Venture Capital for your First Business

From my new Online Series O-Biz 101. This is part 2

Inspiration:

To get inspired to create your very first internet business, you need to make some money right up front, and you need to be able to do it for twenty dollars or less.

Why twenty dollars? Becuase it is a nice figure you can hold in your mind – when I say “Twenty Dollars” probably the first thin you thought of was a crisp green twenty dollar bill (if you are from America) or, now-a-days, it is a greenish peach color… whatever, the fact is you should be able to see your very first net based profits without spending any more than this – and by net based profit, I mean to imply that you make you twenty dollars back and then some.

So, here are my three top business opportunities you can start for twenty dollars or less that can earn you your first internet profits:

1. Sell a product or service on Ebay – each product will cost you anywhere from about 1 to 5 bucks depending on how fancy you get with gallery images, etc.
2. Get a free account on Blogger.com or Wordpress.org, set up a free blog, then join Click-Bank as an affiliate publisher for free and start promoting some affiliate products. This can cost you noting but some time to set up the sites and get your products. There have been some people who have literally made thousands of dollars doing just this – but their secret was awesome copy and content. That is where you will be spending your time in this approach.
3. Join the Warrior forum or the DataPoint forum and promote a product of your own. There is a twenty dollar cost to do this and you have to have a minimum number of days and posts on the forums, but they are a massive wealth of information on internet marketing – many individuals have made thousands using this approach, including yours truly.

These are just three ways off the top of my head that cost twenty or less.  There are probably hundreds more, and if you are willing to purchase a domain name (which usually only costs ten bucks or so) and learn how to use Wordpress stand alone version, you can also create your very own blog without the restrictions of the free blogs. In fact, this blog uses Wordpress and forum software – you could even start your own member site and charge a membership dues.

Inspiration is the title of this second installment of the O-Biz 101 series, and you should be inspired to realize that for your first business there is enough free stuff out there that you can get started right now on you own business.

Stay Thirsty my Friends!

-DTM

Should I buy the micro-brewed Brouwerij Van Steenberge? Or the Primátor Maibock. I can’t take it! I guess I’ll just buy the Budweiser…

Options. Most people and most marketers mistakenly think more is better, but recent studies and some published books have shown that it can be a demotivator at a certain point, actually causing real sales to plummet.

Too Many Choices - In Jelly or Beer

Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar has been studying choice.  For her research paper, “When Choice is Demotivating”:

They set up a free tasting booth in a grocery store, with six different jams.  40% of the customers stopped to taste.  30% of those bought some.  A week later, they set up the same booth in the same store, but this time with twenty-four different jams.  60% of the customers stopped to taste.  But only 3% bought some!

What does this mean for Success in our marketing efforts, in deciding between tasks we want to accomplish? In deciding in goals we want to achieve?

It means we can be paralyzed by choice. The human mind is capable, on average, to hold up to seven things at once. We can only truly focus on one thing, but we can keep track of about seven max (for the best of us). Probably between 4 and 6 is more realistic for most of us. What this means is that when we are face with choices that are very much greater than this, we face a dilemma where we are not sure what the best choice is because we cannot analyze all of the choice data, so we get internally frustrated and ultimately make no choice.

This is statistically significant – in fact if we know exactly what we want, or have a pretty good idea, we can eliminate most of the multitude of choices and focus down to the few we really need to look at. This accounts for the three percent who actually bought jelly in the example. So what occurs when we have even a partial focus is we are able to “recreate” the situation with fewer choices. But when we are completely unfocused on what choice we want, and when we are faced with too many options, we don’t make a choice. This is a general principle that needs to be applied to our marketing efforts.

How many times have you seen a website where there were a dizzying array of possible options, links, videos, audios, banners, pictures,etc. and you simply did not know what to do. Perhaps you felt like you wanted to click something, but you had that frustration that whatever you clicked on would take you away from a possible better choice that led somewhere else…

How many times do you think sales have been lost at websites like that because of the issue of over-complexity and too many options? Probably more than most think, because most people assume that more options is better.

