It’s a matter of courage
Whether you are taking your very first step as a child or writing a book or may be starting a business, it all comes down to courage. The only difference is the belief people around us has.
When we are kids, none of our parents says “OK Varun, no need to even try and get up and walk, you’ll never do it”. Do they say that? No… they don’t. They say “C`mon once more, get up, C`mon… just a step, YES, that’s the way”.
And things starts changing as we starts growing up. People starts telling us “NO, you can’t do it”. Of course often it’s meant to help us be safe from harmful stuff. But our mind doesn’t understand that, it gets programmed anyway.
It’s a matter of courage
When you are setting your goal today, you are going to add an extra ounce of courage to that. Because it often comes down to that. There’ll be time when people around you won’t support you at all. At that time, you have to…
Believe in yourself and take a leap of faith.
You’ll be surprised how much things change when you just add a dab of courage to your step.
I remember when I first wrote the sales letter for my book and posted it. I just couldn’t handle the butterflies in my stomach.
I remember when I first created an email list and wrote a newsletter, it was mind boggling pressure.
I also remember when I wrote an email selling a product.
I also remember when I got my first refund request.
Yes all of times, I was pressured by some invisible force crushing me. But I had to stand up, handle it because I made a decision, decision to change my life.
Its just a matter of courage. Times, events, people will change no matter what. The only thing that’ll remain unchanged is your courage.
Your courage to take a step towards unknown.
Your courage to push beyond your limits.
Your courage to face your own fears.
That’ll be unchanged forever.
Varun Pratap
Aim for That Peak Like Mad.
Shadow Such people and Cheer Them On.
Traffic Tactic 7 – Creating a News
Imagine, you are a reporter on a mission to uncover hidden secrets about your company or product. How would you approach it?
News -> New. News have to be new otherwise it’s not news. That’s the job of the reporters. With 24 hr News channel, their job has even become harder. They have to dig deeper, find or twist the realities to create news.
And what all of this have to do with creating traffic?
Heh, heh, EVERYTHING.
If you have the ability to create a news, you’ll be able to write stuff (press releases) which will bring you truck loads of traffic in no time. Plus these days with bookmarking sites like digg and others, people respond to news far better than a sales pitch.
You are launching a product? WOW… what a news? NOT. Have you seen press release websites?
Most press releases are something like this..
“We are so-so of the company so-so proud to present our chairman getting the awards of okay-okay. So on and on.”
“I am proud to announce the latest product launch in our catalog which is really good and I believe will change the future of the market”.
Now, I know I made up the above lines all by myself. But there’s truth in there. These kind of stuff might be news to you, but chances are to your market… Nah, nope, not ever.
How do you test if you have a news or not?
You cannot check it if you are thinking from your self or your company’s self. You have to get into 3rd person mindset and look at it objectively. If there is anything which makes you rise your eyebrows and say “what the heck?” chances are it’s news.
When you start looking at the object from multiple angles, you’ll see news.
If you think you have stuff which people will more likely bookmark and refer to their friends, it might be a news.
I’ve often talked about “Viral Marketing” mindset. Which is what you are also looking here. Easy to bookmark, Easy to refer.
Of course, like every skill, it takes time to master creating news. You should try to write at least 1 press release per week and submit and notice the results you are getting. You’ll start seeing a trend in your own writing (or fact finding). When you write a certain type of stuff, it’ll get more results.
For me, it was the question WHY? Whenever I asked a question with WHY and created a release, I got results. Whenever I tried to make it newsy, it bombed.
It’ll also help if you watch some news and see which news catches your attention and ask WHY.
I know this is little odd way to get traffic but it’ll work in long run.
Varun Pratap
Aim for That Peak Like Mad.
Shadow Such people and Cheer Them On.
