Five Rules To Live By When Hiring A Writer
September 9, 2009 by http://ReplytoYaro.com (Yaro Starak)
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This is a guest post from Anne Wayman, who is a freelance writer, ghostwriter and blogs about writing at aboutfreelancewriting.com, a blog for freelance writers. She’s also taken all three of Yaro’s programs, Blog Mastermind, Membership Site Mastermind and Become A Blogger Premium (yay Anne!)
So You Want To Hire A Writer?
Until you’ve actually worked with a writer you have no way of knowing how well that writer will write for you. Even when you’ve checked every reference, and read every sample, a writing project can still go wrong.
As a writer who has been hired by many clients, I have developed five questions that when answered clearly almost always result in a satisfied customer.
It boils down to this…
The writer needs to know exactly what you want written.
Sound obvious? Good. I have, however, found some clients don’t understand what they need or how to communicate it. Read the rest of the article here.
Living The 2-Hour Workday: How To Create Event Independent Income Streams
September 6, 2009 by http://ReplytoYaro.com (Yaro Starak)
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In the previous article on living the 2-hour workday I introduced the concept of travel buffers, cash created either through saving or selling assets that is designed to give you a buffer of capital you can comfortably spend if you need to while you travel.
Travel buffers are mostly for piece of mind so you can relax while you travel or use in case of emergencies, but ideally speaking it’s better if you don’t dip into your capital while you travel. In order to facilitate this, you need some form of consistent income streams that are greater than your total expenses, including costs to travel.
What Is Event Independent Income?
My largest source of income has come from significant events, either selling an asset or conducting a launch for a new product.
There’s an inherent weakness with this type of income – you have to do something, often significant work, to get the result, or once you do it’s difficult to repeat, for example once you sell an asset, it’s gone.
Conducting a launch is definitely NOT two hour a day work, it takes a lot more than that. Depending on how you travel it’s quite possible to integrate periods of time where you conduct a launch, for example I did a reopening campaign for Blog Mastermind while traveling in Toronto, resulting in well over six figures in income. However to complete the work required to conduct the launch, I had to settle in Toronto for a summer, renting a house and effectively living there as a local.
You can choose to travel, stop and work, then travel some more, if you depend on event income like launches, but if you really want true flexibility and never want more than a two hour a day work commitment, then you need to develop some event independent income streams. In other words, you need money that is either completely passive, or nearly-passive, consistent as a result of working only two hours a day or thereabouts.
The challenge with this sort of money is keeping it consistent. So many systems for making money online are fantastic as one-hit-wonders, and they work again and again in different niches, but the problem is the amount of ongoing work required to keep things going or to get started in the first place.
Sure you can outsource much of your work (I’ve got a couple of great podcast interviews about outsourcing coming up soon), which is a great strategy especially when you have a system that is already making money, but it takes time to do this and still you have the challenge of always staying one step ahead of the market or finding new markets to enter once one dries up, or the competition catches up.
In my case I’ve always had a solid independent income stream that’s served me well for almost ten years now.
So what is it? Read on to find out…
The problem with positive thinking
September 4, 2009 by Seth
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All the evidence I’ve seen shows that positive thinking and confidence improves performance. In anything.
Give someone an easy math problem, watch them get it right and then they’ll do better on the ensuing standardized test than someone who just failed a difficult practice test.
No, positive thinking doesn’t allow you to do anything, but it’s been shown over and over again that it improves performance over negative thinking.
Key question then: why do smart people engage in negative thinking? Are they actually stupid?
Read the rest of the article here.
Andrew Warner Reveals How He Created A $30 Million Dollar Internet Business
September 3, 2009 by http://ReplytoYaro.com (Yaro Starak)
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Click here to download the audio-only MP3 [ 64 MB ]
Andrew Warner is passionate about entrepreneurship and loves talking with his fellow entrepreneurs. He came to my attention when he recently interviewed Gideon Shalwick on his current blog, Mixergy, which features tons of great video interviews with leading entrepreneurs.
Read the rest of the post here.
Organizing customers
September 3, 2009 by Seth
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The local youth theatre troupe recently put on a performance of Grease. It was a high-spirited outing, with terrific performances and it was a great way for them to spend a month or two over the summer. I was amazed to discover, though, that the budget for the rights to the play were $3,000. That’s pretty steep for a high school production of an old, not particularly wonderful musical script that was only going to be seen by the local community. Should it really cost $7 for every person who watches the play?
The reason fees for licensing plays are so high is that almost all plays and musicals are licensed by just a few firms and the purchasers have no power whatsoever. The sellers have signalled each other and created an artificially high pricing floor. “Take it or leave it” is their motto.
Here’s the opportunity that the net provides (in this case and so many others): someone should organize the customers and negotiate on their behalf.
Read the rest of the article here.
Enormity
September 2, 2009 by Seth
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Enormity doesn’t mean really enormous. It means incredibly horrible.
The problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn’t work. Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down.
Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies and you won’t get a bigger donation, you’ll just get averted eyes.
Read the rest of the article here.
Magic beans, TV and the web
September 1, 2009 by Seth
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New media isn’t the perfect marketing medium, and it won’t be until we find the magic beans.
TV had magic beans for forty years. For forty years, anyone, even a complete moron, could make a lot of money using TV ads. Buy enough ads, don’t screw up, you’re rich.
The hard part was buying enough ads, but once you did that, victory could be declared.
On the web, there are countless marketers just standing around waiting for someone to hand them the magic beans. And that’s the problem.
Read the rest of the article here.
Who gets to decide what you want?
August 31, 2009 by Seth
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When George Washington was a teenager, did he really, really, really want a car?
Unlikely.
In order to want something, you probably need to know it exists. But my guess is that it surely helps if you’ve been marketed to.
One definition of happiness is wanting the things you’re likely to get (or, conversely, not wanting the unattainable). One definition of marketing is persuading the world it wants what you have, regardless of whether they can afford it or not.
Read the rest of the article here.
The problem with doing it by heart
August 30, 2009 by Seth
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The following does not appear in the Star Spangled Banner:
“Babe Ruth through the night…”
When you do something by heart, it bypasses some of the common sense processing we use to navigate our day. Of course Babe Ruth wasn’t even a sparkle in Mrs. Ruth’s eye during the War of 1812, but if you’re singing by heart, you don’t think about it.
Read the rest of the article here.
Spare no expense!
August 28, 2009 by Seth
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The problem with customer service is not a new one. It’s about balancing between serving a lot of people a little, or dropping everything to serve a few people a lot.
Getting a lot of benefit for a lot of people for not so much money isn’t particularly difficult. In the chart on the right, for example, (a) represents the cost of good signage at the airport, or clearly written directions on the prescription bottle or a bit of training for your staff. It pays off. Pay a little bit and you help a lot of people to avoid hassles. The utility per person isn’t huge, but you can help a lot of people at once.
(b) is the higher cost of a bit of direct intervention. This is the cost of a call center or a toll free number or an information desk. You’re paying more, you’re helping fewer people, but you’re helping them a lot.
(c) is where it gets nuts. (c) is where we are expected to spare no expense, where the CEO has to get involved because it’s a journalist who’s upset, or where we’re busy airlifting a new unit out to a super angry customer. The cost is very high, the systems fall apart and only one person benefits.
Of course, if you’re that one person, you think it’s not only fair, but appropriate and right.
This “spare no expense” mantra is extremely difficult to avoid, because in any given situation, when the resources are available, your inclination is to say, “make the problem go away, spend the money!”
Read the rest of the article here.
