Saturday, August 13, 2005
The dog ate my post
Actually, it's more like Blogger ate my post last night. It was a very long one that Blogger choked on and would neither upload nor save. So no blog post last night due to a Blogger glitch and none today (other than this feeble explanation) because I didn't manage to reconstruct last night's post today.
I'll be back tomorrow night with my weekly sharing of favorite links and will see if I can reconstruct my planned blog for last night in a form that Blogger might find a little more digestible.
Jeff
Actually, it's more like Blogger ate my post last night. It was a very long one that Blogger choked on and would neither upload nor save. So no blog post last night due to a Blogger glitch and none today (other than this feeble explanation) because I didn't manage to reconstruct last night's post today.
I'll be back tomorrow night with my weekly sharing of favorite links and will see if I can reconstruct my planned blog for last night in a form that Blogger might find a little more digestible.
Jeff
Thursday, August 11, 2005
The "Your Turn" Trap
Hey, I'm on a roll with these traps that delay or derail many Internet businesses, so I might as well ride it out.
The "Your Turn" Trap is closely related to The Lottery Trap. Both result in the marketer expecting big results to come from little efforts. The difference I see, though, is that the "Your Turn" Trap is far more unrealistic. While the Lottery Trap raises false hopes of finding a simple formula or a single tool that guarantees success, the "Your Turn" Trap clings to false hopes of success coming because... well, just because it's the world's duty to bestow success on the person just because they tried.
It goes like this: the person caught up in the "Your Turn" Trap slaps up a few pages, a few products—all with the least effort the person can exert—and then sits back waiting for success.
There's a little problem with that. "Did you make the effort to find something that people want?"
"Well, no, you see, there was this company out there that said that if I signed up with them, they'd put up a website with all their products on it and people would just come running to buy from me."
"How are you promoting your site to attract people to it?"
"I don't need to do that. People are supposed to find it, aren't they?"
"Are you doing anything at all to promote sales?"
"Well, no. But now that you mention it, it's been two days since I paid for my site and I haven't gotten any checks yet. I think I'll call the company that sold me the site and find out what's the delay."
That's a pretty extreme example, but pretty close to some actual conversations I've had with people who were firmly entrenched in the "Your Turn" Trap. The expectation is that the world is obligated to reward them handsomely for any little effort toward success.
But it's a trap that even those who are working hard and trying to learn the Internet biz can fall into. It can take the form of an expectation that adding some new product, or some new promotion method will suddenly skyrocket sales.
But there's still no substitute for a steady, methodical approach and an ardent focus on what the potential customer is looking for instead of on what y
Hey, I'm on a roll with these traps that delay or derail many Internet businesses, so I might as well ride it out.
The "Your Turn" Trap is closely related to The Lottery Trap. Both result in the marketer expecting big results to come from little efforts. The difference I see, though, is that the "Your Turn" Trap is far more unrealistic. While the Lottery Trap raises false hopes of finding a simple formula or a single tool that guarantees success, the "Your Turn" Trap clings to false hopes of success coming because... well, just because it's the world's duty to bestow success on the person just because they tried.
It goes like this: the person caught up in the "Your Turn" Trap slaps up a few pages, a few products—all with the least effort the person can exert—and then sits back waiting for success.
There's a little problem with that. "Did you make the effort to find something that people want?"
"Well, no, you see, there was this company out there that said that if I signed up with them, they'd put up a website with all their products on it and people would just come running to buy from me."
"How are you promoting your site to attract people to it?"
"I don't need to do that. People are supposed to find it, aren't they?"
"Are you doing anything at all to promote sales?"
"Well, no. But now that you mention it, it's been two days since I paid for my site and I haven't gotten any checks yet. I think I'll call the company that sold me the site and find out what's the delay."
That's a pretty extreme example, but pretty close to some actual conversations I've had with people who were firmly entrenched in the "Your Turn" Trap. The expectation is that the world is obligated to reward them handsomely for any little effort toward success.
But it's a trap that even those who are working hard and trying to learn the Internet biz can fall into. It can take the form of an expectation that adding some new product, or some new promotion method will suddenly skyrocket sales.
But there's still no substitute for a steady, methodical approach and an ardent focus on what the potential customer is looking for instead of on what y
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
The Lottery Trap
Last night I talked about one of the biggest traps that someone starting their first online business faces, The Dream Trap.
Well, my mind still seems to be focused on the things that delay, or even derail, many online business efforts. And tonight The Lottery Trap comes to mind.
The Lottery Trap is the belief that somewhere out there exists some simple formula or simple tool that requires almost no effort, but will suddenly shower you with unlimited riches. I've seen people who were into search engine optimization who were absolutely convinced that, somehow, they could hit on the proper keyword densities and placements, and when they did, every page they constructed would have #1 ranking on all the search engines, providing them with unlimited wealth.
