September 2010

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How To Control Your Thoughts

September 21, 2010 in Inspiration, Uncategorized by jensincero | 2 comments

Oh crap, did I put my red shirt in with my whites?

I think, therefore, I am
- Rene Descartes

Mind is the master power that molds and makes
And man is Mind and evermore he takes
The tool of Thought and, shaping what he wills
Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills.
He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass:
Environment is but his looking glass.
- James Allen

Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right
- Henry Ford

If you’ve done even the tiniest bit of self-development work, you’re familiar with the concept that your thoughts create your reality.

And if you’re anything like most people, you approach it with an attitude of “yes, yes, absolutely, it’s all about changing my thoughts and I can do it and I will” and then off you go, doop de doo, worrying about money, badmouthing yourself, waiting until the time is absolutely perfect before_____, focusing on why nots, dropping your prices because of the economy, playing it safe in a career that you’re good at even though it puts you in a deep deep coma and on and on….

You have GOT to get a handle on your thoughts if you want to change your life. If you want something badly enough, even if you don’t fully believe you can have it, believe it anyway. Fake it until you make it. Do it in spite of yourself. Act as if.

And more specifically, do the following:

Surround Yourself With People Who Think The Way You Want to Think.

Ever notice how you can be in your glory, on top of the mountain, when suddenly someone comes along say, like, oh, your parents, your significant other, someone who you think is really cool, and all they have to do is make one wisecrack about what you’re doing and suddenly your balloon goes flat?

And conversely, how when you’re surrounded by people who are kicking ass and doing huge and glorious things, you feel like a superhero? Will you please make a point to hang out with the latter?

Make a conscious choice to do this. And if you don’t know anyone who’s doing great things, go out and make some new friends.

Keep Your Big Crazy Dreams to Yourself

Until you’ve done some quality control and are sure who you’re dealing with, don’t tell anyone what you’re doing. You have your own doubts and fears to keep at bay, you don’t need everyone else’s. Most people will offer you their opinions and doubts, all out of love and concern of course, but, as discussed above, instead of feeling loved, you will immediately feel justified in sticking with your excuses. The only people you’re authorized to discuss your goals with are the ones who can see big things for you and will do a cartwheel for you. Otherwise, talk about the weather. Protect your dreams with your life.

Meditate

When you shut up for even ten minutes and start to really notice what type of thoughts are squirreling around in your mind, it’s rather….illuminating. If you’re like most people, the majority of your thoughts are about as valuable and interesting as a bunch of sugar-filled kindergarteners fighting over a sippy cup.

Sit in silence for 30, 20 even 5 minutes a day. Every single solitary day I am so not kidding over here. The only way to control your thoughts is to become aware of them in the first place. Sit quietly and try not to think. When you do, simply notice what comes through. Once you’re aware of your thoughts, you can work on controlling them.

Snap Yourself Out of It

Because you have taken my wise advice and are now meditating daily, you are better and better at becoming aware of negative thoughts the second they enter your brain. Whenever this happens, do any or all of the following:
• Instantly reverse the thought i.e. “I can’t because I don’t have the money” to “I will make the money”
• Jump up and say the above out loud – scream it if you have to to snap yourself out of it (easier done if you live alone, but you’ll get the last laugh when you’re living a rocking life so don’t worry about how crazy you might look).
• Come up with a mantra. This can be anything – a quote, a song lyric, a decision, a goal – whatever sets your pants on fire. When a negative thought creeps in, beat it to death with your mantra.

Change Your Environment

Beautify your surroundings, hang pictures of what you want your life to look like all over your house, make a playlist of songs that get you pumped up and listen to it often, read books, listen to motivational tapes, put encouraging sticky notes all over your house, drown yourself in positivity until it makes you gag and then do it some more. Our culture is so fear-based that you need to arm yourself with a massive truckload of I can dooooooo eeeeeeeeeet!

Read Your Manifesto

Write down your goals and your vision of your ideal life and read it to yourself before you go to bed and after you wake up every single solitary day I am so not kidding over here.

