The Death of a Father – The Release of a Son

I received this from Ken Heikkila a few days ago. For years he’d worked dumb jobs having given up hope on making a living as a classical guitarist but then discovered that on the Internet he could capture an audience and not only teach his skills to others but expand his customers’ sense of meaning and purpose.

With the passing of his father he found a new opportunity to reflect on where he’s been:

Hi Perry…

You’ve been a constant source of the future for me in the last year and a half as a conduit for my life as a musician.

for that I am forever grateful….Julie and I are indebted to you for the opportunity to make a living at what we love.

We talk about it almost everyday.

My father passed away on January 18th after a long illness and I am just coming to the point where I can talk about it.

to make a long story short, I look back on the accomplishments I’ve had with Adwords and the chance my father had to see my ‘dubious success’ in his eyes. These are life’s moments.

none-the-less, as I continue with matching keywords to ads to landing pages and see the psychology of multiple markets responding to a single keyword in various ways, I am reminded of how a father unknowingly influences the life of a child, permanently, unalterably.

I think you understand this.

Adwords is about human suffering, not about information, it’s about the search for truth and I refuse to make my campaigns anything but….

And some forum posts condemn me for it….

I have come to accept that because the overwhelming response I receive regarding this is support.

As always, I turn to you to express my feelings because you’ve been kind enough to make my story part of your fold and I am very proud of that… that perhaps my life could help another see something they would not have seen before.

A father should be the starting blocks for the fledgling sprinter in life. Good or bad, everyone of them is… in their own way, and the child always responds.. good or bad.

I chose the good…and I am glad he saw me come full circle whether he agreed with it or not.

We are all nothing but a snapshot in history and I am extremely grateful for your vision and offering a life opportunity for those who are ready to seize the moment and face the truth in themselves.

You’re messages never go unnoticed.

Onward , Perry, ever onward…life is short and I don’t intend to waste a single minute of it…and I’ve had pro’s try to keep me from myself. What a journey these last two years have been ! The release has been nothing short of amazing.

Ken Sakari Heikkila

Fathers have a profound effect on how we see ourselves and what we become in life. Ken’s father didn’t really understand him and never fully acknowledged his success. Some months ago I told him: that, in fact, may never happen. He may not get that from his dad. But he can still give that recognition to himself.

About my own dad… when I was about thirteen our family was in turmoil for a whole bunch of reasons and I had no respect for him. He was getting kicked in the head from every direction and I was happy to supply a few kicks myself.

Fast forward a few years and a lot of that stuff has been repaired but we’ve got a different problem.

Dad thinks I’m lazy.

I pretty much refuse to get a flipping burgers job and I ignore all his suggestions about job searches.

One time I did go out and fill out a bunch of job applications but when the rejection letters came back addressed to “Penny” dad could see I obviously didn’t even fill out the forms carefully enough for them to be able to read my name correctly.

Dad was on a trip once and I was keenly feeling the pressure to prove to him I wasn’t a lazy bum and I got a phone call from one of my friends. He called me and this other guy and said there was a janitorial job being offered and between the two of us, the first to arrive on the scene would be awarded the job.

I didn’t have a drivers license, but I drove there anyway. Got the job.

My older sister tattled on me.

So it was good news / bad news. Good news is, dad comes home and Perry is now in the ranks of the employed. Bad news is, he drove to the job interview illegally which is a serious offense if you get caught.

I worked my ass off at that job. Made about three bucks an hour working after school until 7pm every week night, and six months later dad says to me, “Perry you’ve proven you’re a hard worker and if you want to do something different, go ahead.”

I took him up on that offer and started my speaker building business, which sustained me through the rest of high school.

Just before my senior year in high school, the challenge was, dad had terminal cancer. We had a number of heart to heart talks before he died about all the responsibilities I would have and what it would be like without him.

About 2 months before he died, I got my first purchase order from a “real business”, a local retail store. I convinced the owner to sell a line of speakers I was making in his showroom.

This was just before my senior year. I went to the hospital and told him about it. He was beaming with pride. Within a few hours all the friends who visited him from work had heard about it. Perry starts a successful business in High School and #1 Son is gonna turn out OK after all.

That was my “father blessing” and it was a giant boost. When he died I knew he was proud of me.

That was a very, very big deal. I know that a whole bunch of men go through life having never gotten their father’s approval and are subconsciously in a never-ending mission to get it. Dad’s blessing lent me a level of confidence some people have to fight very hard to attain.

So when I read a story like Ken’s, I pay attention. Hey, the guy didn’t really get what he wanted from his dad. But before dad passed on, he recognized this as an unmet need, that he would press on in spite of it.

Now in his father’s absence, the ghost of dad is not going to haunt him and affect his actions in some way that he refuses to deal with.

A lot of people are going to read this and think “Gee, this guy is awfully philosophical.” Well, maybe.

But he sure does nail a few things:

“Adwords is about human suffering, not about information, it’s about the search for truth and I refuse to make my campaigns anything but….”

Powerful observation, Mr. Heikkila. AdWords – and all advertising and all persuasion – is in fact about human suffering, not data. Not that every Google search is necessarily driven by misery and agony.

But that all of it is driven by a certain level of discomfort. Even (especially) if there’s pleasure involved.

