Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Making progress a habit
One of the biggest things that gets in the way of progressing toward success is that we don't do the things we don't want to do. Those things that we don't want to do are usually the things that are unfamiliar, the things that take us out of our safe and familiar world. Yet when you're trying to get somewhere you've never been before, crossing into unfamiliar territory is unavoidable.

Avoiding the unfamiliar, the tasks we don't know how they'll turn out, is a habit that often holds us back. And habits are hard to break. So how do you get past that habit of avoiding the unfamiliar and do those tasks? You make doing what you don't want to do a habit.

I'm not saying that we should take a martyr-like attitude of punishing ourselves by always doing whatever we least want to do. Just pick out the tasks that will give you the greatest boost toward where you want to end up and do them. Look past the momentary discomfort that launching into unfamiliar territory brings and see those unfamiliar tasks for what they are, necessary steps toward your goal. Looking toward that desireable goal instead of just at the undesireable task can get past that hump that holds us back from starting.

Getting over that hump the first time is hard. But when you complete what you ordinarily would have avoided, and see yourself another step closer to your goal—that's sweet. And each time you feel that satisfaction of overcoming your own reluctance and moving yourself closer to your goal, the easier it becomes to start the next unfamiliar task. And before long, doing what you don't necessarily want to do but know you need to do to reach your goal has become... a habit. And you know how hard habits are to break.
Jeff

The Internet is not your business
I recently picked up the last interview that Internet marketing pioneer Cory Rudl did before his death, a 2-1/2 hour discussion between him and direct marketing expert Dan Kennedy. The CDs are part of a package called the Ultimate Internet Entrepreneur. I'll review it once I've had a chance to study the whole package, but one comment on it really struck home while I was listening to it in my car.

Dan Kennedy commented that the thing that holds a lot of Internet businesses back is the fact that they see the Internet as something magical that makes money for them. But, in reality, the Internet is nothing more than a medium that enables you to reach potential customers. What you do with those potential customers, the relationships you build with them, is your business. The Internet is merely a medium that, at the moment, is extremely inexpensive in terms of low cost of putting you in touch with people.

Now, for someone like me who focuses on helping people start a business online, that's a kind of chilling thought. But he's right: there's nothing magical about the Internet itself that produces money. Business is about developing relationships, whether online, in a store, or through personal contact.

And while there are principles and techniques that currently work extremely well online, it's essential never to lose sight of the interpersonal nature of business. That never changes, even as the effectiveness of various media grow or diminish over time.
Jeff

Promoting your website with articles
Over the weekend, I put together an article for a client and submitted it to article directories to give his site more visibility in websites and ezines that deal with the area that my client's product serves.

I used an article submission tool, Article Announcer, to find and submit the article. I'll have to admit that the submission didn't go as fast as I had hoped. I had experimented with a related tool, Ezine Announcer, last week to submit my newsletter to the Ezine directories and found those submissions to be a lot faster.

I can't fault Article Announcer for the slower process, though. Unfortunately, a lot of the article directories seem to have a lot more hoops for authors to jump through that can't be easily automated. Still, without Article Announcer I would still be hunting for directories that had suitable categories and probably would have found only a fraction of the number that were preloaded into the software. So I spent a LOT less time than if I had done it myself, and should be able to do future articles even faster now that the hoops are done and all accounts are set up.

I'll review both software products on my site in the near future, but I'm sure you're more interested right now in the results. As for Ezine Announcer, my newsletter subscriptions jumped dramatically right after I submitted, but now seem to have settled into a higher than normal rate (but not as dramatically higher) now that my ezine has moved off the front pages of the ezine directories.

With the article submissions, I entered the title of the article, with quotation marks, into Google to see where it was appearing. On Sunday, Google already showed three pages it was on. On Monday, it showed 20. Just now, it showed 142.

Now, granted, not all of those pages have a link to my client's site (the title appears in the navigation bar or on the newest articles page for some of the sites). But, considering that only a fraction of the directories have even reviewed the article yet (some had waiting periods of up to a month), there's a lot of visibility that the article is getting with publishers who may pick the article up.

