About This Blog

Regularly referred to in the media as "Australia's Richard Branson", Pete Wililams is a serial entrepreneur, author, internet marketer and ego maniac. This blog is where he shares his rants and raves on all things business, marketing & publicity - in particular, how to successfully mix internet marketing & business...

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Archive: September 2008

Internet Marketing = Cult?

Click Here to OrderIn the foreword to a new book, Mark Joyner points out that the internet marketing crowd may, on the surface, share some common features with a cult:

“A unique language understood only by those in the cult, “guru” figures of whom many blindly follow, and bizarre rites and rituals.”

Well….

- Unique language: squeeze pages, optin rate, conversion rate, PPC, CPM, CPA
- Guru figures: do I even need to go there?
- Bizarre rites and rituals: launching new websites at the drop of a hat, constantly searching for better tools (which spring up every day), working at all hours of the day or night.

While Joyner’s comparison may in some sense be accurate, there’s another word that better describes this collection of eclectic individuals we know as “internet marketers”.

Family.

Skeptical?

Think about it: in what other business arena do the major players:

- Freely share their biggest “secrets”?
- Promote each others’ products and services?
- Sell to each other, and to each other’s customers?

I can’t think of any other business endeavor where successful business owners are so open and transparent with their colleagues and potential competitors (“newbies”).

And Joel Comm has now taken this transparency to a whole new level.

You may know Joel as the guy who figured out how to make Google’s Adsense a money-pumping hands-free oil well and then turned around and wrote a book about what he learned…

In the New York Times Best Seller The Adsense Code, he pulled back the curtain so others can duplicate what he did.

Joel’s new book –the one with the foreword by Mark Joyner—documents the history of the internet marketing “family”…

Click Here to Order: Stories of the World’s Most Successful Internet Marketing Entrepreneurs is the most complete background of Internet marketing that exists today.

Joel retells story after story of dozens of today’s internet marketers: how they got started and the paths they took to become successful.

Once you finish reading this book, you will never look at Internet Marketing in the same way. Not only do you get an inside look at marketers including:

- John Resse
- John Carlton
- Michel Fortin
- Willie Crawford
- Armand Morin

Plus many others, often in their own words…

You also get the little “nuggets” of practical and strategic wisdom that Joel has deftly included too.
So the book is part family history, part marketing education, and part inspiration.

You might already be part of the family, if like me you:

- Know what a squeeze page is
- Spend time obsessing over your “opt-in rate”
- Check your Clickbank or Paypal account twenty times a day
- Continually search for better-performing keywords
- Hang out with your online friends more than with your “offline” buddies (did someone say twitter?)

…then congratulations! You are already a member of the “family”.

If not, the fastest way to join this family is to read the book!

Click Here to Order ‘Click Here to Order’ (yes, I wrote that right)

Pete

P.S. Don’t miss your chance to get your exclusive peek into the world of successful Internet Marketing Entrepreneurs, and take a shortcut to joining them.

P.P.S. Looks like the book version of the 30 Day Challenge is getting a lot closer to becoming a reality. We’ve had an offer from a publisher, so i’ll keep you all in the loop on that one.. Stay Tuned.

Living In An Empty Inbox

“Clearly, the problem of email overload is taking a toll on all our time, productivity, and sanity, mainly because most of us lack a cohesive system for processing our messages and converting them into appropriate actions as quickly as possible.” - Merlin Mann

The Secret To Success Is INDIRECTLY Related To

- How late you get up in the morning
- The number of TV shows you watch each week
- The length of your lunch breaks
- The amount of sick days you have
- The amount of time you spend on Facebook
- The amount of time you spend playing World of WarCraft
- The number of posts you make in online forums.
- The number of excuses you make
- The number of books you haven’t read
- The number of ‘lessons’ you haven’t implemented
- How early you leave the office
- The amount of exercise you DON’T do
- The amount of security to crave (nothing is achieved withough risk)
- The number of seminars you take, before implementing the lessons from the previous one
- How soon you quit
- The dream-takers you surround yourself with
- Your level of procrastination
- The length of your to-do list

The proof is obvious.

The Enemy of the Best… Is The Good

Mystery and Neil StraussThis is a great quote… I first heard it from a guy who goes by the name Mystery.

Mystery is one of the worlds greatest pick-up artists and teaches the art of seduction through seminars, home study courses and his reality show on VH1.

As a side note, every marketer should study what these guys teach, not so yo can “get laid”, but because it teaches you true social dynamics, how people interact and what make them to do what do.

