#the5 for the week ending December 24, 2010

Posted by on Dec 25, 2010 in Blogging, the5 | 1 comment

I tweet out #the5 regularly on weekday mornings. It's a list of the 5 things in my various channels that I think are worth paying attention to, usually culled from thousands of blogs and tweets in my Google Reader. Folks have asked in the past if they could somehow get these tweets in another fashion, but every Twitter/Wordpress plugin I've seen makes a mangled, annoying mess of processing the Twitterstream, so until there's a better option, I'll just throw out this digest. If you'd like to get these before the summary, just follow me on Twitter.

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Racing ahead: the final week of the year

Posted by on Dec 24, 2010 in Awakening, Productivity | 0 comments

The period between December 25 and January 1 is generally considered to be a giant black hole of productivity. Everyone’s off. Everyone’s away. No calls are being returned, no emails answered. Business to business folks have basically given up, and consumers are out scouring for after-Christmas shopping deals, not answering your summons to commerce unless you’re talking 75% off. No one’s home.

It’s the single greatest opportunity you have all year to get things done.

Summer 2008 Photos

If there are projects that are sitting on your plate that require a day or two of concentrated work, stuff that doesn’t tolerate interruption well (analysis, writing, etc.), this is the week to do it! If you use any kind of scheduling software like Tungle or Exchange calendars, block off the entire week as unavailable. If you’ve got messages piled up in your inbox, burn them down!

The hardest challenge you’ll face is being distracted by yourself. Keep your phone, IM, and Tweetdeck off after the Christmas holiday and get things done. If you need a methodology, go back and watch the 10-2-5 burndown method videos and re-watch Inbox Zero.

Got a set of resolutions for the New Year? Use the week as a practice run to see whether they’re sustainable so that you’re already in motion, so that you already have momentum, going into 2011. You may find you need to adapt, adjust, or change and you’ll spare yourself the disappointment of abandoned resolutions with your week of practice.

Enjoy the void week between Christmas and New Year’s!

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Bank of confidence

Posted by on Dec 22, 2010 in Awakening | 3 comments

One of the mistakes we simple human beings do is try to see things in a binary fashion. Something is or isn’t. Believer or non-believer. Black or white. Republican or Democrat. Rich or poor. One of the areas which can be deadliest to our well-being and personal power is seeing attributes of ourselves in the same light.

Let’s take one of the most abused: confidence. We see confidence as an either-or proposition almost entirely. She’s confident. He’s not confident. Even in our use of language, we rarely ever refer to degrees of confidence. “Sort of confident” doesn’t really exist linguistically in the same way that middle class does in economic language.

What does confidence even mean? Short version: a belief that what you are doing is correct or effective based on evidence and history. Confidence is far from binary. The more evidence and history you have of being right, being effective, being productive, the more confidence you probably have in yourself. The more evidence and history that you have to the contrary, the less confidence you probably have in yourself.

Guild bank

If you begin to think of the history and evidence of confidence as a sort of currency or commodity, then you change confidence from a binary belief to something that you can measure and manage. What if confidence operated like money you put in a bank vault? An activity that demonstrated evidence of a lack of your capability would be a significant withdrawal in the confidence bank. An activity that demonstrated evidence of your superior capability would be a significant deposit in the confidence bank.

Put in this light, then, managing your sense of confidence becomes almost transactional in nature, something that most people can understand and do. If you take a big withdrawal from the bank, you have to build back up that reserve. What’s more, because you’re starting with fewer resources on hand, you won’t be able to make as big an investment to recover your loss, so you have to look for smaller opportunities to build back up that reserve.

Suppose, for example, you performed badly on stage in front of a major audience and you took a giant withdrawal from the confidence bank. In order to build that back up, you’d take a series of smaller speaking engagements or other activities that deposit more and more into your confidence bank until you’re back to even, and then you can make big investments and risks again.

When you view confidence as transactional in nature, you can then assess all of the activities and actions you take on a daily basis on a confidence-economy scale. Some activities will generate very little or none, because the outcome is never in question or has no value. Some activities will generate or withdraw small amounts of confidence, such as getting positive or negative feedback from friends on your Facebook wall about your latest venture. Some activities will generate or deplete large amounts of confidence, such as speaking publicly or competing in a martial arts tournament if you don’t have enough evidence and history to support your success in those endeavors. Once you have a sense of what builds confidence for you, you can re-prioritize how you live day to day to focus on activities that build or deplete confidence at a level of risk you’re comfortable with.

Think about how you manage your own levels of confidence and whether you treat it as an all-or-nothing belief in yourself or something transactional and manageable. If you operate with a sense of confidence being a dynamic, fluid currency in your life, you’ll be able to restore and build confidence in yourself much faster than someone waiting for the big break that may never come. It’s the confidence equivalent of investing smartly over time versus playing the lottery and hoping to get lucky just once.

