’s by the age of 30 but I’m guessing that if they don’t embrace this reason, they’re far from a pillar of innovation and inspiration in their industry.

Maybe your old acquaintances consist of those people who did everything right – went to school, got good grades, got their diploma, got married, and now if they stop numbing the pain of being themselves with their phone, Facebook, Twitter, TV, video games, alcohol, drugs, etc. and shut their mind up for a few seconds and look at who they’ve become they might feel like they’d be scared out of their goddamn mind and feel like they’d be better off dead because they hate the chicken shit, debt-ridden, passion-less life they’ve boxed themselves into.

But the point that’s left out of Dan’s reason is that you want exposure to people who are playing at the next highest level

We’re all exposed to “others’ thinking” but the key lies within who the others are. Are they incredible people who are empowering others by their words and example or are they fucktards who whine and drag people into the slop that is their warped and diseased consciousness?

Think of your mind as a plant.

When a plant is exposed to water, fertile soil, and sunlight, it flourishes and gives off beauty and rich oxygen. Expose this same luscious plant to toxic sludge and it will cease to offer any value to their environment.

Who and what will you expose your mind to?

Incredibly Important Reason #3: You can’t stay current if you don’t read. You must read a monstrous amount and you’ll probably still be behind. You should be reading a book or two, half a dozen magazines, and a few newspapers every week. If not, you become a dinosaur.

This fax is now 7-8 years old now and you probably know Dan’s a caveman when it comes to technology and rails against it which is why he speaks only of consuming knowledge via reading print books, magazines, and newspapers.

Of course, I know he endorses listening to enlightening audio programs. So I’m expanding this reason to, “You can’t stay current if you don’t consistently upload information that moves you closer to realizing your goals into your mind via print, pixel, video or audio.

The key part of that sentence is “information that moves you closer to your goals” because as we all know, all information is not created equally. You never want to mistake activity for achievement.

And I, just as much as you, yearn for idiot entertainment. For me lately this has consisted of watching both seasons of “The Walking Dead”, the first season of BOSS, and the first season of “The Borgias”. ALL IDIOT BRAIN DEAD ENTERTAINMENT.

I’m not immune from the siren call of this bullshit.

What I am changing though for these next 90 days is I am only letting myself indulge in brain dead idiot entertainment as a reward for reaching each of my daily outcomes of spending 30 minutes learning French with Rosetta Stone, 30 minutes improving my typing speed, 30 minutes meditating/breath work, my regimen of voice exercises, some form of exercise/physical stimulation, and scripting my next day.

Until each of these are accomplished for the day, I don’t get to indulge in mind numbing activity. Once they are, I get to go balls to the walls completely guilt free.

This is all aside from the learning I need to do on a daily basis in order to be able to produce notes and write the posts I do for this site.

I love cruising the web for the latest memes, making people laugh their ass of on Facebook and going into a coma in front of my TV just like you probably do.

Some gurus tell you to quit all of this cold turkey – no TV, no surfing, no partying. I won’t. I would say to abstain from indulging until you’ve done some stretch activities to move your life forward. And going to work doesn’t cut it. That’s not stretching yourself. Stretching yourself is anything you do that aren’t already doing now that would move you closer to your goals.

I listed mine above. To give you a hint at what yours are, think about all the things you say you want to do, that you say you don’t have time for. Start with that list.

Incredibly Important Reason #4: If you want to influence anyone, including your children, they need to see you advancing and reading. They need to hear you talking about and acting on what you read.

My father did this by joining Alcoholics Anonymous.

When he first started he spent most of free time going to meetings and talking with his sponsor and serving others. I was a little pissed that he wasn’t around to play around with us as much. His wife and my mom ragged on him most for that but I didn’t mind because now the house was nicer to be around when he was around.

What annoyed me more was how he got all preachy with all that shit, you know like new converts do with religion, and I didn’t want to hear it. I actually didn’t need to hear it because I saw the night and day difference. I may have been young but I wasn’t mentally retarded.

He did the same thing with running shortly after joining A.A.

He went from a complete non-athlete at the age of 39 who’d boozed the second he got off work from being a 6th grade teacher and smoking a couple packs a day . . . to running a 5k and he steam rolled this into eventually piling up 13 marathons he completed – all with a jacked-up Spondylosis spine.

My dad learned some new stuff, took massive action and therefore his whole energy and demeanor changed and he brought more to the table to offer me by his example.

How can you be, do, and have more for you and the people you touch in your life?

“Advancing” doesn’t mean you have to go to make a dramatic shift like joining A.A. (unless of course, you’re a fuckin’ degenerate), start training to run a marathon or go back to school and get a diploma but for god’s sake do something besides getting your sense of “Advancement” from reaching the next level of “Call of Duty” or from buying an information product you know you aren’t going to do shit with.

Start small in any area of life doing something that moves you closer to the goals that enrich you and those people you have love for.

Oh, and this is important – don’t ram your journey of improvement down their throat. No matter what you think, this won’t work. Never does. The only converts you’ll get will feel like they’ve been forced to join you and they’ll do everything half assed and bail on the “movement” the first opportunity they get.

Just BE more attractive and if people ask you questions about your transformation simply tell them they’re welcome to join you if they wish. Invite rather than impose.

But guess what? Someone in your life isn’t going to like this. I don’t know who it’s gonna be but it’s a guarantee that when you start dedicating time to make progress, which takes place of the time you used to spend jerking off with them, they will overtly or passively piss on what you’re doing.

This is what I think about those people . . .

My dad had to live by this credo in order to advance, Dexter had to, I had to. When you embrace this mentality, that’s when you’ll be free to think the thoughts and take the actions that allow you to grow rich – mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Talk soon,

Lewis LaLanne a.k.a. Note Taking Nerd #2 a.k.a. L.L. Cool Nerd

PS. If you want access to the premium personal improvement advice Eben Pagan doled out in his Self Made Wealth how to get rich course, I highly suggest you click here now to put your hands all over these notes I took on the full program <—–

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Marketing Notes On What It Takes To Make Your Advertising Pay

NoteTakingNerd2 — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:43:00 +0000

There’s a few great campaigns that have been done by advertising agencies – See my marketing notes on some of the finest ones ever created

Hey you,

It’s Lewis a.k.a. Nerd #2.

Today I want to share with you notes I took on a presentation that featured some of the finest concepts mainstream ad agencies have to offer.

These are notes I took FOREVER to take for you from “Art & Copy: Inside Advertising’s Creative Revolution” which is a documentary film directed by Doug Pray

First of all let me say that I believe 95% of the ads that ad agencies pump out suck moose cock. Their main purpose is to please the agency, to not offend anyone with a pulse or to offend unnecessarily, and to get nominated for some kind of advertising agency award – not to get the maximum response from the perfect prospects.

Now this show only features ad men who run famous agencies and highlights major campaigns that got massive attention because they ran nationwide on TV and in print.

And being that I’m in favor of advertising that not only gets attention from precisely the perfect prospect but also gets results, I’ve left out the campaigns where I felt like it seemed like the campaign was all about the agency jerking themselves off in pursuit of winning an award and I only highlighted the ones where there was a direct correlation to the ad running and money flowing in like a motherfucker as a result of it.

Enough talk. Let the show begin . . .

“The frightening and most difficult thing about being what someone calls a “creative person” is having no idea where any of his thoughts come from really and not having any idea of where they’re going to come from tomorrow.”

George Lois (you’ll see his stellar back story below) said, “I was listening to a discussion on what some people at some agency like J. Walter Thompson thought advertising was and my partner saw me making faces and he asked me why I was doing so and I said, ‘I think these guys are in a different business than we are. I think of advertising as poison gas –advertising should tear you up, choke you up, give you the chills and maybe make you pass out when you watch it.’

Phyllis K. Robinson was the original copy chief at Doyle Dane Bernbach. Advertising up until this little 14 person agency started up in the 50’s was the old boys club – ingrown mediocrity. The old boys thought this agency would never catch up but they blew past them and left them in the dust.

Bill Bernbach was the guy who pioneered putting the art director

in the same room as the copywriter. This had never been done before. The way it was done before was the copy was taken to the art department and they made an ad out of it. Art directors had zero input in terms of the thought behind the copy they were handed. When Bernbach told the art director and the copywriter to work it out together it opened the gate for art to actually enhance the message.

I’d never heard of George Lois until I watched this but seeing his animated renegade spirit come alive on scree (which you’ll see in video below) and in his work has led to me LOVING George Lois.

Here’s a snippet from a New York Times piece done on him that gives you a lightning fast version of his back story . . .

GEORGE LOIS, one of the most influential admen of his generation, is the sort of person who has a dozen brainstorms an hour, at least half of them good and only a few really harebrained. Among the better ones were the early Xerox commercials showing a chimpanzee deftly operating a photocopier, the “I want my MTV” campaign and Lean Cuisine.
But among certain groups of people — magazine collectors, veterans of the 1960s, admirers of brilliant design — Mr. Lois is best known for the covers he created for Esquire from 1962 to 1972. There were 92 in all, including one that never ran: an antiwar cover intended for the December 1962 issue, which was dropped because the State Department was insisting that American troops would be out of Vietnam by Christmas. Thirty-one of them are part of an exhibition that opened at the Museum of Modern Art on Friday.
The show looks a little like a tidied-up version of a great many college dorm rooms back in the ’60s. There on the wall, neatly mounted instead of just torn out and stuck up with tape, are Tricky Dick having lipstick applied, L.B.J. holding a Hubert Humphrey dummy, Andy Warhol drowning in a Campbell’s soup can, Muhammad Ali posing as St. Sebastian and a grinning Lt. William Calley, the leader of the massacre at My Lai, with four Vietnamese children. There’s also the image Mr. Lois created for the December 1963 issue, in response to a plea from Harold Hayes, Esquire’s editor, for something “Christmassy.” It shows Sonny Liston wearing a Santa hat — probably the last person white Americans hoped to see coming down the chimney in those days.
Many of Mr. Lois’s covers were controversial, not so say irreverent or deliberately provocative. The Liston cover cost the magazine $750,000 in dropped advertising. But they were immensely successful at drawing attention, on the newsstand especially.
“The covers weren’t the only thing going on in those days,” Byron Dobell, Esquire’s managing editor during many of the Lois years, recalled recently. “We thought there was some pretty great stuff inside as well. But the covers proved to be a very effective way of advertising our kind of journalism. They were way out there.”

