New ideas about a dip in the middle of your product lifecycle

Seth's now created two separate bell curves with a dip in the middle. Convenient for him, he has a book called "The Dip" that's been out for awhile. While this tends to explain his world-view, it may not be correct for all circumstances/situations.

I've earlier covered about the Product Life Cycle (which is explained various places), adding that such a marketing cycle (bottom is against time, not attitudes) can be restarted.

With Godin's double curve, he assumes a time function at the bottom as well. So he then has your product moving through the first, into the dip, and then into the second.

In both Bell Curves, your mainstream is at the top. Mainstream passionate, and mainstream pop. For both cases, your supply/demand then peaks (with least profit) at that point - for that set of public.

For many product life cycles, the early adopters are those "dweebs" on the "cutting edge". Gladwell talks about this in "Tipping Point". Artsy Greenwich Villagers who liked Hush Puppies started a new product life cycle trend (which lasted years), but then got out of that trend when it went mainstream.

Jeans, on the other hand, have been eternally popular - having ups and downs, but mostly making Levi-Strauss tons of dough meanwhile. I love the mainstream part of this, as now I can get really cheap jeans (which last no longer than the expensive ones) and be comfortable in the humid Missouri summers wearing nothing but cotton. (As well as being able to keep my dress slacks in the closet because I work outside with cattle and fences and greasy farm equipment during the days.)

Jeans were a necessary point early on of those passionate about gold-mining in California. Later, other trades found that durable work pants fit their operation as well - that niche was expanded. When they became a fashion statement during the hippy '70's, they became mainstream - and all sorts of people started branding their own. And extensions to this, such as Dockers and what not, gave the same durable easy wear some status as they could pass for corporate wear as well.

The original niche expanded, went mainstream, and then subdivided into smaller niches again. (One particular niche is the ultra-durable versions. Overpriced Carhart's with their trademark brown is one example.)

While you could have a dip in the middle, you could also simply have the early adopters being the passionate and the pop-cycle taking up the slack (and probably causing the slack) in the passionate demand.

You could even have several dips, as different niches find their use for that item. Jeans' sales above has had several dips in sales. In every case, it was where a certain niche-client-type was using their product heavily and then another niche found them. (Of course, a rather slack marketing approach can cause dips, as well as poor transition into mass-production.)

Dips are also seasonal, sandals don't sell well in winter - but also, high gas prices could keep more off the beach - or more going to the beach. A dip for one area would be a peak for another.

Charles Haanel's "Master Key System", Wallace Wattle's "Science of Getting Rich", and Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich" - these continue to sell well, helped by Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret" DVD, and a host of lecturers who discovered people still bought these books and wanted more information about them. But look through eBay and you'll see that these books are being bought regularly for decent prices as more and more re-discover them and then want more data. Sure, they were in their hay-day during the 20'2 and 30's - but have gone on to sell way more copies than they ever did to begin with. But don't think they had that much of an extreme dip in between - the 50's had a lot of self-help going on (Nightingale-Conant developed during that time and the early 60's). This particular dip would be due to generational differences.

The passionate are not always the first bell curve in the sequence. Specialized niches can "discover" a product and start using the hell out of it way after it's fallen off the "pop" radar. Velcro has tons of uses, but has never replaced buttons or any other fastener - except in certain niche products.

- - - -

Now, that Bell Curve isn't really just 2D-flat. It's actually more of a bump, with niches and passions on every side. And that bump wouldn't necessarily be smooth - as you might have mini-dips as your product transitions from one niche to another, going out of style over here while ramping up as popular over there - and there.

Against time, you might find that a certain passion-niche remains steady for demand of an item (like farmers and their jeans - they've become consumers of the cheap and durable) - so you have a tunnel-effect throughout the overall life-cycle. Demands for gold-miners peaked years ago, and there certainly aren't as many farmers as their used to be, but people have gardens and like to go outdoors and so need durable pants-type clothing.

A 3D graph colored by niche would show all sorts of amazing interactions. But no one goes this way, so we'll leave that be.

Your takeaways today?

• Passion and Pop are just different niches.
• One's contraction is another's expansion, dip or no dip.
• Don't figure that the passionate are always first.
• But there is always early adopters for every niche, as well as late adopters.
• And, as always, product life cycles can be re-started through brilliant marketing - which is, again, creating a market for a product.

Seth's Blog: Avoiding the Passion Pop Gulf:

"The reason you need to care is that gap in the middle. Every day, millions of businesses get stuck in that gap. They either move to the right in search of the masses or move to the left in search of authenticity, but they compromise. And they get stuck with neither."

Inspiration, execution and monetization makes the online millionaire

The trick in becoming an Online Millionaire is in following your Inspiration, Execution of your plan, and Monetization of everything.

This is a review of a product I just purchased which is a very good example of how to use the Internet and locally-delivered CD's to monetize information products.

Now, as you've been following these blogs of mine, you'll know that I've been researching eBay as a selling platform and reverse-funnel - meaning, it allows buyers to find you.

I found through Deep Analysis/Hammer Tap a certain product was selling over 60% with several auctions each week and multiple items. So this thing and its marketing was bringing home over $2-300 a week, not bad for a single item. Approximately $12-15K per year.

The reason I bought it was because of the marketing, because it had resell rights, and because shipping was free.

Then - I got the package.

Did I get what I bought? Yes.

The kicker: it was printed and burned on a home pc and mailed in a little blank cardboard mailer with a - get this - 58-cent stamp.

If I had this drop-shipped by an online company, it would cost $1.75, plus about $7.00 shipping. To deliver something like this, I'd put a $2.00 handling charge - so that I'd have straight profit on it. But then the price would be a lot higher.

For their $14.00 price, they have a near-nothing fulfillment line and able to print these off at home in bulk, labels and all, then simply drop them in the mailbox daily for each sale.

Let's examine what they had on the disc:

It was really nothing but an autorun program and an executable which pulled up a web page - which then linked to other web pages. That's it - nothing much more than 4 megs of data on there.

Everything else was on external websites:

• One website was a membership-only site, meaning they got your email address - and gave you a membership with lots of downloads in it, while still being built.
• One website was a collection of eBay articles, compete with adsense - another money-maker.
• One website was a collection of wholesale lists for the US, Canada, and International markets.

