How to get more done, be more productive, more profitable, and make your projects successful.
I am sure you know someone who chases the latest shiny flavour of the month tactic and fails every time. I’m also sure you know some people who work really hard toward their goals, but never seem to get anywhere. Today I want to help you avoid these problems so you can grow the business…
Do you find you give and give, but people do not seem to be buying? Or maybe people do buy, but not in the numbers you would like? I get that, and I hear it a lot. You might have heard me joke that for a while there I was stuck in a loop of…
Have you ever listened to a keynote speech and got all pumped and motivated, then found out what the speaker has suggested just didn’t give you the results you hoped for? Or maybe you bought a best-seller and found it page-turning fascinating, but no clearer on what you were meant to do next? Silver Bullet…
Creating and selling information products is all the rage right now, with forums filling with conversations about launches and techniques. I can understand the enthusiasm, and I would suggest a lot of the excitement is coming from Jeff Walker’s latest “Product Launch Formula” buzz. Sadly I think a lot of the people who are getting…
“The only stupid question is the one you fail to ask”. That has always been my philosophy. Of course at school that philosophy contributed to my regular beatings. Any pupil who took too much of an interest in class was considered fair game for a head-flushing. In adult life though we should be above such…
One of my clients was telling me how they feel overwhelmed because of all the commitments they feel they have been guilted into making. She knew I had wrestled with this lately and wanted to know my solution. I think she was disappointed to find out my magic bullet was to simply say “No” more….
During an interview with Sonia Simone for their Teaching Sells course members, I realised I had created more products in the last eleven months than I have the previous five years. That’s eight products delivered and two more in the works, either solo or as part of a joint venture. This was while moving my…
Jake Nickell is the founder of Threadless, the super cool t-shirt store/design community. When I reviewed the Threadless book I only touched on what the company is about. So here is more of an insight into the workings of a 10 year old successful internet startup. Q: What do you think has made the biggest…
Fear is a huge deal in our lives sometimes. It can stop us making progress. I recently had an email conversation with Julien Smith, one half of Trust Agents and all round cool dude. We talked about fear and how to manage it. He had some wise words for us: Chris: In your blog you…
Have you noticed how most of your day goes to stuff that is not related to what is really important? I am not even talking about the obvious things like dealing with spam, hanging out in Twitter, and people hanging on the telephone too long. There are lots of things that demand our time and…
Are you wondering how you can get more people to visit your site or buy what you are selling? People often ask me why some people can get a lot of traffic or business while others struggle along with what seems like the scraps from the table. Why can “over night success” stories break through…
One of the disgusting but useful phrases in the programming and developer community is “Eat your own dogfood”. I am sure there are people out there who really do have to eat their own dogfood in a literal sense, but the meaning behind the phrase in our context is that you have to experience your…
“It’s the year 2022… People are still the same. They’ll do anything to get what they need. And they need SOYLENT GREEN.” I was only small when I first saw the film Soylent Green. Perhaps that is why it had such an impact on me. It’s an old film, it came out the year before…
I’m a firm believer in networking. In fact I credit my network with a great part of why I have achieved my goals in the last five years. My journey from intention through to completion just would not have been possible without my friends, mentors and contacts. Many of the people responsible for where I…
Ask a business owner what they want, why they are in business. You will certainly hear the following amongst the answers: Rewards (financial or otherwise) Freedom Control What you will find though, and I include myself in this, is business owners actually working COUNTER to those aspirations. Rewards, freedom and control come from being at…
Most times when a company kills their brand it is through a steady decline. The kind of loyalty to unloyalty that Scott talks about in his excellent post over there. There are also those occasions where the brand goes from king of the world to “wouldn’t touch that in a hazmat suit” bad overnight, such…
Five years ago I cut loose from my day job and launched myself into the adventure that is working for oneself. That was the start of my journey towards claiming my independence day, and I think there are lessons for you if you want to do something similar to what I have done. I’m proud…
Networking has delivered more return on investment than any other tool in my business. Both financially and in non-monetary terms, my network has delivered so much value that I can not imagine what my situation would be like without it. If there is one thing that I could suggest that would be guaranteed to boost…
What would you say is the main habit that is common to all successful online business owners? Is there one thing that if you just applied it would make a massive difference to your own progress? As an inquisitive student of internet marketing I talk to a lot of people involved in the online business…
I was interviewed late last night for an American radio show where I was asked where I get my product ideas from. My answer was that I am not any kind of bright spark when it comes to this stuff, so I do the easiest thing, which is to ask. I ask my community what…
Melani wrote a great post called “Happily Delusional or a Few Things to Make You Feel Better about Your Marketing Stats“. In it she talks about how people feel about their business numbers and it has some strong messages for any business. A lot of my friends, clients and contacts look at their results and…
During a webinar the other day, I asked the following question. Have a guess what the result turned out to be. I wonder if you will be as shocked as I was … Have you ever had a successful launch? There were only two possible answers, yes or no. We had a discussion about “success”…
I have been putting a lot of thought into why some people succeed and others fail. It’s easy to put success down to luck or natural talent, but while there will always be an element of that, it does not seem to be “the answer”. There seem to be some ingredients that a lot of…
SXSW is a fixture on many a geeks calendar. It’s the biggest and wildest conference on the scene, encompassing “interactive”, film and music. My coolest friends in the UK thought it was the music festival I was attending, I didn’t have the guts to tell them I was only going to the nerdy bits, ha….
