Right tool for the right job

Right tool for the right job creates the right solution.

My dad used to repeat that when I was growing up. At 81, he still practices that old saying.

In January, I got a first hand reminder from him how important it is to have the right tool for the right job.

I sat at his kitchen table pecking away on my computer in his Florida retirement home while mom stood at the kitchen sink peeling a banana. (She never goes a day without eating a banana.)

As I glanced out the garage, I saw dad standing on an 6 foot step ladder in the top of a giant crepe myrtle tree trimming the winter limbs.

I jumped to my feet, ran to the ladder and put my hand through his belt on his back to steady him while gently tugging him down. “Please, let me do this, Dad. I’m here to help.”

“I can do it,” he said. “I’m not an invalid.”

That’s true. At 81 and just six months after nearly dying from a gangrenous gall bladder infection which put him in an Atlanta hospital for 31 days, he can still work circles around me.

“I know. Just let me do this,” I said.

So, he climbed down. I’m much taller than dad, so I didn’t need the ladder. And besides, with the telescoping pruning shears he was wielding, I could reach nearly every limb and trim them easily.

The shears were sharp and exactly the right length.

For an hour, I clipped. Nearly exhausted in the January heat, I stumbled into the house while dad cleaned up the yard – for three more hours.

Mom smiled when I sat down, sipping my cold water. “I can’t stop him,” she said.

I’m the hardest working guy I know. I always have been. It’s in my blood. But my dad continues to outwork me. And because he has the right tools, he always gets more done. Our parents were always teaching us, one way or another. Some of the lessons stick.

That mantra still fills my mind: Right tool for the right job…

Hard work can become much more with smart tools was one that my dad taught me.

In my business, I focus on the right tools all the time. Tools help me get more done, and the right one is worth the investment.

Students and NAMS members ask me all the time, “Which tools should I buy? Which gurus should I follow? Which techniques should I incorporate?”

So, I’m answering those questions over the next month.

We’ll start with my top 20 tools. I’m going to work my way down from 20 to 1. I could have told you about the top 100. I use at least that many tools. But I decided to focus on the ones that I use on a regular basis, at least weekly. More likely, these are tools I’ll use daily.

Remember, right tool for the right job creates the right solution.

Today, I want you to tell you about CBEngine.com.

If you’re an affiliate marketer, you know that ClickBank offers a huge opportunity to provide quality digital products in nearly any niche.

But how do you decide which are worth your time, investment and reputation? After all, every affiliate product recommendation is going to improve – or sink – your reputation.

I never, never, never refer a ClickBank product without researching it first on CBEngine.com to make sure that I’m referring the best product available in that niche.

But CBEngine.com does so much more. New products are highlighted at release. It allows me do search for products that meet specific criteria such as sales momentum (are other people selling it and is it converting?), helps me build ClickBank ads, determine profitability and a ton of other helpful utilities.

But here’s the kicker. You can get CBEngine for a single, one-time, lifetime fee that is incredibly cheap. But, you have to look for it. It’s kind of hidden on the site.

Instead of opting for the Pro membership which is an annual fee, click the small link on the front page that says “New Lifetime Membership”. The following image will pop up and you’ll have the opportunity to get the lifetime membership for the price indicated below.

Listen, I paid much more for this lifetime membership. You can get this now before it goes back to the regular price. You’ll use it for sales research, finding and promoting niche products for a long time to come.

Enjoy! And remember what my dad says: Right tool for the right job…

Discover your passion and find life itself…

By David Perdew Leave a Comment

NAMS student Mark Mason at Mason’s World asked a really good question about how to discover your passion.

In response to a blog post I did yesterday about turning your passion into a business, he asked :

“One of the questions that I hear all the time is ‘how do I discover my passion’ – and you seem to agree that discovery is key. You say ‘Look closely and you’ll find yours too.’ — can you elaborate? Is there a process that you recommend to people?”

That’s an interesting and complicated question Mark. You probably know the basic answer as well, which is:

There’s no recipe that tells you how to discover your passion.

But lucky for you, I’ve got an opinion 🙂 I know you’re surprised.

The reason it’s so vague is that a person’s passion can change on a dime, so the discovery of your passion is an ongoing thing. And that’s fine. We gain more life experience every day and our priorities should change as we become smarter.

