Issue #1976
- WEALTHY: Lose 70% of the time… and still make money (Charles Delvalle)
- HEALTHY: Is your cholesterol too low? (Dr. Al Sears)
- WISE: Fred Saberhagen on paper
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- Going offline with your e-mails and website (David Cross)
- Tips for breaking through blog block, part 1 (Michael Masterson)
- It’s Fun to Know… about shoelaces
- Add "soporific" to your vocabulary
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When Losing Could Mean Winning
By Charles Delvalle
Nobody, not even Warren Buffett, picks winners 100 percent of the time. Of course, it’s better to pick more winners than losers … but it’s not necessary to do that in order to have a winning portfolio. If you cut your losses short and max out your winners, you could lose 70 percent of the time and still make money.
It all boils down to simple math.
If you make 10 $1,000 trades and take a 5 percent loss on seven of them, all you’d need is a 15 percent gain on each of the other three to make a 10 percent overall gain. Not bad for losing most of the time.
In the end, being a successful trader is about having a system in place that makes you money, not about how often you win or lose.
[Ed. Note: Charles Delvalle is a contributing editor to the Investor’s Daily Edge newsletter, and a regular contributor to INCOME, ETR’s new investment service. INCOME provides a slew of high-dividend-paying companies, with the goal of providing you with a total return (dividends plus capital gains) of at least 14 percent per year.]
"My gut feeling is that paper and ink are going to be with us for a long time yet."
Fred Saberhagen
New Dog Learns Old Tricks and Fetches the Paper!
By David Cross
One major thing that we wanted to change when we revamped the Early to Rise website late last year had nothing to do with the Internet… well, not really. But it’s something that affects every website in some way. Because in the race to have the coolest, "stickiest" website, the way many millions of people use the Internet is often overlooked.
Think for a moment about how you use the Internet.
When you receive an e-mail, you speed-read it to see if it requires you to take any sort of action. If it does, you print it out … to make sure you don’t forget.
When you use a search engine and (finally!) arrive at what you think is the right site, you scan and skim to make sure it’s got the information you need. If it does, you print it out.
The same goes for the promotional copy that shows up in your inbox. Though it may be about something you are very interested in, you almost never have time to read it immediately. So you give it a quick look-see… and print it out.
That’s the way most of us solve the problem of online information-overload. We take matters into our own hands… literally… by taking the information we need offline.
All we have to do is go to our file menu and choose "print."
Paper is lovely, tactile, touch-feely stuff. You can sit in bed with your cup of cocoa and a slice of hot-buttered toast and get crumbs and greasy paw prints all over it. Snug in the woolly-cotton fog of your comforting quilt, you slowly succumb to paper’s soporific charms. As you drift into slumber, the paper slips from your tired fingers.
And what should be waiting there for you – patiently – right by your bedside the next day? Paper! The antithesis of everything computers are.
We’ve been creating printed works and scattering paper around in our lives since the days of Egyptian papyri … and in even greater profusion since our good friend Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1453.
And you think the Internet will change thousands of years of human behavior? Pah! Not a chance. If you create information online that is worthy of being assimilated, people are going to continue to want and need it in a format they understand. A format that makes them feel in control. Paper!
They may accept the Internet as the transmittal medium, but they’re going to want to hold that information in their hands.
The challenge all online businesses face is how to capture a casual website visitor’s limited attention and focus it – to "convert" them from passively browsing to being an actively engaged enquirer, caller, or paying customer. Given what we know about the habits of so many Internet users, that means giving them an easy way to physically hang onto the information we’re giving them.
It’s difficult to assess how many people print Web pages. But a test I did some years back – where we placed a "Print This Page" button on each page of a client’s website – tells me that as many as a quarter of the people who spend time reading your individual Web pages will also print them out.
Unfortunately, many websites and e-mail messages aren’t particularly printer friendly. You can print off a sheaf of type, all right – but it might come out in an unintelligible jumble, full of unclickable Web addresses, useless hyperlinks, clipped-off menus, missing text, misaligned tables and dates, and distorted images or graphics.
That’s why, when we revamped ETR’s site and e-mails, we worked so hard to make them printer friendly. Here’s what we did – and what you can do to improve your own online efforts:
Tip #1. Make it easy – very easy – for people to print what interests them.
Sure, they can click "print" on their file menu – but in your website and e-mail design you can make sure that those pages print out without parts of the text or images being clipped off. And (see Tip #2) you can actually code your website information to completely skip such items as menus and other "screen-only" elements that are so irritating when they try to print a page.
Tip #2. Point your Web designer to Jeffrey Zeldman’s super article on creating print-friendly style sheets at zeldman.com/essentials/print/.
It explains how to show menus and "Web-only" elements on-screen, but to have them disappear when a person hits "print"… leaving only what the person really wants. Using this and Tip #3 to create print-only content, page headers, etc., can make your printed pages look great.
Tip #3. Paper gets lost.
