Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

The Pain Now is Part of the Joy Later
Applying a line from the movie Jerry Maguire yesterday to online marketing brought to mind a line from another favorite movie of mine.

The movie is Shadowlands. It follows the rather unconventional romance of elderly Oxford professor and popular Christan author C.S. Lewis and young American divorcee Joy Gresham. In the story, Lewis is a lifelong bachelor, with a well-settled and routine life.

He grants a meeting with Gresham, a fan of his writing, during her brief visit to England. They establish a casual friendship that grows when she later moved herself and her son to England.

When an immigration issue threatens to end her stay in England, Lewis suggests a marriage of convenience to enable her to stay. Married in name only, she continues to live in London and he at Oxford.

When she undergoes a bout with cancer, however, Lewis realizes that his feelings for his longtime friend are much deeper than he had allowed himself to realize previously.

He takes Gresham and her son into his home to care for her better. During a remission in her cancer, Lewis and Gresham take a trip. They talk of their joy in this special time together, but Lewis quickly turns somber in wondering how much longer they have together.

Gresham immediately rebukes him. She says, "The joy now is part of the pain to come. The pain then is part of the joy now."

The quote has always stuck with me as sort of deep and inscrutable. But as I have viewed the economic distress all around now, that quote has become more meaningful to me.

Joy and sorrow are not incompatible. They are the two sides of the coin of our lives. Each one is part of the other. Joy is not joy with sorrow to contrast with it. And sorrow is generally the soil from which grows our greatest joys.

Approached properly, the pain now is a necessary step toward the joy of future success. Don't believe me? One of my favorite marketing mentors, Jim Edwards, has done a whole video on this in his "The Net Reporter" training site. The video is called, "Do I Have to Go Broke Before I Get Rich?"

In the video, Jim shows how common it is that successful business owners experienced hitting bottom before they started their rise toward success. He experienced that himself. And he lays out what those who rebounded to achieve success did differently than did those who hit bottom and stayed there.

The site is a paid training site, so you I can't give you a link directly to the video. You can do two things with this post. If you want, you can simply take heart that you have the capacity to turn any pain now into future joy.

Or you can check out Jim's The Net Reporter site, search among his huge library of excellent business training materials, and see his very timely video for yourself. And once you're in The Net Reporter, mine the riches of profit-generating information in there.

How good is the material in it? The Net Reporter is the absolute last expense I would cancel. And I would cancel it only if I planned to quit doing Internet marketing forever. I think you'll enjoy it.

Jeff

Labels: Jim Edwards, mindset, The Net Reporter

Things are Not as They Seem
My wife and I watched a favorite movie of ours the other night, "Jerry Maguire."

The economic conditions and the pain they currently cause many (of whom I am no exception) had me thinking of a favorite quote from the movie.

The scene has sports agent Jerry Maguire talking to his last remaining client, football player Rod Tidwell, about contract negotiations.

Maguire pleads with Tidwell to stop hindering the negotiations with his chip-on-the-shoulder attitude. Tidwell just laughs. He wants the negotiations to succeed, but he refuses to "dance," as he puts it, to get what he wants by playing politics.

The conversation grows more heated. Finally, Maguire storms out. Tidwell calls after him, "That's the difference between you and me. You think we're fighting; I think we're finally talking."

As the movie progresses, the two men become close friends, possible only because they finally cleared the air and started talking to each other honestly and fearlessly.

That quote is on my mind lately because of the level of economic fears going around. I think there's a message for our current situation in that quote, "You think we're fighting; I think we're finally talking."

A lot of people look at their hardship right now and see only the fighting, the struggling, the pain.

But there's more to it than meets the eye. In this pain are seeds of tremendous potential growth. In this pain is the motivation to make changes.

Perhaps the initial steps toward change are just an instinctual movement to avoid pain. But those steps get us moving.

Most people will go no further than stepping out of the direct path of that pain. They'll stop just barely outside its grasp.

Most people will continue to live their lives right on that border of pain, just far enough outside to USUALLY not be affected by it, but ALWAYS close enough to easily slide right back into it.

A few others will use those first steps -- taken purely to avoid the pain -- and turn them into momentum that will bring true change to their lives.

