Just as important is how you think about your goal. Do you “hope” you can achieve it? Does it seem like something you’ll try to do… and see what happens?

Or do you think of it as if it has already been accomplished?

To achieve the extraordinary, you need to feel that kind of certainty about it.

Use this strategy with your team. Start talking about what you want to have happen in the future as if it has already happened. You will see amazing results.

[Ed. Note: Tom McCarthy (www.transformationtechnologies.com) is a success coach and business consultant. As the emcee at ETR's recent Info-Marketing Bootcamp, he kept attendees motivated and working toward their goals. You can see Tom in action, along with a dozen experts in business building and Internet marketing, in the Bootcamp DVD home-study program.]

“Finally! Someone tells the truth. Michael, you’re brilliant. Issue #2795 was right on the mark. Small productive actions taken consistently change attitude (and reinforce taking more actions) faster than anything else.”

Stacey Morris
New York

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How the “Missing Link” can kick your online business into overdrive

Every inefficient system… whether it’s an overweight body, a sputtering car, or a losing football team… has a “missing link” that prevents it from operating at full capacity.

It’s the same thing with a floundering online business.

There’s a “missing link” that keeps it from bringing in big-time revenues.

But once you pinpoint this “missing link” and get it taken care of, you can make more money online than you ever dreamed possible.

And the best part is, it is so easy to do, you’ll kick yourself for not thinking of it.

Let me show you how…

As Dr. Al Sears writes in his book, The Doctor’s Heart Cure, endurance exercise actually makes the heart, lungs, and muscles smaller. They can perform longer with less energy — but what you gain in efficiency, you lose in reserve capacity. In your later years, it is this reserve capacity that protects against heart attacks.

To improve the health and strength of your heart, focus on short intervals of intense exercise punctuated by brief periods of recovery.

Well, some people keep trying.

You’ve seen it. The ne’er-do-well who keeps bragging about his big plans. The office screw-up who keeps apologizing for his mistakes and committing to do better in the future.

You probably don’t do that kind of thing. But if things fall apart, you may be tempted to climb out of the hole by making promises.

Resist the temptation. You’ve already established your good reputation. It was built on what you did, not on what you said you would do. If you want people to keep thinking highly of you, do more and talk less.

Promises are powerful weapons, but they lose their impact when they miss their targets.

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The Simple Six-Figure Marketing Strategy – Paul Lawrence spent less than $100 to start his first business. He used just one marketing plan. Soon he had so many customers, he hired someone to do the work. He went after new business. He used his marketing plan again. Almost instantly, he was making $4,000 a month. The people he sold the business to (so he could finish college — paid for by the sale, by the way) used the same plan. They are making $100,000 a year. Read more…

According to LL, a young colleague of mine who’s recently become a real-estate broker, you should hit the prospect with “is its?”

“You want to sell the house, don’t you?”

“Well, yes.”

“And you plan to list it with a broker, right?”

“Well, I suppose so.”

“You appear to be hesitant. Is it because I’m a woman?”

“Oh, no. Of course not.”

“Is it because I’m too young?”

“No.”

And so on, until there are no more “is its?”

“It really works,” LL says.

LL didn’t say so, but I’d guess you would not want to offer an “is it?” that really could be “it.” For example, you wouldn’t want to say, “Is it because I’ve never sold a house this big before and I couldn’t possibly know anybody rich enough to buy it?” Ask a question like that, and you might be stumped by a “Yes, that’s exactly it.”

That qualification stated, the “is it?” technique makes a good deal of sense when you are dealing with irrational objections.

The proper uses of I and me are among the first grammatical rules that schoolchildren are taught. Yet even as adults, writers and speakers sometimes get it wrong.

The distinction is not that difficult to keep straight. Grammarians call I the nominative case and me the objective case. So use I when you’re the actor: “I’m going to the office.” And me when you’re the object of the action: “Please give the package to me.”

True, a few situations arise where following the rules might create a stilted or pretentious result. “It’s me” sounds more natural on the phone, for example, even if it’s technically incorrect. (Officially, “It’s I” abbreviates the phrase, “It is I who is speaking.”)

Similarly, “How do you know it was I who signed it?” is a trifle awkward. But problems like this can usually be solved via adroit rephrasing. One possible option: “How do you know I was the person who signed it?”

This column brings to mind two movies that were popular when I was growing up. The title of The Egg and I was admirably correct. But Me and the Colonel was ungrammatical. Of course, the filmmakers knew what they were doing.

[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 that shows writers and other creative professionals how to diversify their careers into speaking, consulting, training, and critiquing.]