Un-complicate things
While surfing around today, I came across a very interesting post by Jimmy D brown titled, “3 Keys To Kick-Start Your Biz In 24 Hours”. Now, now, I know, it’s very salesy title, but the idea or the knowledge he shared is Important here. It wouldn’t do any good to you if you miss the essence of the post because of salesy title.
The essence of the article was to “Un-complicate things”. Like he said, most internet marketers are chasing after the new shiny tool like dog chases its tail.
Like I always talk about “Mastering one way of doing things before you move on”. Often Doing it One way produces far better than spreading out in many different fields. Again, Do not complicate things.
People often equate simplicity = Not advanced enough = Bah, I am an expert, this thing is below me.
For anyone who ever practiced martial arts knows, “Basics properly executed often wins over advance technique”. In MMA UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), Royce Gracie+’s (Elite Fighter) most victories came from simple arm bar.
1. Streamline
2. Systemize
3. Stick
Are the simple formula Jimmy Uses in his life and marketing.
I also use simple formula to explain my philosophy.
Product + Targeted traffic + conversion = $$$.
Then I talk about 1 way of doing things. 1 way to create product, 1 way to increase traffic, 1 way to improve conversion. It starts with just 1 way.
And folks, that’s how you do things.
Varun Pratap
Aim for that peak like mad
Shadow Such people and Cheer Them On.
Traffic Tactic 7 : Building an Avalanche like momentum
Like I always propose, “Traffic building starts the moment you decide to build a website”. If you think and change your mindset in this way, you’ll see different results. Why?
Because, your planning will depend on :–
What kind of market you are in?
What kind of keywords you are going to target?
What kind of promotion strategy you’ll use? or
What kind of customer retention techniques you’ll use?
How you’ll increase consumption of the product?
Every single questions needs to be answered if you are interested in getting loads of traffic.
Create An Avalanche Like Traffic
To build an ever growing traffic you need to work on your strategies, tactics as regularly as possible. If you remember from my old posts about Active and Passive techniques of getting traffic. Implementing those techniques will surely help, but you need to go beyond that.
If you take an example of avalanche, it starts with a tiny flake of snow and it all starts from there. As the time passes, it grows into a HUGE storm of snow with a huge potential of creating a disaster. This is what your image should be of getting traffic.
To make that tiny flake into Huge Storm.
One of the Techniques that you can use is called “Viral Marketing”. Mark Joyner termed this phenomenon and is pretty much god father when it comes to Viral Marketing.
Mike Filsaime is another person who’ve used something like this with great effect. He created FREE membership sites (with a Paid Upsell) and build his sites and list tremendously. Of course, It’s going to be hard to discuss his strategies in this blog.
But there are 3 things you can always consider from Viral Marketing.
1. Easy to Consume – If you can produce something which is easy to consume without any hassles then the chances of going viral is tremendous.
2. Reason to promote – You have to think Why people should promote your stuff. You have to give them reason, reasons good enough to make them get off their asses and write an email or may be an article or may be create a blog to promote it. Is it easy? Nope. Can it be done? Oh yes.
3. Ease of promotion. If you can make it easy to promote by providing stuff and examples then you further increase changes of getting your name out. In Mike filsaime’s case, anyone could promote his products/membership sites provided they had an email account. Now you tell me who doesn’t have an email account at this day and age?
Viral marketing and Words of mouth advertising is one of my favorite way. Because it pushes you to think beyond your current capability. Most often you’ll see that you’ll have high percentage of failure for these campaigns, but when they succeed, they’ll bring and create a HUGE momentum towards your site. All you have to do is capture this momentum and ride along.
How Just 15 minutes Added Extra $100 per day?
If I told you, just 15 minutes per day can add Extra $100/day, would you believe it?
Well, If I told myself this about 3 years ago, I never would.
As things, circumstances and mindset changes, so does perception. One of the good thing about building your own business is that you see miracles happening in front of your eyes. It’s like magic.
So The question remains, How can you add an extra $100 per day?