But the absolutely essential element is mindful doing. Without sounding too much like a Zen practitioner (nothing wrong with that by the way…), being aware of likes, dislikes, and, more importantly, things I LOVE to do and be – these are the essential elements of sifting through your feelings to identify passion.

Having said that, one of the most difficult things you can do is figure out how to discover your passion.

Imagine you are come home from a particularly troubling day at the office, sitting down to dinner with your mind racing and reliving the activities of the day, cleaning your plate, and walking away wondering what it was you just consumed?

Has that ever happened to you? I’ve sure experienced that.

That’s not very mindful. Too often, I get up from my desk in the basement to trek upstairs only to find myself standing in the living room wondering why I came upstairs. (I don’t write this off completely to getter older as some people would have me believe.)

Around my house, my wife and I remind each other of our two favorite time zones:

Now, and NOT Now!

Now is always comfortable, secure, enjoyable and fulfilling. Not now is…well. Let me explain it this way.

There’s a myth about the maps created before the discovery of the New World that always displayed a big vast unknown area with the legend:

Here Be Dragons!

NOT Now is where the dragons, demons, fears, anger and anxiety live. Whenever I’m anxious (and sometimes I boil over into a full-blown panic), it’s because I’m projecting into the unknown future where I don’t see things going the way I planned, or looking back at the past and wishing I could have done something differently.

When I come back to the moment at look at what’s going on around me, all is well.

It takes a lot of work to be aware of all activities at the moment we’re doing them. Pay attention to what you’re doing and feeling. That’s the key. Otherwise, you can’t possibly know what you love doing if you don’t allow yourself to feel it. Before you can discover your passion, you must allow yourself to feel what you love.

When coaching students, the first thing we do together is to fill in the blanks on a mindmap template about creating a vision for the student. I push them to think way outside the box. The premise is that money, time, nor resources are not an issue – you have all you need. If you could be doing anything you want, what would it be? What does it look like?

The first assignment is to write it down in a one-page document. It has to be infused with painterly imagery so you can see, feel, taste, and smell it in your mind. Post it where you can’t miss it, review it daily, and revise it as things change. This is the first step that helps you discover your passion.

And frankly, this is the hardest thing to do.

Some people freeze up. They just can’t do it. They can’t think beyond the little world they live in. They can’t allow themselves to feel what it would be like to fulfill their dreams. But once we identify the dream, the longing that is inside, it’s smooth sailing from there. Because the rest is just tactics, and doing what other people have done to be successful.

And when you know why you want to do what you want to do, then the doing is a joy that you can’t wait to do.

(You might want to read that sentence again!)

Your activities almost become an obsession because you’re heading toward something wonderful – and you’re passionate about it.

But the it takes a lot of self-investigation to discover your passion. People who don’t do this thoroughly are really disappointed with the results.

Stephen Covey says it best, I think. Here are four quotes from his works.

Quote 1 – Priorities:

Take a long, hard look at what you consider to be the most important things in life. Put these in a hierarchy, make them priorities in order of this hierarchy, and make sure all other concerns are subordinate to these priorities.

Quote 2 – Clocks vs. Compass:

Our struggle to put first things first can be characterized by the contrast between two powerful tools that direct us: the clock and the compass.

The clock represents our commitments, appointments, schedules, goals, activities – what we do with, and how we manage our time.

The compass represents our vision, values, principles, mission, conscience, direction – what we feel is important and how we lead our lives. In an effort to close the gap between the clock and the compass in our lives, many of us turn to the field of “time management.

Quote 3 – Success:

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

Quote 4 – Why:

He who has a why can deal with any what or how.

Numbness, in any form impedes your ability to discover your passion.

With so many distractions such as the internet, video games, movies delivered via download at any time of night, forums, chat rooms, Skype lists, TV, political screaming matches in the media – all of it can become a distraction to the point of numbness.

Active alcoholics and addicts talk about courting one feeling, and it’s the only one that matters to them at the time:

Getting numb to all other feelings.

So many things in society today, like those mentioned above, are addictive because they deliver that numbness. Our minds can take something really good and turn it on us if we let it. How many parents (and I was one) are so busy running kids around that they can’t take 15 minutes for themselves to write in the morning, or take an art class?

That’s avoidance of the most dangerous kind, because it has the stamp of martyrdom on it. “See what I’m sacrificing for my family!”