That last quote mirrors what Hugh Hefner talks about doing with

Playboy Magazine when it was in it’s prime.

I love what George said about the Sonny Liston cover, “Black Santa Claus was me spooking the whites of America. Everyone was saying, ‘Hey, I’m for negro rights but you’re going a little too far here.’ And I said, ‘Fuck you, this black son-of-a-bitch is gonna come down your chimney and cut your balls off!’

Is it any surprise that I like this guy?

George hated the system. He hated the status

quo. They were out to change the world and people respected it. They were making political and graphic statements that grabbed at the heart and the throat. He believes this is what he’s done all of his life with his advertising. He wanted to sell the product but he also wanted to make a point while doing so.

George Lois believes advertising should be revolutionary, subversive.

I believe Dan Kennedy’s Renegade Millionaire system accomplishes this. Dan makes a statement about what he believes life should be about and I sincerely hope you recorded his 4 launch videos for his re-launch of this packaged course that included his Renegade Time Management program as well so you’d have an idea of how to do this with an information product.

Money To Be Made In Advertising

This movie was released in 2010 and they’d estimated that by the end of the year, the global advertising business would exceed $544 billion dollars.

44% of all satellites launched are for commercial communications
75% of global satellite services revenue comes from television
70% of U.S. TV broadcasting revenue comes from ads

Mary Wells, one of members of the Doyle Dane Bernbach team when they hit the scene says, “I think that people who are loners or have lives where they have to overcome when they are young, I think that they get a strength that’s very useful later on.”

She had the ambition to turn advertising into theater. She wanted her clients to do big dramatic things with their advertising. (I believe the Renegade Millionaire launch fused theater into the direct response outcome they were gunning for beautifully)

Charlie Moss, the Creative Director at Wells Rich Greene (Wells being Mary Wells), says, “Anybody who’s a terrific ad person on the creative side, usually has the two qualities of being a salesman and an entertainer.”

In the 1970’s, the average city dweller received about 1,000 advertising messages every day. Today it’s closer to 5,000.

Hal Riney of Hal Riney & Partners did a campaign for a bank in the late 60’s – an old fashioned bank with old fashioned customers either dying or about to – who was trying to bring in more bidniz.

Hal went to the president of the bank and told him that they should take some of their money and hire a bunch of song writers to write a song about young people and how their lives are changing.

He didn’t tell them what the song was and couldn’t tell them what the commercial would be because he wouldn’t know until the song was written and the guy in charge told him this is some pretty vague advice. Rightfully so. But they went ahead with it and this was the result . . .

The song became one or two in the entire nation so not only did they have a nationwide hit, but it also led them into some commercials that didn’t have to really say anything with ad copy but instead played the chorus of the song and showed images of young people getting married and driving off into the sunset with each other who’d only just begun and the implication of the ad was that you needed help getting to you wanted to go and they understood that and were sympathetic to this.

Only they weren’t.

They touched young people with the message. The young people swarmed the banks asking for money. The bank decided they didn’t want the kids in the bank because they didn’t have any money (Just in case you didn’t know, the most welcome person in a bank is the person who doesn’t need their money).

So deciding that the campaign wasn’t targeted right, they killed it but not before they franchised it to banks all over the country to make the most out of what was an ill-thought out campaign.

This is a primary lesson on why it’s incredibly important to know precisely who your perfect prospect is so that when you spend money to speak, you’re calling out to the people you want to do business with.

The documentary failed to point out this highly important lesson explicitly instead choosing to highlight Hal’s “wise?” decision to have a song written that ended up being a number 1 or 2 hit. He was younger so this was a stepping stone for him and I imagine it stuck with him helping him to nail some big level stuff in the future which you’ll see below.

Look At How People LOVE Their TV…

The average household watches over 8 hours of TV per day
There are 1353 HDTV satellite channels around the world today – this number will grow 350% by 2013. There are 565 satellite-delivered TV networks in the U.S.
75% of U.S. homes have 3 or more televisions

Lee Clow is the worldwide chairman of

TBWA/Chiat/Day and at his heart he’s a California surf boy.

He’s another guy who wanted to go against the establishment. He started out working for an agency who represented everything he thought was wrong with the advertising business which was milking clients for as much money as you could get and giving the client what they wanted and he believed it was deceitful to allow clients to dictate mediocre work and for them to get paid for it when he knew something more was possible.

He escaped to Chiat/Day which when it was just being born and Jay Chiat and Guy Day were pirate and rebel spirits like he was. His rebellion was in pursuit of the creative people being in charge instead of the suits and he found a home here.

You’ll see some of his famous work coming up.

Now Back To My Rough Rugged Renegade Muthafucker…

George Lois grew up in a strict Irish neighborhood, the most racist neighborhood possible and he had at least 50 fist fights with kids who ended up becoming his best friends. He had to fight his way through the neighborhood because he was Greek.

George has always the reputation of being tough with clients. It’s true in the aspect that he had a big idea and he would show it to them and embark on selling it to them in pursuit of making them rich and he found he had to drag them kicking and screaming into becoming rich and it drove him crazy.

He could get excited about selling a new pen. He’d see a couple of cool features and in his words he’d say, “Let’s sell that motherfucker!” and he’d get excited about almost nothing.

George Lois Shoots the Load That Is MTV Into The Egg That Is American Society

In 1984 George rolled over the slogan for some old timer breakfast cereal called “Maypo” from 1967 and rolled it into Music Tele-Vision – MTV which gave birth to the slogan “I want my MTV”.

George told Bob Pittman, the founder of the channel, that he could get them a rock star to appear in their commercials that he wanted to design with the express intent of getting the 1,000’s of rock fan viewers to call up their cable TV providers and tell them they wanted them to start featuring MTV.

Bob Pittman thought it was a crazy idea because he’d been hearing all kinds of shit from the rock stars because they were showing videos of the stars songs giving the rock stars free publicity and not paying them for doing so.

George went after Mick Jagger and got him and

the rest is history.

They ran the first commercial on a Thursday night and at 8:30 the next morning in New York which is 5:30 in San Francisco the cable operator calls up Bob Pittman and says, “GET THAT FUCKING COMMERCIAL OFF THE AIR!” Pittman told him he’d take it off right away. And the cable operator says, “By the way, I’ll take it.” Pittman says, “Take what?” The operator says, “MTV.” Pittman says, “Why?” and the operator says, “Because I’m getting thousands of phone calls asking for it.”

George’s ad got ‘em by the balls.

How To Introduce The New Kid On The Block So That Everyone Takes Notice

I don’t know if you know this or not, but George Lois is the only reason you’ve ever heard of a guy named Tommy Hilfiger. Here’s why . . .

Tommy Hilfiger calls George a visionary because he sees things that normal people don’t see and he thinks about what people want to see before they know what they want.

George had just finished with the launch ads for MTV when he met him which was based around the same concept/challenge Tommy was facing which was introducing an unknown brand to the world. And like with MTV, he got people to know who Tommy was almost overnight.

George’s idea was to put a picture of Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Ellis, and then we’ll say you’re the next in line. Tommy said, “You can’t compare me to these guys! It would sound like I’m bragging. I like to think of myself of looking at those guys as the gods.”

So George shows him the ad you see here and George says that Tommy’s mother couldn’t even fill in the blanks. George shot that high and told this big of lie. More like a prediction that came true.

Tommy of course didn’t want any part of this. His little Tommy nuts had shriveled into his body into his stomach.

George sits Tommy down and says, “If you want to have any name recognition in this business at all, you’d need millions of dollars worth of advertising over and over and over and it will take you years. If you want your name to be known right away and for people to go and look at your clothes we need something unique like this.”

“Seemingly Outrageous,” is a term George likes to use thinking you should look at something and think it’s a little crazy and within the next 2-3 seconds this is something you want to look into. But as George says, “The product better be good. Because if the product isn’t any good it’ll put you out of business. People won’t keep buying it if it’s a piece of shit.”

Tommy couldn’t sleep because he thought this would be the end of his career. But then, he’d think about what would happen if the name became known and people looked at the clothes and like them.

The ads ran and people went crazy. All of 7^th Avenue said, “WHO

DOES HE THINK HE IS?!? He’s no designer! Ralph and Calvin have been working for years and years and years.”

As a result of this campaign Tommy ended up being on the Johnny Carson show the week after he ran the ad. Tommy told Johnny that George was the one who dreamed up the campaign and convinced my business partner we should run. And that it wasn’t his choice to run this campaign. Then he proceeded to say he was a struggling designer and hopes the best for his company but that he was truly embarrassed by the campaign.

