Du Hepd Me Feel Beder | All That Seems Random Fridays #28
Wow, it’s Friday again which means it’s time for All That Seems Random Fridays, where we share how aware (or not) we are of the events, people and opportunities the universe has presented to us based on our focus and desires.
Because we need to CELEBRATE them.
This week was a week. I’m glad I saw it. I’m just as glad it’s gone. And it’s a reminder that nothing, nothing ever happens the exact same way twice which is good when it’s bad and bad when it’s good.
It’s also in these moments if we’re paying attention, that we get to practice ending the patterns we tend to live our lives in.
Looking back at the week now, I realize how much was accomplished, although on Tuesday, I was just about ready to quit.
It Was a Bright Sunny Day.
Sunny wasn’t really helping me focus. In fact Sunny kept drawing my attention away from what I wanted to focus on. So I allowed it to do just that and headed outside into the bright sun drenched backyard, with the dogs.
Me, mumbling under my breath, questioning existence while beating myself up with self-talk for not doing what I felt I needed to do. And just to make sure I was well aware of what I was doing, I’d just finished reading the introduction of “How to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable”, by Suzette Haden Elgin.
Hmphf, disagreeing with myself disagreeably, huhhhh bouy.
And On a Sunny Afternoon, Closing In On a 60 degree High, Near Mid Afternoon …
stood a lone blade of grass, surrounded by a other tufts of grass. The lone blade held 7, maybe 9 drops of dew and none of the other blades held any.
I suddenly I felt better.
I smiled. And I hear on the breeze, “see beautiful!”
And I realize, I am thirsting and receiving.
And I can’t help standing there with this silly smile, forgetting the disagreeable disagreement I’d been having with myself.
The dogs and I stay outside for 20 minutes and play.
Now the Random Part
Yeah, I would tell you if I could, but I can’t. It’s a good secret though. Indeed it’s very good. It will benefit my right people, who I know are heading my way.
I have no complaints, minus the pain in my butt that I’ve been talking to and the things it’s told me. But that’s not a conversation for here or now. Another post, another time, another place maybe.
I’m still smiling.
And then there are the notes found on the desk this week:
Oops there were no notes. Did I mention, this was a week?
That’s it for me, what random events, people and opportunities are showing up in your life, that aren’t really random at all?
Ally Ally Oxen Free | All That Seems Random Fridays #27
Wow, it’s Friday again which means it’s time for All That Seems Random Fridays, where we share how aware (or not) we are of the events, people and opportunities the universe has presented to us based on our focus and desires.
Because we need to CELEBRATE them.
And this week… I talk about things that HAD to be done.
I HAD to do a thing because I HAD TO.
Not for reasons, like the one where I believed doing it would create a windfall of overnight online success and riches and certainly not for the reason of getting my elusive, some say none existent Forty Acres+Mule promised me and my people waaaaaaaaaay back.
Nope, what I HAD to do had nary a thing to do with those reasons. At least they weren’t the main all intents and purposes, reason.
Am I’m glad I did what I HAD to do? YES. Would I do it again? YES. Am I going to tell you what I HAD to do without you having to ask? YES.
I HAD to do a six month long experiment in blogging, without following any proven success plan or any plan other than before midnight on each Friday starting May 22, 2009 and for 26 consecutive weeks after that date, write and press publish on a blog post.
I HAD to build consistency muscle.
Because of the long term goal I have. Because of the inconsistency muscle I’d strengthened by acting inconsistently.
I mean would you do consistent business with a company, by company I mean me, who’s only level of consistency was in how inconsistent they happened to be?
I figured it would take me 6 months to create the kind of consistency I wanted. Going week after excruciating week. Pushing through the – noone gives a crap, what if I’m talking into a black hole about and to myself (which turned out to not be so bad, not always the most gratifying but not bad.) Feeling like I was a failure because only one or two people commented regularly. Thinking I wouldn’t have anything to say.
I honestly felt it would be excruciating when I started. And who am I fooling, I’ve had to practice shutting up since I learned how to talk – me, not have something to say… phshaw…now if I’d said not always having something valuable to say…Anyway…
Now that the consistency muscle has been built, it’s time to move on and step out of what started to look like a black hole of narcissism where all I ever talked about was me, and my and mine and begin talking to you about you and yours.
It’s time to focus more on the small steps my folks (southern speak for my kinsmen and kinswomen) can take to build the skills to start, run and potentially sell an online business, without assuming you have knowledge related to technology or business.