I've seen people who were focused on incoming links who felt that they could reach some magic number of links, and, if they did, they'd rank #1 and be rolling in similar wealth.
I've seen people buy one ebook after another and tool after tool in the hope that this one would be the one that lets them settle into a comfy hammock while their website or auction churned out effort-free sales.
And that sad thing about that is that even if the resources they bought could have helped them build a successful business, they leave them all gathering dust—unused—as soon as they see that they'll actually have to put some effort into carrying out the steps that those resources give them to lead them to success.
And what do they do as those resources gather dust? Why, buy another resource in the hope that that one will be their lottery ticket to a life of ease. Or they beat their head against another dead end, hoping fruitlessly to discover the secret optimization formula or the magic number of links that will ensure them lifelong success.
The truth is, that even the most automated, effort-free business doesn't start out that way.
I have never met any successful web business owner who was able to start a business without putting a lot of effort into building it.
If you're approaching your web business with an expectation that all you need is some small thing that will give you success, recognize that your first step toward success will be to lose that lottery trap attitude. Even the best tools, tools that walk you through all the steps of starting a successful business, like SiteBuildIt!, require that you make a big commitment of time and energy in order to put their resources to work.
There is no quick, easy, or effortless way to success. But success is available if you're willing to work at it.
Jeff
Last night I talked about one of the biggest traps that someone starting their first online business faces, The Dream Trap.
Well, my mind still seems to be focused on the things that delay, or even derail, many online business efforts. And tonight The Lottery Trap comes to mind.
The Lottery Trap is the belief that somewhere out there exists some simple formula or simple tool that requires almost no effort, but will suddenly shower you with unlimited riches. I've seen people who were into search engine optimization who were absolutely convinced that, somehow, they could hit on the proper keyword densities and placements, and when they did, every page they constructed would have #1 ranking on all the search engines, providing them with unlimited wealth.
I've seen people who were focused on incoming links who felt that they could reach some magic number of links, and, if they did, they'd rank #1 and be rolling in similar wealth.
I've seen people buy one ebook after another and tool after tool in the hope that this one would be the one that lets them settle into a comfy hammock while their website or auction churned out effort-free sales.
And that sad thing about that is that even if the resources they bought could have helped them build a successful business, they leave them all gathering dust—unused—as soon as they see that they'll actually have to put some effort into carrying out the steps that those resources give them to lead them to success.
And what do they do as those resources gather dust? Why, buy another resource in the hope that that one will be their lottery ticket to a life of ease. Or they beat their head against another dead end, hoping fruitlessly to discover the secret optimization formula or the magic number of links that will ensure them lifelong success.
The truth is, that even the most automated, effort-free business doesn't start out that way.
I have never met any successful web business owner who was able to start a business without putting a lot of effort into building it.
If you're approaching your web business with an expectation that all you need is some small thing that will give you success, recognize that your first step toward success will be to lose that lottery trap attitude. Even the best tools, tools that walk you through all the steps of starting a successful business, like SiteBuildIt!, require that you make a big commitment of time and energy in order to put their resources to work.
There is no quick, easy, or effortless way to success. But success is available if you're willing to work at it.
Jeff
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
The dreams trap
As I drove my youngest daughter, Lydia, home from soccer practice today, we talked about her love of writing. She spoke of a project she's toyed with for a while, but never felt it paid to try: resurrecting the family newspaper she and her sister ran while all the kids were little.
She complained that she's the last to find out what's happening with her brother and sisters out on their own, and with both other brothers leaving this fall, it seemed like a good way to keep in touch with everyone.
I encouraged her to do it and she got excited thinking about what it could be. By the time we got home, her ideas had grown from just brothers and sisters to also include two of her aunts. And by the time she told her plans to her mom, they had grown into also contacting all five aunts and uncles and all 21 cousins and asking them all to submit regular reports for this greatly expanded family paper.
At that point I saw it happening: the dream trap was threatening to strangle her plans before she ever got started. I've seen the dream trap strangle many projects I wanted to start and I've seen it strangle the business plans of many people who wanted to start a business of their own on the Web.
The dream trap is when you start with a simple, do-able idea and then let it get away from you until it grows so big that it becomes too intimidating to do. One Stop Web Support was itself almost a victim of the Dream Trap. Having experienced success creating profitable websites for clients moving out onto the Web for the first time, I decided to offer my skills to others who were in the same position.
But the idea quickly became gargantuan as I decided I would offer every possible web marketing service that new business owners could conceivably need—design, copywriting, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, public relations, webmastering, reciprocal link brokering, newsletter publishing, and anything else they would possibly need. And I was going to do all this for multiple clients all by myself. I, one person, would fill every possible need of five, ten, twenty clients.