Get Coaching

I can personally attribute the majority of my success to the fact that I hire coaches to keep me in the proper head space. Think about it – professional athletes have coaches. They don’t decide all of a sudden, “alrighty, I just made 8 million bucks throwing a ball around this year, I think I’m pretty well set to do this on my own.” They continue to get coaching so they can stay at their peak level and keep growing. What makes you think you think you can do it all by yourself?

Cause and effect is as absolute and undeviating in the hidden realm of thought as in the world of visible and material things, (from As a Man Thinketh by James Allen, while we’re on the subject of brilliant books you need to read).

I promise you, if you make controlling your thoughts a top priority in your day to day life, succeed at keeping them positive and in harmony with your dreams, and take radical action in the right direction, you can have whatever you want.

Whatever. You. Want.

How frikken awesome (and honestly, no harder than you choose to make it) is that?!

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How to Make Your Books Bestsellers, Seth Godin Style

September 16, 2010 in Uncategorized, Writing by jensincero | 2 comments

I was going to make today’s post a little sneak preview of the call I’m doing later this afternoon where I will divulge the secrets of 3 of my favorite and insanely successful bloggers and nonfiction authors (which you can sign up for HERE).

I started by writing about one of the heaviest hitters of them all, Seth Godin, and got so sucked into his story of how he became a bestselling author many times over that now there’s no room for the others because I would like to leave the house at some point today and I’m still in my robe as I write this.

:-/

But his ideas are so interesting and different that I had to share them all with you. As you read them, you’re unauthorized to think, well, he knows about computers and he has a big list and he’s already an established writer – all of his ideas can apply to you no matter where you’re at if you get creative.

This afternoon on the call, I’ll go into some other methods that other people used, but right now, it’s Sethapalooza.

This post is taken from a video I watched of Seth’s presentation from O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, New York City, NY, February 11, 2008 called 10 Bestsellers: Using New Media, New Marketing, and New Thinking to Create 10 Bestselling Books

TIP #1: GIVE 1/3 OF YOUR BOOK AWAY FOR FREE

After talking his publisher into letting him give 1/3 of this book away for free, Seth spent $400 building a semi-crappy website for it and told people to send him an email and he’d email them the first 1/3 of the book for free. He did this in one really long email that, in several places, said click here if you’re tired of reading this and you’d rather just buy the whole book. That’s all he did to market it and ¼ of a million people took him up on the free sample, then enough people bought it to make it a bestseller. (If you’re already freaking out that you could never reach that many people, check out my post on driving traffic to your blog HERE) In hindsight, he wished he’d said “I’ll send you something every week the rest of your life until you die,” and continued selling things to these same people, but alas, he didn’t.

TIP #2: GIVE YOUR ENTIRE BOOK AWAY FOR FREE


Because this book is all about the concept that ideas that spread that win, he decided to focus on the spreading and give it away for free. He went out and spent anoather $400 on another semi-crappy website and told people they could download the whole book for free on a PDF file. Millions of people went ahead and downloaded it for free, and loved it, but hated reading it in that format. So he printed up a hardcover copy that he sold for $40 on Amazon and in limited distribution at a few other places and it became an Amazon bestseller because everyone already knew about it. He talks about how the book was a souvenir – if people like an experience, they want a souvenir to keep. This is how he thinks you should look at books.

TIP #3: MAKE IT SUPER CHEAP AND DO IT BEFORE ANYONE ELSE DOES


This book was an ebook about website design that he sold only at Amazon for a couple of bucks. Because it was one of the first ebooks on this topic and was cheaper than anything else out there, people were willing to try it out and because it was awesome, the word spread and more and more people bought it. He talks about how volume has to be one of your goals. The more a book sells, the easier and easier it becomes to sell more because of word of mouth.

TIP #4: DON’T DO IT THE TRADITIONAL WAY
I just realized I forgot to make note of which book this was and instead of sift through the video again for who knows how long until I find it, I’m just gonna go ahead and leave it out. All you need to know is that he decided to go the traditional route with this one, dropped a wad building a fancy website, put ads on it, put up billboards in San Francisco, basically played by book publishing rules and it didn’t do that great because, as he says, he didn’t focus enough on using some of these other tools that had brought him such huge success before.