I don’t assuming for both our sakes. I’ll be learning right along side you. And also hopefully sharing without making either of us feel as though we need to know everything, right now, this minute to make an online business a reality.
Plus if I can help you avoid experiencing the following phenomena:
Purchase Product A, giddy, exited by it’s promises of easy to put into practice, step-by-step online wealth generating actions. Read it. Try to implement it. Fail.
Purchase Product B, giddy because it’s supposed to help you implement the thing you failed to implement in Product A. And you just absolutely know that if you knew how to implement that one thing it would change everything. Read it. Implement a few parts. Quit in frustration because it doesn’t actually tell you how to implement that one part in Product A you thought it was going to tell you how to implement.
Purchase Product C. Read it. Implement a few more parts and do it a little better than before. See tiny shoots of success. Get totally excited and run to tell your friends and family. Now because they are watching, the laws of quantum physics take over and the shoots of success shrivel up and die. You, feeling dejected because crap, the shoots didn’t grow AND THEY WERE DEFINITELY SUPPOSED TO GROW, start beating yourself up for attracting the law of quantum physics.
Then because you’re beating yourself up and you want to stop doing that you purchase Product D because it will teach you how to stop beating yourself up and to use the quantum physics you keep attracting, to your benefit, so what you focus on grows. Read it. Drop it because it’s a hot potato with too much positive muckity muck and you want to punch yourself in the face, which totally counters the very reason you talked yourself into purchasing Product D in the first place. You also realize you’d pretty much punch anyone else in the face who sounded, felt, acted that freakin’ positive all the freakin’ time.
And you look so nice.
Eventually, run out of money. Move in with your parents. Borrow money from your grandmother and figure out that consistent action yielding peanuts beats big action with a one-time yield. Yes, the one-time yield feels good sooner but the peanut yield feels good longer. And longer is better. Guaranteed. If you like longer.
In order to pay back your grandmother and move out of your parents house you try to work one, two, ten of the plans you purchased, all at once and become overwhelmed with the sheer volume of conflicting information and actions you’re supposed to take. And now nothing feels good.
And you still don’t know how to put up a website, even after paying that monthly fee to your web host company and renewing your domain name again.
*Sigh*
Ally, Ally Oxen Free.
Are you willing to share your technology hurdle? If so just fill out the quick form below. I’m the only one who’ll see your response, unless there’s someone standing over your shoulder.
Definitions for New Buyers and Marketers
Give yourself an A+ if you already know what the internet marketing terms blow mean and can spot them in the marketing you’re insisting on exposing yourself to every day.
If you don’t know them all, fret not, just pay careful attention, especially if:
- You’re completely and totally new to the provider side of the consumer/provider pond and…
- You’re buying products teaching you how to make money or start a business or work from home using the internet.
- You only pretend you know what they mean so you look knowledgeable around the other people also pretending to know what they mean.
- You are trying to figure out how to make some money using the internet and you’re afraid of asking because then no one will ever buy anything from you EVER because you had to ask.
- Any number of other reasons.
I’ll turn it over to Marlon now.
Memo From: Marlon Sanders
Memo To: LaShae
Re: Key Internet marketing terms & vocabulary
Hello,
Marlon here.
A lot of times Internet marketers throw terms around and assume everyone knows what they mean.
To help you out, I’m providing a list here written in layman’s terms. Some of these aren’t the “precise” technical definition. But they’re what I call working definitions that are easy to understand.
KEY TERMS AND VOCABULARY
Continuity: This means something that people are charged for regularly, typically monthly or quarterly. In the biz, we call this “continuity income” or recurring billing. Newsletters are usually paid for monthly as are membership sites. The reason you see a lot of emphasis on continuity offers is it provides steady income and gives you a way to pay your bills. The classic example is the book club of the month programs.
Forced Continuity: Forced means you don’t have a choice. The way this works is when you buy one product, you’re given a free trial of a newsletter, membership site or CD of the month club. The trial is usually 14 to 30 days. Sometimes as long as two months. At the end of that time
period, if you don’t cancel, you’re charged monthly for whatever it is.
Some marketers get people in continuity billing then NEVER send emails or communications hoping people will FORGET about the purchase and let the billing continue forever. I
find this to be legally risky. If you do forced continuity, make sure people know they’re being charged and can cancel without jumping through hoops.
