Steve Oliphant’s Musings

Last night I sent an email out to all my lists about a webinar I put on this morning at isuccess.com. The webinar went great, and is archived there.

Aftwards, I found the following email in my inbox:

Dear Steve,

(name removed)
-------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Steve Oliphant"
> (name removed)
>
> Obama has won. If he was your candidate, you are most likely happy.
> If he was not, then you are probably feeling a little down.
>
> Well, either way, it doesn't matter! There are 77 days before he
> takes office, and months after that before he is able to achieve
> anything.
>
> And you can be making money on the internet WAAAAYYY before then.
>
> http://www.isuccess.com
>
> In 7 hours I will be presenting a webinar on how to create and use
> online videos to get holiday traffic.
>
> This traffic is free, and can be used for either your own product
> or an affiliate program that you are promoting.
>
> Even if you missed the class (and I know, I am dumb to send you
> this email only 7 hours before it starts!) the recording will be
> available at http://www.isuccess.com
>
> As are recordings of previous classes.
>
> Go all the way to the bottom, there are LOTS of previous class
> recordings there.
>
> At the bottom you will find a place you can login to participate in
> the live webinar, or you can watch the recording if you miss it.
>
> Here is to your success!
>
> -Steve Oliphant
>


Well, I had to think a little bit about this, because I too feel that those who base their whole business on selling get rich quick type of schemes are frauds, and the email promoting the webinar was a little bit over the top.

But in the end, I simply sent him back this:

Hi (name removed),

-Steve


What do you think of how I responded? What lessons can be learned from both his emails and mine?

-Steve Oliphant

Everyone knows that one way to get search engine love is to get other websites to link to you. What people don’t often realize is that you can make this happen yourself. Sarah Paine wrote a great blog post today that caused me to realize that this is not common knowledge.

Anyway the way it works is you link to a blog with trackback enabled, and (sometimes after a few hours or days, depending on if they moderate their trackbacks or not) they will link back to you.

So, If you want high powered, high traffic websites to link to your blog or website – it is easy. find them ones with trackbacks enabled (Google for your topic + trackback) and then l ink to them and follow the link, and feel the link love coming back at you!

J.P Maroney posted the thought provoking question: What do you believe are the TOP 5 Most Common Fundamental Problems, Challenges or Mistakes Entrepreneurs must overcome in order to grow their businesses?

I posted the following in the comments on his blog:

1. Lack of taking action
2. Fear of Failure
3. Lack of technical knowledge (which is really just the same as 1. as anyone who can ready and follow directections can learn how to do pretty much anything online.)
4. Lack of focus – not finishing a project
5. Lack of ideas. (Which I think really relates to 4. – )

I guess to sum it up, lack of taking focused action is the biggest problem. Causes of this problem are fear, procrastination, self doubt, and time killers like TV.

So the question I have is: What do you do about it? How do you overcome? (And if you disagree with my 5, please feel free to post your own.)

Comments below are open.

I recently read an article entitled Why we don’t always learn from our mistakes that shows that the more we repeat a mistake the more we are likely to repeat it in the future.

This applies directly to internet marketing and growing your own business. We spend lots of time doing things that won’t help us move forward towards our goals, or that even hurt us in moving towards our goals.

These are mistakes. And unless we STOP doing them, we are simply re-enforcing them and are more likely to repeat them.

Common mistakes include:

Watching TV

Checking email every 10 minutes

Buying the latest get-rich-quick program before the time is up

Buying into the hype of easy money on the net. (It is easy, just not the way they want you to think)

Starting some guru’s program, and not finishing. (I believe this is the worst one. Almost any method for being succesful will work if followed through to completion)

Believing that because you failed at something, you are a failure. Most succesful people will have failed more times than you. The trick is to learn from your failure, not repeat the mistakes that caused it, and try again.

Doing things the easy way instead of the right way. The old adage of “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right” is true.

On the other hand, another common mistake is not releasing a product or marketing campain or web site until it is perfect – and then never arriving at that point of perfection. Michael Masterson has a great book entitled Ready Fire Aim on how has created and expanded many multi-million dollar businesses. The main message is in the title.

But probably the most common mistake of all, and this includes most of the above, is simply NOT DOING. In order to make something happen, you have to DO. Set aside time, right now, and DO.

If you want to make money online, you have to be able to accept payment. One way to do this is through paypal. It is easy to create a “buy now” button that will let people pay you. I have gone through each of the steps with screens shots below so you can see how to do it.

Step 1. Login to your paypal account or sign up for one if you don’t have one. Then click on the “Merchant Services” Tag.

Step 2. Click on the “Buy Now” link in the Create buttons area.

Step 3. Fill out the details

Step 4. Scroll down and select options, click on “Create Button”

Step 5. Select and copy the html code generated by Paypal

Step 6. Paste the select code wherever you want. I had to choose the “non-encrypted” version of the button to get it to work with wordpress. But, yes, that button below was copied and pasted into this blog post using this method. Please feel free to click on it and donate $5.00 to me if you found this little tutorial useful!

And there you have it. Now go make your own “buy now” button and sell something!

James Brausch in his post on How to Learn has a good idea for taking notes. It involves carrying a voice recorder around with you, and then every couple of days listening to your recordings and writing them down. There is an easier way.

jott.com will let you call a number (I have it setup in my cell phone on the speed dial and with a voice command, I can dial it with 1 touch) that will record up to 30 seconds of voice, and then transcribe it and email it and (if you choose) text it to you or anyone you have setup as a contact with them.

So, no more excuses! Record your ideas! Act on them!

Everyone seems to want to get rich quick, make money with little or no effort, basically have a fortune handed to them with no effort on their part.