TIP #5: USE PACKAGING THAT SCREAMS “LOOK AT ME!”


This time around he decided to self-publish and get crazy with his packaging. He started by publishing an excerpt of the book in Fast Company Magazine , a magazine he was a columnist for that had 1/2 million readers, and offered everyone a copy for free if they sent in 5 bucks for shipping and handling. He stated that there were only a limited amount of copies and mailed the book out in a purple milk carton. Not in a box, just in the milk carton itself, so that when people got it, it became a conversation piece. If it was sitting on their desk at the office or their table at home, people had to ask “what the hell is that?” He mailed out 5 thousand, all of which had the URL to his website on the carton itself next to some copy explaining that if you wanted your own copy for free, you could only get them in bulk 12 at a time. So you had to send in 5 bucks for shipping and handling each, but the book itself was free. This way, people would get their copy and give the other 11 away, thereby spreading the word and starting a conversation about his ideas.

TIP #6: MAKE THE BOOK THE FOUNDATION FOR YOUR BLOG


This one was all about his blog. He built a blog talking about marketing, elaborating on the ideas that were in the book so that anyone following his blog eventually wanted to buy the book to get his original ideas. He based this on the method the Freakanomics guys were using. Today they blog about stuff that’s not even in the book, but if you get into their blog you’ll want to learn about the foundation of what they’re talking about and buy the book.

TIP #7: FIGURE OUT HOW TO BE MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL


Books sell much better when other people write about them than when the author writes about them. So if you write content that will hugely benefit people, they’ll write about it because it’ll make them look good (sort of like what I’m doing right now). With this book he decided to do this in person and go on a book tour. He posted on his blog and said he’d come to your city and give a talk if you organized it and guaranteed to get 500 people in the room. The people who set up the talks made no money but increased their status in the community by organizing the them. Everyone of them has written Seth and told him how those connections helped them immensely. With this method he helped his fans, spread the word and sold thousand of books.

TIP #8: JOINT VENTURE WITH OTHER PEOPLE AND GIVE IT AWAY FOR FREE


This is one of the best ways to increase your exposure – piggyback on other people’s lists. For this book Seth hired someone to contact bloggers who wanted to host a podcast to join him for an hour long conversation. He asked them to invite all their readers, thereby getting Seth new exposure, giving valuable content to the blogger’s readers, making the bloggers look like superstars and then created another cheapo website to send everybody to where the podcasts were given away for free.

Here’s a short recap of all these ideas:
• Books are souvenirs – there’s nothing in a book that you can’t get online for free anyway so if you make the content good enough, people will want to own a copy.
• Permission is the only asset – deliver messages to people who want to get them. If they don’t hear from you and they complain, that’s permission. You want to appeal to your perfect audience and provide them with valuable content, not inflict yourself on people who aren’t your target market.
• Conversations are marketing. If you can make people talk about what you’re doing because you’re writing brilliant stuff, then you win.
• Words for readers, not readers for words. You’re not in the business of finding readers for your words. You need to find words for your readers. Once you build the permission base, ask yourself what do my readers want next? When you have a dedicated list, go out and find things they want to read about and the word will spread.
• Blogs work. It’s the nature of dripping ideas into a place where they can spread. Ideas online will spread. If you’re an author who doesn’t have an idea that will spread, you shouldn’t write the book.
• It’s not about selling books. Focus on putting out great ideas, then focus on creating interest and excitement around those ideas and the books will sell themselves.

Authors are idea merchants. Ideas that spread win. Free ideas spread faster. The way you monetize is buy selling souvenirs. This, she is the Seth Godin credo.

And now I’m going to get dressed.

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How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

September 8, 2010 in Uncategorized, Writing by jensincero | 2 comments

sixty mile, nine day Chinese traffic jam

This photo is of a traffic jam in China that spanned over 60 miles and lasted 9 days.

SIXTY MILES AND NINE DAYS!

