If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

My Friends,

I want to share something with you.   I have been studying self-help/motivational writings and practices for over 30 years.  One thing I firmly believe is "your mind creates your reality".

An ultra-successful marketer, Lisa Diane, apparently also adapted this mindset and shares the reasons for her success.  She has created five multi-million dollar businesses when she discovered this for herself.  She started in over $50,000 in debt and had her car re-possessed.  She now earns $400,000 per month in automated income, so she is probably someone to listen to.  She started with direct mail.  She went from flat broke to earning $1,000,000 in one year, which is quite an accomplishment.

Here are two links that are free and you don't have to opt-in to listen to them.  The first one from a webinar last night.

http://www.6mprofitmethod.com/af/replay

The second link is here.

www.themilliondollardesire.com

Enjoy and please listen to what she has to say.  It may change your life.

All the best!

Angela Wickenberg

www.sgrsecret.com/lesson/2

www.sgrsecret.com/lesson/3

One of my favorite books is "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". Like so many of the books I have read throughout the years, I passionately read and accepted Franklin Covey's teachnings and practices, but then after a time, lost focus and went on to the next thing in my life.

But recently, I have been faced with incredible challenges, some might even say "unspeakable"… and this has led me into a paradigm shift in my way of seeing things and the way I think…  I didn't actually think I would go through yet another paradigm shift  this year, but it happened.

It wasn't planned; it was just a flash of awareness that came up on me today,  but when looking back, I can see how this has gradually come into being throughout the last few months.  The situation I had been enduring suddenly lost all meaning - I finally realized that. And I relaxed all my efforts in that direction.

Steven Covey says that many people experience a similar fundamental shift in thinking when they face a life-threatening crises and suddenly see their priorities in a different light, or when they suddenly step into a new role… if we want to make relatively minor changes, we can focus on our attitudes and behaviors, but if we want "significant quantum change", we need to work on our basic paradigms.

But this doesn't happen in an instant.  It is intimiately associated with who we are - with our character.  If we want to change our lives, we have to change development our character, the perspective through which we view things and people and situations. Sometimes we create situations in which we are simply forced to develop character, or perish.  Always looking for shortcuts in life, trying to skip vital steps in order to save time and effort and still reap the desired results. But when we shortcut natural processes in our growth and development, we end up becoming very disappointed with ourselves, and disppointing everyone else around us.

We have heard it all before, but never want to listen; we have to take baby steps before we start to run. Many of our failures are due to this one thing - this one defect - our refusal to accept the fact that  "A thousand mile journey begins with a single step"…

…and must be taken one step at a time…

 

To You Online Success,

Angela Wickenberg

Become the clarity of a cloudless sky.

When you see the entire sky endlessly clear,

enter such clarity;

the clarity of consciousness;

transcending the mind -

whose nature is confusion - mass consciousness.

Get our minds out of the clouds

and into the day,

filled with newborn life,

like the clarity of a newborn babe,

uncontaminated by fear,

which becomes muddled as our minds develop.

Whatsoever you see,

enters you

and is reflected.

Best Wishes for the New Year,

Angela Wickenberg

Since I recently participated in a contest but did not win, it feels important
to focus on what I succeeded in doing; what did I accomplish?
When I focused on why I did not win, I contracted a very bad case of the
post-competition blues… we all like to receive something of high value
from someone we admire or from an organization as a proof of how much
THEY value us. It's like proof of how much we are loved and recognized.
Funny how we, as humans, need that kind of confirmation from others to feel self-worth.

More

The guys at Hexatrack show exactly how to make $45,000 in two days with their new free tool, Hexatrack. 

Here's a link to the video:

Here's the play-by-play breakdown of what they did: 

1. They identified an interesting, timely offer on the CommissionJunction affiliate network with a payout of $15.00 per conversion.
2. The offer was centered around a main keyword; let's say it was a 2-word keyphrase which we'll call the "seed keyword."
3. They "dropped the seed" into the HexaTrack keyword spy tool, which yielded a few dozen "short tail" keywords used by our competitors at the time. If  competitors are using these keywords, they can't be all wrong!
4. They prepared to spend some money in Google Adwords and uploaded these short tail keywords to a new Adwords campaign. ("Short-tail keywords" are named so because they contain the seed keyword plus one additional word, or two at the most.)
5. Then they began running these "short tail" keywords as "broad matches"… i.e. if a user searches Google for a phrase that is identical with the short-tail phrase, it's a match… but more importantly, if the Google user's phrase contains the short tail phrase, it's a match as well!
    