My first experiences online came before the web, and before most of the modern “nettiquette” was written. It was the days of ultra nerdy folks (like me), librarians, and academic PHD types in lab coats. When people were not doing serious science type stuff there was a lot of socializing going on. There were hippy…
I was reminded on Twitter by a quote how life coaches and gurus often talk about how sports people visualize victory. They say if you use positive visualization, then your outcome will improve. Then there are the people who tell you that if you use the “Law of Attraction”, that is if you ask the…
Analysis paralysis is just one of my procrastination challenges. A couple of other things have caused me to have to make an effort with my productivity. See if they are familiar to you and your own productivity issues: I have a compulsion to fix things I never think I have done enough Do you have…
What is holding you back?
Are you afraid of what people will think of you?
I bet you have skills, knowledge, experience or time that you could share with others, that you could offer to people to help them, but something is holding you back …
There are two challenges that 90% of my consulting clients face and I am going to give you the answer to both in this article. After you read this you will be able take a look at your blog or your business and know what you need to do in order to make your 2010 more successful than your 2009.
A big claim? Maybe, but I see it work over and over when I coach my clients so I am confident if you implement what I am about to tell you.
I have been there.
The system I used to enter and ultimately get established in each of these niches is the sytem I call Authority Blogging, but it is not just about Authority, and we are not just thinking of blogging here either …
When I was a programmer hoping to get notices I didn’t have a system and I wasn’t doing what you would strictly call blogging either. But I found my profile was growing to the point where people wanted to pay me a lot of money to teach them, help them out of sticky situations, coach them to do what I was doing, and to buy products from me. I was invited to talk at seminars and events, and was offered magazine and book writing opportunities.
After I decided I didn’t want to be a programmer any longer I had to figure out what I had done to get this great reputation and revenue so quickly and effortlessly.
Family and friends thought I was crazy. I was going places in the coder nerd world, I was making decent money from my day job and my sideline businesses. What was I thinking giving all that up? Especially as I was making little progress moving to gaining full acceptance in the marketing world. At the time I was seen as a programmer with marketing skills, but I wanted to be known as a marketer with a technical background!
Why was breaking into this new niche so hard when somehow I had found it so easy in the programming world? I had passion, I had expertise, and I was putting in the effort. Something was missing.
The solution turned out to be a combination of three fundemental things.
Authority we have already touched upon, and I have talked about it a fair amount on this blog, it is after all the name of my course where I teach all this stuff in step-by-step detail.
I found the biggest missing ingredient, and the real nuts and bolts of my system is the ARC process that I am going to talk about now.
With only one of the vital ingredients this stuff does not work half as well. I guarantee also that someone will read this and think it is common sense, but when I click through to their website I will see while they think it is common sense they are not actually implementing it.
So it should go without saying, but the third ingredient is actually putting these factors to work.
To summarize so far:
Before we get into this, what were the two big challenges my clients ask for my help with?
Growing an audience and making more money. The solution is right here, so read on …!
What is so natural to you that it is like breathing? What aspect of yourself, which behavior, skill, activity, talent, is so part of you that you could not imagine yourself without it? Answer this question and you could make yourself so much happier and successful, ignore it and you could be making yourself and…
Benefiting from social media network effects requires you to be vigelant about who you are connecting with.