Ow. Ch.

As someone who is only mildly interested in technology, when I first started researching all the ins and outs of blogging and driving traffic and SEO and analytics and pingbacks and Technorati postings, it elicited the same response that imagining myself stuck in a Chinese traffic jam did.

So, let me begin by saying that there are officially 8 bazillion ways to drive traffic to your blog, but I am only going to give you some that I find most useful.

Some are easy to understand, and some are much more technically oriented than others and will have you, if you’re anything like me, glazed over and playing with your lip in lieu of actually incorporating them into your blog yourself, but you need to know about them so I’m including them.

Here goes nothin!

How To Create Your Own Chinese Traffic Jam:

At the very tippy top of the list is the most important of all traffic drivers. You have no business blogging, at all, if you don’t make sure to follow this seemingly simple and obvious rule:

PROVIDE AWESOME CONTENT!

It seems like a no-brainer but if you’ve ever nosed around the blogsphere, you understand why I’m putting it in all caps.

Here are some tips on how to write good content:
- Write stuff that’s topical, that people are searching for right now
- Break news if possible, if you hear about something insane and newsworthy, get on it before anyone else does
- Also write stuff that’s got a long shelf life, that people can refer to years after it’s written (and send their friends to read long after it’s written)
- Make your posts easy and fun to read, break up paragraphs, use bullet points, put in pictures and video
- Do interviews with well known, searchable people who will hopefully link to your post from their own, highly-visited blog
- Do something ongoing, give people a reason to keep coming back. For example, if you have a mommy blog and declare September “how to get more sleep month” people will keep returning for your tips.
- Entice them at the end of each post – leave a hanging question or suggest that you’ll go deeper with your next post, share more tips, show a naked picture of grandpa, etc.
- WRITE THINGS THAT ARE USEFUL TO YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

• Be active in forums in your area of expertise and link back to your blog

• Exchange links with other bloggers

• Submit your blog to blog directories (or have your assistant do it). This will provide the ever-hallowed links back to your blog as well as get you exposure. Here’s a great article on 20 good ones to submit to.

• Use Isnare to get your articles circulated in article directories as well as sites that offer up content for newsletter publishers.

• Make sure your blog URL is in the signature of every email you send and on all your business cards and brochures.

• Write short ebooks and allow other bloggers to give them away for free – make sure to put your blog url throughout the information and make sure to make the information GOOD.

• Be a guest writer on other blogs.

• Get an account at Technorati (an internet search engine for searching blogs) and make use of their tags in your posts.

• Submit your RSS feed to feed directories. Again, get that assistant on this. Here are some good ones.

• Bookmark your blog posts at socialposter. This will instantly submit them to multiple social driven sites at once such as digg, reddit, del.ico.us, stumbleupon, etc. so you don’t have to do each one separately.

• How you doing – you still with me? WAKE UP!

When you post a photo, make sure to write a clear description of it in the “alternate text” option (a box for this will appear when you go to insert a picture on your blog). For example, the alt text for the photo in this post should be “China’s nine day, sixty mile traffic jam” rather than “holy crap, kill me now!” It will not only let people who’s browsers are slow know what’s they should be looking at, but it will make your post more searchable.

• Encourage your readers to put your posts on all the social bookmarking sites like digg, technorati, del.ico.us, reddit, etc.

• Invite other people to chime in on a topic and post it on Craigslist, FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, everywhere you can think of. For example, invite mommys to email you with their best tip for getting sleep. Then compile the best ones, post them on your blog and ALERT the mommys whose tips you’re using that you’re using them and ask them to spread the word about the post they’re in.

• Create some sort of hilarious or shocking or otherwise noteworthy video, post it on your blog and Facebook and everywhere you can and try to get it to go viral. Make sure the URL to your blog appears in the video.

• Get the hell out of the house and network – go to seminars and meetings where your target market will be, charm them with your winning personality, talk about your blog and hand them your card.

• Come up with tasty tidbits from each post and put them on FB, Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Use keywords – figure out exactly what your target market is doing google searches for and use those words in your posts as often as possible.