Like I said in my book about my own relationship with my kids, “too much help is no help at all…” And too much doing prevents you, in fact, the entire family from learning how to discover your passion.

My passions are so real and so clear, that I must constantly find help to check the things off my list to more done that gets me closer. I don’t have time for anything else now. That’s where outsourcing comes in.

I pity the fool who chases money thinking that will fulfill them. Money is important, but I doubt that you’re passionate about money. And if you are, look more closely.

Listen to me:

The only way to combat the numbness of wrong-headed activity is to focus on, identify, court and prioritize your passion. It’s all about paying attention to your inner guidance system. Mark Hendricks, one of my favorite people, once described it like this in his success course, and I’m paraphrasing.

When I stopped trying to steer and just paddled the canoe, it actually goes where it’s supposed to. Any other way is struggling against the flow and pointing me toward the rocks.

Stop steering. Paddle. Your life’s purpose should be focusing on how to discover your passion, and paddling in the direction it takes you.

Breaking news! Google is getting Slapped!

By David Perdew 10 Comments

And this ain’t just going to be a love tap either, Google!

Watch as Google takes an uppercut to the chin.

From Bloomberg News Site today:

“U.S. Federal Trade Commission has begun a review of its business practices, kicking off what’s likely to be a broad antitrust investigation.

The company received a subpoena on June 23 “relating to a review by the FTC of Google’s business practices, including search and advertising,” according to a regulatory filing today. Google said it is cooperating with the probe.”

Is it wrong that I was doing the happy dance in my office when I read this?

Monopolies, benevolent dictators, religious fanatics, right- or left-wing zealots, bankers in collusion with mortgage companies that crippled our economy…I’m not a fan of any of them.

But Google? Why Google? Aren’t they the tech darlings with the only good ideas left? Or at least don’t they want us all to think so? The only other company with that much hubris these days is Facebook.

And they’ll get their’s as well as they get cockier.

I’m not a fan of anyone who will shut you down without notice and a vague non-explanation: You violated our terms of service.

Okay, how? Let’s fix it. Tell me what to do.

Heeeelllloooooo! Anybody in there?

Talking to Google is like putting a message in a bottle and pushing it out to sea in hopes that someone who can do something about your situation picks it off the beach on the other side of the world.

I absolutely believe in the every business’s right to do business with whom they want unless it violates our basic equal protection laws.

But, there’s basic decency laws too. (More like laws of nature.) And pompous, all powerful companies who become moral arbiters are way out of line.

Google, Facebook, PayPal, others: Listen UP!

My dad used to call it getting to big for your britches. Monopolies, by definition, are the only game in town. Yes, there’s Yahoo and Bing and 1000s of smaller search engine and advertising providers.

And they’re hungry. Read that as more customer friendly. But they’re also inconsequential – relatively. Google is the big dog. If you want to maximize your profit, you have to play with Google.

Until they take their ball and go home.

Yesterday, I saw an open letter from my friend Jeff Herring to Google because they shut down his Youtube.com account. They did that to Kevin Riley as well last year. Both are outstanding business educators and trainers.

In Jeff’s case, he lost about 125 videos over night, and tons of traffic from those to his sites. Google lost tons of traffic to Youtube and their advertisers. Jeff had 550 subscribers; that’s a really respectable number of subscribers who want his videos and want to be notified when he delivers another. Maybe it ain’t Britney Spears, but with that audience, it still seems to indicate a real following.

Gone.

No explanation.

Okay, I’m getting a little guilty pleasure out of this rant because Google banned my Adsense account 5 years ago. And I still don’t know why. The form letter was just that, and there’s no way to talk to anyone who can help you. I did notice that it was two days after I received my first check.

Part of me feels like I’m driving through my ex-wife’s neighborhood. I really hope and pray I don’t run into her, but I sure wonder what she’s doing sometimes. After all, I loved her once.

And I still love Google. They are incredibly innovative. They make tools like Google Analytics, Adwords and the External Keyword Tool. And they keep getting better and better.

They’re incredibly smart. I know a lot of people who are incredibly smart – many of them come to the NAMS workshop as students and instructors. No one, no matter how smart, is authorized to run my life. To me, that is abhorrent in the extreme.