Fucking. Rat Bastard. Clients. Gotta love ‘em, right! Hahaha George made sure he ran that ad on 7^th Avenue just to piss off Calvin and everyone else. This move put Tommy on the map overnight.

A side benefit is the embarrassment that Tommy felt it drove him to roll up his sleeves and work harder than he ever thought he could. He knew the only way to prove the naysayers wrong was for him to come out with amazing clothes.

So he worked like an animal making sure that every button, every zipper, every button hole, every color, every fit, every fabric was to perfection.

Tommy says, “George turbo-charged my success. The hip-hoppers started wearing it, then the rockers, then the suburbanites, then the dads and the moms and the kids and my business burst into a multi-billion dollar global business.”

George says,

“Great advertising makes food taste better, makes cars run better, it changes the perception of everything.”

Mary Wells believes that people who are good at advertising have the ability to sense what will turn you on.

Food companies spent $32 billion dollars on advertising in 2009
Car companies spent more than $15 billion
$2.6 billion dollars was spent on political advertising in 2008

“Brutal Simplicity” is the mantra of Rich Silverstein of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Jeff Goodby believes that advertising is “Art serving capitalism.”

These are the guys charged with making milk popular again. The dairy people had to market milk generically because there are no big flashy brands. Milk sales had been dropping about 4% a year, every year.

With the proliferation of drinks like soda, Gatorade, vitamin flavored water, etc. people were ignoring milk when it came down to choice of what to drink. Milk was becoming something you only used for cereal and cooking.

They were stuck because unlike Snapple who roll out flavor after flavor of sugary tasting delight, milk had three options – chocolate, strawberry or plain.

The intent of the “Got Milk?” ad campaign was

only driven to keep people from running out of milk which was only asking for an incremental increase in sales because people would stay ahead of letting their milk go sour or used up.

Rich looked at the line “got milk?” and hated it. He thought it was clunky and hated that it wasn’t even English. But Jeff liked that it was almost nothing, almost gone before you could say the words. Well, as you well know, it worked like a motherfucker.

$100’s of millions of dollars were spent prior to this on the concept of “Milk does a body good” and this showed athletes in uniforms drinking milk which didn’t connect. Most people don’t want to be healthy, that’s why they’re over or under weight. They say they want to be healthy but their actions tell an entirely different story.

The reason this campaign landed as truth is that they focused on situations where it sucked to be out of milk – like a scenario when you wanted to eat cereal so you poured it into the bowl and you go to the fridge and come to find out there’s just a splash of milk left and it serves like a kick to the balls in the moment where you’d worked yourself up to having your cereal. This was a truth people could connect with and relate to.

Rich believes their company is trying to entertain people using their client’s products. With this thinking the product and the marketing take the back seat to the concept. Jeff tells people all the time he believes advertising is the same as making art. They make stuff and put it in peoples faces and it hopefully it enriches them and makes them feel something and it’s a rush to have this happen to millions of people at once. You can experience an ad as a single person but millions of others are seeing it at the same time. It’s a mass communal happening and not too many things offer this in life.

Here’s how this mass communal effect plays out in numbers . . .

In 2009 Time Warner sold $8.8 billion dollars worth of advertising
A 30-second ad on American Idol costs $750,000 dollars
Michael Jordan’s value to Nike has been estimated at $5.2 billion dollars

David Kennedy of Wieden+Kennedy thinks that most creative people are so damn insecure that they want to think they know everything but they know that they’re in deep trouble from the minute they wake up in the morning and he tells the people who work for him that that’s the way it’s supposed to be and finds they see this as liberating.

They preach the concept that you want to strive to be like Babe Ruth and swing for the fences and be okay with striking out. These are the guys who did the famous Michael Jordan Nike commercial and you’ll see their perspective on failure along with Michael’s along with George Lois’s at the end . . .

George then goes on to say, “My mother told me to be careful. My father told me to be careful. Everybody told me to be careful, schools, coaches, school directors and in advertising that’s where everyone told you to be careful. In meetings people would tell me to be careful. What I try to tell everybody is that you’ve got power in you to do more than you’re doing. Everything should be ambitious.”

I like that.

I believe that even the lies you tell yourself should be ambitious rather than derogatory. The fact of the matter is, we all lie to ourselves. Most of tell the lie of “I’m not good enough and people don’t love me and I’m a failure.” That’s a lie.

Why not instead constantly tell yourself the lie that you’re fucking incredible and that people love the hell out of you and that everything you touch turns to gold,”? They both can come true. One is coming true right now, but more likely than not, it’s the one you don’t want.

When you can lie to yourself in an empowering way and not be attached to wanting it to happen, not care if it’s gonna happen, I believe amazing things can happen for you.

“Strong ideas, simply presented.”

This is a theme Carl Ally stands on. Their company is the one who

introduced Fed-Ex.

A 30 second ad during the Super Bowl costs $2.7 million dollars

If there’s a truth in it, it’s not a truth about the product and it’s not a truth about your relationship with the product when you buy it. It transcends to your be part of a group of people who “get it” because they own this product.

Harley Davidson ran an ad years ago that was the Harley logo tattooed on someone’s arm and it said, “When’s the last time you felt this passionate about anything.”

That’s what’s crazy when you think about how passionate people can be about a brand if brands are these interesting, fascinating and high-minded concepts that you want to assign to being a part of who you are ala being a Apple fan boy.

The interesting thing about a brand is that you’re not only planting an idea in the minds of your customers but also in the company itself of who they are and what they stand for and a sense of their role and their responsibility to their customers. This is like being a midwife to something.

A few ad men have higher aspirations for what’s possible for their clients than the clients have for themselves. They tell clients they can be more than simply a car company or a pet food company. Why not aspire to loving dogs rather than just supplying them?

Lee Clow says, “Any really competitive person is driven by wanting to prove something. If you’re going to be intense and passionate in business I think that you almost have to say you’re going to attack it in a rebellious kind of way as opposed to an orderly kind of way. The spirit of being the rebellious David vs. Goliath in the form of little clients trying to take on big clients, makes it more fun trying to be the little guy who’s trying to kick the big guys ass. And for some people who couldn’t kick people’s ass in high school but found a way to do it in business with their creativity jujitsu to knock the big guy out, this serves as an outlet.”

This is the premise they operated from when doing the first advertisements for Apple who at the time was going head on with IBM.

People always call Lee around Super Bowl time to ask him why he believes his Apple 1984 ad was such a breakthrough . . .

Some people thinks this ad made such a huge impression because they never showed the product, some people say it was because no one had ever gone with the “dramatic” example for a Super Bowl ad, some people point to the fact that they only ran once but he thinks it’s because they were actually introducing something that was revolutionary.

Macintosh and the mouse graphical interface changed EVERYTHING.

How often in advertising do you get to tell people something new and great is available and you can now buy it?

The other part was that they had a client in Steve Jobs who believed the product was world changing that told them to go do an ad that doesn’t look like anything else that’d been done before. The board saw the commercial and noticed that it didn’t even show the computer and told them to pull it and Jobs and Woz each footed half the money to pay for it and ran it anyways.

Everything that was done to launch that product is now done differently because of this product. The editing of film, the editing of music and sound, all the production tools that go into the television, all the tools that we use to produce magazine ads, print inserts, and Clow believes every computer company on the planet does their ads on a mac.

This is the message of theirs that Clow did that I actually like . . .

The Master Of Connecting To Emotion In Advertising

Hal Riney believes he let advertising be an avenue to express some of the things, like a happy family life, that he didn’t experience in his life having had a dad that been sent to prison when he was very young.

Another person said that what they believe people are buying into when they witness a Hal Riney ad is an experience of what they wish life could be. Riney pouring himself into an ad like this coincides directly with the principle of, “The more personal something is, the more universal it is.”

Here’s the killer ad he wrote for the re-election of President Ronald Reagan . . .

Not only was the copy great at making a bright and sunny case for Reagan but the imagery helped create warm and fuzzy feelings. When Ed Rollins, Reagan’s campaign manager showed Reagan this spot he remembers Ronald tearing up and saying, “I wish I was that good.”

Reagan understood that a presidential campaign was nothing but advertising and the power in tapping into emotion. When they showed 150 of the most cynical reporters in the world this ad, when it ended there was dead silence. They were all moved by it.

Ed says these ads were the best ever made in politics. And they led with emotion.

The Statement That Changed America Forever

Nike’s sole purpose for existing in the market place is to serve the athlete but in the late 80’s Nike expanded the definition of “athlete” beyond the people who participated in organized sports.

Nike is often credited with making jogging and running popular in America. Before Nike people didn’t run to get in shape. Running was something you did if you needed to condition yourself in order to play a sport at the highest level.

Nike’s mission became one of inspiring people to participate in sports.

The inspiration for their most famous ad campaign was fueled by a man who was about to be executed for murder in Utah. His final words to the firing squad were, “Let’s Do It!” and The New York Times ran them in the headline for this story.

This inspired “Just Do It”.

Nike was completely shocked by the impact and resonance this statement had on it’s audience. It’s a concept that applies to every area of your life where you’re hedging.

Think about how big of an impact this company had on women playing sports, not just recreationally but also professionally as a result of an ad like the one above and this one . . .

I can’t imagine how immense of an impact this movement to empower women has had on the reality we live in where women are kicking men’s ass all over from college all the way to the work place as is highlighted statistically in this post here.

This concept allowed the consumer to be okay with Nike’s outcome to sell a ton of shit because at the core of the concept was the belief that you could be and do more and we like people who believe in and inspire us.

People don’t mind being sold to as long as they like the reason that it’s happening. Remember that. Tattoo it on your mind so you never forget it.