In general the more contacts you have, the more you will benefit from social media, or any network for that matter:
There can be downsides of course, mainly in the area of “noise” and time spent maintaining many loose connections.
Your experience of growing your social network connections will be down to your management of it.
Due to the annoyance and productivity problems, many people aim to keep their network contained and high quality.
This is a perfectly good solution, and precisely what I was doing with my FaceBook account. The maintenance impact of the silly side of FaceBook, and other services, meant I retreated to Twitter.
Thing I have discovered is I have a history of trying and abandoning social networks, only to “get” them on my second trial. Each one will succeed or fail based on who you interact with and how. Right now I am giving FaceBook another go, based mostly on experiments I am observing from people like Frank Kern (who up to now I considered to be a total IM guru but behind the social media curve, go figure!).
I have found that Twitter has provided me with a good training on maintaining signal versus noise. The solution is simple – Set a standard and ruthlessly stick to it. If you follow people who pester you with nonsense or tweet about their eating habits, you only have yourself to blame. It’s not Twitters fault, it’s not FaceBook, it is your choice of friends.
When you think about it, you wouldn’t blame a restaurant for your boring dinner conversation, would you?
That last one took me a while to figure out. Tools can actually hurt your productivity if they demand too much of your attention. Turn off beeps and popup message alerts, they just take you away from work. In my case using TweetDeck has helped me a great deal (when the thing doesn’t freeze on me) because it puts front and center the most important stuff while keeping less priority stuff accessible.
Once you have tried out a social network you can discover your own rhythm. You don’t have to live in social media like Chris Brogan or Robert Scoble to benefit from it 
Right now the main social networks I am involved in are:
I find I can spend maximum an hour a day on these quite happily with only a positive impact on my business.
By sticking to this schedule, and the guilt-free policies outlined above, I have found I can maintain a large and growing network quite happily. People send me messages, I mostly reply to them, but not necessarily right away that second. People are aware and not too insulted that I don’t take part in FB games and applications. It’s all good.
As with anything Social Media, take advice (even mine!) as a guide, there are NO RULES. Do what works for you. If people do not like what you do or how, they can un-follow.
Do you have social media tips to share? Agree or disagree with me? Share your thoughts in the comments …
Reciprocation is often talked about in terms of what you can get out of it. You might be forgiven for thinking of it purely as a tactic to get other people to do what you want them to do. But, as common sense would tell you, that is not the whole story, in fact it is just a simple human trait of “give and take”.
I do something for you, you do something for me. Simple, but often abused. If you want a good reputation, you need to be a generous “giver” and not a “taker”.
At the very least if people who do something for you then they need to be acknowledged.
So answer comments, thank people who send you feedback, link or vote up your articles, re-tweet your twitter messages, and so on. If someone subscribes to my blog they get free ebooks (more coming), as well as all the lovely regular content you would expect
What if it is more than one comment?
I don’t like “top commenter” sidebar widgets because that often turns your comment area into a quantity competition, but you still need to show gratitude for people who keep your comment area lively. Occasionally I will write up a post and thank my top commenting folks or find a way to help them in some way.
Let them know you want to show thanks even though you know they were not being kind or helpful in the hope of receiving an award. People are sometimes offended otherwise, and whatever you do, do not show gratitude with money! That is a sure way to turn friendship into offense.
On my forum we have a Featured Blogger each month, to recognize valuable community contributions. The winner gets a free Authority Blogger Course membership as well as the praise and awe of forum members.
Contributions often matter most when they are simply and honestly friendly and helpful. In October the winner was Jamie Horrop from Jamie Horrop.com who got some excellent conversations going, and last month it was Educator Dan from Daily Home Renovation Tips who we have all watched go from a cautious newbie to helping out others by sharing his blogging experiences.
Have a think what you can offer people by way of thanks. Here are somethings I do that won’t cost you the earth and that you can do even if you don’t currently have any products to offer:
Of course you can also say “I am so grateful to you, is there anything I can do for you in return …”
If there is one thing we all need in this new media world is helpful friends, so when you find them, make them feel valued!
How do you show gratitude to people who help you out?
There are often unexpected perks to being a blogger and this Sunday was one of the best I have experienced. On top of having a great day out, I realized something about internet marketing that can benefit you in your business.