Back End: The back end of the business is everything AFTER the initial sale. In other words, it’s the follow up business. In the ideal world, you break even or make a small profit on the initial sale (or what we call the “front end”.) And you make your profits on the upsells, downsells and subsequent sales.
Upsells: Additional products or services offered at the point of the sale. As crazy as it sounds, the EASIEST time to make another sale to the customer is when they already have their credit card out! Any additional product offered is an upsell.
Downsell: If the upsell is declined, another offer for a lower price than the upsell is made. This is called a downsell.
Target market: A market is a group of people who are in the MARKET for a product or service. A target market is the market you’re targeting. For example, males online between the ages of 35 and 65 who want to start a home-based business would be a target market. Stated
differently, it’s the people who are the potential buyers of what you sell.
Sales letters: In this business, we often use very long sales letters similar to the direct mail letters you receive in the mail. We call these sales letters because they’re me-to-you letters that SELL something. These are different from a brochure, which is an impersonal communication. Sales letters are written as though you’re talking to the person directly. They’re more personal and persuasive.
Membership site: These are password protected sites that have content delivered regularly and often have a forum or other way to interact with members.
Forum: These are places you go to talk to others who share a common interest.
Opt ins: When someone joins your email list, they “opt in” to receive emails from you.
Double opt in: When someone joins your email list, they receive an email asking them to click a confirmation link to PROVE they subscribed to the email list. This is an anti-spam feature and is now standard practice.
Autoresponder: This is a software program that lets you send email broadcasts to everyone on your list. It will also send a sequence of emails any number of days apart that you specify.
Shopping cart: The ordering mechanism you use to get people’s name, address and credit card or check info and process their order.
Affiliate program: A program where you promote a vendor’s product or service and receive a commission when there’s a sale. The classic example is Amazon.com. You can link to books on Amazon. And if a visitor to your web site buys one of them, you get a small commission.
Associate program: Same as affiliate program
Banner ads: Those square or horizontal ads on web sites.
Ebook: Basically the same as a printed book but delivered online, quite often as a PDF.
PDF: Portable Delivery Format. This is a uniform format for delivering digital information. A standard of method of delivering documents on the web.
White paper: A research paper or report delivered as a PDF.
Name Squeeze: A term trademarked by Jonathan Mizel. See Squeeze page.
Squeeze page: A page with only one purpose to obtain or “squeeze” a name and email address, or email address alone, from the web visitor.
Lead capture page: Same as a squeeze page.
Power Squeeze page: See squeeze page
Hits: Some stats programs measure web site traffic by hits. This is not a particularly accurate way to measure visitors.
Unique visitors: Stat programs attempt to identify actual visitors and eliminate duplicate visitors in a 24-hour period.
Cookies: The way things get tracked on the Internet. These are little text files put on your computer. They contain tidbits of information that allow stuff to be tracked. In the case of affiliate programs, the way we track sales and credit the correct reseller with the commissions is
through the use of cookies. The cookie simply contains that affiliate’s ID number.
PPC: Pay-per-click advertising. Google made PPC a dominant advertising method. As a ppc advertiser, you run ads on Google and ONLY pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Monetize: When you find a way to make money with something, you monetize it. So you’ll hear people talk about monetizing their traffic. All their talking about is finding a way to make money off of their web site visitors.
Traffic: Visitors to your web site or web page are traffic.
Product launch: When a number of affiliates promote one product o one day or one week. Typically last for one or two weeks and often involve heavy promotions by affiliates who are trying to win cash and prizes.
AWeber: One of the main autoresponder services.
One Shopping Cart: Another autoresponder service that also contains a shopping cart, ad tracker, affiliate software and other bells and whistles.
Ad tracker: A program that lets you create links that track when people click on them and then also count actions or sales that follow the click.
Affiliate software: Software that allows you to run your own affiliate program and pay affiliates commissions when they sell your product or service.
Clickbank: A marketplace for ebooks sold by affiliates.
This list by Marlon Sanders from MarlonSanders.com. You have permission to re-publish this list as long as you leave this part in tact.
Visit Marlon’s blog at: http://www.marlonsnews.com
Nope, you won’t make money overnight, even by knowing all these terms. You can however begin to spot when their being used and possibly begin to use them for your purposes as well.
Keep chewing,
LaShae
Just What Was Needed | All That Seems Random Fridays # 26
Wow, it’s Friday again which means it’s time for All That Seems Random Fridays, where we share how aware (or not) we are of the events, people and opportunities the universe has presented to us based on our focus and desires.