   Are you following on why they were running their first list of spyed-out keywords in broad match mode?   For example, if the keyword we were paying for was "life insurance", and a Google user searched for "capital life insurance," our ad would still successfully display on Google, because "capital life insurance" contains the phrase "life insurance". Thus, it's a broad match!

   Here's the kicker… (important!)
   

6. Whenever a conversion happened (sale, lead) HexaTrack would detect the actual keyword that the user entered into Google at the time… which is not necessarily the keyword that we were bidding on originally!

   Let me repeat this, because it's so important: After every time you convert a click to a sale or lead (a money-making action), HexaTrack will report back to you the long-tail keyword that the user had actually searched for, which may be different from the short-tail keyword that you were bidding on in the first place.

   For example, if you ran the broad match on the short-tail keyword "life insurance" from the example above, you might find out from HexaTrack:

   a) that "life insurance" by itself is an overpriced keyword because it is so broad that "everyone and their brother" bids on it (remember, most bidders on Adwords don't know what they're doing, and thus drive up bid prices on "obvious", but badly-converting keywords); and
    
   b) that a handful of previously-unknown "long tail" keywords such as "California life insurance review" turn out to be hotly-converting keywords …and they aren't even keywords that you were explicitly bidding on!

   Without HexaTrack you would not have had that information at all!

   (Frankly, I don't even know how we made any money in PPC before we developed HexaTrack!?! Larry?)

7. Here's what we did next: We simply removed the expensive broad-match/short-tail terms that didn't make any money… and replaced them with the lean, cheap, long-tail keywords that HexaTrack found out for us… i.e. we are now only buying those keywords from Adwords that users actually tend to enter before they buy!

   Put another way: We're replacing our ad spy keywords that may sell, with the actual keywords that are proven to convert Google users into conversions. We are taking OUT the guesswork.

   For example, if our initial test with "life insurance" was unprofitable, we would now replace it with a dozen or so exact-matches of various long-tails that HexaTrack found out for us. One of these long-tails could be, for example, "california life insurance review", which HexaTrack could have reported to us as one of the keywords that we know has actually converted real people to our $15 affiliate offer!

Do you get it?

• First HexaTrack generated our initial "test balloon" short-tail keyword list right out of the box, by spying on our competitors (which is basically a VERY good estimate on what people will enter and what keywords are likely converting for our competiitors)…
• Then, after just hours, it showed us the precise keywords that people actually entered before they clicked on our money-making affiliate offer, so we could eliminate some of the expensive short-tail duds from our keyword arsenal and enter the profit zone rapidly. (Within a day of testing to be exact.)

$45,000+ within 2 days after the initial experimental phase — how is one supposed to react to that?

Were we all cool and laid-back about this result? Did we chalk it up as just anoher night at the office… business as usual at Larry & Amish's? Of course not! This was a home-run in anyone's book, no matter what some Adwords gurus would want you to believe…

The point here is not to make you think that you can make 45 grand out of the gate, every other day, from the first day you're using HexaTrack PRO. The point is that, with diligent research of the kind we'll be teaching our PRO members, you probably will stumble upon a gold mine market like this, a few times a year. Consider such spectacular opportunities as the gravy on top of your meat-and-potatoes markets… (the latter being the ones that bring you solid PPC income every single day).

We'll get more into your long-term strategy of balancing steady markets vs. outrageous home-run opportunities in one of the next blog entries. For now let it suffice that 45 grand in a couple of days is possible.

 

Here's the link again to the video:

And a link to where you can sign-up for a free account:

 

To Your Online Success,

Angela Wickenberg

Taking a pause.  What would life be like if we never took one? 

Maddening I would say.

I had a deepened realization of this as I was Twittering this morning at twitter.com/ebizmom.  I had been feeling disoriented for the past few weeks, but especially after some minor day surgery a week ago.

"Feels like I lost footing and can't remember what I was doing",  and I wrote that  "Sometimes, it's important to just breathe deeply and relax when things are cloudy and even a little 'out of order'. Letting the dust settle", and  "The most important symbol in music is the PAUSE, and pausing when speaking is THE most powerful strategy to use. And so it is with life."

As I ate my mid-morning snack, I couldn't stop thinking about the Pause and it's importance in our lives, even for all life, and how we unconsciously use the pause every day.   We would go insane without taking a pause every now and then, so in this sense, the Pause is the most important word in the dictionary, and the most important thing, the one thing we all need to learn how to purposely use in our lives. Even in software development, a breakpoint is an intentional stopping or pausing place in a program, put in place for debugging purposes, according to Wikipedia.

In my humble opinion, the Pause can be used to attain fantastic goals, like Peace of Mind, Love, Friendship, and Financial Freedom.