Where companies run in trouble is when they treat people like they’re stupid instead of treating them the way they want their spouse or their kid to be treated.

A lot of advertising is trash.

Remember, this realm isn’t exempt from the 95/5 rule that says 95% of advertising is normal, boring, or just plain worthless or worse, dangerous and 5% of advertising is the game changing kind that empowers people.

Most people aren’t aspiring to be in the 5% in any area in life and advertising is no different. This is why most advertising is offensive, intrusive, aggravating, annoying, and intellectually based at the lowest common denominator. They aim low and get low results.

Don’t Fall Victim To The Majority

Each year, the average child sees 20,000 TV commercials
Americans see 61 minutes of ads each day on the internet, TV, and mobile screens
65% of Americans believe they are constantly bombarded with too much advertising

You see these stats and you know that the majority of the ads people are seeing is horrible and it’s no wonder why advertising and marketing gets a bad rap. The 95% of the apples spoil the entire fruit – the fruit that gives live to the business, to jobs, to income.

But when advertising is done right, it’s a thing of beauty and can be celebrated because of the feeling you love experiencing that they promise to bring you.

Good advertising is a way for big soulless corporations, mid-sized businesses and small businesses to actually have a personality and to enable meaningful interaction with the people who keep them alive.

For the most part corporations are big lonely beasts confined to their cage. Small and medium look to these guys as examples to follow. Good advertisers help release them from this delusion.

George Lois believes creativity can solve anything. Anything. This reminds me of Gary Halbert’s belief that a good salesletter is the solution to any problem that you have in your business.

That’s it for today. Take the major lesson from this entire documentary and run with it – STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM BEING AVERAGE, NORMAL, OR MEDIOCRE WITH YOUR MESSAGE.

Talk soon,

Lewis LaLanne a.k.a. Note Taking Nerd #2 a.k.a. L.L. Cool Nerd

PS. IF you want the power to make your advertising/marketing/content to convey an awesome personality people become passionately attached to, you definitely want to click here now and put your hands all over these marketing notes I took on Dan Kennedy’s DNA Game Changer seminar <—–

Internet Marketing Expert Shows You How To Create A Product Based On Your Passion

NoteTakingNerd2 — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:00:51 +0000

Yanik Silver brought Internet Marketing Expert Chet Womach To His Underground Seminar to Show You How He Built A 7-Figure Niche Business and You’re About To See One Of The Best Suggestions He Gave To Go About Starting or Enhancing This Process

Hey You,

Get your customers eating from your hands using what you discover here

It’s Lewis a.k.a. Nerd #2.

I’ve posted Gary Vaynerchuk’s presentation on turning your passion into a profit before.

And now I want to extend this discussion to a specific product you can create even if you are a complete beginner on a specific topic. All you need is the desire to learn and master this new skill set.

One thing that is interesting about this Chet Womach’s approach is that he goes into niches that he knows nothing about . . . but is wildly passionate about learning it inside out and becoming world class at and while he doing so, he documents this process.

Let The Journey Begin . . .

The first niche he pursued was bird training but not out of a compelling interest in birds but but out of the impending necessity to pay his bills.

His parents had these ginormous caged birds in their basement. They were so big that if they bit you with their beak on the hand, they could break bones or if they bit your face, they could leave you having to get reconstructive surgery.

So he bought some how-to videos on how to train these birds to do tricks but he couldn’t get within 10 feet of the cage without the bird going psycho telling him in bird communication that it wanted to gouge his eyes out and poop in the holes.

But none of the videos he had purchased started from this place. They all

presumed you were best friends with the bird and that your bird wasn’t 3 years or older when they start getting all horny and sexually hormone crazed.

So he thought to document the process of how to go from your bird wanting to maim you . . . to your bird loving you and being submissive to your every command.

And with this idea he went bought some black felt to tack to the ceiling to give him a black background, took some of his mom’s fern plants, got a single bare bulb shop light, and a camera he borrowed from his dad and set out to conquer this challenge.

So he took all the techniques he could get a hold of and tried them, getting bit and having success on camera.

He captured on tape “The Becoming Process” – the process of him going from clueless to becoming a good trainer. In 30 days he’d gone from getting his hand eaten to getting the bird to wave at him, dunk a basketball, and other tricks.

And through PPC he was able to sell his training process and this was the beginning of him growing this information business to the place where it’s hauling in over a million dollars a year for him.

You Could Call This a Reality TV Based Product

If you have zero credibility or you want to get good, especially if it’s something you’re passionate about, what better way is there to build your relationship and credibility with a market and the current experts in the market?

This could be you learning to box, learning to pick up women, learning to win at poker, or any other skill. You’re essentially shooting a training documentary.

TV shows based on the theme of overcoming a challenge is REALLY popular – Dog Whisperer, The Biggest Loser, Flip This House, etc.

These shows have all spun off all kinds of info-products.

The beginner market is HUGE and there’s nothing better in their eyes than seeing you were in their place and seeing you getting your ass kicked for them and learning all the wrong ways to do things and now guiding them down the path of least resistance.

It also makes you unique in your marketing when you use this hook.

And you don’t have to be the subject of becoming. You can video tape someone becoming a ninja under your tutelage. He did this when he moved from birds over to dogs.

Your First Action Step:

Pick something you want to get good at. Get the first steps you need to take to start your journey. Then videotape your every attempt at improving. You can do this with concealed video cameras, regular ones, etc. And keep doing this until you’ve reached your desired outcome. That’s it.

You can make this harder than it needs to be by trying to make this perfect. Don’t. Especially if you’re a beginner to this entire process of product creation.

Be proud of driving the imperfect product to completion and be proud of having mastered the skill you mastered. Leave the shame and perfectionist bullshit beliefs with the losers.

Talk soon,

Lewis LaLanne a.k.a. Note Taking Nerd #2 a.k.a. L.L. Cool Nerd

PS. If you want to learn from the internet marketing expert who’s hailed as being a ninja by Yanik Silver for being a master of not only selling products to but also of teaching beginners in multiple niches how to become more, you definitely want to click here and put your hands all over these notes . . .

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Personal Improvement Notes On The Four Questions Strangers Ask Themselves To Determine Whether They Like You Or Not

NoteTakingNerd2 — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Hey You,

It’s Lewis a.k.a. Nerd #2.

Tim Sanders is the author of the personal improvement book, “The Likability Factor” and today I want to share with you my notes on a presentation he did on the subject of why people do or don’t like you.

His research and passion for this project is coming from a place where one of the first memories he has of his childhood is being 3 1/2 years old and being abandoned by his mother in a motel room who’d hit the road with some truck driver only to be discovered by a maid 72 hours later.

After living in a bunch of different foster homes his Grandmother decides she’ll take care of him and he credits her with providing him with a happy childhood.

He’d skipped the second grade and this led to him being the smaller and younger kid every year in his class which led to him getting his ass kicked at school. His grandma told him, “You need to learn how to like those boys. That will solve all your problems. Cultivate a belief that you like those kids.” He said, “Why would I like bullies?” She said, “You like people not because of who they are. You like people because of who you are.” That’s good.

These are only a couple of his life experiences that sent him for on a quest to answer the question of . . .

Why Is It Important To Be Liked?

One of the most important life lessons that was ever passed down to Tim was from the chairman of Neiman Marcus while Tim was working for him. The chairman said, “Don’t ever forget to make yourself emotionally attractive. If you do, very good things are going to happen in your life.”

That’s another writer-downer you want to trap onto paper or pixel somewhere and reference daily.

Tim has since coined being emotionally attractive as Likability.

The writing of his book involved finding and scouring millions of pages of research to find the answer to questions like, “Why do you

listen to somebody? Why do you extend extra effort for someone but not for someone else?”

This led him to the conclusion that “Likability” was one of the most misunderstood words in our culture.

He’s learned that likability doesn’t come from telling people what they want to hear. It doesn’t come from using someone’s name over and over in a conversation. It doesn’t come from mirroring physiology.

Likability reflects your capacity to consistently produce positive emotional experiences in other people.

When you make people feel good, they reciprocate more often than not and do what they can to help you feel good too. People who have a high L-Factor are resourceful and seek solutions and synthesis.

People with what researchers call a low L-Factor have a tendency to create negative psychological experiences in the lives of other people.

Tim calls people with a high likability factor “Angels”. They want people to feel enriched.

Likability can be scored on a level of 1-10. They have a 20 question document that helps determine what level you are.

What research has found is that if you rank at a 3 out of 10 on the scale of emotional likability there are a few things you can count on experiencing . . .

1) You’re one of the first people let go when lay offs happen.

2) You’re more likely to get the anal probe at the airport. Research has shown that if you’re smiling as you walk through security you are less likely to be “randomly selected”. One research study cited that if you’re walking down a city street smiling you are THREE TIMES less likely to be attacked than someone who has a blank expression or a frown on their face.

3) If you’re a psychological beast (person with a low L-Factor) you have a higher chance of being hauled into court and to not be believed by the judge or the jury.

Anyone with common sense can look at these outcomes and say to themselves, “Yep, that seems about right.” And yet people still wallow in behavior that attracts shit into their life.

Two Factors That Fuel A Low L-Factor

The First of These Is The Scarcity Mindset.

People who indulge in a scarcity mindset are prone to have a low L-Factor. He believes that when someone has a bad attitude that scarcity is ALWAYS to blame. Scarcity thinking makes you believe that there’s not enough _________ to go around – women, money, love, food, water, etc. fill in the blank.