The answer is deceptively simple, by Adding more products to your catalog.
I helped one of my apprentice with creating her product catalog.
Like I always My advice was very simple and She stuck to it and followed it. I told her…
“Just spend 15 minutes per day, talking and recording your thoughts on XXXXXXX. In a month, You’ll have couple of products ready to sell. You can add it as an upsell, downsell, or just sell them stand alone, no matter what, it’ll add to your bottom-line.”
That’s exactly what she did. But she took my advice a bit far than I expected.
She spend more than 30 minutes per day (damn that woman, how dare she do more than what I advised?? 
).
She said, “I just couldn’t stop after 15 minutes, I needed to get things out of my mind so that it gets recorded and I was able to finish the product in 7 days”
So she just couldn’t stop herself after 15 minutes?
Of course, that’s what I was expecting from her. I baited her to do the speaking for 15 minutes and I knew, after 15 minutes, she’ll have so many ideas floating in her mind, she won’t be able to suppress them.
And I knew, if she makes a habit out of this, in a month, she’d have to worry about what to do with so much stuff. Guess what??? It worked.
That’s what I do in my life. That’s how I build simple habits to overcome any obstacles.
I am starting Effortless Writing Workshop which will show you how to write anything be it articles, sales letters, emails or web content effortlessly. There are few seats still left open, I highly recommend you to register your seat now.
Varun Pratap
Aim for that peak like mad.
Shadow Such people and Cheer Them On.
Getting Into the Zone
Just 10 minutes ago, I was banging my head on my table.
You see for damned reason, my neighbor decided, he doesn’t like his building, He tore it down and started re-building it.
Personally I am pissed about it for 2 reason
1. He’s making his guys work 24/7.
2. My bedroom is closest to his plot.
oh… how could I forget the 3rd reason.
3. He’s using some big ass machine to drill for god knows why.
Yup. to say I am irritated is an understatement.
Now I am worried about not sleeping properly as couple of Yoga Nidra (Yoga sleep) can take care of restless-ness, mild head irritation.
The reason I am irritated is because I am having problem with focusing on my work. I just couldn’t concentrate with all the noise.
Then 10 minutes ago, I realized something to my horror, I was making this same mistake for last couple of weeks. It was such a simple error that anyone can miss it unless pointed out.
Damn. Thank god, my irritation helped me find this before it becamea bad habit.
It all started with when I caught cold at the change of season. 4 days of cold, few bad habits creeping up and become permanent.
What happened with cold that my mental state changed and it became droopy-relaxed and I started going through motions of doing things rather than taking care of my state.
Now your state matters A LOT when you are working. If your mental state is good, it’ll show through your work, no doubt.
So if you are working on anything, you have to take care of your own state. That’s YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. Noone else will tell you if you should do your work with motivated state.
Because people (Your boss, wife, kids, friends) just want the thing to be done.
NO, it doesn’t work that way, when you want to succeed online.
You have to manage your state All the time.
There’ll be time when negative thoughts, patterns, feelings creeps up and instead of just sighing and reaching for anything sugary, you jump up and change your state.
Now after I realized this, I Stood up. Paced around the room for a minute. Sat back down and started typing. Now I am telling you about the State of Your Mind and it’s effect. And it has A LOT to do with your success.
Manage your state before you sit down to :-
Write
Create Video
Create new strategy
Work on new ideas.
Everything will stem from your state. Bad state = Bad Product = Bad result.
As I am nearing the end of this post, I have written pretty close to 550 words in about 14 minutes. This happens when you are in this state. Everything flows. Ideas, thoughts, expression, everything literally pours out and gets into the paper (or rather on keyboard) effortlessly.
And that’s the state I always tell others to achieve. Sure you can go in this zone like state in and out but constantly doing it on command it completely another thing.
Well my friend, this all I have right now. Have a great weekend and Happy Diwali (For those Of you who don’t know about Diwali, you can google it. It’s my favorite festival in India).