We take pauses every day.  But a lot of the pauses that we take are unconscious; they have become automatic.

We need to learn to take conscious pauses when we breathe, eat, play and work.

A great speaker takes pauses in strategic places to emphasize a point, and so do the greatest of salespersons.

The music that moves us the most uses pauses very effectively. 

It's called Fermata.  This word is very similar to ferment: to stir up or seethe with excitment.

We become more exciting and build expectation when we take a pause, even though the taking of the pause itself is relaxing.

We need to rest. Give ourselves a chance to release the past and heal. To become whole.

In poetry it's called Prosody; the study of poetic metre and the art of versification.

Without the Pause, there is no Beauty. There is no Music. There is no poetry.

Prosody is also the patterns of stress and intonation in a language.

To take a pause means to take a short break; a temporary stop.

Taking a pause lets the dust settle, but it also helps build momentum and excitement.

Taking a few deep breathes clears my muddled thoughts and helps me focus better. 

In this sense, the Pause is meditation.

To stop.  To reflect. To consider. To remember what's important.

To breathe.

It only takes a few moments. Just a few breathes, and we can change our lives.

Go in a new direction. Or decide to continue on a chosen path with new-found direction and purpose.

So, take a conscious Pause, and breathe.

Angela Wickenberg

 

34 Rules for Maverick Entrepreneurs

1. It’s got to be a BIG idea that you, your team and your customers can “get” in seconds.
2. Strive to create 10x – 100x in value for any price you charge. Your rewards are always proportionate to the value you provide.
3. You must charge a premium price so you have a large margin to provide an extraordinary value & experience.
4. Provide a ‘Reason Why’ customers should do business with you and pay you a premium.
5. Get paid before you deliver your product or service.
6. You get to make the rules for your business. Don’t let industry norms dictate how you’ll work or who you’ll work with.
7. Create your business around your life instead of settling for your life around your business.
8. Consistently and constantly force yourself to focus on the ‘critically few’ proactive activities that produce exponential results. Don’t get caught up in minutia & bullshit.
9. Seek to minimize start-up risk but have maximum upside potential.
10. Get your idea out there as fast as possible even if it’s not quite ready by setting must-hit deadlines. Let the market tell you if you have a winner or not. If not – move on and fail forward fast! If it’s got potential – then you can make it better.
11. Find partners and team members who are strong where you are weak and appreciate being paid on results.
12. Your reputation always counts. Honor your obligations and agreements.
13. Never, ever get paid based on hours worked.
14. Leverage your marketing activities exponentially by using direct response methods and testing.
15. Measure and track your marketing so you know what’s working and what’s not.
16. Bootstrap. Having too much capital leads to incredible waste and doing things using conventional means.
17. Your partners and employees actions are their true core – not what they tell you.
18. Keep asking the right questions to come up with innovative solutions. “How?”, “What?”, “Where?”, “Who Else?” & “Why?” open up possibilities.
19. You’ll never have a perfect business and you’ll never be totally “done”. Deal with it.
20. Focus most of your time on your core strengths and less time working in areas you suck at.
21. Make it easier for customers to buy by taking away the risk of the transaction by guaranteeing what you do in a meaningful way.
22. Always have something else to sell (via upsell, cross-sell, follow-up offer, etc) whenever a transaction takes place. The hottest buyer in the world is one who just gave you money.
23. Always go back to your existing customers with exceptional offers and reasons they should give you more money. It’s 5x less expensive to sell to happy customers than go find new ones.
24. However the flip side is - fire your most annoying customers. They’ll be replaced with the right ones.
25. The marketplace and competitors are always trying to beat you down to a commodity. Don’t let that happen.
26. Develop and build your business’s personality that stands out. People want to buy from people.
27. Create your own category so you can be first in the consumer’s mind.
28. Go the opposite direction competitors are headed – you’ll stand out.
29. Mastermind and collaborate with other smart entrepreneurs if they have futures that are even bigger than their present.
30. Celebrate your victories. It’s too easy to simply move on to your next goal without acknowledging and appreciating the ‘win’.
31. Make your business AND doing business with you FUN!
32. Do the unexpected before and after anything goes wrong so customers are compelled to ‘share your story’.
33. Get a life! Business and making money are important but your life is the sum total of your experiences. Go out and create experiences & adventures so you can come back renewed and inspired for your next big thing.
34. Give back! Commit to taking a % of your company’s sales and make a difference. It this becomes a habit like brushing your teeth pretty soon the big checks with lots of zeros won’t be scary to write. If you think you can’t donate a percentage of your sales simply raise your price.

Here's the URL to the entire blogpost:  http://www.internetlifestyle.com/blog/?p=341