Now, the reseller gimmick - you couldn't modify the product. Meaning you were sending them new customers. So the whole thing is viral just because it gives you money.

So the thing is beautifully developed to not just sell, not just be viral, not just get subscribers - but all at the same time. And the great part is that they get people to pay to be part of this system.

A critique -
a little on the cheap side. Depends on Windows to run - so the effect varies widely, depending on how your individual computer is configured. (And depending on Windows to do anything dependably is a bit like predicting the economy or the weather - good luck with that.) If they wanted to really take it to the next level, they'd get an affiliate sales system going - which is missing.

Now, how to improve it even more:
Without modifying the program - you can give additional value, which will then possibly bring your customers to your site. Just add in additional PDF's and or another executable file - which would drive people to your site. Then you can include that original product as part of the purchase price.

Your marketing could sell the product, but your packaging would start up yours first - and then they'd find the original resell product. You get first take at the buyers.

Your alternative is to simply take the affiliate commissions directly, minus your sales fees - and give away further sales unless you contact them directly.

But -- take their design and improve on it, plus the economy of their production line - and you've got a real winner.

Because creativity is the heart and soul of becoming an Online Millionaire.

Why Internet Marketing Works - and how anyone can make a great deal of money with it

Here's why Internet Marketing works - and how you can make money with it: in great heaps and piles of cash...

I talked about this in An Online Millionaire Plan - the section on copywriting. There, I boiled down understanding how marketing works (and why people buy things) to three authors:

• Cialdini
• Maslow
• Nightingale

Cialdini said there were 6 emotional states which prompted all action. And that's what copywriting is supposed to do - get people to act, to buy that product in front of them.

Maslow, however, covered it more broadly. He had a "hierarchy" (pyramid) of needs, going from the basic - like getting food - up to the sublime, which is your ultimate expression of who you are and what you're here to do with your specific life.

Earl Nightingale covered additional points to the above, saying that there were three things people constantly strove for: Recognition, Change (Diversity), and Security.

All three of these are describing the same mountain all of us climb - but through their own unique perspective (just as each of us has your own path up that mountain).

Now, here's the bottom line: Once you get everything around you settled and have reached that sublime top spot - you don't really need much to live on, and probably have everything you could want anyway. Those who haven't made it are still grasping to buy things which give them emotional satisfaction.

That's why you have to sell "things" rather than ideas. People have the stuff around them associated with various emotions - instead of realizing that they create the emotions which they then put into those things around them. (While many authors have talked about this, I'd recommend Nightingale's Strangest Secret above as well as my own "Go Thunk Yourself" self-help book.)

Yes, what we experience around us - we actually put all that happiness, excitement, satisfaction, and everything else into that experience.

But marketing takes advantage of that situation. No, marketing isn't exploiting the poor uninitiated, the downtrodden, the victims - (sounds too sad, doesn't it?) Marketing is actually helping them surround themselves with the things they feel they need to build a secure life around them. People are trying to achieve security by building walls composed of flat-screen TV's, fast cars, faster food, lots of Italian shoes, and boxes of chocolate.

This is normal and every person does it. But when you study up on those who tell you how to make this money which can buy you things that remind you of happiness - they'll tell you that money isn't all it's cracked up to be, and that you are better off enjoying the journey to acquiring all that dough instead of worshiping the almighty dollar/euro/yen/etc. as itself.

Now, what marketing does is to take those 6 points of Cialdini and those 3 points of Nightingale to get people to buy their service. To the exact degree that people actually get what they want out of your service (compared to what they think you're promising) - then they will continue to act to get more of your services/product/et al.

What they and you are working to attain is the top of Maslow's hierarchy/pyramid.

You're working, actually, to get at peace with yourself. Now, religion (for example) is a seeming short-cut to this. You can attend services every week and get some peace within yourself - and you tithe to continue to support that group (what the word "church" actually means) which is bringing you that peace.

And yes, this explains why charismatic preachers have through history acquired great personal riches (though the truly great ones retired to obscurity without payment). The incredible service they were providing was emotional appeal and a temporary uplift. Same reason you go to movies - and why entertainment sells even in Depressions and recessions.

We all want our security by building a world around us that reminds us of our own views. At the same time, down deep we know that this is temporary and so still seek diversity in our lives so that we can continue to build that world around ourselves - to find that mysterious thing we are all looking for...

Here is why the person who "has it all together" is lauded and cherished beyond belief. (But whether they actually do or not is another question that they can only answer for themselves.)

People who are "secure within their own skin" apparently have one up on the rest of humanity. Because they have built an internal world-view which can tolerate all sorts of changes to their outward lives and still be at peace with that world.

Because that's one of the key steps in getting to the top of your own mountain. First, get your own physical security. Then get your own emotional security. After that, find that you are creating your own security. And with those tools in your tool-belt, you can then achieve real and permanent personal peace.

Now, the whole time - in order to acquire this peace - you have to be helping others achieve their own. Just the way this world works. (Read the 24th lesson of Haanel's Master Key System, as well as Nightingale's Strangest Secret recording.)

And this is what Yanik Silver, Joe Vitale, and all these guys are doing - they are helping people around them to make their world secure. That used car salesman is working to help you find reliable transportation which also "gives" you an emotional boost. Jay Abraham, Rich Schefren, Tim Knox, and all these others are helping you build a business around your core beliefs - so you can be secure and working at what you really want to (have chosen to) achieve in your life.

You've got examples where this gets out of hand - you could hardly tell a real estate broker that their driving real estate prices out the roof was evil. Or those (bleeping) bankers who took advantage of people who could not/would not read the fine print and so were "trapped" into escalating loan rates.

And perhaps the most "guilty" are the modern TV "news" and "entertainment" producers. All these shows just produce an emotional result. New moguls figure that if something is really perverse, it will get a lot of attention. If you look up what goes for "news" through history, you'll see that it has never changed. Yellow journalism wasn't invented by Hearst - nor did it die there. This type of over-the-top promotion ("news" is only marketing: really, really bad marketing) was found on the walls of Pompeii and in the records of Rome - and in the legends from the Indus and Mesopotamian valleys.