• Try to come up with a good URL that includes a keyword or two. Also, buy the misspellings of your URL and forward them to your blog so if people type in the wrong thing, they can still find you.

• Make the title of your posts obvious and easily searchable rather than merely cute and witty. If you can do all three, you win, but always err on the side of searchable.

• Answer questions at Yahoo Answers to get exposure and leave people totally impressed by how smart you are.

• Get a VA (virtual assistant) and hand off as much of this to them as you can!

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Leaping. It’s Not For Weenies.

September 1, 2010 in Inspiration, Uncategorized by jensincero | 3 comments

I want to pick up where I left off in last week’s post because there are 3, very important things you must do if you’re going to grow out of being who you presently are into the big, beautiful, glorious beast that you long to be.

The crazy part about these 3 things is that while they’re simple, obvious and quick, most people avoid them like the plague in favor of clinging, with determined white knuckles, to their ho-hum lives.

Ready? Behold, the holy trinity to freedom:

1. Listen
2. Believe
3. Act

Listen
Have you ever been about to do something or say something to someone that scares the living crap out of you, and have you ever noticed that if it’s something you were really meant to do, the second the thought enters your head, along with the pantwetting fear comes this massive, exhilarating rush and this teeny tiny voice inside of you that starts screaming youuuuuuu caaaaaaaaaaaan doooooooooo eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

And right before you take the leap, if you pause for even a second, that’s when the negotiations start seeping in, the doubts rear their heads and the justifications of why you can’t and how later really would be better and hey, I think I’m hungry, I wonder if there’s any pizza leftover from last night?

Meanwhile, the only thing you should be listening to is the little voice inside you that knows that this leap is the portal to the other side.

So, to get better acquainted with that voice, practice shutting up. Shut off the crazy squirrels running through your brain, push out all thoughts and just breathe deeply, focus on nothing and listen.

This is what the hippies call Meditation and I swear on my organic hemp hand-woven poncho, doing it for even 10 minutes a day can make you a mighty superhero.

Believe
Changing your belief systems can be a big, long, drawn out drama or a split second decision. Next time you’re about to follow your little, screamy inner cheerleader and doubt creeps up behind her and crams a pillow over her face, make a conscious decision to remove the pillow.

Whatever it is that you’re worried you can’t do, simply decide to believe you can. Even if you don’t believe you can, believe you can anyway. Because your only other option is believing you can’t and where’s the thrill in that?

Practice doing this. You don’t even realize how often you decide you can’t do something before you even start. Pay attention to your thoughts and when they go south simply replace them with mighty ones.

If you need help pulling yourself up, listen to music that rocks your world, talk to a friend that thinks you’re invincible, scream affirmations to yourself or tape quotes all over your house that remind you to be huge. You will look like a giant weirdo, but you’ll get the last laugh when you’re livin the life.

Act
So last week I talked about taking action regardless of what other people think of you. This week I want to talk about doing it regardless of what you think of you.

If your intuition tells you to do something, do not invite your brain into the decision making process. Your brain wants you to side with caution. Your heart wants you to leap to into the unknown.

Take the leaps regardless of the fact that you have no idea where you’re going to land. The more you practice doing this, the bigger you’ll get, the more addicted to the thrill you’ll become, and the easier it’ll get.

When it comes to every pivotal decision I’ve made in my life, there was always a moment when an idea flew into my head and was simultaneously snatched up by fear and faith. In equal parts. I get that little alien kick in the gut informing me it’s game time, and my reaction is always, oh great, now I have to go do that?!

It’s always something terrifying and revealing and waaaay uncomfy, but I know it’s what I should do. For example: I wrote an alarmingly personal book about sex. Became a bestselling author. I spent more money on a life coach than I spent on my car. Tripled my income. The list goes on and on (as I’m sure yours does) and in every case a huge part of me didn’t want to do it, but I knew I had to. And was thrilled I did.

Let’s recap, shall we? Listen to your gut, decide to believe you can, go out and do it. And if you don’t feel like you’re going to puke, you’re doing something wrong.

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