Because we need to CELEBRATE them.
Remember how I talked about this intuitively guided party? The one that was happening from November 14 through today – yeah that one.
Well it started off with Mark Silver helping you get to the core of your business.
And after that
nunca, bubkis, zip, zilcho, nyet, nothing. It didn’t really go anywhere.
I’m sort of, almost, beginning to be okay with that because I’ll tell you a little secret…
That was the most nerve racking thing I’ve done. No, not the party. Telling people about the party as in announcing it in advance of the actual party.
It felt like setting myself up to fail, before I even started because …OMG what if no one shows up? And if they do, what if they think I’m all – me, me, me and then they hate me and call me names and …
whew.
None of that happened. I’m alive. I’m still blogging and I’M ALIVE.
I don’t think anyone showed up. If you did and you didn’t see me, I was cowering against the wall dressed to blend into it perfectly.
Still, intuition showed up and guided me to where I needed to be. I connected with Source and I allowed. Instead of my normal pattern – just don’t show up because it won’t be perfect. And they’ll hate me and call me names.
Was it a bad party? Yes based on the expectations I had in mind.
It was supposed to be my sweet 16 Cotillion, Rockin’ 21 party, I made it to 30 and I still look good party. It was supposed to be the I never had an adult party, to beat all parties party.
It was the ‘I’ve got to impress’ them party. I thought I wanted it to be the proud to be a sexy, single, business woman party.
It wasn’t any of those things. It was a quiet completely needed soiree with myself and my heart.
A big nothing on the outside – a deep widening, stretching and waking up on the inside.
I’m sure there’s more I could say, but I won’t.
I will leave you with the notes found on the desk this week:
- level of perfection desired = amount of procrastination practiced
- I move into my greater good. My good is everywhere and I am secure and safe. ~ Louise L. Hay, “You Can Heal Your Life” ~
- Small Businesses need to use technology and automation. Consider it an employee.
That’s it for me, what random events, people and opportunities are showing up in your life, that aren’t really random at all?
Hearts On Sleeves
Psst, is anybody out there, for the party I mean? ‘Cause I’m the hostess and I have to tell you so far this party is la-ame.
The whole intuitively guided, uhm yeah. At least today, not so much.
And that’s when I realized, this is a business party. Sure business can be intuitive, but what do I know about being intuitive? I am, as yet, incapable of fully checking in with my own heart and finding my jewel and I’ve been working on it for what I think is far too long.
Plus, there is no context, no who for whom to be intuitive yet.
And it’s nerve racking because if you are reading, I don’t know it. And that is completely my fault. The analytical thinker forgot to put analytics code on the blog.
So while I don’t like to make assumptions, for now I’m going to and I’ll retract any that aren’t true once I know more.
This is what I believe I know about you.
You like to check your email. You enjoy surfing the internet, spending time caring for your family and you want an online business, sharing your precious talent, hard learned knowledge and experience. Oh and earning money, good money.
You don’t know much about business.
And that scares you, a lot.
You’ve purchased more than a few of the “follow my system to make money hand over fist 24/7/365 by tomorrow” guides in the range of $7 to $97. You’ve been burned by some those. Some have been helpful and you’ve met some decent people because of the purchases.
You don’t see how to apply the guides to what you want to do though. The guide owners aren’t all that eager to help you understand it, unless you buy their more expensive personal coaching.
So you saved the guides, hoping they will be useful at some point. Your hard drive is full of them.
You’ve also promised yourself ‘I’m going to figure all this out, soon’.
One day has become far too many days strung together and nothing is figured out yet.
That original idea is still rattling around in your brain and you’re wondering whether or not it’s a viable business idea.
You’ve mentioned the idea to your spouse and a few friends. You want to take action, but you’re hesitant.
You’re not sure what you need and you’re not comfortable discussing what you don’t know you need, with just anyone.
Mark Silver says, “If you are looking for solutions to situations that you feel stuck in, don’t leave any stone unturned.” pg 32 in Getting To the Core of Your Business.
I’m going to head back there myself because after editing this and reading it aloud, I’m the very person I’m talking to.
You could be too.
I can help with the technical systems, by helping you learn what to use and how to use it, once you get that far.
For the rest of it though, I’m still turning over stones too.
That’s all for me today.
How are you doing in the Unveiling of Your Jewel?
–
LaShae
0 Comments