“A good swipe file is better than a college education,” says my old direct-marketing “professor,” master copywriter Milt Pierce.

The swipe file provides inspiration and ideas that you may be able to use in your own promotions. With a swipe file, you can overcome writer’s block and write copy better and faster.

Lots of copywriters keep swipe files of promotions in their industry. Milt, however, always preferred using promotions for products other than the ones he was writing about. If, for example, a client who was selling insurance asked him to create a direct-mail package, he would look in his swipe file for ideas — but not in the section where he filed insurance packages.

Why?

The reason is simple. “If you create an insurance package that looks like every other insurance package, you’re just being a copycat,” says Milt. “However, if you check through other types of packages, you’re likely to come up with an original approach.”

A good example is a recent ad I saw for a Stauer watch.

The ad shows a photo of the watch. The headline above it reads:

“We Apologize That It Loses 1 Second Every 20 Million Years.”

The style and approach seem to be inspired by David Ogilvy’s famous Rolls-Royce ad. The headline for that ad was:

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”

If the Stauer ad were for a car, it would seem derivative. But by adapting Ogilvy’s fact-based approach to a watch, the copywriter created something new.

It’s an approach not typically used for watches… so it supports Milt’s claim that applying ideas used in one industry to another can have interesting and effective results.

One interesting footnote to the story…

David Ogilvy has been accused of stealing his Rolls-Royce headline from another copywriter. I have also heard that he found the fact about the Rolls-Royce clock in an automotive trade journal. Others now say he took it from an ad for another car: the Pierce-Arrow. And the Pierce-Arrow headline, published years before Ogilvy’s Rolls ad, is remarkably similar:

“The only sound one can hear in the new Pierce-Arrows is the ticking of the electric clock.”

Today that ad is forgotten — but Ogilvy’s is one of the classics.

The best results I’ve seen from using swipe files have come from the cross-pollination of ideas between industries.

For instance, I was looking for ideas to sell trading software.

I started with my file of options trading promotions. Nothing. So I flipped through my other swipe files. In my health swipe file, I came across a promotion for a vision supplement.

The headline: “Why bilberry and lutein don’t work.”

I knocked off the headline — and tripled my client’s previous response rate.

My headline: “Why most trading software doesn’t work… and never will.”

A non-profit organization sent a free paperback book to potential donors. The “book” was actually a promotion written to solicit donations, and it did gangbusters.

A major financial publisher copied the format (now known as a “bookalog”) to sell an investment newsletter. Their book, titled “The Plague of the Black Debt,” was one of the most successful promotions of all time.

When you swipe from another industry instead of your own, you steer clear of copycatting charges — and you are credited as brilliantly original when your ad works.

P.S. Using a swipe file is just one of the “tricks of the trade” I teach in the Internet Cash Generator program. It’s a top-to-bottom guide to starting and growing your own part-time-work / full-time-income Internet business. Find out more about here.

[Ed. Note: Bob Bly is a freelance copywriter and the author of more than 70 books. To subscribe to his free e-zine, The Direct Response Letter, and claim your free gift worth $116, click here now: www.bly.com/reports.]

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A Few Hundred Bucks a Week – Everybody wants to make millions online. But would you settle for $200 to $400 a week? You set up your business once. Then it’s fully automated. You look in your bank account, and the money is there. That’s a car payment… your rent or mortgage… whatever you want, taken care of. Read on to find out more…

Example (as used by Clayton Makepeace today): “There are pretty much only two kinds of prospects in a marketer’s universe: (1) casual copy scanners, and (2) inveterate readers.”

Hand a sales letter to a dozen people, and you’ll see what I mean. Some of them — the inveterate readers — will read the headline and every page of the copy.

The rest — the scanners — will quickly flip through, reading only the heads and subheads.

Before the invention of sidebars, we rarely gave scanners much that would draw their eyes into our sales letters. But sidebars turned scanners into readers. And because only readers respond to an offer, they dramatically increased our chances of making the sale.

My point — and I do have one — is…

Great sidebars turn scanners into readers — AND responders.

Notice I said “great sidebars.” Unfortunately, a lot of the sidebars I see are not great. They look like what they are: afterthoughts. Or, worse, “leftovers” from an earlier draft.

Instead of sleepwalking through your sidebars, try writing your running copy first. Then read each paragraph, thinking, “What kind of sidebar could I use to drive this point home in the most powerful manner possible?”

Do that and, suddenly, every sidebar becomes more focused. So does your entire sales message.

Then, after you’ve written a sidebar, ask yourself, “How can I make sure this is not a dead end? What can I do to help this sidebar drive the reader back into the copy? Or, better yet, to my order device?”

