Ozzy Ozborne, Malibu Freaks, Yoga and The Universal Laws of Abundance and Prosperity is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

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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 ]]> Ozzy Ozborne, Malibu Freaks, Yoga and The Universal Laws of Abundance and Prosperity is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

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.

Copywriting – How To Start Making Money Right Away is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

Despite having only recently hung-out my own shingle as a writer-for-hire, I’ve been writing copy for my own business ventures, and learning a thing or two, since at least 1999. Even though my businesses until 2005 or were mostly local concerns (aside from selling old tools on Ebay), I still used copy in ads and promotional materials.

I also learned some hard lessons about how many balls you need to juggle to make it in the hard goods business. Finally I threw in the towel and went into marketing and selling stuff only instead of what I had done before, which was design, customize, manufacture, maintain machinery, pick-up all manner of heavy and awkward materials, advertise, kiss clients’ butts, install stuff, work long hours for low pay, market, write copy, try to sell, network, and generally run myself ragged trying to do it all by myself.

Did someone call me a fool?

Actually I learned a lot. I learned that owning a small business is a lot more complicated than doing the same thing just for pleasure, ]]> Copywriting – How To Start Making Money Right Away is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

Despite having only recently hung-out my own shingle as a writer-for-hire, I’ve been writing copy for my own business ventures, and learning a thing or two, since at least 1999. Even though my businesses until 2005 or were mostly local concerns (aside from selling old tools on Ebay), I still used copy in ads and promotional materials.

I also learned some hard lessons about how many balls you need to juggle to make it in the hard goods business. Finally I threw in the towel and went into marketing and selling stuff only instead of what I had done before, which was design, customize, manufacture, maintain machinery, pick-up all manner of heavy and awkward materials, advertise, kiss clients’ butts, install stuff, work long hours for low pay, market, write copy, try to sell, network, and generally run myself ragged trying to do it all by myself.

Did someone call me a fool?

Actually I learned a lot. I learned that owning a small business is a lot more complicated than doing the same thing just for pleasure, especially if your business involves working with clients AND physical labor.

Call me stupid. Somehow I thought that despite the hard work, cabinetmaking was somehow an honorable profession and a desirable career because OTHER people told me how much they envied what I was doing… people who made WAY more money than I did and lived in big, beautiful homes told me how grand it was for me to be an artisan, how they wished they could do such a thing themselves.

Hogwash.

Being in business for yourself is way too much work to do it without the intention of creating wealth for yourself. In this day and age, if you have the capacity, desire and mental focus to run a business you can get rich doing it.

Why not aim high?

Don’t get me wrong: I value my experiences and skills as an artisan. I just found out it wasn’t a BUSINESS I wanted to be in anymore – even though I still have a soft-spot for helping artists market and sell their work more effectively.

The one overwhelming benefit of having transformative sales copy working for your business is the way it works for you like a 1000 little salesmen – each person who reads your copy is getting a one-on-one sales presentation. This is an awesome advantage because once you have the right copy figured-out to sell a particular product you can “scale-up” your advertising and rake in the cash until you’ve exhausted the market for the time being or taken on as much business as you want according to your capacity to serve your customers.

However, unlike a lot of self-styled copywriting pundits out there I won’t tell you that the ability to write persuasive copy is a license to print money. It is only as powerful as your ability to make the kind of offers people want in the REAL marketplace, and back-up those offers with real value.

That is… if you want a real business with long-term customers and not a lot of trouble with the law. Copywriting skill CAN be used to mislead and bamboozle people. The roll it plays in a legitimate direct-marketing business is powerful and essential, but it is NOT, I believe, essential unless you are in the business of actually writing copy for clients yourself – ie. The copywriting is both the method and the product AND the customer service your provide.

Now if you are, or want to be, a freelance copywriter this is good news because it means that pretty much the whole show resides inside your head. No bulky equipment, warehouses, shuffling materials around, all the stuff that goes with the hard-goods industry.

Currently a lot of copywriting material in the current “make money in your bathrobe” frenzy goes awry telling you it’s all about writing to sell ebooks and information products.

Nothing could be further from the truth; because unless you are an information-product junkie the majority of the purchases you and most people make are for hard-goods and sales copy is actually a persuasive force which is working on you, often subconsciously, on a daily basis to affect your preference for one brand of stuff over another.

Internet marketers are supremely guilty of navel-gazing myopia – because there is a huge world of opportunity to adapt whatever marketing and copywriting skills you have into selling all sorts of hard-goods – by which I mean stuff people can hold, enjoy, touch or put stuff in without any requirement of literacy, like purebred cats, dressers, automobiles, pianos… you get the idea.