And because of this, most marketing failures are rooted in a failure to understand the felt needs and human experience of the customer.

Furthermore, the best markets are the ones that are driven by misery and agony.

Most people are squeamish about this.

Well… your health insurance provider sure isn’t squeamish about it.

Your gas and electric company aren’t squeamish about it. If you refuse to pay, they’ll cut you off, and they won’t care all that much if it causes you freeze to death.

So why should you be squeamish about charging money for what you do?

It’s real, real hard to be successful in business if you’re not OK with the fact that you’re benefiting from someone else’s pain and suffering.

What’s important is that if you take their money, you are, at minimum, giving them a fair shot at reducing it.

Onward with more of Ken’s letter:

And some forum posts condemn me for it….

People who post on forums are generally professional bitch sessioners. Yes, I have seen notable exceptions – like once I knew a brilliant, prolific, extremely productive guy who also appeared to spend most of his time posting on message boards. He designed ingenious products and must have had an IQ of 200.

But he was an exceedingly rare exception.

Most people who hang out on discussion forums are lame-ass complainers who just like to see themselves type.

But anyway, if you squarely deal with problems rather than pussyfooting around them and selling band-aids that mostly just allow people to rationalize their mediocrity, you’re going to get criticized for it.

Ken went on to write to me:

“There is a huge need for those searching for themselves in my niche and apparently that comes through to them as they visit my sites. Funny, I’m not selling my stuff as much as I’m providing a conduit for people to find their stuff. Often for the first time. Many in their 70’s and 80’s wishing they would have found me 30 years prior.”

If someone comes to your site to buy anti-itch cream or watch batteries, they’re probably not engaged in some deep search for themselves. But Ken understands that if someone’s going to pick up a guitar and commit many hours each week to practice, there’s something deeper that’s going on below the surface. It is because he understands this that he connects with his audience at this level.

This is the kind of connection that defines the difference between someone who merely has customers vs. someone who develops a cult following. The other day Mark Power was here at my office for a 4-Man Intensive. Mark is a speech pathologist from California who helps people who stutter.

We asked Mark a lot of questions about what he does and who he does it for. I saw a tendency for him to lapse into therapyspeak – talking about the various methods and equipment he uses and how it works and the methodology and procedures.

But things got really interesting when I asked him to tell me his story. What it was like to be a stutterer and why it took him so long to get rid of his stuttering (it took 30 years), what it was like to finally be free of it and how he felt while he was still struggling with it.

The story of stuttering and what it’s like to live with it is in many ways entirely different than the process of treating it. But the treatment of stuttering is part of the story of an ex-stutterer and stories must start from the beginning.

We spent the morning re-defining his sales process in terms of his story, rather than his practice. Four days later I get this email from him:

Thanks for an overwhelmingly productive two days at your house and a great night with the boys from Jersey! I implemented the Google Ad just as written: (outside the box – out of my comfort zone):

Old Ad:

Stuttering: Get Help Now

Learn How to to Stop Stuttering!

5 Day Intensive Clinic

www.HelpForStuttering.org

2.0% Click Thru Rate

New Ad:

Stuttering Therapy Failed

I tried therapist after therapist And still believed it was MY FAULT

www.HelpForStuttering.org

9.1% Click Thru Rate

I guess not following the crowd and pushing my envelope is getting me in touch with more people

that I can help! To our success…

-Mark

This was way outside of Mark’s comfort zone. He’d never seen speech therapy sold this way. With story, with empathy, with naked honesty. He’s only seen it sold with credentials and detached professionalism.

You can see the difference – four and a half times more response. He’s going to kick his industry’s collective ass once he’s got this whole thing sorted out. Then he’ll get reamed on the discussion boards for being able to charge 300% more money per hour than everyone else does.

He also has to adjust to the reality of dissing his colleagues. Most of them don’t know how to treat stuttering and some of them still stutter themselves. By setting himself apart from them he automatically draws their ire. That comes with the ability to address human suffering more effectively than others. “No good deed will go unpunished.”

So how does the story continue? I asked Mark to tell me about his journey from stutterer to stutterfree.

Some amazing gems came out. Together we wrote this copy for his landing page:

Did they saddle you with yet ANOTHER well-meaning, ineffective speech pathologist every year in school?

Did she finish her unsuccessful attempt to “fix you” and then blame you for the failure?

Are you sick and tired of promises, promises, promises with high fees but still stuck in the same miserable place you’ve been in your whole life?

Do you HATE sitting in the back of the room and avoiding conversations and missing out on the good jobs and not meeting new people because of this embarrassing problem?

This is my story…

Hi. My name is Mark Power and for 35 years I felt like a misfit and an alien. No matter where I went, I could not escape my stuttering problem and my hatred of talking. I hated the sound of my own voice.

At my school there was one other kid who stuttered and he didn’t have a clue either. We didn’t know why we did this. We just knew we were ashamed of ourselves, and the school would set us up with a therapist every year. We would lumber through their suggestions about taking deep breaths, making eye contact, talking about how I F-E-E-L about stuttering severely, being told this was a psychological problem, slogging through two miserable years of psychotherapy…

It was a total waste of time.

My mom drove me from New York to Greenwich Hospital in Connecticut for therapy twice a week for two years and when it didn’t work, they told her it was HER fault!