What put this goofy expression on my face? Read on …
6th Gear Driving Experiences had invited a bunch of online geeks, Al Carlton, Dave Naylor, Kieron Donoghue, Patrick Altoft and me, for a day of thrashing supercars around a race circuit. This involved us driving £1million worth of posh motors at bowel-shaking speeds, all the time wearing grins like the one you see above.
As the day went on I did improve marginally in my driving ability, but it made me think of how driving supercars and success in the activity of marketing online are related with the following three factors:
Obviously in my case with the driving, number #2 let me down. I was in brilliant and expensive machines, in an ideal environment (purpose built track on a clear, dry day), but the instructors showed how someone with actual driving skill could really do the business.
Now if in your business something is holding you back, you can put these essential elements back on track:
Have you got the whole package? It would be worth taking an honest look at your setup then putting right any deficiencies now …
We were all so buzzed on the day I am sure there will lots of ideas percolating amongst our collected brains so let me know in the comments if you would be up for taking part in a supercar event next year.
It’s impossible for me to adequately describe how cool it was, so I won’t even try, it is written all over my face in the picture. Suffice to say I would totally recommend the supercar driving experience to anyone, and if you don’t want to take my word for it, check out the reports of the day from Dave, Kieron and Patrick who have wasted no time in blogging the event, and my flickr gallery here.
You might have seen, if you are visiting my site and not reading in email or feed, that I have one of those pop-over email sign up forms appearing right now.
Yes, it’s because of Darren. Blame him, heh.
Thing is, I don’t actually like these pop-overs much. While I think the way I am doing it with only showing it once per person is not as bad as every visit, I still believe people have popup blockers for a reason, and that reason is people don’t like popups, no matter what the technology used to deliver them.
So why on earth would I inflict on my own readers something I don’t like myself?
The good news it will only be a couple of days and I will be replacing it with an alternative approach. My reason is simple, I try to not make statements about tactics unless I have tried and tested them to my own satisfaction, and if I am going to offer an alternative I will need data to back up my arguments.
There is a lot of advice out there, some good, some bad. Some of this advice is based on experience, some is based on gut-feel, some of it pulled out of … thin air.
As I was just saying on my blogging forum, have you spotted how many “make money online” tips blogs there are now started by people with no money? I don’t think the “my diary of trying to make money” type are bad, it’s the “here is how to make a fortune … just ignore the fact I haven’t got one” style that make me cross. Why would someone take money making advice from someone who is broke?
It’s one thing to take the advice of Darren Rowse, problogger and monetization guru to the stars, it’s quite another when advice comes from random folks off the internet. But even so, Darren can and does only give you the benefit of his own experience, and that is all anyone can do. Your own experience will be unique because you attract your own unique audience, for your own unique niche and in your own way.
I talk a lot about authority from the publisher or business-owner point of view, but on the recieving end, as you learn and experiment authority can only go so far, you have to use judgement and your own testing to tell you what works for you.
Bloggers are for the most part very protective of their reputations. When topics like affiliate marketing come up in conversation, some people get nervous. I have been challenged a few times by folks who were worried about my recent appearance at A4UExpo – had I been lost to the “dark side”? Controversially, I don’t think…
Authority Bloggers are best placed to ride out economic turbulence. Can I stand by this statement as the economy turns and churns?
A few years ago a book changed my thinking about business in a way only one other author has managed to do. The first of these will be familiar to a lot of you, especially my clients, it is the E-Myth series. I’m not alone in having a light bulb moment with those books. The book I am talking about here though blew me away because it made me realize what was wrong with the systems I was fighting against every day.
The book was, I think, “The Goal” by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, and the light bulb wisdom was his “Theory of Constraints“. I say “I think” because I quickly read all of his books that I could lay my hands on.
You don’t need to read up on the theory as much as I did though. In a nutshell, quoting from Wikipedia …
every organization has – at any given point in time – at least one constraint which limits the system’s performance relative to its goal
Common sense, right? Well the trick is consciously looking for the constraint, finding the real constraint, then elevating the priority of the constraint in order to fix the problem. The solution is, again, forehead-slapingly simple.
- 0. (Step Zero) Articulate the goal of the organization.