Best Regards
Varun Pratap
P.S. To get into the Zone, First have the Desire. Second, get the knowledge. Third Preserve
Until you succeed. If you are willing to do above success is yours to taking.
P.P.S. Effortless Writing Workshop http://www.imbasics.com/eff-write.html
How Any Internet Marketer Can Make $10,000 NEXT Weekend
My NOTE : When I read this article, I was like, “YES, that’s what I’ve been saying for last couple of years and it sums up very nicely”.
Lately, I hear from a LOT of struggling internet marketers. Many of them are worried about paying next month’s rent, or having their electricity turned off. In other words, I hear from a lot of internet marketers “with their backs against the wall.”
The sad part is that if they’ve studied internet marketing for a year or so, this is completely unnecessary. They already possess the knowledge to generate as much as $10,000 (or more) in a single weekend. They just haven’t learned to properly value and market their know-how.
How does a struggling internet marketer go from zero to $10,000 in a single weekend? You CHANGE who you are marketing to.
Instead of trying to convince other internet marketers that they need some $20 ebook, you market to people with money already budgeted for expertise similar to yours.
The customers that I propose you market your internet expertise to are local offline businesses. Many of the local businesses in your area are struggling, and need your expertise, and are willing to pay for it.
What am I proposing?
I’m suggesting that you put on a 1-day workshop where you TEACH local businesses to use the internet to drive more paying customers through their doors.
You charge a token fee of $100 – $200 (or more) to these local businesses, so that they value what you are teaching, but that’s not where you cash in.
In your 1-day workshop, you teach these local businesses about things such as search engine optimization, long-tail keywords, and capturing the email addresses of their customers (and website visitors) so that they have an easy way to follow-up with them.
You teach the local beauty parlor that, if they noticed Thursdays are always slow, an easy way to fix that problem is to send out an email on Wednesday to all of their customers, telling them that if they come in on Thursday, they get a 10% discount. Then you teach them how to capture their customers’ contact data so that they can easily contact ALL of their customers for free.
You explain the power of email to them as compared to say newspaper or radio advertising where there is considerably more preparation and lead time required. You teach them that email is practically instant AND free.
You spend the day teaching these local businesses how to really harness the power of the internet. You don’t need to hold anything back – you can teach them everything that you know.
At the end of the 1-day seminar (you can make it 2 days if you prefer), you offer to do the things for them that you just taught them how to do. You’ll be pleasantly surprised when 90% of them want you to do it for them (even though you just taught them how to do it).
These local business people are too busy running the day to day operations of their businesses to learn a whole new set of skill, so they will pay YOU handsomely to do it for them.
Here’s the secret, you “outsource” that work. You charge the local businesses enough where you can pay someone else to do the work and still end up with thousands of dollars from the weekend.
You funnel the work to talented people that you’ve met online or find through sites such as Elance.com
It really is that simple and easy.
But what if you don’t feel up to putting together a presentation? You can get a complete seminar in a box, with slides, script, handouts, everything you need, from several places online.
In fact, I didn’t write the presentation that I use when I put on local workshops. I got the entire presentation at: http://TeachingEcommerceToLocalBusinesses.com
That “seminar in a box” package is so complete that it even has the ads you use to let local businesses know about the seminar. It is so complete that you “could” just hand the slides and script to an assistant and they could run the seminar for you.
I was so impresses with the completeness of that package, and how easy it was to just take it and host a seminar for local businesses, that I interviewed the two marketers who created that package on my radio show. You are welcome to grab the transcript of that show free. I entitled it “How to Make A Fortune Offering Freelance Consulting To Local Offline Businesses” and you can download it here: http://WillieCrawford.com/FreeTranscripts/
When hosting local seminars, you want to keep your costs low, so you want to use a meeting room in a local hotel, high school, or you can rent a meeting room very inexpensively from the local Knights of Columbus or Shriners. Lots of local civic and fraternal organizations have their own meeting place, and happily rent them out. You can even get some of these organizations to publicize your seminar for you 
Everything that you need to know about organizing a seminar for local offline businesses is included in the package mentioned above, and the free transcript shares a lot of great information too.