On my way to the first stuttering program that actually worked, I stopped at a lonely gas station in the middle of the night. When I walked into the office to ask for the key to the restroom, I stuttered so bad that the attendant panicked (he thought I was crazy), reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a .45 automatic.

He pointed the gun at my head and I stammered, “I’m a stu-stu-stu-stu-sssstutterer.”

I didn’t know it then but the tunnel of darkness was about to come to an end. Dr. George Shames and his wonderful staff changed my life. After one week of intensive therapy I found myself striking up conversations with…. yes, even gas station attendants whom I would have never talk to before, just because I could.

(And none of them pulled a gun on me!)

Iwas liberated.

After 35 years of communication prison, I had a LOT to say. I was making up for lost time.

You will too. When you discover what I discovered: That it’s not your fault. That the ineffective therapists were trying their best but the knowledge they’d been given was inadequate.

That the system has been stacked against you for decades and only now are growing numbers of stutterers

breaking out of this old mindset and discovering what can really happen when you’re finally set free.

“For The First Time In My LIfe, I Could Say Anything I Wanted To Say.”

I want you to say what YOU want to say. Anytime. Anywhere. With anybody.

I would like the opportunity to tell you the whole story. Exactly how it happened, from the rocky road of failed efforts and well-meaning therapists to the breakthrough that de-programmed me from all these horrible lies and enabled me to set hundreds of other stutterers free. Being stutter-free for 26 years now and suddenly able to help people like you too.

I’ll tell you how we did it, what happened and how it can happen to you too.

Tell me your name and your email address and the story will begin to unfold right away.

To your success,

Mark Power

Recovered Stutterer

President, Power Stuttering Center

Want to hear the rest of Mark’s success story? Stay tuned, because I’ll tell you in an upcoming issue.

Meanwhile, seize the day – don’t be afraid to address the human suffering and the real story head-on.

Your audience will reward you for your honesty.

Perry Marshall

Mistake Numero Uno for Rookie Copywriters

A lot of beginner copywriters appear to think that copywriting is the art of making hard things sound real easy. Painting pictures of billowy clouds of ease for your prospects.

That’s a half-truth.

Cynics will be inclined to assume the copywriter is just trying to lie to everyone, but I don’t think that’s the real reason. I think the real reason is: They don’t know who their prospect is and isn’t.

If Shackleton had made any effort to disguise the hardships of his voyage to Antarctica, he would have had two problems:

1) He would have attracted a team of pansies and wimps who’d all have frozen to death or starved on the trip;

2) He would have wrecked his credibility with the true adventurers

Naturally, it’s totally ridiculous to suggest that anybody who can fog a mirror and don a parka could become a famous arctic explorer. But people do the same thing selling any number of other things. If you’re all things to all people, you’re nothing to no one.

Here’s an example from my own product line: My “Marketing System in a Box” – www.perrymarshall.com/inabox.htm. In theory you could apply the methods I teach in that system to just about any business. But if I position it that way, I have no positioning at all. It has modest appeal to everyone but substantial appeal to almost no one.

The positioning is greatly enhanced by saying, “If you’re in Insurance, Real Estate, Retail or Financial Planning, this system is NOT for you. It’s not for dentists or chiropractors or restaurants. If you’re in one of those businesses, you can find other systems more appropriate to your business.

“However, if you sell or create hardware or software or some kind of sophisticated product; if you do high-end consulting; if you run a boutique service firm selling specialized information or knowledge… if your customers demand expertise and you know you have to present it properly to gain their trust… then you’ll be hard pressed to find a system that teaches you how to generate sales leads from those kinds of customers better.”

On a scale of 1 to 10, people have to be a 9 or better if they’re going to buy. If you’ve got “everyone” at an interest level of 5, all the copywriting magic and rosy promises in the world ain’t gonna get them over the hump. The way you get to a 9 is find a slice of your audience that’s got no one speaking directly to their unique needs and cater to them at the expense of everyone else.

Obvious willingness to ignore everyone else proves to your audience that they are in fact special. I think it’s a very good idea to make a list of things that your ideal customer is NOT. John Paul Mendocha taught me that sales, first and foremost, is about disqualification. For example:

• If it absolutely costs a minimum of $5,000 to participate in your program, then you need to get rid of everybody else as fast as you can. Don’t be sheepish about it.

• You will often find that the only people who actually do business with you have a desperate need to solve at least part of their problem. For people to actually give you money, they have to be dead serious. If that’s your customer, then that’s your customer. Know it and own it. For example Sunny Hills, a coaching grad who does AdWords consulting, figured out that if a client couldn’t spend at least $5,000 a month and if they hadn’t already acquired a fair number of bumps and bruises attempting to do Google on their own, they weren’t a match. Customers who didn’t match that criteria would sometimes become customers but it never turned out to be the kind of great relationship Sunny prefers to have. Hey pal, have some self-respect. Define what kind of customer is really a good match for you.

• Let’s say you sell an herbal supplement that improves short-term memory. If you simply wax eloquent about all the ways this product helps anybody and everybody remember, I don’t think that’s nearly as persuasive as making some disclaimers: “Do not take this product if you have peanut allergies.

Also if your memory problem has any connection to Alzheimer’s this product will be of little help to you. However if your memory problems are connected to pregnancy, job or family stress or a stroke, this product makes a positive difference 75-80% of the time.”