So, what’s next for Google? At this point, it’s pretty predictable and costly.

The answer is lots of lawyers.

This paragraph from the Mashable.com article predicts the future pretty well based on the Microsoft experience many years ago.

“It’s inevitable that people will compare this investigation to the famous Microsoft antitrust investigation of the late 1990s. That case, United States vs. Microsoft, ended with a settlement that stopped Microsoft from using Windows to push its other products and lock out its competitors. Microsoft’s growth came to a halt after the case, and the company has never fully recovered.”

The Wall Street Journal also reported that the FTC fought the Justice Department for the right to handle this case. Yikes! This can’t be a good sign: Two mega government watchdogs with teeth wanting to take the first bite out of the fresh meat…

Google, it’s now time to eat a little humble pie. Take it like the mega giant you are Google.

Utility Poster Eliminates Blogger’s Block

By David Perdew Leave a Comment

Did you know that Utility Poster stops writer’s block – or I guess, more appropriately, blogger’s block dead in it’s tracks?

Do you occasionally stare at that blank screen wondering what to feed the content monster today? It just sits there staring at you demanding to be fed, but you have nothing profound to say.

What if you could just provide a very fast roundup of keyword-targeted news that helped you delivered lots of content to your readers in a very short time?

And what if that news roundup helped you rank for hundreds of keywords and get you a ton of trackbacks?

Jack Humphrey, one of the foremost experts in blogging and blog marketing for high search rankings, has released a new app he uses to rank for over 6400 keywords in Google!

(That’s not a typo! He ranks for more keywords than that, but he gets targeted traffic from just over 6400 keywords a month!)utility-poster-eliminates-bloggers-block

The reason he created the application was to give you a way to keep your blog active with high-quality, search friendly content and to get you trackback links.

Thank God he did because it’s one of my favorite tools for creating weekly round ups on some of my blogs. And it’s so simple, even I can do it in about 5 minutes. I know. I’ve been using it for a few months to check it out.

Those links help you get higher rankings for your blog posts by simply using a nearly-automated tool to create posts.

Its called “Utility Poster” and it is simply incredible software.

If you visit there now, fine, but be sure to read all of this to learn how to get an additional $20 discount.

It works on PC and MAC – or anything else you can throw at it because it’s an Adobe AIR application
It combines Utility Poster and his other two very popular programs: Video Utility Poster and Trackboost

So, here’s the key

You choose the topic by inputting your favorite keyword, choose the type of content by choosing the search category, and click Search. Voila – you’ve got a ton of possibilities for your news roundup.

Post relevant, keyword-rich, high-quality content in the form of snippets from other blogs, videos from YouTube, Twitter tweets, and Flickr images – all based on whatever keyword you search with.

You choose from the best conversations going on around the web in your target market and efficiently hand-pick what you include in your posts.

The results:

You own an active, engaging, relevant, and search friendly blog as if you were writing 100% original content.
You build links back to your site through trackbacks.
You build content readers WANT to experience rather than bland, spammy SEO articles that only satisfy the search engines but build no loyal following among readers.

Big tip on how to use Utility Poster for joint venture listbuilding

One of the favorite list building leverage techniques covered in our affiliate training here is to create “Top Lists” of category items such as “Top 20 SEO Techniques“.

But how do you find those techniques? And how do you find people to participate in the promotion?

Do a blog search using Utility Poster, put together the piece by dragging the 20 blog post snippets with links into your new post window (just as Jack shows in the demo video), contact the 20 bloggers and encourage them to promote the roundup article naming THEM as a top 20 technique.

Who wouldn’t want to promote your blog post if they were recognized as an expert in the post? And you’ve just put this together in about 10 minutes…choosing only the most targeted and effective posts to reference.

Other bloggers will willingly and happily link to you as if you wrote the whole thing from scratch.

And you can do in minutes what would normally take you hours to do for such quality posts!

The best way to experience the power of Utility Poster 3.0 is to watch Jack’s complete walk-through video here.

Utility Poster is going to take your blog to new heights in the search engines while cutting your blogging time to a fraction of what you spend now.

Never be afraid of the blank screen again. Now, you can post great content whether it’s video or blog posts or pictures with Utility Poster.

A secondary benefit of using this tool is one that Jack never addresses: Research!