In fact, by making a study of the way all these sorts of things are sold with copy, every day, you open-up a whole new world of awareness for yourself… and writing persuasively is all about awareness – seeing and drawing attention to things most people don’t notice or think about.

If you’ve been writing copy for information products, especially in the “make money” niche, you are up against the twin forces of skepticism and very, very real competition to sell people stuff they might WANT but do not in fact believe they NEED.

In reality we don’t “need” a lot, but in a skeptical marketplace you will find it takes considerably more persuasive skill to sell “wants” like another ebook than it is to sell tangible goods. Selling intangibles can be extremely lucrative – as information products are… just don’t overlook your own opportunities to turn, for example, that old junk in your garage into hard cash by applying your writing skills to something as mundane as writing a Craigslist ad to sell your old lawnmower – you might be surprised at how writing to sell tangible stuff gets the juices flowing.

Give it a try.

Loren Woirhaye prefers to play gypsy music on guitar or accordion – but when he isn’t doing that he writes direct-response copy, consults with clients to help them make money with their websites, coaches people who want to fire their employers and blogs about success, life, his personal foibles, and online marketing at http://malibumentor.com

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.

Selling With Values – the secret ingredient to supercharge your business success is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

I am an advocate of being aggressive in your marketing – relentless.

I am also a champion of being sincere, selling with your values, following your heart.

For most people the words “selling” and “sincerity” are not ones they associate readily.

This is the fault of society, TV, your family and friends who have talked to you from both sides of the mouth your whole life.

If you listen to what a lot of people say about sales and salespeople and marketer you might think we are nothing but liars and thieves.

…and it is true that we’ve all been burned by salespeople who were not straight-up with us – and that can contribute greatly to the notion that salespeople are unethical shysters.

However – carrying such attitudes with you will do more to prevent your happiness, acquisition of wealth, and success in your own business than any other factor.

Yes, the mind can be a terrible things – especially when it is running on a program that is telling us everyday that we are doing something bad. Like trying to ]]> Selling With Values – the secret ingredient to supercharge your business success is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

I am an advocate of being aggressive in your marketing – relentless.

I am also a champion of being sincere, selling with your values, following your heart.

For most people the words “selling” and “sincerity” are not ones they associate readily.

This is the fault of society, TV, your family and friends who have talked to you from both sides of the mouth your whole life.

If you listen to what a lot of people say about sales and salespeople and marketer you might think we are nothing but liars and thieves.

…and it is true that we’ve all been burned by salespeople who were not straight-up with us – and that can contribute greatly to the notion that salespeople are unethical shysters.

However – carrying such attitudes with you will do more to prevent your happiness, acquisition of wealth, and success in your own business than any other factor.

Yes, the mind can be a terrible things – especially when it is running on a program that is telling us everyday that we are doing something bad. Like trying to sell stuff to make money.

Wait!

That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

After all, we all need to make money to pay our way through life, and if we make more than we need we can share it with others.

If you step back and look at it differently having more money than you need gives you the ability to bring more joy and happiness into the lives of others.

Not such a bad thing after all.

And when you think about it you realize that we all have to sell the advantages of ourselves to others… all the time. We work to impress others to get dates, put our best foot forward in social situations, and certainly a job interview is a time when you MUST sell yourself.

So selling is just part of life. It’s part of the social structure we live in.

The origin of the word “sell” has to do with “helping” or “serving” – so the ancients saw things with a little more clarity than we have today.

We all like to buy things…. yet we hate to be sold.

And we resent the people who do the selling for a living – even while we may envy the wealth
and confidence of successful salespeople somehow most of us carry around the mental refrain, endlessly cycling through your brain “I’m just no good at sales”

Believe me, friend, you need to break that pattern once and for all if you want to get ahead in the new economy.

To help you do it I am going to share some insights with you here.

I call it “Selling With Values”

To my way of thinking you really need to get straight on why it it you want to be in business for yourself.

Time freedom?
More money?
Work from home?
More time with family?

There are a lot of reasons. Some people just want to get rich and they don’t care who they hurt to get to that point. I hope you aren’t one of those people because it really isn’t necessary to lie or cheat to get ahead in sales.

In fact the liars and cheats usually suffer ultimately. It’s not good for business because word will get around you aren’t to be trusted.

It’s usually better to be on the up-and-up, admit the flaws of your product, and sell to people with contained enthusiasm but also an attitude of respect.

When you start to look at sales through a softer lens you can see it as a natural part of the human experience, and one which you can reap great rewards from yourself.

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.