• Big trust factor: If your prospect knows that if your product isn’t a match you’ll come right out and tell him – it scores big points. It makes you the reference point for their buying decision. Walking away from business that’s a poor match enhances your confidence and sense of integrity.

Selling the Impossible Proposition

My top 100 customers and affiliates received a gift from me at the beginning of the year, Caroline Alexander’s beautiful book The Endurance which chronicles Earnest Shackleton’s treacherous journey to the South Pole and back, in 1914. It may literally be the world’s greatest adventure story. He and 27 men sailed to Antarctica with a team of dogs and plenty of supplies with plans to travel all the way across the continent in the summer. This would be done after preparing and exercising the dogs while stationed at the edge of the continent during the winter.

The winter went well but in the spring, as the ice melted, shifting plates of ice ground their ship into toothpicks and it sank. Suddenly 28 men were stranded in Antarctica, nearly 1000 miles from the tip of South America, with nothing but three life boats.

It took an entire year for them to get back and the story of how they accomplished this is nothing short of remarkable. Shackleton didn’t lose a single man. His story is well worth reading and Caroline Alexander’s book does a superb job of telling it.

This was no adventure for the faint of heart.

According to legend, Shackleton ran the following classified ad:

MEN WANTED:

FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL.

HONOUR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS.

-SIR ERNEST SHACKLETON

Nobody has verified the authenticity of this ad; somebody may have made this up much later.

Nevertheless it accurately captures the true spirit of the expedition and the harshness of the job. We do know that the trip was widely publicized before it happened and Shackleton received something like 5,000 applications from potential voyagers.

Please do not fail to notice that Shackleton didn’t have to tweak his story with purple prose to get a host of loyal followers. Nobody made any effort whatsoever to disguise the fact that if you went on this trip, you stood a pretty good chance of dying, freezing or starving to death.

Consider a different mission impossible – the largest single mass movement in the history of the world.

What do you do and what do you get if you sign up for this one?

Brother, sister, father and mother may hate you You may lose everything you possess If you have two coats, give one to a person who doesn’t have one If someone asks you to carry their load one mile, take it two

• Decapitation, torture or burning at stake possible Long prison sentences

• False friends, true enemies

• Gigantic reward after death

• No signup fee, but you must tithe 10% of income right off top, after trial period

• Eternal damnation if you refuse

That proposition has had about a billion plus takers over the last 2000 years.

Hey, who said you have to make everything sound fun and easy?

The #1 Threat To You Becoming a Sharp Marketer is…

At the last gladiator club meeting in Chicago (where a lot of people told me it was like no other marketing seminar they’d ever been to) I asked for a show of hands, how many marketing email lists are they on? The number ranged from 5 to 20.

Five to twenty people in your email box every week, telling you that you must do X, Y, Z, or learn this revolutionary new technique, else risk becoming road kill on the Information Superhighway.

So here’s what happens: All those guys distract you into becoming well-rounded at five or ten things and sharp at none. It’s a crippling form of Attention Deficit Disorder. A little bit of SEO, a blog, some videos on You Tube, a bunch of links on del.ico.us, website copy that you were given permission to swipe from somebody’s e-book, a frustrated attempt at an AdWords campaign that’s currently on pause. Hundreds of hours of work, yet…

Nobody exactly knows how well the site converts, only that it generates a sale every now and then.

There’s not a strong sense of confidence or conviction about the product itself and there’s no “psychic connection” with the customers because there’s no one place where customers come from and there’s no one profile for the perfect customer.

So what’s the solution? Hey baby, we’re missing the boat with all these new social networking sites, let’s join a coaching program where they’ll teach us how to master that and six months from now this biz will be at an entirely new level.

It’s a never ending stream of something else, something else, something else and success is always elusively waiting just around the next corner.

The solution to that is really simple:

Know your customers so well, you know exactly where they’re hanging out and exactly what they’re saying to each other and themselves.

Then master ONE way of getting traffic until you’ve got it nailed.

Master ONE way of converting traffic until you’ve got it nailed.

From that point forward, everything else you do will proceed with confidence and security. You won’t be a victim of Marketing Attention Deficit Disorder anymore.

Seriously, this is how my successful students make it happen. They focus on two or three areas – which by the way is usually 1) creating an offer that truly resonates with their audience, 2) mastering the craft of one traffic source, and 3) perfecting one sales funnel by whatever means necessary.

Then their business gets over that maddening hump and suddenly success isn’t around the corner anymore. It’s in their hands.

There’s no point in diversifying your investment portfolio until you’ve first found at least one investment that pays off. Making these investments pay is really a matter of focus.

You’ll notice the lists of ways to get traffic and convert it are pretty long. There’s a lot of flexibility in terms of how you go about doing this. Some of my customers are very analytical and they love spreadsheets and graphs and columns of numbers and they run tests and it’s all a big science experiment. James Prout comes to mind… he sells legal forms on his website and he has methodically tested dozens of combinations of colors, layout, copy and offers and got his business over that hump. Brought his wife home from work and biz is screaming.

Others are all heart. They struggle with the technical stuff but they can describe their customers’ angst with empathy and conviction. All they need is to get the prospect to listen for awhile and she’s hooked. A perfect example of this is Ari Galper. Honestly, Ari doesn’t have a mathematical bone in his body. He built his business on empathy and personal connection and those fingerprints are all over his work. Why should he try to be a math guy when his people skills are already off the charts? He can build those even stronger.