With just a little preparation, and the decision to share your expertise with the “right market” – business people who have already set aside funds for growing their businesses, you literally can earn $10,000 (or more) in a single weekend.
If you get into action now, you could literally do this next weekend, although I’d allow a little more lead time.
This IS something that you can do!
Take a look at the resources mentioned above, flow out the event, and then do it! You’ll find yourself looking not only at your city, but at other nearby cities. It’s that lucrative, and that much fun. You’ll become a local celebrity, and a hero to local businesses too.
Willie Crawford has been teaching internet marketing and ecommerce since 1996. As founder of The Internet Marketing Inner Circle he now teaches his tactics in the membership site at http://TheInternetMarketingInnerCircle.com You are invited to join this community of serious marketers today!
Get on a Info – Diet Now
If you have been struggling for success in online marketing. It’s about time you man-up and Do something about it. The easiest way is to get on an information diet.
If you are sitting on your ass, buying every new shiney products, then you are not spending enough time executing the stuff that’ll make you some money.
Frankly speaking I’ve got tired of information overload in internet marketing.
I haven’t been following any of the launches. (Heck I like Eben Pagan’s course, even then I am not interested in following his stuff). I am not watching any of the Latest products. From what I know no-one made any money buying or following product launches.
I’ve been spending more time on building a business offline.
So what can you do to get on a diet?
It’s easy. These are the things that’ll help you out.
1. Stop checking your email account every hour. Once a day is more than enough.
2. Write articles daily.
3. Write a blog post daily.
4. Hand write a good sales letter daily.
5. Stop reading/watching too many products.
6. Create your own product. A simple 10 page report can be sold at $10. If you just add few audios, it can be sold for $100 and Just by adding few videos and a personal consultation, you can rise the price for at least $1000.
It’ll not take you more than few hours to write a 10 page report.
It’ll not take you more than 10 hrs to create at least 5 hr Audio product.
It’ll not take you more than another 10 hr to add as Video product.
The faster you create a product, the faster you’ll be able to start selling and start experimenting with selling and conversion. Again it’s a process.
Product + sales = Customer
Product + sales + conversion = Lots of customers.
Product + sales + conversion + connection = Stampede of customers.
Product + sales + conversion + connection + relationship with list = $$$ shiney bling bling.
That’s how you do it.
2X, 3X Clickthroughs on your email newsletter
I received few emails after I posted my clickthroughs percentage on email newsletter. Of course my readers are curious about how they can also increase CTR on email newsletters.
Internet marketers talk about giving Content as a strategy in newsletters, which I believe is as strong as a house of cards, full of air (hot air). I noticed couple of glaringly obvious problems with this strategy.
1. Everyone and his dog is giving away content – How the hell will you differentiate yours? If it wasn’t the only pain in the neck, then you have to worry about writing content on regular basis.
2. How much of content is enough? Can you tell how much is enough and when it’s time to shift from telling to selling?
3. Perception of content – If I am publishing something and an Already expert marketer publishes the same content. The perception of his content is going to be higher than mine, even if his ideas are inferior to mine.
If I play the games by same rules, I don’t stand a chance whatsoever against other marketers. So I have to bend the rules.
After realizing it, I went back to the drawing board.
First thing I notice was the marketers I was personally following, reading their emails or bought stuff from. And that number I can count of one hand. Very few marketers. Very Few.
We’ve been hammered to death about how content is important and it is, but one thing they forgot to tell us, that there’s no shift between telling and selling. Either you are persuading people or your are not. It’s as simple as that.
So if you are differentiating between giving content and sales pitch, you can never give enough content. And that’s the wrong way to do this. Remember, you are always selling.