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Affiliate marketing 101

Posted by on Dec 21, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing, Sales | 2 comments

Are you attracted to the idea of having at least one other source of income?

Are you wondering how to get started with affiliate marketing?

Slackershot: MoneyLots has been written on the subject by nearly every Internet marketer out there. Affiliate marketing, if you’re unfamiliar with the topic, is pure commission-based sales. You sign up for an affiliate program with one or more companies or networks and refer people to them. In exchange for your efforts, you receive a percentage (usually small) of any transactions that occur.

How do you get started? Affiliate marketing, since it’s more or less a form of lead generation, follows the same principles as any sales and marketing organization. You need a receptive audience to sell to and products or services to be sold.

For the purposes of this quick article, I will assume you have an audience of some kind that’s focused on your area of expertise or personality. If you don’t, you need to build that first. Even more has been written on how to build an audience. I recommend reading Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation and CC Chapman’s Content Rules as starting points for this.

The first important point about affiliate marketing is to find products or services that you’re happy to recommend, happy to talk about, things you talk about already for free. It’s fairly easy to make compelling content about a product or service if you’ve already been a paying customer of it and like it. The products I recommend on this blog (at the bottom of the post) are products I use and paid for originally before signing up as an affiliate. When I say I recommend them, I really do.

Look at the bottom of the websites of products and services you like. Look for links to affiliate programs, partner programs, etc. as ways to get started. Join an affiliate network like Shareasale or a store like Amazon Associates. There are three things to look out for:

1. An affiliate program manager. Most companies, especially those working with networks like Commission Junction or Shareasale, have a dedicated affiliate manager who can address questions or concerns (like “where’s my money?”).

2. The program rules and terms. Some programs restrict which marketing channels you may use. Failure to comply will result in you giving the company free business, since they won’t pay you. Email especially is excluded from a lot of programs because of the danger of spam. The terms also dictate when and how you’ll get paid, so make sure you understand those clearly.

3. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Every time.

Once you’ve found a few programs that you can like and recommend, use your channels and audience to make your recommendation. Two things are important, one of which is legally required.

1. You must disclose your affiliation. Read the disclosures page here for one example. It’s generally good practice to disclose globally and note where you can that something contains affiliate links.

2. Try not to hard sell. It’s fine to be excited about a product or service you’re recommending, but don’t market crap to people who trust you just because there’s a fat commission on the other end. If the phrase monetizing trust ever creeps into your mind, just go apply at your local used car dealership for a career there instead. Everyone will be happier and know what to expect.

Finally, speaking of expectations, unless you have a gigantic audience to begin with, you should expect beer money performance to begin with. A few dollars here, a few dollars there – it will add up as you continue to grow your audience and your affiliate relationships, but start with small expectations.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a good place to start. If you want to read up on more about how to do affiliate marketing well, I recommend digging into the work of Jim Kukral. A fellow USF professor, he’s my go-to guy for affiliate marketing information and is one of the best folks in the field to know. His book, Attention: This Book Will Make You Money, is also a good starter read.

Disclosure: every link in this post that can be is an affiliate link. It’d be irony and fail if it were otherwise.

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Why you need a personal newsletter

Posted by on Dec 20, 2010 in Marketing | 3 comments

DoorI send out a personal newsletter on a reasonably regular basis containing stuff you’ve almost always already seen. Why do I do that?

One simple reason: it’s about throwing mattresses.

Some of you get the most value from me on Twitter. When I fling very small, 140 character mattresses at your head, they go in nicely. If I threw a big honking Facebook update at the door, it’d bounce off.

Some of you get the most value from me on Facebook. Some of you get the most value from me on LinkedIn.

And some of you absolutely, positively need me to throw mattresses in the form of email, in the form of a newsletter that rolls everything that’s happened up into a tight, compact format that’s your preferred medium because it just works better for you. What percentage of you is that? Fairly significant. As of this writing, I’ve got just north of 6,000 connections on LinkedIn, 25,000+ on Twitter, and over 9,000 active readers in email. If any one of those channels wasn’t working, if there was no one who wanted a mattress thrown at them that particular way, then chances are there would be no one listening. Thousands of people don’t connect in any given medium to avoid listening.

Here’s a simple suggestion: find a way to integrate a personal email newsletter into your usage of social media and online marketing. Depending on who your friends and acquaintances are, you might just find it to be an incredibly powerful medium for communicating what you’re all about. I’ll give you an example: when I ran a financial services audio podcast, I had a fairly good size audience. I thought I was doing well, reaching a few thousand people a day with useful information. The day I added an email subscription option for exactly the same content, I saw a 25% increase in my audience immediately, because a large minority of them were more comfortable with email than anything else. What’s of interest is that the folks tuned in by the RSS feed didn’t go down. The new channel didn’t cannibalize from my existing audience, but rather tapped into an entirely new audience that wasn’t listening prior to the addition.

Try throwing your content mattresses as many ways as you can practically support. You might be surprised at the results.

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