The solution to this dilemma is to find ways of presenting large quantities of choices in a simplified fashion. Splitting the choices using hierarchical trees, breaking data into related chunks, pulling together links into blocks that hide the details so that focus is regained. This is an essential tool in designing a website with many choices.

An excellent example of this is Google – a plain white field with a single logo in the center, a box to enter search terms, and two buttons. That is all. How is that for simplicity? And this engine can bring you the complexity of the entire web. This is the kind of forethought that needs to go into any sales page or product display, etc. It’s nice to have many options, but if you don’t present those options in a way that is digestible to human brains, you could lose most of your sales.

This principle holds in most things, not just selling jelly (or beer) – but in the presentation of data in a slide show for your office, or in presenting a scientific paper – anything that presents objects to be considered in some way.

One option too many can make life just as colorless as one too few. In business, this is an important principle to understand.

-DTM

Purpose: it's out there somewhere...

I was recently having a discussion on the Warrior Forum about the difference between the meaning of the word Purpose and Goal.

It got me to thinking about how words can mean such different things to different people, especially when closely examined. To the persons I was having the discussion with, Goal was the over-arching “thing” to which our life strived for and purpose was how to get to that thing.

But that sounds completely backwards to me and to most people I know.  To me, goals are markers or sign-posts that you set on your way to some achievement, but purpose is what gives you the world-view you have and is what is behind the achievements that you choose to go after.  Strange how the concepts can be flipped – but also, I did not hear this person clearly say that whatever your ultimate “thing” is, that is what drives to choose the accomplishments that you want.

At any rate, here is the dictionary definition of Purpose:

–noun

1.	the reason for which something exists or is done, made, used, etc.

2.	an intended or desired result; end; aim; goal.

3.	determination; resoluteness.

4.	the subject in hand; the point at issue.

5.	practical result, effect, or advantage: to act to good purpose.

–verb (used with object)

6.	to set as an aim, intention, or goal for oneself.

7.	to intend; design.

8.	to resolve (to do something): He purposed to change his way of life radically.

We read about how important it is to crystallize our purpose statement so we have a firm grasp on what it is we are living for – to make life affirmations so that we end up knowing that when we get to the top of “ladder of success” we have placed that ladder on the correct wall.

–DTM

Time is a fluid you can never hold on to.

Time…

Many have tried to describe it, scientists still struggle reconciling it in the laboratory, Einstein found that it could not be separated from the very space around us, yet none of us really have a handle on what it is.

We say that time is money, time is life, memory is going  back in time…

Most of us would rather even not face the realities Time places in front if us, yet routinely we:

• Waste Time
• Kill Time
• Save Time
• Spend Time
• Run out of Time…

That last one is the kicker.  We all eventually run out of time, almost as if we are walking around with a count-down timer above our heads that one day, maybe even today, will reach zero… and then?

We look at pictures of ourselves or our kids and see how quickly they or we have changed, and as we get older each moment  becomes a smaller part of our total memory, making the time we have left seem like it is passing ever faster. We remember our grandparents telling us how much we have grown each time they saw us… to us it seemed silly until we saw our own kids or grand-kids grow so very fast.

No understanding of achievement or success would be complete without a fairly decent discussion of time and what we know and don’t know about it.  We need to understand how we can get the most out of every moment, as some sage said: “To squeeze every drop out of each moment.”

As the picture above demonstrates, time is something we are forced to spend, that we can never ultimately save, and that goes by at the same rate for every person (my apologies to Einstein here, as we are not talking about the Theory of Relativity).  So how can we use our time effectively?

You may have heard the analogy that compares life to a box.  The box holds a certain total volume – that is the sum total of your time.  Events, the things we do, the moments or hours we spend are spherical balls which we can place in our box, each taking up some portion of our total time.  Big events such as “a semester in college” might be compared to bowling balls.  Smaller events such as “a week at the beach” might be compared to a baseball.  Perhaps spending a day at work could be compared to a marble.