This means that when a surprise/change shows up that they don’t like, they’re jarred into the same scarcity mindset a dog goes into when you jerk the food bowl away from them while they’re eating.

When someone has scarcity relative to respect, this is what leads them to negatively gossip. Scarce-minded people think everything is win-lose and zero-sum. This is why someone else doing better irritates them.

When people have a scarce mindset around time, this really cripples them. Every day and half, people who work are expected to read the equivalent of a novel in the form of emails that they have to skim selectively/speed read.

Do You Experience Number Rage?

You can probably relate to the experience of laying in bed late at night and looking at the clock and doing the math of how many hours and minutes of rest you’ll get if you fall to sleep in the next 1o minutes. Some people do this “Late Night Math” multiple times throughout the night and research has shown that when this happens, when you go to work the next day you experience a form of what they call “Number Rage”. And it’s proven that sleep problems lead to personality problems.

The Second Factor is SUFFERING.

It’s all but impossible to feel suffering in your body and your mind and feel that you want other people to feel good at the same time.

You can only do one at a time so someone who’s spends the majority of their time wallowing in suffering is sentencing themselves to a low L Factor which only compounds this state of mind.

People who condemn themselves to suffering have the high tendency to make not only themselves feel bad but also others.

What You Can Look Forward To If You Have A High L-Factor

Emotionally attractive salespeople earn 40% more money than their peers do. One of the reasons for this is that if the prospect likes you, they’ll tell you how to sell them. They’re actually rooting for you to make a sale to them.

If you’re likable at work, you’re more likely to get a better review and more likely to get a raise than your equally talented, not so likable colleagues. If you manager likes you, they give you insider hints on what you need to do to succeed.

You also get higher performance out of people. You get them to reach for the best within themselves. Research has proven that likable teachers not only grade better with the students but the students also get better grades on their tests which is the unconscious desire in the kids to want the teacher to be successful.

Research has proven that you can higher quality care and advice from medical professionals when you’re likable. The same goes for kids with highly likable parents.

Another finding that’s been uncovered is that the number one reason a young person will stay with a job isn’t cash. It’s having the job create a positive emotional experience for them. What helps to prove this is that they found that over a 1/2 billion dollars worth of IRA and 401K accounts had been abandoned and unchecked on by people the year prior. 80% of the accounts were owned by people 27 years old and younger. Financial security has a different meaning for this generation of youth. It used to be that financial security meant owning your home, keeping your job for 40 years and having a pension to rely on. If you’re 20 years old, financial freedom means being free not to work for a douche bag.

And for parents, studies have proven that emotionally aggressive parents are twice as likely to not see their kids at Christmas when they move away after college.

Another study showed that if you’re a male and you have a negative outlook on life, you’re THREE TIMES more likely to experience two divorces in your lifetime.

The number of friends you have after you’re 50 years old will shrink significantly depending on the way you see the world.

If you ask any doctor, they can tell you that the leading indicator as to who lives and who dies after getting seriously ill is the number of people at home waiting and cheering you on to recover.

People stay connected to you or not depending on your ability to make them feel good.

How Do You Get A Higher Likeability Factor?

Tim believes our nature is to be compassionate – that we’re born that way.

Kids take feelings really seriously. Kids that are really young haven’t learned how to resent other people. They’ve haven’t been stabbed in the back so they like everyone until that person proves to them they aren’t likable.

These traits are the foundation of a likable personality.

But there’s four basic questions someone is going to ask about you when they first meet you. And the researchers have found that these questions are asked in this specific order . . .

1) Friend or Foe?

“Is daddy in a good mood?” is our biological go-to question when we meet someone. Once we determine this, we ask the question of . . .

2) Are they relevant to me?

3) Are they empathetic to how I feel?

Significance is the search in relationships for empathy.

4) Is this person real and genuine?

This is unique to the 21st century in the post-Dale Carnegie era.

If they get a “No” on any of these, you don’t pass go on the high likeability factor scale and you’ve essentially taught them to treat you like a nobody.

Here’s How To Proactively Improve Your Emotional Sexiness

FRIENDLINESS:

When Einstein was on his death bed, a reporter asked him what one question he would like to ask of the creator. Einstein responded instantly with, “I will ask, ‘Is the universe friendly?’”

Einstein explained that this was the fundamental question of humans over our entire life. In any situation in any arena with your family, kids, friends, coworkers, etc. when you’re flagged as a “Foe” the people’s minds that you’re interacting with shut down and the negative opinion of you is formed.

There’s range to this friendliness factor which at one end starts with the person being open to you because they feel that you like them. And them opening to you says that they like you as well.

3 Ways You Can Be More Friendly

Some people are just too good for apologizing for freaking out on you and blaming it on your or the stress they were under and they assume that the person they’ve apologized to forgives them.

But research has found that you are more likely to forgive someone’s rudeness the first time you meet them. You can write that off. But a year into a relationship, it’s gonna take an apology and three acts of kindness to even things up. After 5 years the apology is worthless.

What this breaks down to is not being dependent on things to be going well in order for you to be nice. You want to cultivate the skill of consistently being nice when the world is on top of you and when you’re on top of the world.

1st Way To Be More Friendly: Reconnect To What You’re Grateful For

This is an antidote to bad behavior.

Researchers say that if you get a piece of paper and write down on it three things you’re grateful for about any situation you’re having a challenge with and you fold the paper and put it into your pocket, the very next day you can take that piece of paper out if you’re in a fit of rage about this same topic and your handwriting will confront you and bring you back to center.

Truly happy and grateful people aren’t assholes.

2nd Way To Be More Friendly: Tell Your Face That You’re Happy If You Are

People aren’t mind readers. Give them evidence with your face that you are friendly.

Dr. Albert Mehrabian, the author of the book “Mixed Signals” said that there’s no such thing as a friendly person. Rather there are people who communicate with friendly intentions on a consistent and easy to understand basis.

55% of someone’s judgment as to whether you’re a friend or a foe is determined by your facial expressions you wear. And yet people falsely work from what he or she said, which is only 7% of the equation, when trying to explain why the do or don’t like someone.

A recent study done revealed that the average business manager was smiled at 15 times a day by different people and they only smile back an average of 6 times.

A dog’s way of smiling at you is eye contact and wagging their tail. If a dog couldn’t wag it’s it tail, it’d be a cat. There’s the old saying of, “Dogs have friends, cats have staff.” Quit being the dead pan expressionless cat. Smile back and see what happens.

3rd Way To Be More Friendly: Be Kind With Email

Email is most people’s Achilles heel.

Here’s how to never regret having sent an email . . .

First, don’t send emails when you’re pissed off. Email is for saying, “Yes,” answering questions or for asking questions. You say, “No,” you criticize in person or over the phone because you want them to see in your facial expressions that your intentions are positive.

One way to determine if you’re mad is to close your eyes and put your first two finger tips on your eyelids. If they’re room temperature, you’re probably not angry. They’ll be scorching hot if you are.

If you are pissed, save that email as a draft and sleep on the issue and more likely than not when you revisit it the next day, you’ll probably delete it.

It’s really hard to communicate fully with email without using a bunch of emoticons to make it explicitly clear what you mean. Use your face or vocal expressions whenever possible.

RELEVANCE:

Friendliness is what plants the seed for a relationship to develop.

The lowest level of relevance is when you merely have something in common with someone else – you’re in the same business, from the same state, you both like big butts and you cannot lie, etc.

The highest level of relevance is when I’m the answer to your problem. Relevance is the idea that you are what people need.

1st Step To Being More Relevant: Cultivate a More Sincere Interest In The People In Your Life

Leaders need to be sincerely interested in those who follow them.

Some people like parents demean what their followers are passionate about and this puts up a wall where a river of communication could flow.

Stephen Covey, the famed author of “7 Habits Of Highly Effective People” told a story of one of his friends who had a son who absolutely loved baseball. The father barely even knew what a baseball looked like. But what he did was he immersed himself in the sport and took his boy to go see a game in each of the stadiums and this bonding time took their relationship to an entirely new level. When Stephen asked his friend if really loved baseball that much to go through all that effort and he said, “No, but I love my boy that much.”

Becoming highly interested in what makes another person’s heart sing helps them to trust you have their best interest in mind.

Here’s a way to go about putting this into practice . . .

Take two pieces of paper and on one, write down a list of five hobbies/passions you have in your life outside of your job. If you don’t have five, remember or think of things you always wanted to do and list them.

On the next, write down your five most frequent contacts – people you see and talk to the most THAT ARE NOT YOUR FAMILY. Now for each of the people you listed, come up with two hobbies or passions that they have outside of work. If you come up short on this list, asking these people about their passions can lead to an amazing conversation.

When you put these lists together, they’ve found that after having done this exercise with over 3,500 people that you have a 75% chance of creating a direct match between one of your passions and one of the passions of one of the people you spend the most time with.

This can create a mega-bond between the two of you. As Carnegie says, “You can accomplish much more developing a sincere interest in two people than you could ever while trying to get two people interested in you.”

2nd Step To Being More Relevant: Study How Your World Is Changing

Lifelong students who embrace change are flat out more likeable than those who whine about change are the last ones to know it’s coming.

A study by the American Book Sellers Association said that the average business person reads .7 professional books every 5 years. Wow.

People perceive reading to be hard and they don’t do it because they don’t have to.

On the flip side, the average Fortune 1,000 CEO reads six books every year. He rolled this stat out to make the point that “leaders are readers” but I’m not all that impressed by this number and it doesn’t bring that point home to me. This number says to me a ton about the majority of these CEO’s who are dragging this average to the paltry number of six books by reading nothing at all and the 5% at the top are probably reading a book every week or two.