When you listen to politicians being interviewed on "news" channels, you'll just see the pot calling the kettle black - they are both "exploiting" the emotions of viewers to get the same thing: they want the viewer to continue to follow their campaign - and buy into it meanwhile, paying real dollars for the opportunity to be exploited again.

What do people get out of this? Emotional satisfaction.

When someone buys something on eBay what are they getting? Emotional satisfaction - or the promise of this.

All this emotional satisfaction (again - study Cialdini above) will give you (hopefully) emotional security.

And you're after emotional security so you can ultimately acquire unflappable peace of mind.

Those fast cars, closets filled with expensive shoes and clothes, great (high-priced) food bought in expensive and exclusive restaurants - all these things give you an emotional boost and help you build your secure world view.

Now, when you find you put those emotions into those articles - well, you don't need all that anymore. Unless you are trying to "prove" to others that they don't really need all that stuff in order to get the security they want in their lives.

But if a penniless, itinerant ex-carpenter from a rural town could bring down the immense greatness that was Rome with just a few parables - then anyone could.

As you understand these basics, then your own marketing can become incredibly effective. All your copywriting has to appeal to the emotional security people want. Your product has to help build that person's world view into a stronger one.

And if you worked your product-line and marketing campaigns back from helping that person achieve permanent personal peace - then you will have the most valuable and highly paid job on this planet.

That's why you make money online with Internet marketing.

- - - -

P.S. That link to an Online Millionaire Plan above is by direct access only. And the price is only just above what it costs to print it (or pay the bandwidth for your download). So buy it now - while you still have this link... ;)

Simple schedules to make your online marketing more effective

Getting your schedules, daily and weekly, is one of the keys to success in online marketing.

Some lessons come slowly - at least to me. Schedules are a necessary part to achieving goals. But sticking to them sometimes gets in the way of intuitive, right-brained, imaginative flights-of-fancy.

At least that's how I see it.

For some twenty-plus years, I was part of a corporate cult-ure which ate up over 60 hours of my time every week. There were policies, strategies, evaluations, analysis, production conferences, financial planning meetings, very few perks, and lots of penalties. So finally I quit and "retired" to the family farm to sort things out (which is going along quite well, I can say after 7 years here).

But I really developed a resistance to all this structure. I'm an artist at heart, but an engineer lives in there, too - so I'm all about figuring things out and letting out some of that inspired brilliance whenever I can.

So, like Europe after Rome collapsed (who saw frequent bathing as to "Romanesque"), I gave up all the structure of "weekly analysis based on the progress on strategic plan execution" in order to be more than a bit Bohemian. However, I did manage to keep to three time slots daily/weekly (one for farm, one for work, one for my artistic and Internet urges) out of necessity. Farm was to provide my room and board. Work keeps my bills paid. The third one is for "everything else".

Now this worked fine for awhile. I went back to college (for the first time) and was able to complete a few degrees. I wrote some books and started marketing them - having to learn all sorts of stuff about online marketing, which work still continues.

But when I really got torqued about my day job, I got motivated to do something about it. Like Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich", I now had a BURNING DESIRE (his emphasis). I hated my day job and would do most anything to replace it. A good sales pitch and a chunk of change on a credit card gave me an additional reason to succeed.

When I finally started taking their lessons to heart, I gave a post yesterday about the lesson's learned.

You have to start with your vision-to-accomplish and work this down into weekly and daily To-Do lists, when you then do. Each day, you need to review your vision statement (2 or 3 times or more is best and then your plan. From these, you then check over your recent To-Do's and see what it is you should now be doing next to move your existing scene toward your envisioned scene.

At the beginning of each week, you write a list of steps to do that will get parts of your current planning done. Then work from that weekly To-Do list to make your daily To-Do list. Simple.

Current planning? Yes, you are going to update your planning as you learn more and get more networking accomplished. Hill said to revise your planning as many times as you need to in order to get the best approach to your vision.

So this adds to yesterday's post on learning to make millions through eBay

You are going to have to have a daily schedule for your work - the stuff that's going to make you financially independent. And it's going to have to include:

1. Open your binder or folder where you keep all your traffic for that particular business. (Get one if you don't have one. This is a basic organizing tactic.)
   
2. Check and review your vision statement - and envisioning it with all the emotions connected to it, getting the idea that it's already here.
3. Check your plan to see if it's accurately going to achieve that vision statement - and tweaking/revising as needed.
4. Check your Weekly To-Do list for what is done and what you can do today.
5. Write your Daily To-Do list off that - and what you didn't finish yesterday.
6. Check your emails so they don't back up, which includes eliminating spam and opting out of non-productive mailing lists.
7. Review your RSS feed aggregator - and streamlining this to only those sites which give you truly useful data on a regular basis. (Sure, you can get your news this way, but take care you don't get sucked into Yahoo's daily 100 posts... "useful data" is the key.) You find and subscribe to useful blogs/sites so you get new data quickly, faster than you could log onto that many sites - and less distractive.
   
8. Allot some time here to leave appropriate comments on any site/post that allows you to leave your site url. (And consider unsubscribing from those who won't.)
   
9. Now, take some time to check your metrics and see how your sales are doing, how your website is converting your customers. Might be something you do one day out of the week. But if you can convert it to an hour or so daily, it will help you keep on top of things.
10. Note down poorly performing web pages you have. Or pages you can't metricize. (Google Analytics has a free program for you which fits on most public pages.) Figure out if you have to tweak these or note for later overhaul.
11. Your next piece of time will be in developing new products to sell and/or launching a marketing campaign for these. If you do a single new product every week, then spend the rest of that week (or the next week) marketing it, you'll have between 20 and 50 new products creating revenue every year.
12. Just before end of your slotted production time, check off the To-Do items you accomplished and note which are still in-progress. Put your list in your binder or folder to keep it secure, then close it for the day.
    

There you have it - a simple way to organize your life and business to stay on top of everything you have to do and to get it all done.

You have to be prepared to run your business as a business. Doesn't mean you can't love what you do - you really should, after all, because why are you doing what you really don't like to do?

Get your binder so you can organize your business into a highly efficient scene. And watch your profits grow and grow as your real work becomes more and more enjoyable.

Good Hunting!!

Worry not over silly bouncer traffic to your website - go for buyers.

