This Marketing Gem comes from Joe Vitale’s great book,
“The Attractor Factor : 5 Easy Steps for Creating Wealth (or Anything Else) from the Inside Out”. The book is about how to attract wealth into your life. It is an expansion of an older book titled "Spiritual Marketing".

That’s when I first learned about the concept of levels. That is, people tend to stay on the same level of business or social status. When they meet friends, it’s usually in their circle of activity, whether church, work, school, or some club. As a result, they rarely get out of the level they are on.

That’s not bad. You can stay on the same level you are at and do well. But if you want more, or if you find yourself starving on the level you’re on, you’ll need to go up a level or two.

I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about Marketing and site design. It is not natural for me yet, and I have an immense amount to learn.

a lot of programmers might not spend as much time, since the topic seems so simple. That’s exactly the point, it is simple, so it is hard to understand all the ramifications. The guys in Call To Action put it much better than me:

As Allen Weiss explains in his article, it’s hard to really understand simple ideas. In fact, it’s often harder than remembering complicated ideas. With complicate ideas, like those in mathematics, software coding, and finance, we tend to really “get it” because we spend so much time trying to understand the ideas.

With simpler ideas we tend to spend little energy (often because we think that it warrants little energy to understand) and often mistakenly think that we understand something because it appears to be simple.

In a lot of ways marketing is simple. For example, the basic ideas behind branding are actually very few. Still, people like to see these same ideas presented in thousands of different ways. People want thousands of different examples that expose the same basic idea — isn’t this a waste of time and money?

The reason for this seemingly strange inefficiency is that marketing is based on tacit know-how. Tacit know-how is difficult to write down and can only be learned by doing. Learning to play an instrument is based on tacit know-how, as is learning to cook and virtually every other practice that requires reading/learning and then doing (many, many times) before you really understand it.

- P.41

Even after using the internet every day for almost as long as it has been in existence, I still find myself amazed at how much really great information remains to be found. Know what I mean? Of course, the net is far too big to really know everything of interest to everyone, but you’d think I would have found all the best sites in my focus areas by now, right?

I don’t know how I’ve missed John Carlton’s Big Damn Blog until now. I am extremely impressed, and I’m planning to spend the morning reading all his archives, something I rarely ever do on any blog. A couple quotes which will illustrate what I’m talking about.

A motivational quote:

Just one more reason to stay rooted in the classic stuff — good old-fashioned salesmanship, down-to-earth conversational copy, and becoming a go-to guy in your market. There will no longer be calming breaks in the information-overload flooding through every one of your prospects’ heads.

The best defense against becoming overwhelmed is to stay connected with reliable sources of good info. If you want to dominate your market, you need to be one of those sources. Part of the “reliable core” of the Web, where mysteries are figured out and handled.

And a writing tip:

David Ogilvy, the advertising legend who brought genuine excitement and classic salesmanship to Madison Avenue, wrote about the value of naps for a writer. He wasn’t referring to not being tired, but rather to using the power of your unconscious – his trick was to load up on information about a project… and then go catch forty winks, telling his mind to have something for him when he awoke.

Technorati Tags: guru, John Carlton, marketing

I am a happy GTD adopter, but sometimes I get “lost in the weeds”.

With all the emphasis on getting the steps done, I can lose track of where I am going and why. I get a lot done, but sometimes it is the low-pri stuff. It all evens out in the end, so long as I take the time to do a weekly project round-up, as suggested by the GTD method. However, with all the excitement surrounding the launch of my new company, and with everyone in my household being ill at the same time, I’ve skipped a couple weeks of this vital step.

Perhaps that’s why this article at 43Folders felt so on-target for me. It has a deceptively simple point, that anything which makes you more self-aware makes you more likely to hit your goals. I particularly liked the summary bullet points:

• action almost always trumps inaction
• planning is crucial; even if you donÇt follow a given plan
• things are easier to do when you understand why you’re doing them
• your brain likes it when you make things as simple as possible

Technorati Tags: motivation, gtd

You should forget any idea of “stealth mode” right now. The concept is foolish and has never worked, except possibly for so-called “submarine patents“. In fact, the idea is counter-productive on numerous fronts. What you want to do is to strip down your functionality and your goals to the minimum point where you might be of value to anyone. Release. Get users, maybe, if you did anything right. Then release some more, with your users’ active input.

It truly doesn’t matter, 9 times out of 10, whether your product is provably “better” than another. What matters is eyeballs, user-base, and momentum. You can’t get any of that without releasing at the earliest reasonable time. Kevin Burton on his Feed Blog says the truth very clearly:

Ideas are a dime a dozen. If you have a viable idea it’s almost certainly on the minds of at least 50 smart geeks in the bay area.

You want an idea for a startup? Buy me a cup of coffee and I’ll give you a dozen in 30 minutes. If your idea was worth money you could auction if off on EBay. Try it. It won’t sell because an idea isn’t worth money.

You don’t have time to execute? You think you’ll have more time in the future? This article says you’ll likely never have more free time than you do now. Think about it.

Technorati Tags: Stealth mode, startup