So you can be ahead relevance wise of 95% of Fortune 1,000 if you can muster up the eye strength and will power to read one book every nine weeks. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

EMPATHY:

When a person in a relationship thinks they’ve been heard, that’s when the connection between the two of you is radically enhanced.

Reaching the lowest level of empathy means you’re a good listener. You can manage to shut your mouth for a second. Incredible empathy is when you can express the sincere desire to see things completely from the person’s point of view.

If you want to master empathy you have to become a deep and powerless listener.

Deep listening is when you are with someone and you’re not listening with your ears but instead are listening with your eyes. You can walk out of that room and name her emotion because you felt into that person’s heart.

Dr. Paul Eckman studied for over four decades how people express their emotions. He found that in every corner of the world from cities to primitive tribal cultures, that people express the seven basic emotions the same exact way in their face.

We have to leak emotions through our face. We can tells stories with our words or body gestures but our face never lies. You can double your deep listening effectiveness by studying it for two hours.

A powerless listener doesn’t tell you what you should feel. They also don’t try to relate by telling about their similar experience; this is sympathy. They say, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

REALNESS:

Researcher say our greatest psychological need is to know what’s real.

In this information age where so much data is coming at us that’s always woven with a bias that’s designed to be in someone’s best interest that might not include us, we yearn to have certainty that what we’re buying into is real.

The basic level of this is telling the truth. At the highest level it’s about finishing what you start in life because that’s what makes you genuine in the eyes of others.

Two Closing Pieces Of Advice

1) When with someone, be with them 100%

Like Bill Clinton or not, there are multiple people who say that when you talk to him, even if you’re a nobody, he locks his focus onto you like there’s no one else on the planet. That is what you call genuine presence.

If you treasure a meeting with someone, don’t take your phone with you and don’t have the meeting where you can be interrupted with ease. Learn to lock in on people and you’ll reap rewards you never imagined.

2) If you want the title, you take the job that goes with it

If you want to be a parent, you raise your kid until there’s no more raising to do.

If you want to be a manager, manage people, don’t hide behind your computer sending emails to someone who’s only seven feet away because you’re afraid of confrontation. When you’re upset with someone learn how to criticize the outcome, not the person.

Long after people forget what you did, long after they forget what you said, they’re gonna remember how you made them feel.

I love that quote.

Go get this book and make it at least the one book you read this year or step up like a Fortune 1,000 CEO and take a leisurely 9 weeks to read it. I guarantee you’ll find some killer actionable insights you never learned from your parents, preachers, professors, or politicians that actually help you experience life the way you want to, well liked by the people who matter most to you.

Talk soon,

Lewis LaLanne a.k.a. Note Taking Nerd #2 a.k.a. L.L. Cool Nerd

PS. If you want even more killer personal improvement advice from Eben Pagan on what you can do be liked in the business world, you’ll definitely want to put your hands all over these notes on his “Connected” course by clicking here now <—–

Internet Marketing Expert Derek Gehl On Proven Conversion Tactics That Increase Your Profits

NoteTakingNerd2 — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:00:00 +0000

See what internet marketing experts Derek Gehl revealed at Yanik Silver’s Underground Online Seminar On Precisely What To Test In Your Online Marketing And Exactly How To Do It

Hey you,

It’s Lewis a.k.a. Nerd #2.

If you’re clueless about how to give your marketing more muscle with testing, you’ll be dangerous to your competitors by the time you finish reading this.

And if you’re well-versed, I imagine even you will find one killer idea to transfer to your practices in what you’ll see below. Yes, the information is THAT good.

Now let’s get this show on the road.

The fastest way to get more money in the door is to turn more of your visitors to your site into customers. And the only way to jack this number up is through . . .

Testing

Most business owners either know nothing about testing or what they know is wrong.

Most people are making changes to their site blindly and then guessing whether or not it had a good impact because they don’t know how to track.

A/B Split Testing

If you don’t know shit about testing, this is the place to start.

This is where you split your traffic 50/50 to two pages that have one difference on each of them that you’re testing and once you’ve pushed enough traffic through you end up with a valid result.

Most people screw up when they first learn about this by testing multiple changes at the same time. The only valid results come from testing one change at a time.

Multi-Variant Testing

Software like Google Website Optimizer allows you test multiple combinations of changes at once.

So instead of only testing one change at a time, you can test 3 headlines, 3 different pictures, 3 different buy buttons which would be 27 different A/B split tests of a piece.

If you aren’t getting a shit-ton of orders, this is going to take you forever to come to a valid conclusion about which combination wins. He uses the term “Confidence Score” here which means you’ve had enough people go through the buying process that the numbers you’ve racked up is high enough in volume that you can believe it.

Adaptive Multi-Variant Testing

At the time he was doing this presentation this technology was so new that he didn’t trust it yet.

What this is supposed to do is quickly spot your promos that are horrible, kicks them out of the test, and re-diverts the traffic to other sites which reduces the time till you know the winning combination.

Derek Gehl’s Favorite Testing Tools

Beginner on a Budget – Google Analytics & Google Website Optimizer

For your stats Google Analytics can do pretty much everything a paid service can. For split testing he recommends Google Website Optimizer.

The things he likes about these is that they’re free, they’re simple to use and they have a ton of support you can access if you’re clueless.

The things he doesn’t like is that you can’t segment your visitors, there’s no heat mapping, and no paid support that allows you to solve problem with one call vs. scrounging through three forums digging for the solution.

Upgraded Services – Adobe Sitecatalyst (used to be omniture), www.vertster.com, and clicktale.com

Adobe isn’t super cheap because it’s a high end analytics tool but if you’re doing some heavy weight volume in traffic in sales it’s gonna pay off because you get paid support, you get the constant improving of it.

Vertster is what you’d use for your split testing. This software allows you to segment your lists. And it also measures results beyond conversion.

Clicktale is a great tool for heat mapping your site.

These services charge you according to how much traffic you’re ramming through them. They’re also kind of technical. But if you aren’t taking your numbers serious enough to track and eventually pay for, you’re leaving money on the table.

What Do You Need To Be Measuring?

1. Your Sales Funnel

Every action that you want people to take should be measured for it’s effectiveness in getting the result you want and constantly improved upon.

You need to know where your site is bleeding – which step is gaping open letting leads and money flow away from you. The numbers when measured tell you exactly where this is.

Metrics You Want To Testing

Conversion

All google website optimizer measures is conversion. But that’s not good enough because your conversion can improve but your cost of sale can also rise with conversion because you’re buying more expensive traffic. Conversion stats don’t paint the broadest picture.

Gross Revenue Per Visitor

You want to know how much people are buying

Average Order Value

You can increase conversion but lower your average order value. If you only see conversion though you never see this stat.

Net Revenue Per Visitor (Minus Cost Of Goods Sold: click cost, commissions, product cost)

This is the number that shows you for real how much money you’re shoving into your pocket. This is ultra important to know.

Most Significant: Projected Net Revenue (version X vs. version Y for Z period)

This almost knowing which one is gonna make you the most money.

You have to see BEYOND conversion. Google Website Optimizer is handicapping so many businesses because they don’t give you these stats. It’s easy to make shitty decisions without having all the right data.

One Metric Alone Is Deceiving

Scenarios that can and do play out in your business . . .

Your conversion can rise but your average order value can plunge and this turns the increase into a loss. If you’ve only got google website optimizer you’re congratulating yourself not knowing the damage you’re doing.

Your conversion can dip but your gross revenue per visitor can rise which leads to an increase in sales. With Google Website Optimizer in place you’ll see this dip and think you need to go back to the control and bail on a site scheme that’s making you great money.

Your gross revenue per visitor can increase but your net revenue per visitor tanks because the test leads to higher pay per click traffic in order to convert and this leads to a lowered conversion of your low cost organic traffic. This is why you want a service that allows you to segment traffic streams. Every source of traffic costs a different amount and has a different conversion rate. The most profitable traffic is free but depending on only one source of traffic is dumb. So to shore up the business we go out and wrangle affiliate traffic, PPC traffic, banner traffic but when we send it all to the same landing page and track it all lump sum, this doesn’t give you valid stats.

Segmenting & Targeting Traffic

As of this recording Google Website Optimizer didn’t allow you to segment your traffic.

Something that you always want to remember is that all traffic is not created equally and different sources responds differently. For example, affiliate traffic responds differently than organic search traffic to the same exact landing page.

You need to measure each source of your traffic and do whatever you can to make sure it’s profitable. The big mistake information marketers make is being undisciplined as a result of being in such a high margin business where the beer flows like wine. So instead of looking at how high is high, they look at broad stats and cash in the bank and never question their approach.

Different sources of traffic should have different sets of funnels they run through. Vertster allows you to segment down all the major sources all the way down to individual referrers so you can see how each source is converting.

What Do You Test?

First you have to determine what your sales funnel is. You measure it. Then you look for what piece is broken.

Also make sure you aren’t ever testing 100% of your traffic on a change. At minimum, you want to do an A/B split.

If your bounce rates on your landing pages are high, this is a blatant signal that this page needs to be tested against another version.

Heat mapping and click tracking tell how people cruise your site. His favorite tool that does this is Clicktale. This is software that tracks where people’s mouse goes to on your page. Researchers have found that where people’s eyes go, their mouse goes which ends up making this software about as 85% as effective as actual eye tracking.