There’s no one right way. There’s just your way. And whatever it is, it’s going to flow from your innate strengths, the ones you already have. So when you look at the long list of tools you “should” use and things you “should” do, please understand: SEO is not for everybody. Live Chat is not for everybody.

Writing articles is not for everybody. But there are some things on the list that are very much you.

Special Club Members Consulting Call-In Day: Monday, April 14

Renaissance Club and Mastermind Members can call in for a free 10-minute consultation (value is $121.00 at my standard hourly rate) on Monday April 14. This is like a radio station: If you get a busy signal, keep trying until you get through. If you get in you get 10 minutes to talk about whatever you want to talk about. If you’re prepared before hand and have your questions ready to go, we can get a lot done in 10 minutes. Visit www.perrymarshall.com for more details

Well-Rounded vs. Sharp

At this point you are not a well-rounded marketer, you are a sharp marketer. Hey, you wanna be wellrounded or you wanna be sharp? Well if you want to put bread on your table, start out being sharp. Don’t be all things to all people, be one thing to a very small population of people, and be that thing to the nth degree.

Every semester at the beginning of my Bobsled Run, I tell everyone: “If one year from now you are still getting almost all of your traffic from Google AdWords, I will have failed.” I don’t want my students’ entire business to be entirely dependent on one source of traffic, and to still be in that place a year later is to have missed the entire point of the course.

Because the point of the course is the Unlimited Traffic Technique and the Traffic Conversion Anvil.

You take one steady, predictable source of traffic (AdWords is one of the few that matches that description) and perfect your sales process. You get your Visitor Value higher than all your rivals and then every other kind of traffic converts better.

Once that is in place, then you do Search Engine Optimization and buy Yahoo clicks and recruit affiliates and do publicity and publish articles and all that other stuff. Your traffic swells like a rolling snowball. And you achieve market dominance somewhat naturally.

Then you are a multiply-sharp marketer.

Still, I contend that realistically very few people are ever going to master all those other traffic sources.

You yourself will probably only get really good at two or three of them. Me, I’m really good at AdWords and email relationship building. A distant third is affiliate marketing, which brings me a ton of traffic, but that happened almost naturally because I applied the Unlimited Traffic Technique and because I’m in a market that’s got affiliates all over the place looking for something to promote. I’m not actually a “master” of Affiliate team building like some people are.

Don’t miss the point that tapping into other peoples’ skills plays a huge part in this. That’s the beauty of affiliate marketing, by the way. If you’re lousy at Pay Per Click, that’s OK as long as you have an affiliate who’s good at it. If you want an article distribution strategy you can always hire someone who likes doing that stuff. That person is not necessarily all that expensive to get.

Perry’s Ladder of Success: Memberships & Coaching Programs

Renaissance Club members receive this newsletter each month, occasional call-in consulting days, and every other month the newsletter includes a sizzling CD interview.

PerryMarshall.com/renaissance Mastermind Club members receive all of the above plus participation in the monthly Mastermind Call and instant access to hundreds of the world’s smartest Pay Per Click marketers in my private members-only online forum.

PerryMarshall.com/mastermind Gladiator Club is for devout students of online marketing and in addition to all the above, meets three times per year for 2-day seminars on advanced and specialized topics. Team Action Groups facilitate cooperation among members.

Next Gladiator Club meeting is May 17- 18 in Chicago.

PerryMarshall.com/gladiator Roundtable is my highest level coaching group, for advanced marketers and mature entrepreneurs only.

Roundtable members get access to all the above, plus intensive interaction in three 2-day private meetings with about a dozen members in attendance.

Members fly in from around the world and iron sharpens iron as each member presents his/her game plan to the group.

PerryMarshall.com/roundtable

Personal AdWords Coaching compresses years of intelligence into a 12 week intensive that accelerates all of your marketing into high gear, from the top of your sales funnel to the bottom.

Current session began February 2008.

BobsledRun.com

Today I’m inviting you to question the idea that there are certain things that everyone’s supposed to know or be good at, or even have some minimal level of competence about. A familiar version of that belief is: By first grade kids should know how to do math procedure A, history lesson B and read at C level of competence. By sixth grade they should have all progressed to X, Y and Z. A cookie-cutter education.

I’m perfectly happy that we do have some minimal expectations that most people should be able to read and write and add, subtract, multiply and divide. But from the eighth grade forward I think the usefulness of the cookie cutter education drops quickly. After all, if you’ve graduated from high school, why does that earn you little more than minimum wage at some stupid job? Because knowing the same stuff everybody else knows gives you no economic advantage.

It’s time to stop grading yourself on that curve. You may not even realize that you’re still doing it. Let me give you a different lens to see things through. Here’s a little graph that describes me, for example:

If I had a magic wand and could customize this newsletter to your personality, I’d put YOUR qualities on this graph. But that’s kind of impossible, so I’ll just give you a few of my categories.

I picked very specific categories… much more meaningful than “math” or “verbal”. Further description would clarify even more:

• Observation of people, things and processes. How things really work. Relationships between people and things. The real reasons why things happen, vs. the external appearance.