This little tool allows you to quickly research a topic to gather some of the best info on the web already. You can use that information (and some images from Flickr) to create your own original material.

Don’t overlook this – because nothing triggers original writing like reading through and rewriting other people’s material and adding your own twist.

Utility Poster dominates in this department.

So, what’s wrong with Utility Poster:

If Jack Humphrey was sitting in front of me and ask me what I didn’t like about the program, I’d mention two things:

The sort order of the blog posts can be a little random sometimes, especially in the date field. While I want my posts to be the latest, I’d like to be able to choose whether they should be in chronological order or relevance order as it already is with the Youtube search options.
I’d like to see a Google search or even a Google News search option in addition to the Google Blog Search.

But that’s it.

Now, to purchase this cool tool, Jack has it priced it to sell at $67 on the sales page, but here’s a tip:

Leave the page, and you’ll get a second chance to buy it at just $47.

It will be one of the best $47 you’ll ever spend. (Don’t tell him I told you about this tip. I paid full-freight for Utility Poster!)

Welcome to the 6 Steps to Implementing Big Ideas – Part 0

By David Perdew 4 Comments

Welcome to the 6 Steps to Implementing Big Ideas – Part 0

Since I was a kid, I fancied myself as a writer. I loved writing. And baseball of course.

So became a journalist working in the newspaper business for nearly 20 years as a reporter, photographer, editor and publisher..

…in the opposite order actually. After graduating from journalism school nearly 35 years ago with a wife and 2 kids, I couldn’t afford to take a entry level reporting job.

News-Republican-Crew-1978 — That’s my newspaper crew in 1978 – I’m the one in the middle with dark hair

I bought a newspaper and became the publisher. That’s me on the right in 1978 leading my team.

I had no idea what I was doing, but it seemed like one of my great big ideas

And besides, it made me a big man in hometown at just 26 years old (I’d been in the Air Force for 4 years prior to school which was why I had the wife and two kids at that tender age…)

Well, in my 6 Steps to Implementing Big Ideas, that would have been called the Dream / Execute 2-step and sure way to fail fast and spectacularly.

If you remember, the six steps to implementing big ideas are:

Dream
Prototype
Test
Execute
Feedback
Improve

I didn’t prototype or test my idea.

So I invested all my money up front on a whim. Even gamblers at the roulette table know better than to lay all your money down at once.

The newspaper was a huge success.

We increased the subscriptions by 130 percent in 9 months. And we won tons of state and national awards. I was on the map as a crusading journalist. And I began getting lots of career opportunities and attention. It seemed like this was one of those big ideas that might just pay off.

The newspaper was a disastrous failure.

Unfortunately, in that same period my expenses tripled (tripling your subscriptions cost a lot of money that advertisers must make up). My advertising revenue was limited by the per thousand price I could charge and still be competitive with the local daily with 10 times my circulation.

There are many hints to why this failed (and I lost all my money and then some) in that 9 months.

Defining processes for growth never entered my mind. That’s what we call prototyping by the way. I just assumed all growth is good. My ego said we should be the paper of record in that town. And get as big as possible as fast as possible. The most profitable that paper was ever going to be was at the beginning circulation when I purchased it.
I hadn’t tested the growth – One question is all I had to ask: What happens if we triple circulation? All I had to do was run a spreadsheet to discover that answer, but noooo….I was too busy executing to test.
Advertisers didn’t care that we were winning journalistic awards. They wanted us to deliver more leads to their businesses for less money than the competition, not more. But I didn’t ask for their feedback...until it was too late. So, as the circulation went up and our advertising prices increased to cover expenses, our advertisers fled. In the newspaper business, advertising makes everything else possible. Newspaper subscription prices make only a small dent in the revenue flow.
I ignored the competition because we were a “better” newspaper. The market was giving me great feedback and I ignored that to. And we when collapsed under debt, that ugly little daily was just cranking along.

The 6 Step process to implementing big ideas that we’re following here would have ensured my publishing success.

But I didn’t know about the process.

You will after you take this eCourse.

If you haven’t yet signed up for this free eCourse, do it now while it’s free. We’ll cover each of the six steps in much more detail.

Next, we’ll dig into the first of the 6 steps:

Dream – or the Big Idea.

Let’s hear what you think of this so far! Put your comments in the box below and tell me what your big ideas is.