Today we’re going to finish up our discussion on understanding yourself.

So far we’ve talked about motivating strategies. Today we’re going to cover two more areas of self-awareness that are equally important.

Combined with your motivating strategies, these two areas will give you…

A 1-2-3 power combination to get

just about anything done in record time!

And what’s really amazing about what I’m showing you, is that you don’t have to learn anything new. You’re simply understanding and leveraging who you are already!

So we’ve got a lot more to cover. But before we dive in, I wanted to make sure you check out the “resources” section at the bottom. I’m looking to add some serious talent here at Strategic Profits and if you think you’ve got what it takes, be sure to check out the ad.

OK. Enough warm up. Let’s dive in.

To higher profits and beyond,

Rich

Two More Strategies To Explode Your Performance

By Rich Schefren

OK, So far we’ve talked about different motivation strategies. You’ve evaluated yourself and determined whether you primarily use moving “toward” or “away” as a motivating factor. We also examined whether you use internal or external cues for motivation. You’ve stopped to consider whether you’re driven out of “necessity” or “what’s possible.” And you’ve also had some time to sit and think about “what turns you on.”

So right now, you’ve got some pretty important insight into yourself that you can use when making any plans. Understandings that will help you get what you want faster and more easily than you may have been able to in the past.

But let’s not stop there, because there are other strategic things you should know to help you achieve your goals more efficiently.

Learning at the Speed of Light

What about your learning strategy? First off, are you a reader or listener? Which do you tend to do more as far as when you’re learning something new? Do you tend to read a lot or do you tend to listen a lot or watch a lot?

Here’s an important point. When I ask people individually how do you learn best; most people have an easy answer for me. However, when I ask them if they act on that information, do they actually consider that and leverage it when they go about learning something – very few people actually answered yes.

And yet acting on your knowledge of how you best learn is the key to growing your performance, to getting better and learning faster. Not acting on this knowledge condemns to inefficient learning and therefore, condemns you to suboptimal performance or non-performance.

So what is the best way that you learn and are you leveraging that way? It could be by reading. It could be by thinking about and writing about what you’ve just discovered. It could be about watching videos. It could be about talking about what you’ve learned with friends. It could be a lot of things, but the point is that you need to know how you best learn.

If you know how you get motivated and you start actually using that to increase your motivation. And you know how you learn and you start leveraging that so you can learn faster, I think you can kind of see where this is going. Ultimately your performance will be so much better than it is right now because you’ve brought some consciousness to who you are; how you do the things you do; and how you could perform at your best.

Work Preferences

Another area is your work preferences. There are too many topics to discuss here, so I won’t go too in depth. But, let’s take one easy example.

Do you work best alone or with others? If you do work better with others, what kind of relationship does it usually take? Is it with friends? Is it with people who are subordinates? Is it with a boss telling you what to do? (I hope not if you’re going to be a successful entrepreneur.)

How do you work best? Do you work best in the morning or the evening? Do you work best working on one project for the entire day or working on several different projects at the same time or throughout the day? Do you work best at your desk or in different environments? Do you perform better under stress? Or, do you do better with a highly structured, predictable environment?

Personally, I tend to work best in different environments so I’m always moving around. A while back, someone was asking me how I dealt with ADD as far as multitasking. I told them when I start feeling bored and get the need to start working on something else; rather than dropping what I’m working on and starting something else, I take what I was working on and I go to a different environment. So if I’m working on something and I’m at the beach and I’m starting to get antsy, then I’ll go to the cigar bar or I’ll go to my office. Once I get antsy there, I’ll go to Starbucks. I’ll just move around.

But it’s not important what I do. It’s important what you do that works best. Maybe you’ve never thought about these things. So you don’t know the answers to these questions right now. That’s completely okay. But now that you’re aware these are things you should know, you can start actually thinking through your motivation strategy; your learning strategy; how you do work strategy.