Here's data backing up my premise that you don't market via social media, only promote. Your traffic, as Seth says below, is all silly bouncers. Bounce in, bounce out.

What you are looking for is buyers. These people are pre-sold, ready to snap up what they are looking for.

Silly bouncers are there for the experience, the entertainment value. Turning them into buyers first means making them participants - getting them to join in the conversation. Then, as they continue to do this and get respect for your offerings, they'll start getting interested. But it's a long route.

Best is to invest in sites (like eBay) which can be mined for pre-sold buyers looking for what you want.

There are then possibly only two types of people surfing the Internet:
1. Those spending their life looking for vicarious entertainment, diversion, or an education - and
2. Those looking to spend money to improve their lives directly.

The later drive ecommerce. The former drive advertising.

Seth's Blog: Silly Traffic: "If you could just convert 10% of the bouncers, you’d be increasing your conversion rate by almost a third! (7.5% is about a third of the 25% who don’t bounce). There’s a million things you can do to focus on this, and almost none of them will show you much improvement.

One other thing you can do is get hooked on the traffic, focus on building your top line number. Keep working on sensational controversies or clever images, robust controversies or other link bait that keeps the silly traffic coming back

I think it’s more productive to worry about two other things instead.
1. Engage your existing users far more deeply. Increase their participation, their devotion, their interconnection and their value.
2. Turn those existing users into ambassadors, charged with the idea of bring you traffic that is focused, traffic with intent."

How to make your millions through eBay - first, change your mind...

Making millions online isn't easy - but there's some "secrets" I recently got via my eBay training coaches.

Bright Builders isn't the only eBay training around, and certainly not the cheapest. However, the value I've already gotten seems worth my investment.

I'm not going to detail the training here - this isn't a sales pitch, and you'll find no affiliate link on this post. But I figure that the tons of material here, with web pages, mp3's, Camtasia videos, and all by people who are certified by eBay as knowing their stuff.

While I've only had the first lesson, I've been able to absorb most of what there is no their site and have a good idea where I'm heading with it. Down side is that this training is initially scheduled to take place every other week - which might be a good schedule for most, but I'm a bit more motivated than the regular Joe/Josie.

You see, that hefty chunk of change on a credit card is the key point to resolve. Sure they guarantee you'll make it back, but it requires you work at it. However, the idea that I can make these payments as well as cover other bills and meanwhile quitting my day job is just too much of a motivation for me to turn down.

The life of a wage-slave

Let's look at what 90-some percent of our nation does: slave for their wages. Essentially, you are giving away roughly half your waking hours each week in exchange for usually a fixed pay scale, which you hope increases each year to keep up with inflation.

Practically, you are a wage-slave and frankly are just pissing your life away. I know of people who work a factory job and set it up to get overtime for more pay. So they're working 50+ hour work and probably live no more than 1/2 hour's drive away (add an hour to their work day). Say 60 hours a week total. Now that means that their weekend is half-used up, giving them a single day of rest and then back at it again. So you can buy that big boat for the lake - you can only use it two or three times a year.

Let's talk taxes. Figure at a subsistence level, you're giving up around 30% of your pay every year to the government, most of which you'll never see again. And figure that as the government isn't popular with anyone (even those who work for it directly), you're just tossing 1/3rd of your money down the tubes. Currently, when you get overtime, it throws you into a higher tax bracket - so now you're throwing 50 % of the money you make away. At $30,000 a year, you keep $20K. At $50,000 a year, you keep $25K.

You work 50-60 hour weeks to make that $50K. So your weekend is roughly 10-20 hours usable time.

One story I was told: a girl went to college to learn the best-paid job possible - dental hygienist. After working for a year, she found out that her take-home pay was the same at full time employment as they would be if she only worked part-time. So she cut back her hours and spent the rest of the time either surfing or skiing. 20 hour work week, 50 hours personal time.

That is the insanity of paid employment - working for someone else. The more you work, the less you get paid. Adding another part-time job just kills you off slowly. No time for yourself and the taxes and deductions are as much as they can possibly take from you without sparking a revolt (known as election upset).

How working for yourself is viewed by the government

Really, this is the best way to get the most use out of your earned income. You earn it however you like, not trying to fit into a uniform schedule and dress-code that someone else considers optimal (Can you say: "Would you like fries with that?").

The government actually wants you to go into business for yourself. That's why they give "perks" to corporations. They want you to form a corporation to get the tax breaks you deserve.

Corporations are legal entities - meaning they are viewed as a person legally (where the "corpse" part comes in as part of that word). Now, despite all the class-warfare going around, you never really tax corporations. Every tax you put on them simply raises their costs - which is passed onto you with higher prices.

Corporations aren't taxed on total income - they are taxed after expenses are taken out. (I'm shorthanding this tremendously, but the basic fact are sound.) AND, the government gives out tax breaks to encourage corporations to act, invest, spend in certain ways. Like advertising is all written off, even if it didn't result in increased sales. And charitable donations (like to a non-profit you are on the board of) come out before any taxes are paid.

If you set up your corporation in states where there are no corporate taxes, then you only have to pay the Federal taxes. Now I'm telling you here to go ahead and pay all the taxes you're supposed to - but don't set yourself up to pay more than you have to.

An online business doesn't have to have an actual physical location. So you could live in one state and work for a business in another. While your servers (and bank accounts) could be in a foreign country. So, depending on the laws, you can actually set up your business to operate at a bare minimal tax level.

Or you could continue paying out the wazoo as a wage-slave here on Planet Earth in America. (And several countries have even higher personal income taxes than ours - but we are one of the top corporate taxers that exist.)

My point here is that you should be working for yourself and not the government or anyone else. Our government is telling you to set yourself up as a corporation and then contract your labor to another company - or better yet, create a new product people will buy and then sell it to them. The highest penalties they have are for people who make a lot of money personally. So you're not supposed to make money - your corporation is. That corporation is supposed to reinvest (spend) excess income and not show any income on paper. (Funny enough, it tells workers to stay poor and so pay less taxes, while corporations are supposed to stay "broke" on paper - to pay less taxes. That's just the way the system is set up.