I'm hoping for 50–100 links to my client's site from this article, which is not bad for about a day's worth of work, especially when you consider that a similar amount of time devoted to reciprocal linking would typically provides me only about a third of that number of decent link. And to make things even better, links from an article will appear in places where people who are potentially interested in the product actually see the links instead of buried in some reciprocal links directory.

So far, so good.
Jeff

It's all about connecting
I used to think life was unfair. I grew up as one of the smartest kids in my school. But as I got closer and closer to college graduation, it became ever more evident: good grades and book learning was not what the world was after.

Again and again, I saw that advancement in the real world was based on something other than who got the highest grades. It was based on people skills. It was based on something I had neglected while I was tucked away in the safety of my little world, learning facts and formulas, far away from the unpredictability of that messy thing known as human interaction.

I call it messy because it's unpredictable. With fact and formulas, you have certainty. The facts don't change, and once you know the formulas, you can calculate all the answers you want with blessed certainty.

With unpredictable human interaction, you never know what you're getting. People don't fit into formulas that allow for only one solution. So I felt betrayed when after seeking after facts and formulas all my life, I was smacked in the face with seeing far lesser students advance ahead of me based on their ability to understand and influence people.

And though I still sometimes still catch myself trying to turn everything into a neat, predictable formula, I've pretty much gotten over the feeling that life was unfair because it valued people skills over my grasp of facts.

Because I realize that that's what it should value.

Life is all about connections. From little on, connections are the glue that holds our lives together: parents, family, friends—they're all a necessary part of life. And that doesn't end when we walk through the school door and are introduced to academic competition. We still need to use what we learn in some manner that is useful to those around us. Otherwise, what reason is there for anyone to reward us with a paycheck, or sales, or commissions?

Yet it's so easy when we start a business, to fall back into that isolationist thinking of "what product do I need in order to make lots of sales?" or "what marketing tricks do I need to learn to make a lot of money?" In one case the question seeks a fact (what product?) and in the other it seeks a formula (what marketing tricks?). But both leave the central part of making a sale completely out of the picture: the people buying your product or service.

Seeking these facts and formulas puts us squarely back in that academic cocoon—trying to solve our needs by surrounding ourselves with nice, predictable certainties instead of seeking to provide a useful service to all those unpredictable, unknown people we'd just as soon avoid.

"How can I ever hope to know what they want? Just give me something certain, something generic that frees me from risking failure by putting myself at the mercy of that unpredictable mass of people!"

But our desire for safe certainty instead of wondrous, but unpredictable, discovery is no more valid than my feeling of betrayal was when I first discovered that I couldn't slide through life on my ability to remember facts and formulas.

Find a niche—namely, people who share a common interest and common needs—rather than a product or a formula. Only once you find people's needs that need solving and a way to solve those needs will any of the facts or formulas do you—or anyone else—any good.
Jeff

Dedicated to the many
I put together my list of links for tonight's favorite links feature, but I somehow, it just doesn't seem appropriate on the anniversary of the 9-11 attack, or with teams still recovering bodies from the devestation along the Gulf coast.

Add to that the fact that my wife Joanne and I dropped our son Ben off as he reported for basic training with the Marines. His goal is to give back to his country by serving in the most dangerous assignments available. His aptitude testing qualified him to receive any job assignment he would ask for; he asked to be put in the most dangerous one—infantry—and hoped to qualify for the most elite and most dangerous unit the Marines have—reconaissance.

So I'm understandably moved by his choice and by the courage he displays. But seeing his choice also makes me more aware of those who have suffered greatly who did not choose to do so—those touched by 9-11 four years ago and those touched more recently by Katrina.

I've stayed away from commenting on these tragedies because I've been sickened for the past two weeks at the number of emails I've gotten from other marketers urging me to buy their products and promising to donate all proceeds to relief efforts, or asking me to make donations directly to them and promising that they would not only forward my donation along to relief efforts, but match it as well.

I'm sure that most of them would keep their word. Most of the marketers I deal with I've found to be honest, caring people. But it just makes me uneasy to see so many of them approaching this in ways that look questionable. So I encourage you to do whatever you can do to help with the relief efforts, but to do so through the agencies working directly on these efforts. Here are two:

• American Red Cross
• Salvation Army

There are things going on right now that are bigger than our efforts to build our own businesses.

Jeff