May any pain you're experiencing now from the economy serve that purpose for you. May that pain spur you to seek something better than you had before.

May it lead to use those steps you take to sidestep that pain and turn them into momentum that motivates you well beyond its borders. May what seems like fighting with disaster be a start of a new conversation with success.

If history of past economic downturns is any indication, there will be some people for whom leaning over the edge of the precipice will become the motivation that leads them to greater success than they had ever had before.

The question is, will you be one of those people who makes that decision?
Jeff

Labels: mindset

Outgrowing Problems
Here's a favorite quote from Albert Einstein:

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

If we hope to move beyond whatever problems that have us stuck, we need to grow our way out of them.

Here's to your growth and mine!
Jeff

Labels: inspirational quotes

My Experiment with Experience
I've been talking for the last couple of posts about the difference between knowing something in theory and knowing it form experience.

That subject has been in the front of my mind lately because of an experiment I started a week ago. I've long recommended blog commenting as a way not only to get a feel for what others in your field are saying, but also as a way to invite visitors to your site.

I've read other people's blogs on an irregular basis and have often commented on them. I've gotten a lot of great ideas from reading other marketers' blogs. I've also noticed that I'll usually get a sprinkling of visitors into my site who followed the link from my comment.

Other marketers have suggested that commenting on five relevant blogs per day had brought them hundreds, and even thousands, of targeted visitors over time.

I've occasionally used a free tool called Comment Kahuna to find little-known blogs that have posted on specific topics relevant to my business. Overall, though, I usually have stuck to posting on better-known blogs of big-name Internet marketers.

So I decided to do a test to see what I could learn (from experience!) about blog commenting. I decided to spend one hour per day, every day, posting five posts. One day I'll post comments to higher traffic blogs of well-known Internet marketers. The next day I'll hunt for lesser-known blogs on more specific subjects and post comments there.

So, every other day, I switch my blog reading and commenting. After a month, I'll compare how this has affected both my traffic and my rankings.

After a week, I'm already pleased with what I've learned. After a month, I should be able to draw some conclusions about what can be accomplished with each method.

I'll be sure to share those results with you as I come to the end of February.

Feel free to share any experiences you have had with blog commenting! You can comment on commenting!

Until the end of February, why not find something you can test in your business, too?
Jeff

Labels: blogging, increase traffic

The Problem with Seeking Perfection
A couple of days ago, I mentioned the difference between knowing something from book knowledge as opposed to knowing something from actually doing it.

I touched on our tendency to hide behind our studies of whatever we want to excel in, hoping to wait until we know everything perfectly before we actually try it.

That's a big mistake. Learning from doing plays an important role in any attempt to learn. It helps us organize and retain what we learn.

A trick that police interrogators use when they suspect that someone is lying is to ask the person to tell them the sequence of events exactly as it happened. Then they ask the person to describe that same sequence, starting at the end and moving toward the beginning.

When someone lies about a sequence of events, they can keep their story straight because they've memorized the sequence they want to tell. But because they have no physical memory of the event, they have trouble telling it reverse order.

The same thing happens when we try to cram our heads full of theory that we hope to apply successfully later. If all we have is theory in our heads, attempts to piece everything together are elusive.

But if we have physical memories of actually attempting a task, our brains are able to organize the theories around tangible events that have imprinted themselves in our memories.

Even attempts that don't work out perfectly become points that help us organize and retain the knowledge. Mistakes ingrain themselves as dead ends avoid. Successes ingrain themselves as paths to follow.

Both mistakes and successes become magnets that organize and hold those thoughts and ideas into tangible knowledge -- knowing from experience.
Jeff

Labels: mindset, personal growth, successful business

About the Super Bowl and Customer Persuasion
I asked my football-apathetic wife today if she planned to watch the Super Bowl with me tonight.

"NO!" she said.

Then I asked if she wanted to watch the Super Bowl commercials with me tonight.

"Sure," she replied.

I simply had to ask her in a way that reflected her interest.

Do you know what questions your website customers want you to ask them? If not, you can increase your sales simply by finding out what they're really interested in.

Just like I did with my wife.

Here's to more sales (and a happier wife) ;)
Jeff

Labels: persuasion