Who actually pays taxes

The smart rich own nothing and all their expenses are paid by their corporation. They don't have earned income and so can't be taxed personally. The dumb rich pay exorbitant taxes personally, due to the amount of salaries they earn. Sure they have more money, but they don't get to keep much of it. (Politician Edwards falls in between. As a multi-millionaire lawyer, everything went to his corporation, and he paid very few dividends to himself as the only stockholder. As a politician, he campaigned for the poor, but was unable to keep his own finances secret - like the size of his house, you could see it all from a distance.)

Reagan changed the tax laws because of the problem he ran into as an actor. Finally landing a great movie role, he found that over 80% of what he was going to make went straight to the government - he was going to keep very little of it. Shortly after that, he got into politics through the Actor's Guild, and then as California's governor.

Anyway, I didn't intend to spiel on and on about taxes. It's just a point of control. Other people have it, you don't - that is, if you only work for earned income as opposed to going into business for yourself.

When you're running your own business, you can say what goes where and what expenses you are going to make - as a corporation, you keep all your money until you are done spending it and then you pay taxes on what's left over. As I mentioned before, taxes are viewed by the corporation as another expense - they are figuring out what's going to be left over to either reinvest or pay to stockholders as dividend (which can then be taxed by the government as personal income).

Who pays all taxes, actually? The employee - that working class individual and those white-collar people, all those who work for someone else and are told what to do each day as opposed to making their own decisions about what they want to accomplish that day and why.

As these politicians tell you so-and-so should pay more taxes, realize that it's probably you and me she or he is talking about.

How to really control all your own income, profits, and taxes.

Work for yourself - fire your boss.

The solution for retired boomers with fixed incomes is to put a small percentage of that aside to play with and invest in real financial independence. What they do have in spades is time. So take that time and convert it to earning income again. But what you do to earn income will mean changing your mindset from employee to entrepreneur.

If you thought taxes were bad, this is even more insidious.

Basically, you've been trained to be an employee (and dutifully pay taxes) your entire life - from the moment you were born, all the instructions and coaching and lessons you've had were entirely and completely designed to make you a creature of habit - being able to sit in a box or on a line and take whatever is dished out.

Factually, one author traced back our current educational system to the Prussian military model, which was used to create a single military force from the separated states of post World War I Germany. (Which force was then used to create World War II.) Seems the old general figured that if you kept people segregated by age and then trained them in large groups, they'd be all set to obey orders as a company or platoon.

In reality, the best schooling is proving to be home schooling (who wins all those spelling and geography bees?) and programs which are self-paced give better results. Lock-step training keeps the bulk of the class tied down to the slowest member (who is constantly getting D's and hearing about it).

But turning over a lifetime of training isn't all that hard - it takes persistence, but you've retrained yourself constantly during your life. You just have to find out how to take control over those tools you've been using all along.

Your own personal re-training tools to change your life (and make you as rich as you want).

1. Nothing is permanent except change - and it doesn't keep a steady pace (change changes, too).
   
2. You can change any habit in 30 days, regardless of how long you've had it.
3. Your world view is reinforced by your surrounding environment.
4. But your own thoughts are dominant over everything else. Everything else.

First, there is no permanency - stuff is changing around you all the time. Notice how that change has been speeding up lately? And it's not just the Internet - things had been speeding up before that. Probably the Magna Carta was a key point, but perhaps the Tipping point was that carpenter from Galilee... Don't know. It took us ages to get out of the Stone Age, but not as much time to move from sailing ships and global empires (East India Company) to airplanes and global corporations. And now anyone can sell to anyone else on this planet and get a product delivered that they didn't even make themselves or own the company that did.

So get over any idea that you have retired (or will retire) into some sort of Security. No security ever existed - but you do have choice. Everyone was born with Free Will - it's what makes humankind that way (and not our opposable thumbs). (And forget the idea that Social Security will be around or that you are going to be allowed to spend any of it. Nice having governments, but it's damned hard depending on them...)

Second, any mental habit you have can be changed in about 30 days if you consistently work at it. That's one serious truth. "The Secret" DVD had that number come up consistently. When I researched it out, it turned up studies by various universities which covered the findings that any mental pattern or habit or conditioning would change in 30 days (gradually) if you regularly reinforced a substitute pattern over the top of it. People were enabled to quit smoking if they consciously got a drink of water every single time they had an urge to smoke. And there are other examples. But the key point is to daily and probably several times every day (yes, that's every single day) for at least 30 days put a new pattern in effect and consciously use it - and whatever is keeping you from achieving that will dissipate or move to the background.

Third, your environment is constantly reinforcing whatever you think about yourself. For that matter, whatever you think about the world at large. Now I'm not stating you can change a Democrat into a Republican if you constantly surrounded them with campaign literature and videos - oooh, that's not a pretty picture either way... But you've surrounded yourself with stuff and that stuff is telling you the same thing back. Want to get over a nasty break-up? Get rid of anything around you that reminds you of that person. An age-old trick - taking a long vacation was also the same cure. Look around your work space, or your home and see what you have sitting there. Want to change your mind? Change your space - rearrange the furniture and fittings, or get some different ones.

Fourth, the oldest "secret" is that your thoughts make up your life. Sure - follow Earl Nightingale's "Strangest Secret", which he got from Napoleon Hill ("Think and Grow Rich"), which he in turn got from Charles Haanel ("Master Key System") and that came from Thomas Troward ("Edinburgh Lectures") who figured it out from studying each of the major religions' scriptures in their own language. Of course, even older than that is Huna, which shows that this idea has been floating around since before recorded history.

Look around your life - what you think determines your actions, which determines your results. Any attitude (or lack of it) is the difference between winners and losers in any competitive sport. Geniuses have generally a very unique approach to life, composed of both intuitive inspiration and persistence toward a goal only they can see. In both cases, it's the personal attitude which launches the progress toward the result (or impedes it).

How to apply this to make yourself an entrepreneur - and a lot of money meanwhile

The trick is that most of your attitudes are on automatic. Meaning that they have become habits.

But, you recall, habits can be changed. The trick is to set it up so that you constantly remind yourself with what you want to be, do, or have as the result. This used to be called "affirmations" - which have been widely panned because people didn't understand how they worked and how to make them work.

The first thing is to set up a vision statement that works.

Just like sales and marketing - people respond to emotions. So you really have to get into the feeling of being, doing, or having whatever you want - and in the tense that it's already there. (Check out "The Secret" DVD for more data on this - but Earl Nightingale also covered it in his "Strangest Secret" recording, available for free online.)

