Written By Loren Woirhaye, September 27th, 2010 Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes (part 5 of 5) Learning direct response marketing gets you out of person-to-person selling. The only reason to do it is because it lends itself to automation and leverage because you can reach a lot of people with one effort. The internet is the most perfect medium for direct response marketing ever because people can pay on the spot with a few clicks. The internet makes buying deliriously easy for consumers. The problem is the internet has matured a bit and now the selling environment online has become competitive. There’s no easy or straightforward path to internet riches these days (sorry to burst your bubble), but if you educate yourself about proven direct marketing principles. Just because the internet is the perfect medium for direct marketing doesn’t mean it’s the best. That’s because the barrier to entry with internet marketing is low so there’s a lot of competition. With direct mail, your costs will be higher but the competition tends to be sparser. Most of the best copywriter/marketers are also intense students of human nature and salesmanship. We read widely because you really cannot learn to be a great direct marketer at school – you have to teach yourself. If you bumble into internet marketing like I did, made some money and thought “Wow!”, good for you. What usually happens though is most people who do that have a tough time re-creating their early good fortune. The market will go shift on you and then the money you were making isn’t there anymore. To be a steadily successful marketer you have to get it together on a bunch of different levels. It’s not all easy and you cannot learn it all fast. But if you keep up with your learning, you’ll gradually come to a better understanding of what’s going on with the marketplace and how to exploit opportunities that come along.
The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog. Written By Loren Woirhaye, September 17th, 2010 Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes Lately there’s some upheaval under my own roof and considerable conflict in my live-in partner’s family and between her and me as well. Everybody’s pretty stressed-out by an unpleasant and costly family-court matter and when folks get stressed out they often look for ways to dump on others to try to get relief . I’m presently working on some things that require me to act very confidently. Call me over-sensitive, but when I’m experiencing conflict at home, it’s hard for me to perform at my best when working with people. Confidence is like standing on a log – you can get knocked-off balance and lose it. I’m processing these conflicts today, so I went for a walk to get sun in my eyes and on my skin. I live in a big loft on the 4th floor of a converted factory. There are no balconies so I have to go downstairs to get fresh air and so forth. Working as I do with computers, I’m prone to getting absorbed and neglecting to go outside, especially when the weather is nice. If you go out wearing sunglasses all the time you’re depriving your body of important vitamin D which gets synthesized when you get sun in your eyes, even if you’re in the shade. I don’t want to argue with your choice of eyewear – but I usually wear a hat when I go out to shade my eyes and it works for me. I know from experience that getting unfiltered sunlight on my skin and eyes helps get rid of headaches I get sometimes. My Fasting Friend On my way back from a park down the road I run into a friend who is Jewish. He tells me he’s going to synagogue for a meal and to celebrate Yom Kippur with a 25-hour fast. Additionally he’s planning to walk home from the synagogue tonight because he won’t drive a car when he’s in prayer this way. I’m not Jewish and don’t intend to convert, but we talk about some things and he reminds me of the value of prayer, especially in hard times. If you’ve been following my activity as an online marketer for awhile you’ll notice that I’ve seldom mentioned faith and spirtuality before recently. The truth is I led a very spiritually-centered life for many years but over the last few I’ve been so absorbed with my marketing career I kind of let prayer fall by the wayside. This was a mistake I now know I need to rectify – at least for me.