It was a beautiful dream. But considering that I was totally swamped trying to do all that for just one client, it was totally unrealistic. And with a goal that ambitious, it quickly became evident that it was too big of a dream to accomplish. So with domain name and web hosting bought and paid for, One Stop Web Support became one of the many perpetually "under construction" websites on the Internet for a couple of years.
I revised my plans eventually to a more realistic vision of writing tips and reviewing tools that people starting their business on the Web could read and put into practice on their own. And the site has grown steadily toward that more modest goal.
But the key is that the dreams no longer are a huge, but distant destination that is too big to accomplish. The dreams now rest in the journey itself. The fact that I am not at my grand and glorious destination (and yes, I still have a pretty ambitious one, even though the focus has changed), does not mean that the dream is out of reach. Because taking the steps along the way are as important to the dreams as the destination is—perhaps even moreso.
The dreams trap leads us to focus all our attention on visualizing an ever more delightful destination and robs us of the energy we need to visualize what steps we need to take to get there.
Don't be afraid to dream big, but don't let your dreams stop at just dreaming. Act big, too, in working out the steps it takes to get where you want to go.
Jeff
As I drove my youngest daughter, Lydia, home from soccer practice today, we talked about her love of writing. She spoke of a project she's toyed with for a while, but never felt it paid to try: resurrecting the family newspaper she and her sister ran while all the kids were little.
She complained that she's the last to find out what's happening with her brother and sisters out on their own, and with both other brothers leaving this fall, it seemed like a good way to keep in touch with everyone.
I encouraged her to do it and she got excited thinking about what it could be. By the time we got home, her ideas had grown from just brothers and sisters to also include two of her aunts. And by the time she told her plans to her mom, they had grown into also contacting all five aunts and uncles and all 21 cousins and asking them all to submit regular reports for this greatly expanded family paper.
At that point I saw it happening: the dream trap was threatening to strangle her plans before she ever got started. I've seen the dream trap strangle many projects I wanted to start and I've seen it strangle the business plans of many people who wanted to start a business of their own on the Web.
The dream trap is when you start with a simple, do-able idea and then let it get away from you until it grows so big that it becomes too intimidating to do. One Stop Web Support was itself almost a victim of the Dream Trap. Having experienced success creating profitable websites for clients moving out onto the Web for the first time, I decided to offer my skills to others who were in the same position.
But the idea quickly became gargantuan as I decided I would offer every possible web marketing service that new business owners could conceivably need—design, copywriting, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, public relations, webmastering, reciprocal link brokering, newsletter publishing, and anything else they would possibly need. And I was going to do all this for multiple clients all by myself. I, one person, would fill every possible need of five, ten, twenty clients.
It was a beautiful dream. But considering that I was totally swamped trying to do all that for just one client, it was totally unrealistic. And with a goal that ambitious, it quickly became evident that it was too big of a dream to accomplish. So with domain name and web hosting bought and paid for, One Stop Web Support became one of the many perpetually "under construction" websites on the Internet for a couple of years.
I revised my plans eventually to a more realistic vision of writing tips and reviewing tools that people starting their business on the Web could read and put into practice on their own. And the site has grown steadily toward that more modest goal.
But the key is that the dreams no longer are a huge, but distant destination that is too big to accomplish. The dreams now rest in the journey itself. The fact that I am not at my grand and glorious destination (and yes, I still have a pretty ambitious one, even though the focus has changed), does not mean that the dream is out of reach. Because taking the steps along the way are as important to the dreams as the destination is—perhaps even moreso.
The dreams trap leads us to focus all our attention on visualizing an ever more delightful destination and robs us of the energy we need to visualize what steps we need to take to get there.
Don't be afraid to dream big, but don't let your dreams stop at just dreaming. Act big, too, in working out the steps it takes to get where you want to go.
Jeff
Monday, August 08, 2005
Favorite links for free (or close to free) tools
Besides moving my weekly sharing of favorite links from Sunday to Monday this week, I'm also making a slight change in that I'm going to focus on free (or almost free) trial sites tonight.
Accelerated Wealth-Building Videos
My decision to focus on trial offers tonight comes from a short-term offer I just found out about this weekend. Videos from Internet marketing pioneer Cory Rudl's last major speaking engagement before his death have been made available for a $2.95, 30-day trial.
Wait a minute, these are videos. Couldn't people watch them for 30 days and then send them back and get all those advanced internet marketing tips for only $2.95? Yep, and I'm sure a few people will.
But I think it says a lot for how jam packed these videos are with powerful tips Corey never shared before. Think of how confident his friend and business partner, Derek Gehl, is that he's willing to bet that people trying out these videos will find them so indispensible that they won't want to part with them after the 30 days. That's got to be pretty powerful stuff to inspire that kind of confidence. But you can get this trial offer only through August 15, 2005.
