Issue #2640
- WEALTHY: What can a few hundred words do for your business? (Suzanne Richardson)
- HEALTHY: How to avoid workouts that hurt (Craig Ballantyne)
- WISE: Plato on exercise
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- 2 horrendous marketing ideas straight from “big name” advertisers (Charlie Byrne)
- Spot the errors – and improve your own writing (Don Hauptman)
- It’s Fun to Know… about painting the town green
- Add “redolent” to your vocabulary
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A Free Way to Build Your E-Mail List
As an Internet marketer, your most important possession is your e-mail list – people who have given you permission to contact them.
Growing that list should be one of your primary business goals. And there are tons of free strategies you can use to do it.
One of the best is to write articles for other people’s online publications.
Julie Broad started writing articles for ETR in 2008. In August, after we published the first one, she got about 240 new visitors to her website. Of those people, 97 signed up for her free newsletter. That’s 97 new potential customers she was able to market to – all from writing an article that was just a few hundred words long.
Let’s say you run a company that sells pet supplies. You simply search Google for related companies, ask them if they accept submissions to their e-newsletter, and send them an article that will be useful for their readers. Include a link to your website (which should prominently feature a box where visitors can submit their names and e-mail addresses), and you can get free traffic and free names for your list.
Most e-newsletters are happy to accept submissions from qualified experts. Search the company’s site for submission guidelines or send an e-mail to the newsletter’s editor.
Note: Be sure that your articles adhere strictly to the guidelines they give you! A good rule of thumb is to model them after the newsletter’s regular content. And always be sure that they are well-written, offer useful advice, and fit in with the company’s philosophy.
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“Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save and preserve it.”
Plato
10 Best Practices for Safe Workouts
When Carrie showed up for her first weight-loss workout with me, she was injured. Only three weeks earlier, she had made up her mind to lose weight. So she started running for 45 minutes per day. But doing so much, so soon was a bad idea for her body, given that she was 20 pounds overweight and hadn’t gone running in years.
It was no surprise that Carrie had developed a muscle strain in her upper thigh, which required weeks of rehabilitation to heal. This made our fat-burning workouts more difficult, because she couldn’t do interval training or many of the bodyweight exercises I use with my clients.
Over time, Carrie was able to heal her injury while losing fat with short-burst workouts. However, she should not have gotten hurt in the first place.
The first thing to remember about keeping your workouts safe is to avoid doing too much cardio.
I don’t understand why so many personal trainers still recommend long, slow cardio workouts for fat loss, when research has shown them to be relatively ineffective and experience tells me that cardio often just lands folks in the doctor’s office.
If I had met Carrie before she started running, here’s what I would have told her to help her lose fat fast… without getting hurt.
Top 10 Rules for Safe Workouts
1. It is important to train conservatively and not overdo things. If you are doing resistance training (and everyone should), don’t do any exercise that you aren’t sure how to do. Always get personal instruction from a certified trainer.
2. Don’t do anything that hurts or “doesn’t feel right.” There are plenty of alternate exercises for any exercise in any workout program. Just ask a qualified trainer for help.
3. Whenever you start a new resistance-training program, use lighter weights than normal and perform only one set per exercise. This will minimize the muscle soreness that you can expect with any new program.
4. If you need extra recovery time within the workout or between workouts, don’t hesitate to take it. Most beginners only think about how they can do more and more exercise to help them lose weight faster. But everyone (from beginners to pro athletes) needs some days of light exercise to allow the muscles to repair. And don’t worry. If you do the right type of exercise, you’ll still lose fat even when you are not working out at the gym.
5. Check your ego at the gym door and start with the easier alternate exercises, even if you have exercised in the past. New movements – even those that “look easy” – will cause muscle soreness. This goes for yoga too. Many beginners overstretch and end up with the same kind of injuries often associated with weight training. So no matter what you do, be conservative.
6. Do not do interval training or hard cardio more than four times per week. Even pro athletes don’t play hard every day. Doing too much cardio is the biggest reason beginners end up hurt, frustrated, and in the doctor’s office. Research shows that all you need to lose belly fat is three interval-training workouts per week.
When you do cardio, you’re doing the same movement thousands and thousands of times in the same workout. If you have even the smallest injury, it will be magnified by this repetition.
7. Never skip a warm-up. Instead of using the treadmill to warm up (which is pointless), do a general bodyweight circuit of easy squats, easy push-ups, and ab planks to prepare your body for resistance training.
8. If you decide to use running as your form of interval training, make sure you have good running shoes, always do an extra-thorough warm-up, and choose a safe running surface (grass or trails rather than pavement/concrete). If you use a treadmill, please operate it safely.
9. If you have any type of injury at all, get medical attention and have a professional therapist rehabilitate the injury before you start an exercise program. You are better off committing three weeks to rehab now, before the injury becomes serious, than to neglect your body and be forced to stop exercising for three months (or more).
10. All together now: “Safety first!” Check with your doctor before starting any new exercise or diet program. There is no need to get hurt, no matter how serious you are about losing weight fast.
Don’t Let Your Workouts Be the Reason You Can’t Work Out
Those are the top 10 safety tips to keep in mind before you start your new fat-burning workout. Don’t make the classic beginner mistake of doing too much exercise too soon.
The great news is that, as a beginner, your diet will have a much greater impact on your weight loss results – so there’s no reason to over-exercise. Your program should include resistance training and interval training to help you burn fat, but you only need to exercise three times per week with total-body workouts.
Take your body seriously! Train safe!