Do you see how knowing these things can make such a huge difference in your level of performance? When you do, you can adjust your work in a way that really leverages the best out of you!

The Way I Stay on Top of These Kinds of Things

That’s one of the reasons I love writing in my journal. Because a lot of questions like these get answered. Not always in a premeditated way, but just by sharing experiences in my journal. I see the patterns over time like “oh, the last six times I really learned something quicker than I thought. It was because I did X, Y and Z in all of those cases.” Obviously X, Y and Z would be something very useful for me to consistently do whenever I’m learning something new.

So, that’ll wrap up this brief topic. I’ll leave you with this…

How well do you know yourself? And based on that, are you leveraging who you are to get all that you want? If not, are you willing to be introspective to reflect, to think through, and ultimately bring more consciousness to who you are, how you best work and what gets you going and how you learn best?

I believe that the rewards for knowing this far, far outweigh the time it takes or the energy that you expand to learn these things about yourself.

If you really want to perform at a high level, then it’s not a “nice” thing to do; it’s an absolutely essential thing to do.

Questions or Comments on this issue?
Click here to send them to Rich!

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Just getting your business online? Here’s What’s Working Now:

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The Parable of The Puppy And The Elephant… 
 
YESTERDAY MORNING, I watched my six month old Springer Spaniel pup sit in front of an open door for five minutes pouting because he couldn’t get inside.

Thinking this was unusual, to say the least, I walked around the open door and led him into the house to get his morning treat.

Then I got to thinking about my own limiting beliefs.

They say that by the time an elephant has grown up in a circus you can tie them to a post with nothing but a leash and they won’t even try to break it.

They can walk away any time they want but they won’t. Because they are being held back by their memories of the heavy chains they were raised with. They were trained much like we are trained to have limiting beliefs…

But when you think about it: What’s really holding you back in life?

You know, I would be willing to bet that you are your own worst enemy. You are holding yourself back from greatness and you know it!

But it’s time to be your own best friend.

The door to the cage you think you’re in probably isn’t even locked.

But you’ll never know if you don’t try it…

Speaking of trying things out:

We’re currently running a promotion on the “What’s Working Now Short-Cut System“, a monthly publication where we interview the top leaders in our industry…

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 Imagine that you’re greatest goal in life is to get married. Here’s a guaranteed prescription for failure:

 1. Walk into a bar or nightclub where a lot of single people hang out

 2. Spot an attractive person already engaged in a conversation with someone else

 3. Barge in on that conversation, crashing into their table and knocking the bowl of pretzels on the table, their clothes and the floor

 4. As your opening line, blurt out in a loud obnoxious voice, “Will you marry me?”

 5. When they look at you like you’ve just escaped from an asylum, raise your voice even louder and repeat, “Marry me – NOW”

 Sounds downright stupid, doesn’t it? And it’s guaranteed NOT to get the results you want.

 But here’s the important question: is this much different than the way most companies market their products or services?

 Most marketing interrupts your day with some over-the-top subject line… then proceeds to make some highly questionable promises… and closes by urging you to buy right now… then it urges you again to buy before it’s too late.

 Not only is this the way NOT to market, but it’s a guaranteed formula for what I call “marketing suicide”. By using this approach, as so many businesses do, you’re locking in your own failure.

 Fortunately, there’s a much more sane and effective way to market.

 ================================

 Introducing “Engagement Marketing”

 ================================

 If you get to the core of what’s wrong with the typical marketing process I showed you above, what it all boils down to is you’re marketing to your prospects in a way that you hate being marketed to yourself.

 So the solution has two simple parts:

 1. STOP marketing this way immediately

 2. Start inviting, engaging and solving

 Let’s take a look at how this is done.

 INVITE – Instead of beating your prospects over the head with a sales pitch right from the beginning, invite them to begin to get to know you. Give them some valuable content they can use to get a result they’ll remember – and do this without any sales pitch whatsoever.