Now, you set up your vision statement and read it with the feeling it's already occurred - you know, full 3D full-on vision of it - two or three times every day. Follow the synchronicities and intuitions you get on this as you go.

The next thing is to have a plan. Work out backwards of what you need to do in order to achieve or acquire what you want. Getting a million-dollar income is going to mean starting out with some income weekly that you produce yourself, independent of any job or pension. Use your time, invest it, and provide some valuable service others will pay you for.

Go over Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich" again - those sections having to do with planning. The old adage applies: Plan your work, Work your plan. That plan has to align with your vision statement, has to back it up.

Review your plan weekly and write a list of To Do actions which will move that plan forward that week. And take that weekly To Do list and create daily To Do lists and follow them. Work these over back and forth - and start making that plan create your vision.

Those three steps: Vision statement, Plan, To Do's - these are everything you need to do in order to change your world into what you want it to be.

Yes, just that simple.

Now, about that environment you live in... You're going to want to do some changing here. Whatever you've put around you has or hasn't helped you become where you are today - looking at making yourself into a millionaire or at least financially independent.

Look over what you're reading and listening to (including your friends and in-laws) to see if these are helping you or hindering you. If they aren't helping you, replace them with something that is. Listening to "shock jocks" on the morning commute and horrendous news and weather on the evening ride home - these aren't making you rich. Period. Replace them with recordings by Brian Tracy, or Robert Kiyosaki, or anyone who has made themselves rich and can now talk the talk honestly.

Same at home. TURN OFF THE TV. Period. Doesn't get you anywhere. Get your news from the Internet - but don't spend forever getting it. Instead, set up a system which will give you inspirational or educational MP3's so you can transfer them to your car for the commute and also listen to them as background data.

Set up your computer to give you all the PDF's on marketing and financial planning you can find. Study these. Buy books (or check them out from the library - cheaper) and read them regularly to find out what you could be and should be doing to achieve what you really want out of life.

What you're doing is reinforcing your vision, making it become a reality around you. Bit by bit - much like building a tall and wide brick wall - that reality will start showing up around you.

Don't look for the immediate. It can happen, but look - you've taken a lifetime to program yourself into the state your end. All you've done, month after month, is to reinstate and strengthen these patterns and habits. So it might take a bit to undo it. But you'll see progress if you look for it. And when you see it, reinforce it.

Summary - let's recap:

1. You can change your world, nothing stays the same. Just take control of the change process.
2. Figure out what you want out of life - write this out in the past tense.
3. Review this daily, getting all the emotion of that - as if it's there right in front of you.
4. Get a plan that works for you so you can achieve this vision - revise it as many times as you need to when you find it needs improvement.
5. Work out weekly and daily To Do lists to get that plan accomplished. Get these done to result. Move them forward until they get done - or find out why they aren't and rectify that reason.
6. Surround yourself with supportive material - change your environment to help you make that transition into your new life.

Once you've got all this done, you can then simply change your vision to encompass a new goal. And then repeat those steps above to get that new goal achieved.

These steps aren't original to me - the authors I've mentioned above all said this same thing in their own way. And these principles are in all the major religions and philosophies on this planet.

Look, there are a lot of people wanting to help you improve your life. Tons of them. There are thousands of books and recordings which do nothing but call out for your to read and listen to them. Pick out the ones which will help you to form that new life. Study, read, listen to them. Absorb them.

And then start looking for hints, clues, and surprises around you which say your new life is arriving...

Best of luck to you and - Good Hunting!

My education in eBay continues - through the world of hard online millionaire knocks

If you thought an online millionaire course in training people on eBay was going to be easy, guess again.

Ah, the hard slogging work of getting eBay feedback up through buying things...

I was up late doing the convoluted dance of buying the remaining cheap digital downloads through eBay - did you know it takes about 6 different screens to buy each item? And even then, you have to wait until that buyer contact you some how with the download link.

Increased my feedback by 6 overnight, just in the buying process. I'll now finish off buying from the rest of the non-duplicative sellers (and non-duplicative products - hopefully), then pile in on leaving them all positive feedback. You know, karma and Golden Rule and all that.

Now, a tip: when/if you do this, keep track of three things on a sheet of paper (or notepad if you like to type) - seller ID, product name, eBay item number. Reason being is that people's email doesn't align to their eBay seller name - but they'll often refer to the product you bought or the item number (eBay always has the item number in every email they send you). This way you can avoid losing track of what you've bought and who you bought from.

Because they can only give you feedback once. You need to buy one extremely low-cost item each from many, many different sellers.

Just bought a chicken wings recipe book with complete resell rights - and the sales page said it was in the public domain... Gotta love eBay.

Was listening to an interview with Socrates Socratous - who has made his living selling digital books and information products. He advises not selling these to other resellers, but selling them to people who really want and need the data. Makes sense - do some research on eBay information products as to average price and you'll see that this market is really polluted with nonsense.

Another approach is to sell the actual item (CD/book/combo) as these actually tend to sell better than the downloads. Also, you can give away the download as a bonus (after you've listed it on Lulu.com and can tell people what it's value is) when they buy your product - just send the link to them.

But your ebook sales depends on what keywords you use in the title. Nobody searches for "WOW!!!", for instance. Buyers search and buy, shoppers look and look. Keywords that attract shoppers' attention will turn off buyers. The great thing about eBay is that it makes it much easier for buyers to buy.

Well, I've now bought the prescribed number of things to get my feedback up above 50. Now, I have to send all this feedback and get it all in (plus drop all these downloads with resell-rights into my hard-drive). And I managed to stay below $5 for each purchase. Let's see - started off with about 19 and needed 31 - so I've spent maybe $50 or so getting these. Maybe you can't buy happiness, but you can buy feedback -- cheap!

If any of these don't come through, I'll look for a few more I can buy cheap and wrap it up.

Notes from Tim Knox webinar: eBay Multiple Streams of Internet Income (Mar. 26, 2008)

(my comments in italics)

(this webinar problematic unless you have very dependable broadband - I'm trying to watch this over satellite in a rainstorm. It's about an hour long - unless you have to restart it often...)