Of course, I shouldn’t say everyone, because there are plenty of people who claim they don’t want to get rich. They don’t want to “sell out”, or to become one of the people they despise, you know, the people who think they are better than than you because they have money and you don’t. Those people think that wealth equals snobbishness.

The are others who think that the those who are rich got there by getting lucky breaks, having relatives give them money, knowing the right people, winning the lottery, or some other “lucky” circumstance. They think that wealth is a product of fate.

And still others who are afraid of money. They don’t want to have the responsibility that comes with having money. They would rather have somone else tell them what to do and how to live their lives. They think that a JOB equals security.

And of course there are the ones that want to get rich, but they don’t understand how. They spend time, money and effort on things like playing the lottery, investing in schemes that are quasi-legal at best, multi-level marketing, and buy every e-book, course and seminar that gurus’ claim will show them how to make million overnight. They think that all it takes to get rich is having the right knowledge.

Because you are reading this, you probably belong to, or at one time have fallen for some of the misconceptions in the last group. I know I have. I don’t believe in playing the lottery, or gambling with questionable investments, but the seductive ideas put forward by the those peddling their MLM programs and their seminars and courses are hard to resist.

The sales letters don’t usally lie, or even mislead. But the overal opinion and view seems to be that aquiring the right knowledge will make your rich and successful. It will, but not by itself. To be successful you have to apply that knowledge in a focused and effective way. And the sales letters make it sound like that will be easy to do.

But in reality it’s not. No matter how great the hype, or even the truth of a guru’s system other guru’s systems will always look attractive, and once you see the actual work involved, the next hyped system that comes along may be better. Focus and perserverence is the key, and at least for me, focus and perserverence are hard.

This is a long winded introduction to my main point:

The secret to getting rich – quick or slow – is to build a viable business.

Create a product that helps people and delivers more value than you charge for it.
Use proven marketing techniques to let people know about your product.
Set up processes that can be automated and constantly improve both your product and your marketing.

When you have your first product set up and selling, repeat the process creating more products until you are making as much money as you want.

That is how you get rich.

It requires knowledge (you probably already have enough of that). It requires work, and and it requires focus.

I will be releasing how-to videos and tools to help you (and me) on this path. Some will be free, and some I will charge for.
http://www.isuccess.com has some videos and tools. More will be available soon.

But the important thing to remember is that you CAN and SHOULD get rich. Don’t believe the lies and misconceptions, be wary of the hype, pick your path and stay on it.

Getting rich slow can happen faster than you think.

Here is to your success!

-Steve Oliphant.

If you have ever wondered why you always seem to get the opposite of what you want, you probably Need to train your eyes to see color again. Check it out.

There is an oldish adage “count your blessings” that seems to be very appropriate at the moment. I have been feeling down because of some slight difficulties in my life, but those problems pale in the large perspective of things.

“Count your blessings – name them one by one” I am not going to do exactly that, but I did want to put down some things that are very right and good about my life that I am grateful for.

1. I have a wonderful wife who is intelligent and wise and beautiful and sexy and loves me.
2. I have children who each have their own unique qualities and traits and who I love and who love me. I am proud of all of them for various reasons.
3. I have a very good – better than I deserve – family that I was raised in.
4. I learn things easily. I enjoy learning and thinking and appreciating the beauty around me, both God made, and that coming from the talents of others
5. Music
6. Literature
7. Income, high (very high by most of the world’s standards) quality of life. I am never hungry unless I choose to be, I have a home and (too many) possessions.
8. I have the ability to find something to appreciate in every circumstance I have ever been in. I sometimes forget this and pay with a bit of depression. But when I remember and act on that ability, I cheer myself up quickly.
9. A sense of humor. I can (when I choose – need to choose more often) find something funny about pretty much anything.
10. The ability to assume that others are doing their best to get along. I attribute slights and insults from others to misunderstandings and circumstances I am not aware of. I am probably often wrong, but I like living in this world that I have created with my outlook that is full of good people.

That is all for now – I am going to bed – how wonderful to have a nice warm dry comfortable place to lay my head each night!

Tomorrow is going to be an absolutely great day. No matter what happens in it.

Whether you use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer that comes default with Windows Operating Systems, Safari with your Mac, or Firefox there is one simple change that you can make to your browser that will increase your productivity by an order of magnitude.

This change does NOT require you to add any of the multitudes of toolbars and widgets available for your browser. It does NOT take longer than 30 seconds. It WILL help you to stay focused and get done what you need to get done.

Think about your internet usage habits. When you first turn on, or resume your computer and bring up your browser, what do you see?

If you are like most people, you see a start page that includes all the latest news stories, human interest stories, and top trends in fashion, sports and entertainment. It takes more will power then I have got to keep from clicking on links that are interesting, and before I know it, hours have passed and whatever it was I set down at the computer to do, has not been done.

The way to keep this from happening is to set your home page to either something very non-distracting, like Google’s search page (NOT their iGoogle page or your gmail page), a blank page, or a page that you make.

This is easy to do.

First, navigate to the page that you want as your home page. You can do this by clicking on the location field, and entering in the url of that page. To use google, enter in http://www.google.com. If you are using file on your computer, the URL would look like: file://c:/mypage.html (assuming that you have a file named “mypage.html” in the root of your C drive.)

On the latest version of IE (Internet Explorer) find the icon in the tool bar that looks like a house. To the left of it is a down arrow that will pull down a menu when clicked. One of the options on that menu is “Add or Change Home Page”. When you click on that, one of the options is to “Use this webpage as your only home page” Check that and then click “yes” and then you are all done. The next time you open your browser, it will be set to a page that keeps you more productive and on task.

The following video shows how to do what I am talking about: