On Thinking Before Acting
Issue# 2703
- WEALTHY: Affiliate marketing with a “legal” twist (Marc Charles)
- HEALTHY: Say goodbye to your personal trainer (Yarixa Ferrao)
- WISE: Norman Cousins on wisdom
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- How to nullify the need for damage control (Robert Ringer)
- The most tantalizing element of ad copy (Clayton Makepeace)
- It’s Good to Know… about bacteria in and on your body
- Add “visceral” to your vocabulary
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Selling Legal Services Without the Law Degree
By Marc Charles
You can offer legal services on the Web – and, get this, you don’t have to pass a bar exam! You don’t even need a law degree or any real legal experience.
The opportunity I’m talking about calls for selling legal services and documents on the Web as an affiliatefor established companies.
I’ve used Web-based legal services personally, most recently to set up a living trust. So, trust me, they are legit (at least, the ones I’m familiar with are). Plus, I’ve saved more than $2,300 over what an attorney would charge. That cost saving is what will attract customers to you and should be featured prominently in your marketing copy.
I recommend affiliating yourself with LegalZoom.com. A few other choices include LawDepot.com and LegalDocs.com. As an affiliate, you market their services on the Internet. Whenever one of your “clients” purchases a legal document or service from them, they pay you a commission.
Granted, there are products and services you won’t be able to offer as an online affiliate, like handling criminal or tax cases. And – this is a biggie – you can’t represent yourself as a lawyer or law firm. But the most common legal documents, incorporations, business agreements, trusts, wills, small claims, bankruptcies, and divorces can be managed effortlessly. And there are many innovative ways to market these products and services, including e-mail, text links, pay-per-click ads, Web banners, videos, and more.
[Ed. Note: As a member of the Liberty Street League board of experts, Marc Charles offers up under-the-radar investment opportunities every month in the Liberty Street Letter, a newsletter dedicated to making money "off Wall Street." Find out more here.]
“Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.” - Norman Cousins
On Thinking Before Acting
What a tragedy that Farrah Fawcett not only is suffering from terminal cancer, but that her 24-year-old son, Redmond O’Neal, was arrested for allegedly trying to smuggle drugs into a jail to give to a friend. (How comforting it must be to know that your son has buddies in the slammer.)
Then there’s Sarah Palin’s daughter, who got pregnant by an 18-year-old punk who not only backed out of marrying her, but decided it would be real classy to go on national television and tell tales about the Palin family.
These stories of celebrities’ kids screwing up go on nonstop. And they remind all but the luckiest of parents that one of the not-so-fun aspects of having children is that they all too often don’t take into consideration how the results of their actions might impact their families.
Which brings me to my 20-year-old son. A few months ago, he was in an automobile accident and nearly totaled both his car and that of the other driver. It was nighttime, and the black car in front of him had run out of gas and come to a stop in the right-hand lane. The driver said he had his emergency lights on, but my son – perhaps due to a momentary lack of concentration – thought the car was moving.
In any event, he looked over his left shoulder to make sure he could switch lanes, and, as he looked forward again, the right front of his car slammed into the left rear of the immobilized black car in front of him. Though my son was going under the 40-mile-per-hour speed limit, the impact was great enough to trigger his airbag and spin his car around several times.
Of course, you’re always at fault when you hit a car from behind. However, considering the circumstances (black car… nighttime… the other car out of gas and stopped in the road… and my son driving under the speed limit), it didn’t seem necessary for the police officer to charge him with reckless driving. But that’s what he did.
A reckless driving conviction can bring a very stiff fine, the suspension of one’s driver’s license, and, in extreme cases, jail time. But, thankfully, no one was injured. And the other driver was a sympathetic gentleman who was just happy that his wife and small daughter were okay. He even called our house later that evening to see how my son was doing.
As with all negative occurrences in life, a lot of good came out of this one. During a recent conversation I had with my son, he told me that he couldn’t believe how much he had learned from the experience.
When I asked him to elaborate, the first thing he said was that it made him realize how easy it is to have a serious automobile accident. He emphasized how much more careful and alert he intended to be in the future.
He also said he had never imagined how involved being in an accident could be – dealing with insurance companies, finding an auto-repair shop, coming up with the $500 deductible for his share of the $10,000 repair bill, finding an attorney and coming up with the money to pay his fee, going to the DMV to get a copy of his driving record for the attorney, making two court appearances, and, above all, the stress of waiting for both his first and second court dates.
Best of all from my perspective is that he said it made him realize what a major effect his actions could have on others – especially his family. Kids normally learn this simple truth the hard way, over a long period of time. But we adults have no excuse. We should already know that virtually everything we do impacts others, particularly those closest to us.
Which is all the more reason why we should think doubly hard about the consequences of our actions ahead of time. As I told my son, it’s a heck of a lot easier to avoid a serious mistake than to repair the damage caused by one.
In my article “Learning from Saddam,” I said that it’s a good idea to learn to “look backward from the future.” By that I meant that you should make it a habit to picture the possible consequences of your actions before acting. There’s not a person reading (or writing) this article whose family wouldn’t be better off had he/she always applied that rule.
Of course, your perception of reality is a critical factor in all this. If you delude yourself about the odds and the possible consequences of your actions, looking backward from the future is an exercise in futility.
But having an accurate perception of reality is another subject for another day. Right now, a good start is just to think about the efficacy of the “looking backward from the future” principle – and start teaching it to your young children.
What if your children are already in their teens or early twenties, you ask? Answer: Good luck.
[Ed. Note: To learn how to survive and prosper during the turbulent years ahead, check out Robert Ringer's powerful audio series Succeeding in a World of Chaos. And be sure to sign up for a FREE subscription to his one-of-a-kind e-letter A Voice of Sanity in an Insane World.]
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Can You Keep a Secret?
Secrets tease, tantalize, and torment us. An offered secret is irresistible – impossible to refuse.
Once our curiosity is engaged, knowledge that someone else knows a secret that we don’t know is like having a stone in our shoe. It gnaws and nags at us. We can’t willingly rest until we’re in on the secret too.
Since offering to reveal a secret appeals to us humans on so many visceral levels, it’s no wonder that many of the most successful direct-response promotions of all time have used it to boost attention and readership. Nor is it any wonder that offering to reveal more secrets in a free report that is delivered along with the product being sold can drive response rates, revenues, and profits through the roof.
So how could YOU use secrets to hit one out of the park the next time you’re at bat?
The way I see it, there are four kinds of secrets…
1. Simple Secrets. If you haven’t done so already, buy a product – any product – from Boardroom or Rodale. Before long, your inbox and mailbox will be stuffed with promotions that tell simple secrets – and offer to give you thousands more secrets when you buy the book or newsletter they’re promoting.
2. Forecasts. If you think about it, predicting a future event in a promotion is kind of like telling your prospect a secret that very few other people know. If you can show him, in your product or premium, how to use this “confidential, privileged information” to solve a problem or get something he wants, your readership and response are likely to soar.
3. Mis/Disinformation. Lies are, by definition, secrets too. When you show your prospect how “the establishment” or, better yet, your competitors are at fault for his difficult situation, you free him from responsibility for it.
4. Conspiracies. These are big, fat, irresistible bundles of secrets that amplify and broaden their power by an order of magnitude. Show your prospect why and how the deck is stacked against him and you create massive credibility for your product by validating his suspicions and creating an excuse for his current predicament.
[Ed. Note: Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free moneymaking e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com.
Good copy is just one element of a successful business. For a step-by-step guide to researching a niche, finding your target market, and then marketing effectively using search engines, e-mail, and more... check out the Internet Money Club: Independent Learner Edition.]
An Alternative to Expensive Personal Training
Exercising on your own can be fun and cost-effective. But there’s nothing like having a personal trainer to help you design workouts, motivate you to work harder, and help you stay on track. Of course, personal training can be really expensive – anywhere from $40 to $150 an hour or more.
If you can’t afford personal training, join a group class instead. You’ll still get one-on-one attention. Plus, belonging to a group of people with similar fitness goals can help you find that all-important social support to help you work harder. As fitness expert Craig Ballantyne says, “The worst thing you can do when trying to lose weight is ‘go it alone.’ Support can help you eat better and exercise more.”
I recommend that you attend a group training session two to three times a week. Then do maintenance exercises – like short-burst cardio – for at least 10 minutes on the days that you don’t have a class.
[Ed. Note: Regular exercise is one aspect of getting fit. But you also need to eat right. For dozens of nutritional recommendations, plus healthful recipes, sign up for ETR's free natural health newsletter.
Yarixa Ferrao is the certified personal trainer and founder of "Get Fit in 6" who has been whipping some Early to Rise staffers into shape. You can now discover all of Coach Yari's secrets to leading a healthy life at her Retreat in Delray Beach this July 10-12. Get the details here.]
It’s Good to Know: The Bacteria on and in Your Body
The amount of bacteria in your armpits, belly button, groin, and inside your nose may alarm you. A recent study of volunteers found 205 types of bacteria in those places, which, because they are moist, are perfect environments for microbes.
The Human Microbiome Project is dedicated to identifying and cataloging all of the microbes living on and inside the human body. They will be analyzing their link to various ailments, as well as how to promote the growth of “beneficial” bacteria that help fight disease.
(Source: Discover Magazine)
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Word to the Wise: Visceral
The word “visceral” (VIS-er-ul) – literally meaning pertaining to the “viscera,” the internal organs of the body – is used figuratively to describe something felt profoundly and emotionally.
Example (as used by Clayton Makepeace today): “Since offering to reveal a secret appeals to us humans on so many visceral levels, it’s no wonder that many of the most successful direct-response promotions of all time have used it to boost attention and readership.”
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