 ENGAGE – Keep building the relationship by giving them more content, completely free of any sales messages. Studies show that it takes a minimum of 7 contacts like this to establish a solid bond of trust with your prospects.

SOLVE – Instead of just showing prospects your product and it’s features and benefits, demonstrate exactly how it solves a difficult problem they have or helps them achieve an important goal.

Sound different than 99% of the marketing you see – possibly even yours?

You bet it does. And I’m sure you can see that by shifting to this style of marketing, which I call Engagement Marketing, you stand to make a lot more sales than you’re currently making with traditional marketing methods.

===============================

How to substantially increase your sales with Engagement Marketing

===============================

In a few weeks, I’ll be presenting a comprehensive new program that covers all the steps of my Engagment Marketing process:

> You’ll discover how to use “invitation marketing” to substantially increase the amount of traffic you drive to your site – and the quality of that traffic

> A simple engagement process that turns a list of cold prospects into a warm audience that enthusiastically looks forward to hearing from you

> Step-by-step details for using my simple “solution selling” approach to help your prospects truly get what they want by using your product or service – and ramp up your own sales at the same time  

> How to expand your relationship with your warm audience and turn one-shot sales into dedicated customers who buy from you again and again

 There’s a lot more, but I think you get the idea. If you want to be first in line to get all the details on Engagement Marketing once they’re ready, you can put your name on the Early Notice list by clicking here:

http://www.ProfitAlchemy.com/engage-early

It’s quick – just enter your name and email address and you’re on the Early Notice list.

I’ll be in touch soon.

Regards,

Bob Serling, Founder

Profit Alchemy, Inc.

2039 Bruceala Court, Cardiff, CA 92007, USA

How Many … To Screw in a Light Bulb?
By Dan Kennedy

At Disney, the oldest joke about the Imagineers – goes like this:

Q: How many Imagineers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Why does it have to be a light bulb?

I call this the Open Architecture Concept. Very, very, very, very few people, in percentage terms, in ratio to population, conduct their businesses or live their lives based on Open Architecture. To the contrary, they approach whatever business they are in by getting a small rule book from somebody or by observing peers, then treat that as a box with cement walls.

Some cultures are still all about closed architecture: caste systems that confine people to the same status in society as their parents, arranged marriages, discriminatory laws that make women chattel and prohibit them from so much as leaving their homes unaccompanied by a husband, father, or brother. Before the interstate highway system, we were a relatively immobile society, so over 70% of the people lived and died and never left whatever town they were born in.

In my business life, narrowly and broadly, I’ve never accepted closed architecture. A narrow example: I never let the client define the assignment. The client says: How much to have you write a sales letter? I say: Why does it have to be a sales letter? 

A broad example: after doing it just once, I rejected the entire ad agency rule book about the way you get a client, wooing, wining and dining, getting a chance to do work on spec and present campaigns in open competition with other agencies.

Nuts to that. Nuts to free anything.

In even broader terms, I’ve practiced Open Architecture just about my whole life, about where I want to live, what I want to do. Most people do not.

What you will find with entrepreneurs and CEOs in the information marketing industry is an extraordinary embrace of Open Architecture. These are people who have created businesses from scratch and routinely go through the process of idea, often odd idea, to market to money.

Their businesses even defy categorization. They are publishers, but they are not in the publishing business. They are often membership associations, but are not in the association business. They put on seminars and conferences, but they are not in the conference business. They have group coaching programs and often do one-to-one coaching, but do not consider themselves coaches. And they operate outside the norms of each of those separate industries.

Traditional newsletter publishers operate very differently from information marketing businesses that, as part of their businesses, publish newsletters. They tend to arrange their businesses to suit their personal preferences.

Two may operate very similarly structured businesses that put customers into groups of 20 or 30, in fee-paid multi-day mastermind meetings, but one info-marketer loves travel, so he moves his meetings around to different sites; the other hates travel, and makes everybody come to him every time.