Whatever Works For You… I’m not into pushing my values onto other people – I’m a live and let live kind of person. I figure you should do whatever works for you to make yourself happy as long as you’re not doing avoidable harm to others. Business is competive and if my business outmarkets yours mine may prosper while yours doesn’t, but on a person-to-person level I’m in favor of being gentle with others because that’s the way I prefer others to be with me. Make sense? Avoiding Burnout Lots of people get triggered by words like God, prayer, and religion – these words mean different things to different people. If you’re an athiest or whatever that’s cool: I won’t try to tell you how to pray or even if you should, just that to succeed as a whole person – perfecting your dance with money, looking after your body’s health, and cultivating nurturing relationships and so forth – takes a lot of energy and if you don’t have a way to replenish that energy, you may very well burn-out and face the consequences of not functioning well at all. I say it’s good to study your own nervous system and the way you react to stress and find ways to be in the flow with energy on a consistent basis. To me, prayer is making some quiet time within yourself to recharge your batteries. Whatever system or non-system you use to do that is fine, but if you make the time to be centered for yourself you’ll always be happier and usually healthier, so it’s a good idea, no? Caffeine and Sugar My opinion is caffeine and sugar have some cool qualities and they can give you mental energy. They also take their tole on your kidneys if used to excess. Drinking a lot of coffee and sugar is like going on a credit card spending spree with your own vitality. You get a thrill, but eventually the bill comes due, with interest. I’ll admit I often drink coffee in the morning and it’s an enjoyable thing for me, but it’s a diuretic and makes you lose more water than you’re drinking. Colas are the same way – they dehydrate you. So if you drink coffee or soda, and you want to live a long, healthy life, be sure to drink plenty of unadulterated, pure water too. Plain water helps flush out your kidneys, which are the seat of vitality and stable energy. The adrenal glands sit on top of the kidneys and produce adrenaline, which in a normal day in a healthy body gives you ongoing energy and vitality.
“Today, Remember To Treat Yourself Well, Because Good Things Will Come Of It”
The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog. Written By Loren Woirhaye, September 16th, 2010 Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes Mean People Suck! If you want to write your own ticket, run your own show, you’re gonna have encounters with people who want to stop you. On the surface they may believe they love you and are trying to save you from humiliation and failure. The slap sometimes comes in a velvet glove. Almost everybody tries to project their own values onto other people. That’s how insecurity manifests, usually. The person doing the projecting (onto you) is feeling ,”I can’t value what you do because I’m scared and don’t understand,” and so they say and do things to discourage you. My first tip is not to enter into direct confrontation with the naysayers until and unless it is necessary. However, if the negative person’s influence on you is especially toxic or over-bearing, there may be no way to stop their energetic encroachment except a confrontation. The problem with making a confrontation with such a person is they’ll probably unleash a lot of bad feelings towards you and if you’re not strong, you’ll feel it and it will hurt and affect your resolve. Energetically, the person abusing you may be saying ,”I need you,” – as in “I need you to validate the way I feel about the world,”. Usually you’re not allowed to disagree with such a person without offending them or hurting their feelings. Such people are common, and the hooks they get into you are emotional in nature. Thus, in order to set limits on toxic people who drag you down, you’re going to need some psychological tools to set limits with them. The most useful tool, in my experience, is emotional detachment. Don’t let the conflict rile you up, or at least try to keep your energy as quiet and centered in the moment as you can. When you detach and set limits with a toxic person, they may heap abuse on you and it will be hard for you to just take it without fighting back. Unless there is a physical assault happening, don’t fight back verbally. As long as the attack is verbal only, don’t try to defend yourself and don’t try to hurt the mean person who attacks you verbally – because when you do you just meet their energy and feed into it. This brings me to another useful tool: silence. There is power in silence. It works on many levels. Only when you shut up can you truly hear what’s going on around you. A toxic person who has his or her hooks in you and won’t make an effort to understand what you’re doing or try to see things from your point of view will resent you anyway. Don’t give them too much information. Remember, they are looking for vulnerabilities in you in order to draw you into their own insecurity. If you know a person who will eventually use everything you reveal to him or her against you – and we’ve all known them - learn to keep your thoughts to yourself. If you live in a household, for example, where another person criticizes your entrepreneurial plans but makes no sincere effort to understand those plans well enough to be constructive, learn to keep your plans to yourself. Silence is power. You have no idea how powerful silence is until you start to use it as a tool to build and preserve your own strength. Of course the other person may accuse you of witholding to hurt them, but just turn the conversation away from you and towards what the other person is interested in. For example, if the toxic person is needling you to get information about your entrepreneurial plans in order to criticize you (you’ve seen it before so you know the signs), turn that person’s attention elsewhere – towards food for example. Say “I wonder if there’s any ice cream in the freezer” or something. Napoleon Hill in his classic book “Think and Grow Rich” writes about the importance of keeping the details of your plans to yourself until and unless you find somebody who supports and encourages you in a totally positive way. You should seek such people out, but don’t try to reform a toxic person into a supportive person; it won’t work.