Eventually we fill our box, but wait!  There is still spaces between those bowling balls and base-balls and marbles.  There are moments between various tasks that may go wasted.  What about the time you spend in your car going to and from work, do you use that time for anything? Or do you just listen to music or scream at the person who just cut you off in traffic?  Could you get some books on disk or MP3, or a course in something like a new language or a success strategy?  Those moments could be compared to BB’s (those tiny little copper balls used in pellet guns).  You could still put a whole bunch of those in that box.

But can we go further?  What about all the spaces between the BB’s, and Marbles, and Baseballs, and Bowling Balls?  Are there little bits of moments that go wasted where you could write down ideas on a note-pad, or just hug your wife or child for no reason at all – but just to tell them you love them?  The analogy of the box goes on to say we can put grains of sand in the box, and then finally fill the box with water to fill in all the rest of the space.

So we too should try to observe how we utilize our time and then how we may fill those moments with things that help us squeeze the most out of it – even if that is just sitting at the beach, holding the hand of the one you love and listening to the waves pound the shore.  That is living.

Remember, those moments will never occur again, they exist only in your memory and the mind of God.  If you let them go by without ever using them, they will still be spent, but they will be empty and wasted.

How might we use our time most effectively?  Here are a few ideas you can try to help you recapture the moments that, up to now, you have been wasting:

As mentioned before, get a notepad and short pen/pencil that you can carry with you to capture ideas. This also helps you get those ideas down before they simply disappear, never to be heard from again…

Get some form of planner, whether it be a phone app, a Day-Timer, a software tool, etc. and use it to track what you are doing so you can keep your tasks “Top-Of-Mind” and get them done.

Learn how to prioritize your tasks, learn the four “Ds”: Do, Delay, Delegate, Dump and apply them to the four quadrants of the “Priority Matrix” (see my earlier post about the priority matrix here).

Spend some time thinking deeply about what is most important to you, what you would do if you only had one day left to live – because you do only have one day left to live – Today.  You “might” have tomorrow, but you are not guaranteed it, you might die tonight, you simply have no knowledge of how long you live, so if you live as if you only have a day, one day you will be right.  And you will have done the things that mattered most instead of dying with regret.

Time requires our careful management, and despite the fact it does not act like any other resource we have, we still must treat it with the utmost respect for it is the raw material all of our life is made from.

David T. McKee

Sometimes you have to remind yourself when the race is over...

I was having a discussion today with someone on the Warrior Forum about knowing when a product or service we have created or are promoting is “good enough” and how much we should service we should “over-deliver”.  In fact part of the discussion centered around what “over-delivering” really means.

You see, sometimes success oriented persons will try to please every customer to the point of giving away much of their time and products/services just because we have a mindset that we want to please them – but we really do them a disservice as well as to ourselves and our families.

I recently wrote a post about “Closure – 99 percent is not Done” but after you reach that 100 percent mark, once you have given a little bit more than you said (your “over-delivering”), then you need to say: “It is done.”

At that point, you need to manage your time, perhaps you charge a small fee for support, perhaps you write a FAQ for general questions and only respond to questions that have actual merit, or point out a true deficiency in your product or service where you have promised to deliver something that is not there.

You need to know when to draw the line, and say, “I have other obligations to myself, my family, my God, whatever.”  Because when you are Achievement Oriented, it is easy to consider every project, service, product, and area of your business as your baby – and it is! but sometimes we need to remind ourselves that in reality these things are THINGS.  As such, they do not actually deserve to exhaust us, and deplete us.  As in everything about being a Master Achiever, balance must always be sought for true success.

So by all means deliver products, services, performance above and beyond what you promise – but make sure you know where the finish line is, and when you cross it, be able to say to yourself and others: “I am done.”

David T. McKee