What you might find when you use Clicktale is that you’re drawing eyeballs to stuff you don’t want to. This allows you to rearrange what is where on your page so that what you want in a prime location is in a prime location.

Click Maps tell you what people are actually clicking on. He’s found that most people who are new to a site and it has an about page, that’s what they click first. Being that this is the case, you want to engineer your About page to assist in herding people into your sales funnel.

The evidence these two services give you great places to start testing.

Your First Fold Is The Most Important Place To Test On Your Site

This will inspire people to leave faster than anything else will on your site.

If you pay for traffic or put a ton of time into generating it, you want to make sure that what they see when they show up gets as many of the right people to do what you want them to do.

And this is why it’s crucial to cater and customize landing pages for each unique source of traffic. If you’re doing PPC you should have different landing pages for different keywords and groups. You want to match the mindset of the visitor showing up – affiliate traffic is warm – PPC is cold.

What To Test In Headlines

Unless you’re Amazon.com or some other mega brand even old people know about, your site needs to have a headline.

Headlines the different sources of traffic see
The Length
Benefits/Emotional Hot Buttons
Colors
“How To”

If someone came in from an ad that had a “How-To” headline, it’s important to continue that conversation by having the headline on your page be a “How To” as well. They clicked with this in mind so keep them so cater to this.

Spelling Out Measurable Results

He’s found that headline that denominate a specific result you can expect to receive “Lose 10 pounds of belly fat in 90 days” will always out pull a broad and general claim like “Lose Weight Fast”.

Negative Focus

People are trained to pay attention to negative headlines by the press.

After Your Headline Tests

Video vs. Graphics vs. Text

He’s found that no one modality completely dominates the other but that certain markets and certain traffic have their buttons pushed by different modalities.

Graphics can convey how something works easily and quickly.

He’s found that traffic that’s been warmed up by a referrer that comes from affiliates and such, respond better to video than any other modality. Also, he’s found that cold traffic that’s come in from a banner or a PPC ad don’t respond as well to video. The reason he believes this is so is because video takes more of time commitment to wait for it to load sometimes as well as to watch.

The company Basecamp increased their conversions on their site by switching from a headline with a sub-headline and a description of what they did to a graphic that showed in pictures what their technology makes possible for you . . .

This graphic allows you to get what they do in one glance vs. reading an entire page. As a result of doing this, they increased their conversions by 14%.

Stuff To Split Test For Your For First Fold

Limit options to two things – Leave or do the one thing you want them to do.

You have to thing about what you want them to do on that page – read, click a link, opt-in and then look for what is on the page that is derailing them from doing this and start pulling them out.

Showcase Other People Saying You’re Awesome

Customize According To Their Location

So one example of this is if you have a an offer for free shipping you’re leading with, you can say, “Free Shipping to “Their City”. He’s found that people LOVE them some free shipping and if this is directly relative to them because you’ve used technology to spot where they are, it hits home even stronger.

AVOID THE FOLLOWING MISTAKE LIKE IT WAS HERPES . . .

Kill any slow loading content that cold traffic will see. When you have only five seconds to suck someone into your vortex, you don’t wait those five seconds to blow by with them looking at a buffering signal because if that’s the case, they’re gone.

You’re going to better off with static stuff especially with people who have no clue who you are.

Order Button Tests

Only Let Them Order At The End

People have found this work better with a video salesletter than if they made it available at the start or sooner. The only way to find out what your market likes is to test it.

In Key Sections Of The Sales Letter

By layering your buy button throughout the sales letter you’re trial closing essentially asking them if they’re ready to order yet or not. If they aren’t they can keep reading. So you could test putting after all your features and benefits, after your social proof, and then at the end.

Order Button In The Top Right Header

He’s found that an ecommerce site selling multiple products needs to have the order button right up top and easy to find.

Shiny, Bright, and Loud

A prime example of this is the “Belcher Button” which you see on any of our sales pages…

What People Need To See When The Click To Order . . .

Make sure that at the top of your order page you sum up the promise of what awaits them, the discounts they’re receiving, and your guarantee. Another good idea is to have testimonials here.

You want to do this assuming that someone skimmed and missed everything you’re summing up here for them.

Pricing Aspects To Test

The only reason you wouldn’t test your prices is if you’re selling a commodity. Otherwise, you always need to be testing price because the market is always shifting.

Anytime he goes in to consult with a business, he can go in and increase the price – example he gave was going from $63 to $69 or $179 to $199 – and not have it hurt conversion at all.

Premium Option: Sell less units, charge more

Value/Volume Option: Sell more units, charge less

Payment Plans

If you make payments available, you always want to make sure the full payment option is the most attractive unless you’re intentionally trying to make continuity income via a payment plan.

Bundle Products Together – Sell Them At High Prices

If you’re selling single products, you always want to look for other products to bundle with it that you can offer them that add more value to the purchase once they’ve already made the decision to buy in the first place. Once people have made the decision to buy, it’s about a thousand times easier for them to decide to buy more if it’s only put of them.

Guarantee

If you have none now get one. If you have 90 days, test extend it to twelve months or for a lifetime

His experience is that longer refunds convert better AND lower your refund. If you have a short guarantee period you give people the sense that you know something is gonna go wrong with this after 30 days from when they bought it. This means that if they aren’t absolutely dazzled by it before then, which in most cases of information products they aren’t because they haven’t even opened it, they’ve got to send it back before they find they’ve been burned . . . again. When you guarantee it for life, it implies you trust it’s going to be solid forever, otherwise you wouldn’t put yourself out there like that, so the buyer can just relax and get around to trying it someday.

You can test only guaranteeing the bigger orders of what you sell

He’s found that in tests he’s done that people will pay more when you only offer the guarantee on the highest priced option.

Find graphic guarantee seals to use

Test showcasing your guarantee either in the top fold, right before you ask them to buy, or on your order page

Social Proof

Facebook “Like” Button

Tweet Button

Digg Button

You want all of these buttons to have the counter next to them. Especially if it shows the number and then stalks their Facebook profile and shows you people they’re friends with there who have also ‘Liked” it. This allows for you to get the third party indirect endorsement from their friends.

Testimonials: video vs. photo vs. written

Videos are the best ones to have here. Not as hard to get as they used to be with web cams, phone cams being cheaper to access than ever. If you can’t get a video one, you want to gun for a written testimonial with their picture next to it. If you can’t get a picture, then you just roll with the words.

Celebrity In The Industry Endorsement

Derek Gehl is a nobody outside of an internet marketing discussion or seminar. But he’s a big somebody in these areas. Having him endorse anything internet marketing related would boost your cred with this market in a huge way. You always want to look for ways to make your celebrities relevant to your audience.

Security Seals

McAfee, Hackersafe, etc.

He’s found that if you’re in the tech niche, these heavy duty endorsements are significant but he’s also known of people in non-tech niches, that you can make a statement on a seal stating that your site is 100% verified and secure (because it is if you’re using a shopping cart) and it has the same effect as if you paid the super high fees to McAfee.

Better Business Bureau Seal

His testing has proven that the only places these security seals ever have any impact on conversion is when they’re tested on your order page. Don’t put these seals everywhere.

Opt-In Offers

Entry Pop-up - Popupdomination.com

These guys use light boxes. We love this! It’s kicks ass! Watch for using these on sales pages though because they can decrease your response.

Opt-in in the top fold on left vs. right margin

Top right has usually tested best for him.

Newsletter update vs. One Time Offer

A one-time offer like an app, a report, a video, etc. is what he’s finding is out pulling Newsletter offers. And the cool thing is, you can let people know when they opt in to get their report that you’ll be staying in touch with a newsletter so you get the best of both worlds.

Headline/Copy

You’re looking for the one mega benefit they’re going to get for opting in. Can’t be complicated. Needs to be sexy.

Submit Button

This is your call to action so it’s definitely something to test.

Video

He believes everyone should be using video somewhere – whether it be your salesletter or your testimonials or these other ways. He’s found that you always want to go with auto-play, video that start automatically when a the page loads.

Videospokesmodel.com

This is a technology that allows for a person to walk out of the side of your site and give an introduction to your visitor. You go to their site, and for $500 bucks you can pick out a model, give them a script, they shoot the video professionally and then send you all the info you need to be able to plug it into your site. He’s found that in a big broad market this can be effective but not in the small world.

Sundaysky.com – multi-SKU ecommerce sites

Information marketers have long used video more than ecommerce sites. There’s sites now that are recording demonstration/pitch videos for each of the products in their line (shoes, equipment, etc.). This service allows you to have someone shoot the videos for each of your products for you. If you’re selling a set of skis for $1,000 bucks it’d make sense to do this more than it would for the $5 dollar pocket hand warmers.

Video salesletter vs. Traditional salesletter

You always want to split test this.

Video salesletter with a traditional salesletter underneath it

Test the length: Different markets and different traffic have a different attention span

Screen Capture vs. Direct To Camera (infomercial style)

Screen capture works well for selling information. But if you’ve got an object like a sham wow you’re trying to sell, letting people see it in action (infomercial style) is a thousand times more compelling than talking about what it can do. If you do go with the infomercial style, you gotta make this look professional all the way down to the person doing the demo to the quality of the video (easy now to do HD).

Random Stuff To Test

Free shipping

People love them some free shipping. You can raise the price of the product to cover you paying for shipping and reap the benefits of more sales.

Adding shipping insurance (insureship.com)

This is an actual legit insurance company that will replace something that got lost when it was shipped. It’s something the customer can just check off and add to their order and you end up making a couple of bucks each time they do.