The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog. Written By Loren Woirhaye, September 15th, 2010 Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes JMUMM7FSB8X5 Sooner or later, you may come to the conclusion that I am not a safe-n-sane online marketing-expert dude, but really some sort of crazy freak. That’s ok – because from my point of view non-freaky people are a bit dull. If you were to become a client or friend of mine you’d find out sooner or later, so I might as well admit it. While not in the class of freaky, the truth is I prefer playing guitar and reading fiction to the fussy business of how you make money with all this crazy website stuff, but we all have to make a living, don’t we?  Photo by Lululemon Athletica Before 4 or 5 years years ago making a lot of money was not high on my priority list at all. Even though I’d been selling on Ebay since 1999, I treated it mostly as a hobby, not a career. It wasn’t that I saw making money as being un-spiritual or bad – I was just involved in stuff where money wasn’t the big criteria. I was involved in yoga, music, shamanistic “healing work” between the ages of 23 and 35. In fact, I lived in Malibu, California for several years (hence the blog name), which is a veritable hotbed of freaky people activity compared to which my own freak-ness is quite tame. I could tell you some stories… but we’ll save that for another day. Incidentally, Malibu is as much a state of mind as a place and furthermore, there are two Malibus: “the movie star” sandy beach Malibu where Ozzy Ozborne and Britney Spears have homes, and the “coyote ate the cat” Malibu which is more of a mountainous coastal desert region. I lived in the mountains. “The trip I get hung-up about is that if I get into the spiritual field of looking at things, I think I’m not being pragmatic or practical. Thus I have this ongoing push-pull with my freaky self and my pragmatic, results-oriented self.”
On closer examination and growing a bit more sure of myself however, I’m now ready to declare my beliefs to you: You can be spiritual and metaphysical and also very much in the mix and making money. The two do indeed mix well, but you’ll have to do some experimenting to find the formula that works best for you. Your spiritual side doesn’t have to hide when your money-making hat is on and vice versa – both sides can co-exist and help each other to grow. My transition to a hard-nosed “results oriented” direct marketing type did not come suddenly, but eventually I did make a change – curtailing my Bohemian behavior to focus on developing my skills as an online marketer. For me the shift involved a jettisoning of habits I’d had for several years and a new seriousness of focus on the nitty-gritty of my new chosen career (I made my living as a carpenter before). All this shifting has been part of my life’s journey and a largely positive thing, though not un-painful in some ways. Recently I’ve reconsidered some of my old notions, but in a new context coming from my experiences as a marketer and freelance copywriter/consultant.