• Teaching those observations to others. In fact teaching is one of the most important ways that I learn.When I discover something new the first thing I try to do is explain it to someone else. It’s literally a way that I sort out the world as it happens to me.

• Writing and my developed style of doing it. It’s my most comfortable means of expression. When the Internet came along I immediately liked email. Which, like teaching, is another way I sort out the world as it happens to me. I sit down and write and find I’m much clearer about what I think about things. For years I’ve had various and sundry email pen-pals who help me sort my life out.

• Principles means identifying underlying causes. Getting to the real heart of the matter, rather than merely dealing with symptoms. I dislike fads. I look for the enduring truth rather than the one-trickpony technique.

• Administration is NOT my thing. Once I had a production manager job where I had to organize the work flow of a manufacturing crew who did all these various assembly jobs and I had to plan what time they were going to finish things and which job they would do after that and which parts they needed at their stations and how many… drove me NUTS. My wife would’ve been great at that job (hey, it’s a big part of her home school soccer mom job now, she is eternally planning who goes where and when…) but it kills me.

• Paperwork could drive me to become a kamikaze pilot. If I had a job filling out government forms I would be taking six antidepressants and might develop some sort of severe facial twitch. My nickname would be Perry The Twitch.

• Procedures drive me insane, especially if I don’t understand the reasons behind them. It’s why I didn’t like chemistry in college. Because there were rules, but there were endless exceptions to everything. Give me a simple principle and let me see where it takes me. But don’t give me some mindless set of Byzantine regulations.

Now, all this stuff, it’s just me. And I’m only telling you this because it’s a list of four things I’m good at and three things I suck at. Point being, these are major strengths and weaknesses I bring to everything I do.

And you have your own list. Which is very, very different from mine. One of the most important things you can possibly do is figure out what your list is.

And the worst thing you can possibly do with your list is try to become “Well-Rounded.” The most unproductive thing I can do is try to be a good administrator, become adept at paperwork, get comfortable with procedures. It’s a complete waste of my time and talent. “Barely acceptable” will have to suffice.

On the other hand, developing your true strengths generates nearly endless possibilities for improvement and upward mobility. I remember a martial arts guy saying, “A punch is just a punch.”

Which had two meanings.

When you’re getting started, a punch is just a [lousy] punch. Then you practice and you polish that skill. You focus and develop your concentration and with deliberate effort, that punch becomes an [awesome] punch. But then after that… eventually what used to take deliberate concentration becomes subconscious muscle memory, and a punch is just a punch again. But it’s now a punch that is delivered with devastating force and speed, leaving your opponent on the floor, unconscious and helpless.

The exponential power of a fully developed talent may be the greatest compound interest of all.

Copy is so reflexive for me now, I can scan an entire web page or sales letter and form an initial impression of it in as little as ten or twenty seconds. Same with an AdWords campaign. I can see what’s right or wrong about it in seconds, even though it might take a half an hour to explain what it is I see.

You’re like that with all your best talent zones. My 11-year-old daughter was asking me the other day if it’s hard to drive. The answer to that question is yes and no.

There’s a LOT that goes on when you drive a car. Starting out, not easy at all. At some level it requires an awareness of what’s going on all around you, all the time.

When you’re 15 years old and you have a learners’ permit, you’re in information overload. Your reaction time to everything is slow and things an adult would notice instantly, take 10 seconds to register.

Even though you know everything you’re supposed to do and may know all the rules of the road, you’re still dangerous.

I explained to her that once you develop a whole series of reflexes and a subconscious awareness of your surroundings, you can go through a four-way stop and obey all the rules perfectly, not recalling a single detail of what happened, even ten seconds after you drove through it.

It’s automatic. While simultaneously typing text messages on your cell phone, swatting the kids in the back seat and listening to MP3’s. Oh, and the GPS lady is politely telling you to do a U-Turn while recalculating the route ‘cuz you’re not.

Your weaknesses are a bottomless pit that you can endlessly pour energy into, only reaping frustration and disappointment. Your strengths are a source of strength and vitality, and your investment in them earns huge, compound interest.

Trying to even out your strengths and weaknesses graph for the sake of being “well-rounded” is like treating a ten-cent customer the same as a $10,000 customer for the sake of “fairness.”

OK, so let’s talk about you as an Internet Marketer. You may even aspire to be a well-rounded one, perhaps.

Well my first piece of advice is this:

Out of all the ways to get web traffic….

• Google Pay Per Click

• Yahoo Pay Per Click

• Search Engine Optimization

• Banner Ads

• Inbound Links

• Popups

• Ads in Ezines

• Article Distribution

• Rental of Opt-In Email Lists

• Building Co-Registration Email Lists

• Joint Venture “Elephant Hunting”

• Affiliates

• Ads in Offline Media

• Media Publicity

• Blogs

• Discussion Forums

• Some Crazy Viral Marketing Scheme That Happens to Work

…and all the ways to make traffic convert to sales…

• Good ol’ Fashioned Copywriting Moxie

• Moving Prospects from Online to Phone & Selling Them on the Phone

• Live Chat, i.e. Chatwise

• Fanatical A/B split tests (that eventually succeed, even if you’re dumb)

• Taguchi Testing

• Selling via Teleseminar

• Selling via Live Seminar

• Audio Recordings

• Streaming Video

• Relationship Building Via “Chinese Water Torture” Emails Until They Buy

…choose ONE way of generating traffic and ONE way of converting traffic and master them both.