The cool thing about having Open Architecture–minded clients with businesses that can be grown, expanded, and diversified endlessly is that you don’t even need to compete for or wait for assignments – you can create your own by suggesting work on an unexploited aspect of the business or even some brand-new initiative.

Whether you do or not, these clients are always creating the next product, the next event, the next promotion. Their entire business is really about two things: marketing – via the written, printed, and spoken word, and delivery of content – via the written, printed, and spoken word.

Once you understand this strange tribe and its tribal language and customs and know where and how to find them, bubba, if you can’t stay busy, profitably, in this place, with these clients, you desperately and urgently need to marry rich.

For the copywriter, the information marketing industry is the place with streets paved with gold and money blooming on every tree. No other industry consumes copywriting like this one.

I know it intimately. I have started, bought, built, and sold information marketing companies small and large, niched and mainstream. I literally helped create the industry, as a huge number of today’s information marketing enterprises are owned by my students, clients, or at least people who’ve followed my model, and I also co-founded its trade association, the Information Marketing Association. I write copy for info-marketers and have for many years.

I can assure you, there are terrific clients waiting for you in this industry. They do not know who or where you are, and most lack the patience to find you. You do not know who they are or how to present yourself to them, but I can fix that.

It is as if there were wonderful apple orchards just over the horizon, out of sight from an entire town of hungry folks with money in their pockets and a love for apples, apple cider, and apple pie. I hope you’ll let me show you the best paths in.

But I want to return to my bigger point, the WHY you should let me show you the best paths in, or otherwise, somehow make it your purpose to establish yourself with such exceptional clients: so that you can practice Open Architecture, and design and live whatever Writer’s Life that you imagine and dream of and want.

Editor’s Note:

The Information Marketing Industry Wants You

There’s no doubt about it – Information Marketing is a very lucrative online business niche – perfect for Carefree Entrepreneurs. And it can be very lucrative for the people who create the advertising for info-marketing businesses as well: copywriters.
 
If you’ve ever thought about copywriting as a full-time freelance career … or as a way to make extra money while you grow your Carefree Business … there is no better guide to learning the ropes than Dan Kennedy. He’s spent 35 years in the trenches as a copywriter and marketing consultant, working with clients as well as in his own businesses.
 
In his new program, Dan Kennedy’s Writing for Info-Marketers Training and Certification, he gives you the benefit of his experience to help you craft compelling copy for info marketing (you can use what you learn in your own business, not just for clients). You’ll get the lowdown straight from Dan on how info-marketing copy is different and how to tap into this huge … and growing market.
 
For a limited time, you can get this program thanks to Carefree Entrepreneur’s relationship with American Writers & Artists Inc. And you can also receive the discount Dan is offering AWAI members … but only until tonight, Sept. 23, at midnight. Go here for details.

Tip of The Day:
The “Recipe” For Success In Any Industry…

“I do not know anyone who has gotten to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but it will get you pretty near.” — Margaret Thatcher

Tip of The Day:
Here’s A Time Management Tip From The
Legendary Bruce Lee Himself…

“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.” – Bruce Lee

Tip of The Day:
The Easiest Way To Uproot
Doubt And Fear…
 

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” — Dale Carnegie

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In these 7 free videos Mike explained in simple east to understand steps how I could attract an endless stream of prospects to me ready to join and actually get paid to have these prospects come to me.

These videos have really changed the way I do my home business, and I think they can help you too.

You can get free instant access to these free videos here…

http://wwaddell.magneticsponsoringonline.com
(just copy and paste the link into your browser)

Here’s to your success,

Wes Waddell

Tip of The Day:
Here’s A Reminder To Think For Yourself…
 

“The depression has ended.” – Dr. Julius Klein, Assistant Secretary of Commerce. He said this in 1931. The Great Depression by some accounts did not fully end until the late 30′s or early 40′s. If you research quotes from the Great Depression you may disconcertingly discover that it’s pretty much like listening to current events. It should serve as a reminder to think for yourself.