New Age Nuttiness… Even though I’ve been around the new age scene and had some extraordinary experiences, I don’t buy into all the wild ideas that “new thought” or “metaphysical” type people sometimes talk about. In particular, pertaining to making money I’ve been critical of a lot of the “laws of abundance” and “law of attraction” stuff going around, but I also try to keep an open mind. For example: in no way will I tell you that if you sit in your bedroom and wish for somebody to give you a million dollars will you get it. I will tell you instead that it’s a very good and useful exercise to get a specific idea in your head about what you want to achieve. Then you have to take action in the marketplace of life to create the reality where somebody would write you a million dollar check, provided you had an idea worth that amount of money and the skill to sell it. There’s a thing I learned in studying NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) that goes by different names but I prefer “evidence procedure“, which means the set of feelings and visualizations you can project into the future to show your mind what the outcome of your goal is going to be like. Rather than focusing on the goal, you tell your mind to fetch the specific outcome and the subsconcious mind takes care of lots of nitty-gritty details in between. You direct your mind to fetch the outcome, like a dog fetching a thrown stick, and your marvelous subsconscious brain works out many of the details of getting the outcome for you. It’s quite elegant and useful and worth learning about. Napoleon Hill, if you’re familiar with his writing, was very specific in his book “Think and Grow Rich” that you can establish whatever intent you want in terms of the money you want, but in return you must also have a plan to deliver value to the marketplace. Furthermore, Hill repeatedly admonishes that in all probability many of your plans will fail to bear much fruit but that if you want to acquire monetary wealth you must persevere with great intensity. The advantage of seeing success through a somewhat “spiritual” lens is that it can help you keep balance while you’re working hard to create prosperity for yourself. Your spirituality, if you call it that, can help you be both energized and relaxed about the whole process of making things happen for yourself, which can be a lot of work. Work without meaning becomes tedious and a chore. The thing about being an entrepreneur however is you have to maintain enthusiasm and creative flexibility and energy over a long period of time. A spiritual or philosophically grounded way of seeing success as a journey and a process can help you stick to your vision, stay empowered, and persevere for as long as it takes you to succeed.
The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog. Written By Loren Woirhaye, September 13th, 2010 Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes Good old Google has unleashed some new whackness into our lives with it’s new “instant auto-complete” feature. I’m not sure what it’s really called, but whatever it is, if it sticks around the roll of search marketing optimization as a traffic source will be changed. In brief, the auto-complete suggests key-phrases based on what you type in for your first word. Google has had something like this before but it was vulnerable to manipulation. Phrases like “why won’t my parakeet eat my diarrhea” would pop up in Google’s older auto-complete feature—which may just be a slower version of Google’s new suggestion tool. Aside from the parakeet thing being gross, it’s hard to believe that more than one person ever typed in that search phrase sincerely looking for an answer to such a question. Two theories about why the phrase showed up in Google’s trends are that either somebody at Google put it there as a joke, or a bunch of people got together and conspired to search Google with that phrase or create content and links containing it. Either way, it’s not really the kind of content Google wants to be serving up in general. Now you can check out Google’s new version of auto-complete for yourself. I think the main difference is that it’s faster, as in almost instant. If you go to Google.com and type “why” into the search engine, you’ll get something that looks like this:  why search Some of those results are pretty odd. The raven one from the Mad Hatter in “The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland” by lewis Carroll. Of course it seems like nonsense popping up in your Google search, but it is a rather famous riddle. Furthermore, not making sense was the author’s point. The thing about poop might seem odd, but I can imagine quite a few people wonder about why their excrement comes in funny colors sometimes. I’m sure the answer to this question has assuaged concern in more than one child so I figure some good is being done with Google’s calling it up as a search phrase. How This Affects Online Marketers Like You and Me By redesigning the auto-complete feature to be instant (or at least much faster) Google is in effect steering millions of people towards the most common searches. This in turn will make those search phrases more popular. The concern among marketers, both SEO people and Pay-per-click people, is that this move by Google will steer much of the so-called “long tail” traffic towards the more popular terms. This means Google is making up our minds for us. Google is choosing what we want to search for. Maybe this isn’t all bad because it does make some types of general searching easier for the average Google user. For Google, the effect will be to consolidate more traffic towards a tigher grouping of key-phrases which will—when those key-phrases are monetizable with advertising—cut the long-tail Pay-per-click marketers out of the zone where profits are made and create Pay-per-click bidding wars for the keyphrases being pushed by Google. It’s very clever really, if Google’s motive is to increase and consolidate Pay-per-click revenue. In addition, Google has recently gone on a rampage of banning direct response marketers from it’s Adwords Pay-per-click program. In effect Google keeps putting up new roadblocks to making direct sales from web-pages advertised with Adwords. My theory is that Google wants Adwords to be more of a corporate advertising engine and get rid of us direct response marketers, as we’re viewed as troublemakers. What do you think?
The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog. | | |