In a hot market, one Google campaign that drives people to a simple opt-in page that leads to a wellscripted live teleseminar that converts prospects to buyers can be the backbone of a million dollar business.

Mastery of two major skills (not ten) = six figure income.

Both skills are formulaic. Master The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords and you’ve got the traffic; master Michael Cage’s teleseminar course (www.teleseminars.makeyourwebsitepay.com) and you’ve got conversion licked.

You can also pre-record this same perfectly-scripted, well-performing teleseminar and post it on a replay line (www.eagleconf.com offers replay lines) and the sequence becomes totally automated.

The Myth of the Well-Rounded [Person] [Entrepreneur] [Online Marketer]

In school you got report cards. Like this:

English B

Social Studies B+

Math C+

Art A

P.E. B

And then there were those standardized tests, whose results are always presented in such a way as to illustrate how “un-balanced” you are:

Amy is strong in English and Vocab and weak in Math and Science. John is the opposite and Suzy is fairly strong across the board.

Suzy is “well rounded” while John is constantly hounded about his lousy language skills and Amy takes heat for her poor performance in math.

Real Homes, Real Businesses, and the Building of Real People

In last month’s newsletter I opened a vein and bled a little bit. I talked about our “baloney sandwich and ramen soup” years and the sacrifices Mamalaura made along the way. None of it was trivial stuff.

I got a good deal more feedback from that newsletter than I usually get. My favorite response was from Michael Cage (who, like Mizel, is one of those geniuses that quietly goes about his business):

“I think the idea of the Rugged Individual, while romantic, is basically bullshit. So many people in the entrepreneurial realm are so hung up on having made it “all on their own” that they completely discount things like the space their social relationships (including family/spouse) create for them to be successful and also manifests with the “I don’t have customers, I have numbers” mentality. I did a teleseminar a few months ago all about the ramifications of a horribly controversial idea — “your customers are human!” ;-)”

I remember about 3-4 years ago thinking to myself, “I’ve got a lot of colleagues but I don’t have all that many friends. It was a phase of life – and I think this is quite natural for people to go through this – where there wasn’t room to do or think about much else besides running through the maze, ringing the bell, and getting the cheese.

If that’s where you’re at, that’s where you’re at. I was there for years. (Actually it was run through the maze, try to locate the bell, can’t find a bell, can’t ring the bell, can’t get the cheese, so go back to beginning of maze, run through it, try to find the bell again…)

One of the tricky things about being an entrepreneur is, the people around you do NOT necessarily understand your obsessions. They’re content to watch TV. You’re not. They leave their job at the office. You don’t. I’ve got two things to say about this:

1. You are a misfit. You always have been, always will be. Let me tell you about one of my friends from elementary school, Kent. I grew up with him, all the way through college. We were both in Engineering, we had some classes together. I noticed that while I was still something of an attention getter, one of the louder people in the class, Kent was always quiet and studious. Always got good grades. Always one of the prof’s favorite students, at least if he got noticed.

We worked at the same company for a summer. He started working there when he was 15 and he STILL works there at 39. One of the prize workhorse employees. Steady, smart, industrious, obedient. Pats on the head.

Wife and 3 kids. Model citizen. Yada yada yada.

I get into and out of college…. the company we worked at wouldn’t hire me back because I couldn’t pay enough attention to fine details and I would screw up assembly of delicate parts and they’d have to be re-worked. I would get fired from jobs. Some of my profs thought I was annoying. I work at Jensen and get laid off after a couple of years. I go into sales and that’s kind of a disaster for a couple of years. What is the friggin’ matter with me, anyway? I had hope that I would someday find my groove.

I realize, the world needs a lot of Kents so your electricity will come on every day. The world needs obedient worker bees. But that’s not what I am.

Now I wouldn’t trade with Kent, ever. To me he has a very boring life. He doesn’t go to interesting places or see interesting things, he doesn’t go far from home and doesn’t taste a very wide variety of what life has to offer.

When I go to seminars and give talks, I tell a story of how I got fired for sending an obnoxious FAX message back in 1990, the first job I ever got fired from and telling my wife and her parents and everyone how I got fired.

And then I get fired again… and again…. I tell about how Kent was always the good kid and why couldn’t I be like him?

I ask people, raise your hand if you’ve been fired from multiple jobs – most people raise their hands. raise your hand if you’ve always felt like a misfit – most people raise their hands.

It gets quiet and I say, “Hey you guys, I want to tell you something. You wanna know why you’ve always felt like a misfit?”

They look at me.

“BECAUSE YOU ARE!!! You ARE a misfit. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. That’s why you can’t get into some boring routine. That’s why you spend money and come all the way here from wherever you are and you stay up all night and work weekends and you get fired from perfectly good jobs and you can’t stand the Dilbert cube working under buzzing fluorescent lights. You can’t stand the man’s boot on your neck and you’d rather risk failure and disaster and embarrassment and bankruptcy than submit to that hideous mediocrity that the big machine wants you to conform to. You said, “I can’t fit in in an office, maybe there’s a place for me on the Internet where all the geeks, freaks and misfits hang out.”