The fact that you have a simple link to your order form online matters not when your reader is offline. "Click here to order" is useless when he’s on the couch reading your printed page. Add your telephone number, fax number, and e-mail address to every printed page so people have ready access to your contact info when they’re away from the computer. You can do this by referring your Web designer to helpful articles on creating printer-friendly style sheets ("CSS") and to information about running headers and footers on printed pages. You can also insert your contact info manually every (say) 40 lines and hiding it by using the technique revealed in Tip #2.
Tip #4. Add incentives for people to come back to your website.
Use print-only elements (Tip #2 and Tip #3) to add a message like this that will be visible only on your printed pages: "For a free, easy-to-print report on ABC and 123, visit our website at www.123XYZ.com/report/."
Tip #5. Test printing pages from your website and your e-mails from different Web browsers and e-mail programs.
Adjust the information to make sure it looks good on paper too.
Tip #6. Ask a graphic designer with traditional print design skills to advise you on the best layout and format for your printed pages.
One more thing: Don’t try to reinvent the wheel – in this case, human behavior. People like to print e-mails and Web pages. Help them do it and you may find that more of them will read what you have to offer… which can make a difference in your profits.
[Ed. Note: David Cross is Senior Internet Consultant for Agora, Inc, in Baltimore. David is one of the experts featured on ETR's Internet Marketing DVD Library, where you'll learn dozens of unique and powerful strategies for starting and running a profitable home-based Internet business, attracting throngs of eager customers, earning ten times more from existing customers, and tripling your profits this year.]
“$41,000 without touching the keys…and I did it Three Times in the last two months.”
In the last two months alone, Steve Cook made $30,000, $41,000 and $19,000 on three quick real estate deals – so simple he never even touched the keys. His methods can help you…
- Do quick real estate deals from home with nothing but a laptop
- Never touch the keys
- Never deal with tenants
- Never deal with banks
- Make $17,000 to $41,000 or more per trade
Find out how you can use his strategy to skyrocket your income.
Kam Weiler
Contributing Editor, Main Street Millionaire
Notes From Michael Masterson’s Blog: No One Cares What You Had for Lunch, Part 1
Recently, I read a book about good blogging. It’s called No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog, by Margaret Mason.
To help you break through writer’s block and get something posted on your blog, here are six of Mason’s best ideas:
- What would you do if you ruled the world?
Would you execute able people who use handicapped parking spaces? Torture line-cutters? Go ahead and tell your readers what you would do if you reigned supreme. They will get a kick out of it and will respond with pet peeves of their own.
- Your most embarrassing moment.
Even experts make mistakes. Letting your readers know about the foolish things you’ve done will endear you to them and give them psychological permission to make mistakes themselves. (In copywriting, we call this technique "showing your Achilles’ heel.")
- What was the best present you ever got? What was the worst?
Why? Again, personal revelations bring you closer to your audience.
- Describe a day in your life – but be sure to make it interesting.
They don’t want to know what you had for lunch unless what you ate is going to help them get thinner, smarter, or richer.
- The Noah’s ark question.
If you were taking a long trip, maybe going away forever, and you could only take two books, two pieces of art, two record albums, etc. – what would they be? This is an interesting exercise. I did it recently and was surprised by what I came up with.
- Describe, in detail, something you cherish.
I recently wrote about a Spanish language textbook in ETR. I was surprised by what a positive response I got on that little essay.
I’ll have more ideas from Margaret Mason’s book for you tomorrow…
- Michael Masterson
[Ed. Note: To read more of Michael's unedited, uncensored (and sometimes unexpected) ruminations, check out his blog here.
Learn how you can be part of an exclusive group of 25 to 50 ambitious businesspeople that Michael will be leading through an elite 5-day program that can help you dramatically increase the profitability of your business here.]
The Unreported Dangers of Low Cholesterol
By Al Sears, MD
You’re probably used to TV commercials and doctors telling you to drive your cholesterol lower and lower. So you may be surprised to hear that low cholesterol can be dangerous. But a new study confirms what I’ve been telling my patients for years: Low cholesterol puts you at risk for physical and mental health problems.
Recently published in the Archives of Neurology, doctors from King’s College in London discovered that low levels of cholesterol precede the diagnosis of dementia by at least 15 years.
[Ed. Note: Dr. Sears, a practicing physician and the author of The Doctor's Heart Cure, is a leading authority on longevity, physical fitness, and heart health.]
It’s Fun to Know: About Shoelaces
According to Ian Fieggen, a 43-year-old programmer and graphic designer from Australia, there are 1.96 trillion ways to lace up the average shoe that has six pairs of eyelets. Of course, most of these variations are not practical. For real-world stats, Fieggen cites fellow shoelace researcher Bunkard Polster, who brings the number of lacing variations down to 43,200.
(Source: The Wall Street Journal)
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Word to the Wise: Soporific
Something that’s "soporific" (sop-uh-RIF-ik) induces sleep.
Example (as used by David Cross today): "Snug in the woolly-cotton fog of your comforting quilt, you slowly succumb to paper’s soporific charms."
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.]
Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007
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