Most of the promotions I see would probably pull 10 percent to 30 percent better if the writer had followed this advice.

20 Kinds of Sidebars and How to Use Them

That said, let’s take a look at the kinds of sidebars that give you the best chances of turning scanners into readers…

Readership Sidebars are designed to sell the prospect on reading your text. They generally fall into one of three categories…

• Tables of contents: A listing of the valuable information revealed inside the promotion enlists the prospect’s self-interest.

• Pull-quotes: These boxes put an intriguing proposition… or a compelling benefit… up in lights. I often include a photo of the ersatz author of the piece for added attention-getting power.

• Teasers and page-turners: Inserted at the bottom of a right-hand page, these little gems “sell” the reader on turning the page by hinting at the valuable information on the next spread.

Biography Sidebars are really a kind of a “credibility device.” They’re used to eliminate any doubt that the titular author of the piece knows what he’s talking about. They attempt to lift your expert — and, therefore, your sales message — head and shoulders above the competition. They often take the form of a…

• Curriculum vitae: A true biography of the expert — his education, accomplishments, awards, books, and so on.

• Case history: A narrative of an experience the expert has had that demonstrates his wisdom, experience, and/or prestige in his industry.

Proof Element Sidebars are used to present facts, figures, and other evidence that prove the truth of statements made in your text. I use them in three ways…

• To document the enormity of the problem or opportunity: When I’m trying to evoke concern over heart disease, for example, I might include a chart showing how many Americans will suffer a heart attack this year.

In a financial package, I might use this kind of sidebar to document a claim that 80 percent of all mutual funds don’t keep up with the S&P 500. Or I might use a table listing the advisor’s most profitable trades. Or maybe a line chart showing soaring global demand for oil and plummeting supplies.

• To demonstrate the wisdom of the expert’s approach: This kind of sidebar might be a chart or graph comparing the profits the expert has earned to another indicator — the S&P 500, for example. Or, it might compare the blood pressure of people who take a particular supplement with those who don’t.

Benefit Sidebars are really just like ads within your ad. Each one draws out one of the compelling benefits the product offers. More important, each one is presented in a way that connects with the prospect’s feelings about:

• Avoiding or resolving a problem: With this approach, I typically put my prospect’s negative feelings about the subject at hand into words… validate how he feels… and empathize with him. Then I show him how my product will resolve those feelings.

• Easing a fear: “Fear relief” sidebars appear around the middle of my sales message — after I’ve done everything I can to bring every concern or frustration my prospect has about the subject at hand bubbling to the surface. Once I’ve done that, I use these sidebars to show him how my product will free him from those negative emotions.

• Fulfilling a strong, long-held personal desire: If my main theme is a positive one — focused on one or more benefits that will bring tremendous value to my prospect’s life — I use these “fulfillment” sidebars to prove that my product will, indeed, deliver.

Credibility Sidebars are invaluable tools for convincing your prospect that your expert’s view (no matter how radical) is valued by other experts, and that your product will produce the promised benefit.

• Customer testimonials: These can take the form of straight testimonials or narrative testimonials. They can appear singly to add impact to a spread or be clumped together. I like to do both.

• Expert testimonials: Praise from peers and other experts whose names are known — or whose titles are impressive and/or connect them with respected institutions — establish the authority and credibility of your expert.

• Media mentions and appearances: These demonstrate that your expert is important enough to have been noticed, quoted, or invited to appear on major media outlets. At best, they’ll say something about him that reads like an endorsement. But the simple fact that he regularly appears on CNBC or “Nightline” or is quoted in The Wall Street Journal makes him worth listening to.

Sales-Closing Sidebars generally appear in the final third of the sales message. They are designed to remove the final roadblocks between the prospect and your response device. I use seven of these kinds of sidebars in just about every promotion I write…

• Pull-quotes: To allow the author to look the prospect in the eye and deliver a compelling benefit or horrifying alternative and ask for the sale.

• Premium ads: To ramp up the perceived value of the free gifts the prospect will receive. Usually, these ads are a series of bullets on the most valuable information in each premium.

• Product ads: To fully lay out the value the product will bring to the prospect’s life. These are typically written in much the same way as a premium ad.

• Value sidebars: To demonstrate how mind-blowingly cheap the product is relative to other things the prospect buys. These sidebars are designed to make not ordering feel like the dumbest thing he could possibly do.

• Risk relief sidebars: “Risk relief” is just a fancy-schmancy way of saying “guarantee.” But I make my guarantees go beyond simply saying, “If you hate it, I’ll refund your money.” I use my guarantees to reiterate the benefits I’m promising… to have my expert sign a contract with the prospect, promising that he’ll deliver… and to demonstrate his “money-where-his-mouth-is” confidence that the product will perform as advertised.