Having an image of your digital products and bonuses (ebooks, box for software, CD covers, etc.)

Sans-serif fonts

Font you see in print – books, newspapers, magazines – is in serif. Font you should be seeing online is Sans-serif. The older your market is, the bigger you want your font to be.

Light/white background colors free of patterns

He’s found this always works better. Test it.

Add a dollar value to anything you’re giving away

Add as much detail as you can to your testimonials

Name, city, profession, picture, etc.

Hand Drawn Graphics (copydoodles.com)

This can work in your screen capture videos as well as your traditional sales letters.

If you sell multiple variations of something, show it

If you’re selling socks and they come in three colors, show the three pairs of socks on the same page instead of thinking they’ll go to your drop down menu and do it themselves.

ALWAYS TEST – NEVER STOP TESTING – NO MATTER IF SOMEONE TELLS YOU IT’S THE DEFINTE TRUTH

If You Redesign Your Site Do You Do It One Element At a Time or Redesign Fully and Test?

If you’re going to do a complete site re-design using best practices, do it all at one time, but you still want to split test the traffic you’re getting to the new and the old site. If the new one wins you’re golden. If not, you know you’ve got work to do.

What kind of role does web chat have in the conversion process?

It’s something to test but at this point in time, he didn’t believe web chat would increase conversion because he feels he’d rather get serious potential buyers on the phone and take the order and answer questions that way otherwise you might have a bunch of people who end up wasting a lot of your time going back and forth.

He’s been testing live chat for years on different businesses and been able to make it work.

That’s it’s for today. Go put at least one of the aha’s you picked up here to work for yourself. And once again, feel free to stick aside a few thousand dollars of your profit that came from what you learned here so that you can buy me lap dances and champagne at the Olympic Gardens strip club when you come to Vegas.

Talk soon,

Lewis LaLanne a.k.a. Note Taking Nerd #2 a.k.a. L. L. Cool Nerd

PS. If you want to see the breakthroughs revealed at internet marketing experts Eben Pagan’s Elite Platinum Conversion event, you’ll definitely want to click here now <—–

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When It Comes To Personal Improvement The Difference That Makes The Difference Is Indifference

NoteTakingNerd2 — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Is Your Quest For Personal Improvement Doomed By What You Want? See Here . . .

Hey You,

It’s Lewis LaLanne a.k.a. Nerd #2.

Have you ever told yourself that you suck at something?

I have. And I had a friend of mine the other night call and tell me that he’d just gotten the shit kicked out of him playing poker and that he couldn’t win anymore.

This, on the back of him stomping some serious ass at the poker table during the previous month and for years prior to that.

I told him that he’s got a shit story he’s telling himself that opens up the window for bad beats to come to him (bad beats are when cards turn up in a hand that have the lowest odds of turning up which lead to the heavily favored hand being outdone by the least favored).

But it’s hard for him to get over his story. Especially in something like poker that’s got mathematical equations tied to it based on how many cards in the deck there are, how many players there are, how much money on the table there, blah, blah, fucking blah.

There’s still a shit story floating around there that’s causing him to say “I can’t win anymore.”

A story, that I believe revolves around, “I’m not lucky. I’m smarter

than everyone here and I make the right plays but I’m not the lucky guy and when I lose it’s always a bad beat to the lucky guy. FUCK THE COCK SUCKER LUCKY MOTHER FUCKER!!!”

What if my friend told himself a different story?

What if he didn’t give a shit whether he won or lost and told himself a story that said . . .

“As usual, whenever I sit at the table I have a care free, indifferent, and light spirit. My chest is open and I breathe to my balls with ease and I’m reading people with ease and trusting myself to make the right calls on every hand. And as usual, I’m leaving with at least 100% more money off the table than I put in and many times more than that all from a few hours of play and I get lucky more than the average bear. I meet at least one cool person every time I play and have a great fucking time and have ended up making great friends as a result of my getting out of the house.”

My question is, “WHO LOSES IF THIS STORY DOESN’T COME TRUE?” Answer: No one. But who loses if his existing story comes true? Answer: Him and anyone else who’s affected by a depression slump he goes into when he beats himself up.

The key is to not be attached to whether it becomes reality or not.

Why Indifference Is The Difference That Makes The Difference

A worthy goal to pursue for me is not caring about the outcome of anything and being okay with whatever happens as a result of me taking action that demands the best within me and asks me to push against my fear based tendencies.

So if I go to Starbucks and start talking to woman when I usually would just stare at the floor, I want to be happy whether I end up talking to her again or not.

If I go against the perfectionist in me and publish a post even though part of me thinks it’s a piece of shit, I want to be okay with it being received as a smashing success or a turd that sinks.

And if I ask someone to do an affiliate promotion with me, I want to be fine with whatever their answer is.

You give meaning to everything that happens in your life. The meanings you give are nothing but patchwork quilts of what’s been uploaded into you by your family, your friends, TV and it’s all fake. None of it’s real.

What you obsess about is not that important. It’s only important to the extent that you make it important. And it’s easier for someone experiencing massive success to say this than it is for the person getting their head handed to ‘em on a stick.

But there’s always another level. Especially when you succeed.

This is why it’s important to overcome your attachment to the outcome. Every level of success you reach will afford you a new opportunity to whine and make excuses and resist the obstacles that will never stop showing up. Never.

This is why it’s a good idea to never take yourself too seriously. Especially when you’ve had a success or when you’ve fallen flat on your face.

John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach of the UCLA Bruins was fond of expressing this belief to his players by telling them, “I hope that when someone sees you after a game, they wouldn’t be able to tell by your demeanor whether your team had won or lost.”

He preached to his student athletes that they should walk proud if they worked to their best of their abilities to implement what they learned in practice. If they did this, they could feel like a winner regardless of what the score board read.

Well if you don’t care about winning or losing, why not just sit on your ass and do nothing?

Because the minute you do become detached from the outcome and take right action is when all the things you would like to have happen, will happen because you’re not worried about the outcome.

You can have whatever you’re willing to give up.

Think about how when you’re desperate for something, you don’t get it and how when you don’t give a shit whether it comes or not, it just drops into your lap. I know you’ve had some moment in your life where you didn’t care about the outcome and either the women, money, food, gifts, etc. all just flowed your way.

People unconsciously reward people who don’t care and take action. Caring about the outcome is stopping you from having what you want.

Fretting over what you’re going to get is going to slow down or stop what you want from coming your way which then, if you don’t cultivate indifference, is what opens the flood gates to feelings of shame, guilt, and anger.

When you obsess about wanting something you don’t have and you wonder why you never get it, it’s because you’re in that never ending cycle.

Most people have never really experienced nor even thought about what it’d be like to have what they want. They’ve never had it so they only live from, “I want it. I don’t have it. I’m angry that I don’t have it. Why can’t I have it? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with society?”

This thinking leads you to come up with your story of why you can’t have what you want and you live in this place your whole life. And when you think of it on this level, you can now see why the majority of people go through life miserable, pissed off, eking out lives of quiet desperation.

You’re in the minority just by reading this. You put into practice what you read below and you’ll be one of the “Lucky” people the majority of people wishes they could to be like.

How To Radiate a More Attractive, Carefree, and Light Spirit Right Now…

Don’t believe anything too much. Criticism or praise. Failure or Success.

If you adopt the mantra below for yourself I guarantee you’ll be able to stay centered, resourceful and cool even in the midst of the worst of storms . . .

I seek synthesis. I seek synthesis. I seek synthesis.

Instead of reverting to the default part of yourself that automatically disagrees with people and finds the worst in the situation and sets out to make the other person wrong, or yourself wrong, which is nothing but our childish desire to seek significance, control, or security, you want to stop and ask yourself . . .

“What part of what they’re saying is new, intriguing, different? How is this a new paradigm shift for me and how can I fuse this with what I’m already attached to, synthesize it and bring value to both of us? How can I elevate this situation?”

“I knew that.” and “I disagree.” are the two prison cells that keep both your ability to evolve trapped in a juvenile existence.

How Attached To Your Stories Are You?

Tony Robbins was having a conversation with one of the co-creators of NLP, John Grinder and John told him . . .

“Tony, never believe anything too much because they’ll always be a situation where it’s not true.”

Never believe anything too much because they’ll always be a situation where it’s not true. Never believe anything too much.

Eben Pagan’s personal rule of thumb is that he never really wants to believe anything more than 50%. I like this. To me, this makes common sense.

50% buy in is the max he wants to push himself to because he hasn’t found anything, any concept, idea, or principle that someone else hasn’t come along and shown him how to transcend and take to the next level with a distinction that helped him understand it even better.

There’s always another level. There’s always another side, no matter how thin you slice it. Never believe anything too much.

When you lose your attachment to being right about the story that’s keeping you locked down, you get out of your self imposed prison you’ve locked yourself into.

You get to free of all the pity, the rage, and the jealousy you’ve been clinging to your whole life.

This level of thinking is what prompted me to put this idea into my friends head about his poker game. And I’m glad he made me think of this because now I’m sharing it with you and I ask you to not let yourself be chained by any idea or story that can only make you miserable.

Seek synthesis with ideas you’re resisting and fold them into a new story that only has an upside if becomes reality.

Talk soon,

Lewis LaLanne a.k.a. Note Taking Nerd a.k.a. L. L. Cool Nerd

PS. PS. If you want discover the personal improvement strategies that Tony Robbins laid out specifically for entrepreneurs at his Ultimate Business Seminar (Eben Pagan spoke here too), you definitely want to click here and put your hands all over these notes now . . .