In fact, when you do take the time to familiarize yourself with what they are teaching, you will find that they don’t teach ‘how to get laid’ at all…. All they are teaching is how to interact with society, how to read a person, how to ooze charisma and confidence…. and once you get over the approach, being yourself will close the deal…

But with anything, the seduction community wouldn’t have grown to the phenomenon it has if they didn’t ‘market’ their personal development courses with the ‘honey’ that is ‘getting laid’

Anyway….

Mystery was using the quote, when illustrating the ‘situation’ thats faces a lot of PUAs (Pick-Up Artists) when “in the field” - Part of the methodology they teach is to approach a Warm-Up SET (group of girls) before approaching the TARGET (the girl you really want), so you can find your rhythm and more importantly increase your social value by being seen with other women etc etc.

The ‘situation’ that most PUAs find themselves in is that they even up ‘picking-up’ someone from the first group of girls and never making it to the true TARGET.

The PUAs settles, they live the maxim of ‘a bird in the hand is better then two in the bush’ or however it goes… but this maxim still holds true in the world of… well anything.

In business, this statement could not be 1. any more true and 2. anymore prevalent.

The enemy of almost every business (mine included) is the ‘good’… with so much going on, settling seems to be the norm.

I mean, you start out with big goals, grand plans, but the business gets in the way and those goals of ‘being the best’ get compromised and you settle for ‘good’.

See, whether you are an entrepreneur or a PUA, the ‘risk’ that is very rarely discussed is the one that you are faced with when you have ‘the good’ - The risk of losing it.

Most people focus their teachings on getting started and over-coming the problem of wanting something you don’t have… but very few people openly acknowledge (or provide answers) to the fact that the paralysis brought on due to the ‘problem of losing what you have’ is greater that then the initial problem of having nothing.

“What if I leave this SET of girls, go for ‘The Best’ and luck out…. and have to go home alone?”

“What if I push that little bit harder, spend that little bit extra, go for ‘The Best’ and luck out… will the business be worse off then it is now ?

The true test of ‘the best’ entrepreneurs are those who have the self confidence, the self belief, just like ‘the best’ PUAs and trust that ‘The Best’ is possible.

Achieving Success With The Cumulative Effect

My business partner in the whole “MCG Sports Memorabilia” thing, the great Bruce Hultgren, produces a stella e-zine entitled ‘Daily Life Tips’… and the other day he wrote about setting and achieving your goals, in a way I’ve never really heard articulated so well before.

He spoke about ‘The Cumulative Affect’ and it blew my mind…

As Bruce wrote…

If I wanted to change my body shape (which I do) in the next 12 months - then I will have to do something over and over for a time in order to see results - agreed?

Well - we always talk about goal setting for many things - but this for me hit a home run - it is something I can actually measure on a daily basis and check it off - knowing - that if I do it every single day for a year - the results will be there - whether I keep checking or not!

So then I did a little exercise - let’s say I set a massive goal of doing 100,000 sit ups in the next 12 months - surely this will get a fantastic result - broken down - 6 sets of 50 per day. (Or 300 in total when my body adjusts and allows me to achieve this.)

I know I know - you are probably pulling out the calculators to see if I did my math right and also are probably thinking - not me - too hard - that would hurt or quite simply - that is not that important to me enough to set that goal - this is FANTASTIC! Because I have got you at least thinking about it!

So your life tip for today is….

“Set some MASSIVE Cumulative Affect projects that are important to YOU!”

Here are a couple of mine which I will share with you so you can get thinking….

I am reading for 15 minutes a day so I can complete 20 books this year.
I am setting an exercise program for myself which relies on repetition rather than long stretches of time which includes…. 100,000 sit ups, (and all the following done with a stretchy band - exercises for my shoulders, legs, back, chest, arms and lower back.
I am writing Daily Life Tips each day so I can influence peoples lives in some way.
I am going to walk 4368 minutes in the next year. (84 minutes a week - 4 sessions of 21 minutes - doubles as thinking and head clearing time!!!)
I am going to set yearly work goals for activities, I am going to set time off work goals, I am setting coaching goals and the list goes on.
I am currently setting some annual, monthly and weekly goals for the coming 12 months - from this day forwards because I have had a chance to think so much for the past week away from my usual surroundings.

THWAK - Ok - that’s the sound of the ball getting hit back into your court.

In order for ANY of this to get started - you MUST write it down! MUST MUST MUST

Then of course - revisit it regularly to stay in focus and on target.

See, one of the biggest things that stops any of us achieving a goal is that we look at it was one big result… not a series of cumulative actions. Which is all it actually is.

It’s this focus on actions rather then goals (which is also the principle of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which I will write about in a future post), that allow us to get started and see progress, which stimulates motivation and instills habits.

Instead of looking at a project or goal as a result, try looking at it as a series of small cumulative actions… and if you do those ‘simple’ actions over and over again, the result will take care of itself.

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