- 1. Identify the constraint (the thing that prevents the organization from obtaining more of the goal)
- 2. Decide how to exploit the constraint (make sure the constraint is doing things that the constraint uniquely does, and not doing things that it should not do)
- 3. Subordinate all other processes to above decision (align all other processes to the decision made above)
- 4. Elevate the constraint (if required, permanently increase capacity of the constraint; “buy more”)
- 5. If, as a result of these steps, the constraint has moved, return to Step 1.
Again, online marketing consulting clients who work with me will be familiar with these steps.
Very often clients are worried about traffic, or their web design. I will sit down with them or go over the issues via the telephone and we will realize web design or traffic is not their real problem relative to their goal.
Had they just fixed the symptom they identified they would be wasting their money, because the root cause is something else entirely. This is why system thinking is so important rather than reliance on tactic-du-jour.
Rich Schefren has written a fantastic report that gets right to the heart of it, and it is free to download. Go click, download it, and read it today.
What do you think about Social Media and all the buzz around these services?
Last night I was on a Six Apart telephone conference with Andy Wibbels and Darren Rowse and the topic of how much time and effort social media takes up was raised. Andy made the good point that the people who discuss social media most are the people who need to, people like me who make our living being on top of these things so we can advise others.
If you follow all the advice on blogs and forums, took part in every social media venue, then you would very quickly have no time to do anything else.
You have to think in terms of ROI. What is your return on social media investment? (ROSMI?)
I can talk all day about the benefits of social media, especially around making contacts and networking, but if these come at the expense of your work or business then the picture does not look so rosy.
It’s quite clear a lot of the time spent in social media is for leisure, so right there it is a matter of your priorities and mindset if you regard it as a waste of time. I stopped using FaceBook completely because it had zero return for me, while my Twitter usage if anything has increased from when I first joined (even if I have been quiet on that front lately).
While FaceBook, with its spam and trivialities, did not provide me anything but annoying messages in my inbox, I have found Twitter a great source of connections and news. StumbleUpon and Reddit send me nice bursts of traffic, so partaking in and researching those is worth the time. LinkedIn I am still figuring out.
I parcel out my time over various activities. While it is tempting, I do not have Twitter open all day in a desktop application, I dip in a couple of times and treat it as a break from work. For the others I experiment and have fixed goals. Plurk for example I have placed on the back burner, but am keeping an eye on it as people tell me to give it another try.
Experimentation is what I recommend. See what works for you while keeping an open mind.
For most people I would recommend at least trying out Twitter, just because networking is so important, but do not pressure yourself with any of this stuff and keep your priorities in check. Social Media is just one of many things to spend your time on, unless you see a good return on your activity you probably are better off doing something else.
Pick your battles and closely monitor where your time goes and what results you get, and if you have fun, well there is no harm in that is there?
As I have written before, we are now heading into the blogging summer slump time when the intertubes slow down, people go on vacation, some businesses put off projects, readers spend more time outside and not so much in front of the computer. Of course the first thing most of us think of when things…
Causality and correlation. Ah, the scientist’s friend. Mixed up so many times, the cause of so many arguments, the rock on which we stub our intellectual toes.
What is this concept and why should bloggers care?
Causality is the relationship between cause and effect. That is, for a given effect, you could find the cause.
Correlation is the degree to which two events are related. That is, two things exist together but one does not necessarily cause the other.
All too often people mix up the two. They think because they were holding a rabbits foot when they won a bet, that the rabbits foot is somehow lucky. Take this tongue in cheek quote from Freakonomics also:
Chicago’s beloved Mayor Daley is trying to think of ways to increase the likelihood that the Bears win the game. He’s noticed that whenever the Bears win, people in Chicago are happy. Which sparks a great idea: decree that all Bears fans have to be happy on Super Bowl Sunday. It has always been true in the past that winning games and being happy go together, so by demanding the Bears’ fans are happy, it will cause the Bears to win the Super Bowl.
Blogging is still new, so bloggers are still constantly learning what works and what doesn’t. This goes for all of us.
We look for clues around us, and especially the people who have gone before, people we admire, or people who have had obvious and visible success. Then we cherry pick ideas to see if they will work for us.
Unfortunately it is not always easy to see why or how someone achieved success or failure. Even more unfortunate, just because something works for one blog, doesn’t mean it will necessarily work for your blog and your audience.
As with most things, be very careful about dealing in absolutes. Don’t take things at face value, investigate. Most of all, see what works for YOU.