• Contact devices: Actually, these should appear on every spread and contain a toll-free number the prospect can call to order. I also like to break them out in sidebars to drive my prospect to my response device or to his telephone.

• Action devices: Often imbedded in other sidebars, they urge the prospect to order now — either by calling a toll-free number or turning to the order form.

Lots to think about!

Now, here’s your assignment: Grab a pile of promotions and plop down on the sofa. Look at each sidebar and ask yourself, “Why did the writer include this? What kind of sidebar is it? What does it accomplish? Does it focus his main theme or serve to diffuse it?”

More important, read the running copy and ask yourself, “What other kinds of proof element, credibility, and other sidebars could have done a better job of making the sale?”

By the time you’re done, you’ll be twice the copywriter or marketer you are now.

[Ed. Note: Ready for more tips from the master? At ETR's Info-Marketing Bootcamp, Clayton Makepeace joined a dozen other experts in Internet marketing, social media, and business building. If you couldn't make it to see their presentations in person, you can still benefit from the secrets they revealed from the stage. We recorded every single minute of Bootcamp on video. And those recordings are available for order now.]

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The Greatest Dirty Little Secret of the Internet

To make money as an entrepreneur, you’ve got to constantly scour the earth for high-quality, in-demand products.

You could create new ones. But that can be expensive. Time-consuming. And after all the work… you might wind up with nothing.

But a few of the Internet’s top marketers have found a way around this problem. They don’t spend time (or money) on products that may or may not sell. Instead, they pluck moneymakers from a reserve of pre-made products and sales promotions.

A martial arts expert from Florida has turned this strategy into a small fortune. He estimates that one “pre-made product” made over $20,000 in one month… Another has gone on to pull in over $332,250.

Discover how he found these moneymakers… And learn how you could use this secret to make anywhere from a few hundred bucks a month to a few hundred thousand bucks a year right here.

Unfortunately and probably not uncommon in Hollywood, he bailed.

Nevertheless, I was sure my idea to find a partner with industry “mojo” was sound. So I advertised on a website for the entertainment business. Sure enough, I got a response from someone who owns a large comedy talent agency. He has many relationships with television networks and folks in the business. Our interests were a good fit. So I have a new partner. He has the connections to make my event bigger and better. And, most important, more profitable.

If you need a partner for a specific industry, a trade publication or website can be a great place to find them.

There are trade publications and websites for almost every industry and niche. Many of them offer some form of classified advertising. In my case, the posting was free. But if there is a charge, it will usually be minimal.

[Ed. Note: Paul Lawrence is the publisher of the “Street Smart Business” program. It’s packed with dozens and dozens of ideas to help the small businessperson succeed. For more info click right here.

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In some cases, that may be necessary. But in most cases I’ve witnessed, second-guessing is a response to a real problem. So before you accost your bossy boss and set him straight, make sure his worries are groundless.

Next time you feel you’ve been questioned or criticized unfairly, calm down and take a deep breath. Repeat after me: “I am not perfect. It is possible for me to be wrong in this case. If I am wrong in this case, it doesn’t mean I am human waste.”

Once you are comfortable with the idea that you may be wrong, try to figure out why your boss thinks you are.

What, exactly, happened that shouldn’t have? What didn’t happen that should have? Did you have all the resources you needed? Did you follow sensible procedures? If you had to do it again, from scratch, how could you do it to produce the desired outcome?

You need to ask yourself these questions — and you should also ask a trusted friend or colleague for input.

Once you understand what went wrong and how it could have been right, set up a meeting with your boss. Admit your mistakes. Tell him what you’re doing to avoid the same missteps in the future. And ask him for his suggestions.

I can’t imagine any good boss not being impressed with that. If he doesn’t respond positively, then he’s the problem, not you. Look for another job.

“Just what I needed to hear.”

“I just wanted to say thanks for some great content in the ETR newsletters. I find something useful in just about everyone of them.

“Michael’s lead article prompted me to respond today. A number of times, he’s shared some really useful tips for dealing with difficult people and situations. And they’ve been just what I needed to hear, like this one was today.

“Many thanks.”

Stuart May

Torquay, Devon, U.K

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Ready to Impress Your Boss? – You’ve just read about one way to handle a second-guessing boss. Wanna know the best way to avoid such a situation altogether? Know more than he does about business and marketing. Just read Michael Masterson’s book, Ready, Fire, Aim, cover to cover.