Eben pagan talks about “moving the free line”, again good advice with half truth. Move the free line, but don’t forget to sell along with it. There’s no difference between telling and selling.
How to increase conversions on your email marketing?
1. Create a better relationship – Go Beyond content. Create a relationship with your list without using content. Content is small part of the strategy. Using content is like creating friendship with hidden motives. And that sucks.
When my subscribers write back to me, they write like they write an email to their friend.
2. Talk like a normal Guy – Again, following the first tip, I am just another guy who understands their situation and have a solution or an example that they can learn from. Don’t Act like a guru. If you don’t understand this, look at Frank Kern and Ed dale.
3. Connecting from the very first email – Your first email is very very important. Try to create a connection from the get go.
4. Use preview to increase readership – One of the good technique I learnt from Jimmy D brown was to use previews to talk about upcoming stuff. It builds anticipation and curiosity.
5. Don’t use too much of their name – Have you seen how some of the marketers use subscribers name in every subject line or emails. The personalization trick works but doing it for every other time is way too much.
Imagine how you’d feel if someone starts talking to you like this. Use their name when it’s natural.
6. Enjoy writing your emails – It’s such a little thing that we miss. If you don’t enjoy writing to your subscribers, it’ll come across through your emails. And this will create a disconnect. Which will always drop your sales.
Phew, I am typing from last 30 minutes and I need a little break.
Before I end this article, I have to comment on few questions/things I got from subscribers.
1. Someone asked me, if I write regularly to my list? How many times per week do you write?
The answer is yes. Write whenever possible is good way to start. Either people like you or they don’t.
2. Do you use and combine blog with email marketing?
Again, the answer is yes. But it’s not that necessary.
Varun Pratap
Aim for that peak like mad
Shadow Such people and Cheer Them On.
PS: This week India is celebrating Deepawali, so I won’t be able to do more than 2–3 Blog consultation. So if you want to get your blog strategy reviewed and consult, then you should contact me as soon as possible.
Improving Clickthroughs of your email campaigns.
Recently I ran a email campaign and I was surprised at the results I got. Unfortunately I missed tracking email opening settings in my autoresponder… But I know it was pretty darn high.
As you look into the graph, My CTR is 75%. I am not generating percentage on basis of readership, instead from my subscribers numbers.
Campaign Email Test 1
Campaign Email Test 2
Campaign Email test 3 – This one was pretty slow and failure compared to others.
I know, now you might be wondering how in the world I got so high Click throughs on my test campaigns.
3 very simple reasons. 3 important marketing concepts that you should spend time learning and implementing in your business systems. And they are
1. Segmentation.
2. Relationship.
3. Follow up.
First concept you should understand and learn is segmentation of your list. Depending on how your subscribers behave, likes, you should try to segment your list. For example, I have an internet marketing list, I’d start with segmenting it into Traffic building, content, blogging, copywriting etc. You can further segment these lists.
But the real deal is to understand when to stop segmenting. Unfortunately, this only comes from experience and testing.
Second concept is about relationship. If you have a robotic one-way relationship with your list. You’ll not get high results. I have a very open relationship with my list. Whatever I write, I write in a way that connects with them. Plus, the segmentation also helps in writing.
Third and last concept is follow up. Now this is very interesting concept. If you are not following up, chances of your creating a relationship with your list is very low. When you put people in the sales funnel, you have to follow up. Follow up after they subscribe, follow up after they buy, follow up after some time. You can use follow ups in so many ways.
Follow up should be added in almost every step to the sale and beyond to increase customer experience. Remember, according to the research, it takes 7 contacts to make a sale.
Let’s not forget a good email copy also helps. While segmentation allows you to increase CTR and sale percentage, only testing will show you how to increase opening rate and CTR.
Varun Pratap
Aim for that peak like mad
Shadow Such people and Cheer Them On.
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