“You’re here because you’re a geek and a freak and a misfit and I am too and that’s why you’re here and Kent is not. And you know what? It’s OK!”

That’s right. You’re a misfit, and… it’s OK.

2. The other thing I want to tell you is: Somebody has to put up with you. Don’t feel guilty about that; they get to share in the rewards, too. Surely they knew they were in for some of this when they signed up. But think about it: When you were cutting your teeth as an entrepreneur, it was your sweetheart who was putting the bread on the table and making ends meet. Maybe they still are. Enduring your learning curve along with you.

Make sure you give that person the appreciation they’re due. (Look ‘em in the eye and say it. Oh, and a letter in the mail wouldn’t be a bad idea. Way better than an email, by the way. Would only take you 15 minutes to express your appreciation to her / him on a piece of paper and drop it in the mail. Whadaya think?)

A few months ago one of my Roundtable members from the UK brought his wife with him to the meeting.

He’d implemented new ideas like a banshee and they are raking it in. And his wife is there telling me, “You know, I’m real mum about this recent success to my friends. They just get jealous. If I told them how much we’re making now they’ll think they deserve a share of it, and meanwhile, be completely oblivious to all the years we labored hard together in the trenches, making this thing happen.”

And I’m sayin’, Amen, sister. Yes, you are who you are because a lot of other people have contributed to your success. Not just glamorous gurus either, but un-glamorous, un-celebrated people who live with you and love you and your crazy misfit idiosyncrasies. Make sure you thank them.

To your success,

Perry Marshall

A Money Maker is Not Necessarily a Business…

…just like a place to live is not necessarily a home. You want a real home and a real business. This month’s CD squarely confronts the difference.

Jonathan Mizel is one of the original lights in the world of online marketing wizardry. He’s been one of my main mentors ever since I entered the AdWords scene five years ago.

The reason you don’t hear from him much is, he pretty much does what he pleases, having been somewhat unplugged from the guru scene for a couple of years.

But I just talked to him yesterday, and he remains as sharp as ever. Quietly doing his own thing.

The reason he’s not in the guru scene is, he practices what he preaches. He’s built systematic, automated businesses and profited from them, freeing him to do what he wants. Like live in Maui and vacation in French villas.

Jonathan has always been hip to the strange techniques and wrinkles that can turn big profits as new approaches emerge, but he’s equally aware of how easily people can get trapped by the necessity of chasing “yet another deal.”

That gets old after awhile. It’s just another version of “What have you done for me lately?”

And from a business owner’s perspective, I see the opportunity to own a highly automated, systematic business as being more important, more desirable than the ability to “chase deals.” Hey, you might decide to spend a few months or a year obsessing about something other than business, maybe once or twice in your life. Ya think?

Perry’s Ladder of Success: Memberships & Coaching Programs

Renaissance Club members receive this newsletter each month, occasional call-in consulting days, and every other month the newsletter includes a CD interview.

PerryMarshall.com/club Mastermind Club members receive all of the above plus participation in the monthly Mastermind Call and access to my private members-only online forum.

PerryMarshall.com/mastermind Gladiator Club is for devout students of online marketing and in addition to all the above, meets three times per year for 2-day seminars on advanced and specialized topics. Team Action Groups facilitate cooperation among members.

Next Gladiator Club meeting is May 17- 18 in Chicago.

PerryMarshall.com/gladiator Roundtable is my highest level coaching group, for advanced marketers and mature entrepreneurs only.

Roundtable members get access to all the above, plus intensive interaction in three 2-day private meetings with about a dozen members in attendance.

Members fly in from around the world and iron sharpens iron as each member presents his/her game plan to the group.

PerryMarshall.com/roundtable

Personal AdWords Coaching compresses years of intelligence into a 12 week intensive that accelerates all of your marketing into high gear, from the top of your sales funnel to the bottom.

Begins February 2008.

BobsledRun.com

But I want you to notice something:

None of the things at the end of this list invalidate or obsolete anything at the beginning of the list.

Anymore than e-zines replaced magazines. Yes, the Internet has eroded print media. But nevertheless – I don’t know about you, but when I go to Barnes & Noble, there’s a whole bunch of magazines on the rack. Kinda fun to go read some of them sometimes. There are still new magazines being launched every week.

Now the conversation between Reese and Mizel on this CD, it’s about 3 years old and the fact that virtually nothing they discuss is outdated is proof positive, this conversation is pure gold. I want to encourage you to focus on principles not techniques because the principles are where the money is made. Techniques used to implement improper principles eventually fail. Always.

On this recording Jonathan and John refer to people making tons of dough with “Traffic Equalizer” pages and similar search engine tricks, now long obsolete. And the temptation of making “easy money” with things that really don’t add value or help anybody at all. Don’t get sucked into that vortex, you’ll never get out. Everything you’ve worked hard to create will be laying on the slag heap of bad ideas gone by. Create valuable things on the Internet and enjoy the fruits of your labor for a long, long time.

This interview is about 80 minutes, too. Don’t let anybody say I short you on content. This ain’t some cheesy 30 minute promo like comes with a lot of other newsletters. You should listen to all of it. Oh, and if you wanna listen on your iPod, you can download the whole thing in MP3 via Zip file:

http://www.perrymarshall.com/mp3/jmjr.zip.