[Ed. Note: No matter where you are in your weight-loss efforts, you don't need hours of cardio to get into tip-top shape. Learn how you can get fit with three 45-minute workouts a week with fitness expert Craig Ballantyne's Turbulence Training for Fat Loss program right here.
For more easy-to-follow advice on how to stay fit, lose weight, and eat right, sign up for ETR's FREE natural health e-newsletter.]
Make Attracting Cash into a Game
What if there were a system that could help you make money…
That would tell you – almost instantly – if your cash-producing efforts were working or not…
And would help you fine-tune your actions so that you made more and more and more…
There is.
It’s truly simple to use. And you can put it to work from the comfort of your home.
Let me tell you all about it right here.
What the Heck Are These Delusional Madison Avenue Types Thinking?
Sometimes I get good ideas from looking in other business niches and seeing how they might apply to direct marketing and internet marketing.
But every once in a while I also see horrendous ideas that make me ecstatic that I’m not in another industry. Here’s one shocking example…
The March 30 issue of TelevisionWeek trade magazine featured an article on how, despite the recession, the upcoming Major League Baseball programming season is expected to do well from an advertising standpoint. OK, fair enough.
But I almost fell off my chair reading a couple of lines in the piece…
Nearly Insane Comment #1: “[Baseball is] DVR-proof, live, exciting, and localized.”
I can see why the quoted TBS executive would like his trade readers to believe TBS’s product (ad space during baseball games) are “Digital Video Recorder proof”. But his comment goes against my experience. As a baseball fan with a DVR, here’s how I watch a game…
1) Set DVR to start recording game at actual start time (say 7:30). 2) Do something useful (work out, cook dinner, write) from 7:30pm to 8:30pm. 3) Sit down and watch game starting at 8:30PM, fast forwarding through all commercials and thus watching a 2.5 hour game in about 1.5 hours.
Direct Marketing Principle Violated #1: Knowing the behavior of your prospects. But it’s understandable that 99% of TV advertisers don’t know this, because of…
Nearly Insane Comment #2: The new “MLB Network Channel” is already being piped into over 50 million homes, but “Nielsen won’t be ready to provide ratings for the channel until after the fourth quarter – after the 2009 season ends,” said the article.
Direct Marketing Principle Violated #2: Measure immediately; cut your losers, run with your winners.
Can you – as a smart Early to Rise reader – even imagine spending probably billions of dollars launching a new business, and not being able to determine your actual “size of your list” for nearly a year? This would be funny if it were not so sad.
One easy way to get good business ideas from other business niches is to think about how you can “migrate” techniques that are working in that niche into your niche – where perhaps no one’s using them yet.
But this example shows equally that keeping on eye on other niches can show exactly what you should NOT be doing!
[Ed. Note: Charlie Byrne is Associate Publisher of Early to Rise. Get up-to-the-minute ideas by following him on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/CharlieByrne.]
The Language Perfectionist: Mistakes in the News
By Don Hauptman
You might assume that respected publications employ battalions of skilled editors who work assiduously to ensure that no errors appear in their pages. Maybe so, but the mistakes don’t always get caught. Here are four that I recently found in major newspapers:
- “When Mr. Biden indulges in his rhetorical overkill of repeating the same phrase three times – the proud men and women of Scranton, he said… ‘wanted the government to understand their problem, to understand their problem, be cognizant of the problem’….”
Did you catch it? He didn’t repeat the phrase three times. He repeated it twice.
- “We create elaborate Excel spreadsheets in our head sorting what we would buy….”
In our one collective head? Try the plural heads.
- “Indeed, the banjos owned by Mr. Scruggs were nearly priceless.”
As the MasterCard ads suggest, the word priceless has some validity when it’s applied to a sunset or time with one’s family. But a rare collectible surely has a price. What’s more, “nearly priceless” is nonsensical.
- “I have known him for nearly two years, and have seen him in a variety of situations… over a glass of wine in his boyish loft in Manhattan’s Tribeca….”
The word boyish means “like a boy” or “youthful and innocent.” The word may legitimately be used to characterize an adult male, but can it describe his apartment? Nope. In place of this clunky phrasing, the writer should have told us something about the resident’s furnishings or toys. That would have conveyed a vivid and concrete image.
These examples demonstrate once again that it’s a good idea to express oneself carefully. Sloppy writing and unprofessional editing tend to stop readers in their tracks and distract from the message.
[Ed Note: For more than three decades, Don Hauptman was an award-winning independent direct-response copywriter and creative consultant. He is author of The Versatile Freelancer, an e-book recently published by AWAI that shows writers and other creative professionals how to diversify their careers into speaking, consulting, training, and critiquing.]
It’s Fun to Know: Painting the Town Green
In a growing trend across the country, the unwatered “brown” lawns of foreclosed properties are being painted with green dye. The cost is about $500 per lawn, and the treatment lasts up to six months. In most cases, homeowners’ associations and municipalities are ponying up the dough. But some realtors are paying out of pocket in an attempt to spruce up homes they are trying to sell.
(Source: Associated Press and The Record)
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Word to the Wise: Redolent
“Redolent” (RED-uh-lunt) – from the Latin for “to emit a scent” – can refer to something that’s (1) aromatic or (2) evocative.
Example (as used by Lisa Verrico in the [London] Times): “Backed by soaring sax and energetic percussion, Martin makes the sort of celebratory, Spanish party music redolent of warm weather and cocktails.”
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Copyright ETR, LLC, 2009
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