(Tim) started with a $7 ebook and built into multi-million income in about 3 years.

After 11 years, laid off with no severance package - wife, new baby, new house, new car. Went to flat broke, sleeping on his mother's couch.

These days - no such thing as job security. Single stream of income is like keeping all your eggs in basket - wind up with a basket full of broken eggs.

Diversification, automation. Multiple streams of income on a semi-automated basis.

Best time to start a business is now - due to Internet.

Work once - get paid many times.

Roadmap:

1st income stream - ebay
- easy to start, up in an hour
- open eBay store quickly as a web presence
- promote yourself with About Me page: funnel traffic from eBay to other websites
- Internet is in runaway expansion mode; lots of buyers online, Billons of goods sold yearly.
- eBay ready-made pool of potential clients

Sell what sells
- don't follow the herd
- don't sell "hot items" people who made money on iPods sold accessories
- don't invest big money until you know you have a product that will sell (test market first and drop ship)

(When you are selling for a drop-shipper, you are actually being an affiliate - you name the margin you want to sell it for. Consignments are the same arrangements. You are a independent/freelance salesperson. When you buy lots of wholesale goods and ship them yourself, this is still the same framework. When you rent your own warehouse, then you are doing the same functions, just with a different title. Manufacturing the stuff yourself is only slightly different - but you still have to sell that product, or attract affiliates/freelance salespeople to do so.)

Start off with selling everything you don't need or use around the house. This gives you experience in writing titles, copy, photos, etc.
- you can also go to storage unit auctions/sales
- flea markets, thrift stores, consignment sales (even RV's), closeouts, bargain basement...

2nd income stream - start your own Ebay store (doesn't cover this much - diverges into info products, which he later elevates to its own income stream)

Informational products (see yesterday's post)
- can be about mostly anything.
- charge more for the hardcopy (these also sell better).
- add audio/video with it, and you can get over $200 for it. (Link to your About Me page and they go right to your download site. Meanwhile, sell dropship CD's/DVD's on ebay.)
- can be easily automated, just send the emails over to the fulfillment company. (And meanwhile, get them to subscribe to your mail-list for additional bonuses...)
- high profit margins (don't get stuck in selling resell rights to resellers for .99 each - go upscale with CDs/books/packages, and then bring them back to your website to buy downloads for much higher - $47, $67, etc. Your overhead is the same, essentially zip.)

You can hire writers to write for you.
- elance.com, etc. (caveat - get writers who know what they're doing, some have good credentials and good feedback, but no clue whether what they write is correct.)
- when you become an author, your credibility goes up, more people are likely to buy from you
- use ebooks to supplement your regular product line (example: "teaching dogs tricks" book for a pet-toy store)

3rd income stream - Joint Ventures
- partnership between two parties to promote a product and share in profit.
- fastest way to build your list
- turning point to his business was JV
sequence:

1. find successful sellers
2. approach them with your idea, and send them a free copy
3. should be complementary to what they are selling already
   
4. seal the deal (do your homework in this area)
   

4th income stream - Affiliate Marketing
- sign up to sell others products, or sign others up to sell your product
- register as an affiliate, sell the product, collect a commission (see above)
- you don't need your own product or your own website to sell as an affiliate
- you can sign up others to see for you, paying commissions as high as 75% (sales you wouldn't have otherwise - money in both your pockets, but you keep the new clients on your list)

5th income stream - Build your own website
- funnel buyers/shoppers from eBay to your site
- can build simply with templates, etc.
- add on ecommerce, etc.
- (caveat - don't use a free site. Best I've found is getting a cpanel-powered web-provider)

6th income stream - Turnkey website
- get these already set up with products, etc.
- don't get a middleman from the dropshipper

Variations on this - he mentions briefly a membership website. This would be another income stream all on its own, but you'd have to have a web-provider, etc.

Income streams:
- eBay: direct sales
- eBay store
- Info products (auctioned or through store or both)
- Joint Ventures
- Affiliate Marketing (for someone else or others for you)
- Own website
-Turnkey website

- - - -

Let's reconstruct this:
First - start on eBay and get your grounding in online sales, delivery, customer relations. Study everything you can, including peoples' websites. Take some courses in this if you can - where they actually give assignments, not just send you emails.
Second - Set up an eBay store and run your business from there. eBay will actually send customers your way, again this is a gradient approach
- you can use joint ventures here
Third - Write or commission some info products and put them on your eBay store and auction them. Goes on your eBay store.
Fourth - Expand your sales expertise by becoming an affiliate. Study up on online promotion, SEO, and social media promotion.
Fifth - Get your own website
- Can be turnkey from someone else
- Or build your own with ecommerce engine, etc.
- Add in affiliate sales (others selling for you)
- Joint Ventures
- Subscription site - sell memberships

My review of Tim Knox:

All of this stuff works. He speaks sooth. Only really misses one point, that he actually refers to through out but never specifically takes up - which I include below.

This webinar is good data, and he gives tons of his products you can buy at the end. (Which is what webinars are for - they are online infomercials, afterall.)

The overall theme is that you have several different income sources so that if one tanks, you aren't left holding an empty bag (as most jobs are).

The approach to start off with eBay is a good one, since your success here will lay the foundation for your later success. If you don't do well, then you aren't out a great deal.

If you already know a bit about website-building, then just get your own site up and running, then start funneling traffic from eBay over there. Get a good hosting provider which can handle the high demands or can scale.

Once you have your website with a good e-commerce engine, set it up for affiliate sales. Add in joint ventures. (Note: you can actually set up affiliate sales with nothing more than a few sales pages and thank-you pages where affiliates can send you buyers.)

Tim's missing point: at some juncture, you are going to have to get an autoresponder service. This is how you upsell, cross-sell, and continue to sell earlier buyers/clients you have had. You really want every person you sell to to opt-in to your mail list. Every auction you get has emails coming to you. Give them the option of becoming part of your mail list (give them a bonus ebook or other ethical bribe). Then you can sell them over and over. Build a big list and then you have the capability to announce new products to that list. And is how you can have an "instant" bestseller on Amazon - tell everyone you know and JV that product with other people to their mail-lists. (That bestseller then generates more traffic for your other products.)