1Shopping Cart
Here's another almost free trial. 1Shopping Cart is my favorite shopping cart program because you can do so much with it. You can use it as a shopping cart, ad tracking tool, autoresponder system, ezine publishing system, affiliate tracking tool and so much more. I call it the Swiss army knife of shopping cart programs.
The people at 1Shopping Cart offer a 30-day trial for $3.95 in which you can use all those powerful features. Obviously, they hope you'll sign up to keep using them after the trial. And there's a good chance you will. I've been using it for years and I'm still finding new things I can do with it to help both my business and my client's businesses.
Newbie Club
OK, enough of the almost free stuff. Here's one that doesn't charge a cent and doesn't even have a trial period. Internet marketer Joe Robson came up with a brilliant idea: create a site for people who are new to Internet marketing, new to the Internet, maybe are even new to those computer thingies they have in their homes.
His site requires that you sign up to get in, but contains lots of free tutorials and tips (as well as some quality products) for anyone looking get control of that computer that keeps doing strange and mysterious things, as well as anyone building their first online business. I especially love his collection of downloadable inspirational ebooks written by some of the old print marketing masters that he's updated for the computer age.
Starting Your Internet Business Right
Another great free ebook comes from one of the experts of finding products for online businesses, Chris Malta. He's spent years researching wholesale suppliers online and shares his knowledge of how to avoid the scammers and go directly to the source of wholesale products online.
Chris also offers a free sneak peek at the first three chapters of his new ebook (Understanding the Internet for Business).
I hope you enjoy some of these free (or almost free) tools and trials.
Jeff
Besides moving my weekly sharing of favorite links from Sunday to Monday this week, I'm also making a slight change in that I'm going to focus on free (or almost free) trial sites tonight.
Accelerated Wealth-Building Videos
My decision to focus on trial offers tonight comes from a short-term offer I just found out about this weekend. Videos from Internet marketing pioneer Cory Rudl's last major speaking engagement before his death have been made available for a $2.95, 30-day trial.
Wait a minute, these are videos. Couldn't people watch them for 30 days and then send them back and get all those advanced internet marketing tips for only $2.95? Yep, and I'm sure a few people will.
But I think it says a lot for how jam packed these videos are with powerful tips Corey never shared before. Think of how confident his friend and business partner, Derek Gehl, is that he's willing to bet that people trying out these videos will find them so indispensible that they won't want to part with them after the 30 days. That's got to be pretty powerful stuff to inspire that kind of confidence. But you can get this trial offer only through August 15, 2005.
1Shopping Cart
Here's another almost free trial. 1Shopping Cart is my favorite shopping cart program because you can do so much with it. You can use it as a shopping cart, ad tracking tool, autoresponder system, ezine publishing system, affiliate tracking tool and so much more. I call it the Swiss army knife of shopping cart programs.
The people at 1Shopping Cart offer a 30-day trial for $3.95 in which you can use all those powerful features. Obviously, they hope you'll sign up to keep using them after the trial. And there's a good chance you will. I've been using it for years and I'm still finding new things I can do with it to help both my business and my client's businesses.
Newbie Club
OK, enough of the almost free stuff. Here's one that doesn't charge a cent and doesn't even have a trial period. Internet marketer Joe Robson came up with a brilliant idea: create a site for people who are new to Internet marketing, new to the Internet, maybe are even new to those computer thingies they have in their homes.
His site requires that you sign up to get in, but contains lots of free tutorials and tips (as well as some quality products) for anyone looking get control of that computer that keeps doing strange and mysterious things, as well as anyone building their first online business. I especially love his collection of downloadable inspirational ebooks written by some of the old print marketing masters that he's updated for the computer age.
Starting Your Internet Business Right
Another great free ebook comes from one of the experts of finding products for online businesses, Chris Malta. He's spent years researching wholesale suppliers online and shares his knowledge of how to avoid the scammers and go directly to the source of wholesale products online.
Chris also offers a free sneak peek at the first three chapters of his new ebook (Understanding the Internet for Business).
I hope you enjoy some of these free (or almost free) tools and trials.
Jeff
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Bookmarks postponed to Monday night
Sunday night's the night I usually share some of my favorite bookmarks, but what with taking off more of the weekend for family activities than I normally have lately, I've decided to postpone that feature until Monday night this week.
It was refreshing spending more time with family. And with my sons Ben and Joel heading off for the Marines and for college, respectively, soon, I want to make sure I get some more time with them before they leave.
Jeff
Sunday night's the night I usually share some of my favorite bookmarks, but what with taking off more of the weekend for family activities than I normally have lately, I've decided to postpone that feature until Monday night this week.
It was refreshing spending more time with family. And with my sons Ben and Joel heading off for the Marines and for college, respectively, soon, I want to make sure I get some more time with them before they leave.
Jeff
© 2005, 2006, 2007 Jeff Baas, One Stop Web Support