Summary advice - what I've learned over the past few years

To someone just starting out: find people who have actually made their own success at what they are writing or talking about. I recently heard of a person who had actually gone bankrupt as a PowerSeller on eBay and was now pitching an expensive course on how to become a PowerSeller (!). Look up their track record, not just the "glowing testimonials" and the sales spiel.

Get a coaching program that makes you actually work at this. Maybe you could do two or three - if they each increase your income, and more than pay for themselves, you can take as many as you have time for. Pick out programs which provide the structure you need. If you need to attend someone's intensive boot-camp, then so be it.

Study up on everything you need, ask questions, look for real-world examples.

Learn to look beyond the hype. Once you understand how sales pages are constructed, you can get easily through the silliness that goes for most sales pages. Learn the scams that are going around and how to avoid them. All the free bonuses in the world doesn't mean you need to buy that product. (Even if they all have resell rights - not so good if you can't resell them for more than $.99).

Change your world-view to become an entrepreneur - not an employee. Those are the people earning the big bucks these days - self starters. Surround yourself with effective examples and inspirational books, MP3's, videos, etc. Read biographies of people who have started out with less than you have now - keep their examples in mind as you go through life. Quit watching TV and listening to radio, reading newspapers. Get your news through the Internet, and keep it brief. Use an RSS reader to give you synopses. You can't waste time, since it doesn't come back to you.

Do tons of research, constantly. Know before you go. Look before you leap. The only constant that stays the same is change. Check your results as next week, they might not be the same.

When you sell - sell only to niches. Find the demand not being serviced. Expand your niches and take on more niches and/or broaden the ones you're already in.

Convert every first buyer into a lifetime buyer.

Automate every part of your business you can. Hire people to save you time as you need them.

Shoppers look for bargains - buyers are willing to pay any "reasonable" price (reasonable to their own idea of its value to them.)

- - - -

More applications in marketing into/through social media

I've covered earlier (and these posts started this current eBay research) about how you can promote through social media, but can't market there.

The point, as many have discussed, is to start or take over a conversation. You really can make a big mistake here with ClueTrain when you say that marketing is a conversation, so just start conversations and then you've marketed. No. Marketing conversations include the exchange of goods. Social conversations establish you as an authority, and then people want to hear more about your view of things and so will look you up. So all your social promotions need to have active links which come back to you and your products.

But the site itself carries the heavy lifting. It has to convert visitors to shoppers to buyers. And social media fails as marketing as the majority of the traffic is visitors - they aren't even up to shopping. They mostly are even below taking the bait of free downloads/bonuses. They are there for the experience.

And here's where eBay as a social community comes in. It's full of buyers more than shoppers. It's built to do the heavy lifting, since every single item has a built in urgency to buy now.

Most web sites (and I'd include most item descriptions on eBay) couldn't lift a feather with a strong wind under it. Those people never learned the basics of copywriting, headlines, keywords, titles, images - nearly anything connected to a web page. When you get into marketing, your result has to be intended from the outset - you are going to wind up exchanging your valuable good for something of theirs, usually money in some denomination.

Social media has conversations which are intensely enjoyable - but that is the end product for most of these: an enjoyable experience. So these conversations are not marketing, at best they are promotion, but mostly they are either educational or entertainment. Education always has some sort of agenda - and so is a form of promotion. The best entertainment has a story behind it, and people use these to evaluate and improve their lives - so entertainment is promotion.

Social media promotions don't equal marketing. Marketing can promote through social media to get traffic, but the result is traffic, not sales or subscriptions (potential leads).

eBay is a premier social network for marketing, since every sale is a classic reverse-funnel - you only get their email after they buy something from you. And so, this is reasonably the best introduction to online marketing, online sales, and the springboard to financial independence.

And all social media isn't equal. eBay could "almost" be considered social media, except for the common ideas (and reputation) surrounding it. It rather falls into the more formal "community" aspect instead of the wide-open cowboy-scene we have in MySpace and some of the others. Just talking about structure as the chief difference between earlier social communities and today's social media.

Creating your "aura" of authentic credibility through social media and comment marketing

Social media promotion is almost too easy. It follows fads even more closely than Google could ever (which explains why Google follows social media so much).

1. Go to popurls and find out what is going up on the world. Digg is another relatively painless way to find out what is considered "hot". Google trends and Yahoo's version of this - not so much. (They're simply too dinosaurian - can't move that fast.)
2. Pick a subject area you are interested in (preferably something you know about or are interested in enough to research).
   
3. Find blogs talking about this and start leaving comments which forward that conversation. Make darned sure that your web address (or several) is hotlinked (and not your email address). Preferably use Search Status plug-in to find blogs which don't use no-follow links. (Get your link love where you can - but this isn't essential.)
4. Make sure whatever is at your web address is representative of what you represent and every single link is monetized, either through affiliate sales or direct sales through your own ecommerce efforts.

If you do this well, people think you know what you are talking about and will want more from you. They come to your web address and you convert them to buyers.

Yes, this is simply comment marketing. Something that's been done on forums for years and before that the BBSes (yes, I'm that old).

Social media just adds a great deal wider variety of formats - such as pictures, slideshows, video, podcasts, etc. So you want to link to and use a great deal of these-type media in your posts.

This is marketing, because you are using social media intentionally to bring traffic to your web address which then converts them to buyers. Your intention is to get sales of your products from the get-go. You are creating a market.

Simply participating in the discussion isn't necessarily marketing - or even promotion. Only when that discussion leads to a sale or a future sale (ie - name on a mail list) is it marketing. Marketing has definite metrics - sitting around talking in a coffee shop only results in sales of coffee, muffins, and bathroom supplies. But you aren't selling coffee or any of that - so you're getting no return on the time you just invested.

That's the difference in marketing conversations and social media conversations.

- - - -

And tomorrow I start my 20 hours of day job. Usually too tired to do much after that (slogging heavy boxes and rugs around in someone else's warehouse isn't all that much fun).

Rest of tonight will probably be in listing my old books on Half.com - again, so that I could essentially raise my feedback without having the hassle of setting up auctions.

Most of the research on eBay itself is now done. The Tim Knox interview above really tied everything into a package. My own notes on HammerTap over the past few days show the advanced (and only profitable) way to go with this.

Next Tuesday is my first coaching session. Should be interesting.