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Copyblogger Weekly Wrap: Week of October 3, 2010

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I’m going to keep this week’s intro brief because my dog is biting me. My mother says he bites us all because he’s herding us (he’s a collie mix and barks and corrals when anyone runs), but I think it’s because he wants to be on the winning side. If anyone is play-attacking anyone else, he bites the person being attacked. He’s kind of an ass that way. So it really can’t bode well that I’m being harassed while writing the Wrap. Speaking of ass, it’s just like that time he bit Jennifer Lopez while she was busy working on Gigli . Now for the part where I massively fail to tell you what happened this week on Copyblogger (with bite marks): Monday: 4 Simple Ways to Get More High-Paying Clients with Your Blog If you’re not getting clients with your blog, chances are you’re not doing the four things in this post. Or possibly, you’re doing them but are wearing a clown costume. So remember also #5: Don’t wear a clown costume. And off you go. Read the full post here . Tuesday: The Simple Tricks Experts Use to Always Get Paid For Their Time Sometimes the person asking to “pick your brain” isn’t a zombie, and when that happens, you’re really in trouble. Rather than awkwardly stumbling through a conversation containing sentences like, “But my brain is supposed to make me money, you freeloader!”, Laura Roeder has better ways to deal with sticky situations. Read the full post here . Wednesday: Captivate Your Readers with a Marketing Story that Sells Let me tell you a story: There once was a guy named Johnny, and he had the very unprofitable hobby of writing stories. Then he discovered that if you can learn to tell your own true story in business, you can make money… so he did just that, and taught others how to do it, too. Then he hooked up with seven Victoria’s Secret models and lived happily ever after. Read the full post here . Thursday, part 1: The Easy-to-Use Tool that Helps You Build a Breakthrough Blog Apparently there’s this newfangled trend out there in the Interwebz called “being organized.” The way I read this, some people actually plan things out on a calendar and do NOT blog totally randomly. Apparently this crazy new trend has some advantages that you can read about in this post, like “knowing what the hell you’re doing.” Hmm. Interesting. Read the full post here . Thursday, part 2: Two Conferences for Serious Online Marketers Brian Clark will be speaking at the BlueGlass Internet Marketing conference in Florida November 2-3, and at PubCon Las Vegas on November 8-11. That’s pretty much it. Not funny enough? Okay, imagine him speaking in a clown costume. Read the full post here. Friday: Blogging with a Learner’s Mind This post made me think of how people say that kids pick up languages naturally and well, and how my response is, “If you were content to just say stupid and incorrect things and had people tirelessly correct you for months until you got it right, you’d be good at languages too.” Pamela says it best: “A learner’s mind is fearless.” Learn to lose that fear and be content to learn over time and your blogging will become so much more awesome. Read the full post here. This week’s cool links: Three Problems that Make Me Leave Your Blog in Three Seconds : It’s kind of a problem if people arrive at your blog, are really turned off, and leave. Here’s what may be driving them away and how to fix it. Why Free Plans Don’t Work : A lot of software offers a free plan, with the intention being to convert those people to paid users later. But is it a good strategy? Yes, the Internet Is Changing Your Brain : So, the use of Google and the net in general is changing the way you think. The question is, how, and in which directions? Sales Psychology: Why People Won’t Pay Your Rates : The fact that you look expensive or cheap doesn’t have much to do with the price, because everything is relative. Here’s an explanation of what really matters. The Basics : Sometimes we make simple things too complicated, like when a restaurant adds a bunch of things to Macaroni & Cheese. Always remember the basics. (Mmm… basics.) About the Author: Johnny B. Truant specializes in selling through stories and would like very much to set you up with a cheap blog or website . (That’s “cheap” as in “inexpensive,” not as in “tawdry.”)

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Copyblogger Weekly Wrap: Week of October 3, 2010

8 Bad Habits that Crush Your Creativity And Stifle Your Success

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“The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts the moment you get up and doesn’t stop until you get into the office.” ~ Robert Frost It’s a myth that only highly intelligent people are creative. In fact, research shows that once you get beyond an I.Q. of about 120, which is just a little above average, intelligence and creativity are not at all related. That means that even if you’re no smarter than most people, you still have the potential to wield amazing creative powers. So why are so few people highly creative? Because there are bad habits people learn as they grow up which crush the creative pathways in the brain. And like all bad habits, they can be broken if you are willing to work at it. Here are eight of the very worst bad habits that could be holding you back every day: 1. Creating and evaluating at the same time You can’t drive a car in first gear and reverse at the same time. Likewise, you shouldn’t try to use different types of thinking simultaneously. You’ll strip your mental gears. Creating means generating new ideas, visualizing, looking ahead, considering the possibilities. Evaluating means analyzing and judging, picking apart ideas and sorting them into piles of good and bad, useful and useless. Most people evaluate too soon and too often, and therefore create less. In order to create more and better ideas, you must separate creation from evaluation, coming up with lots of ideas first, then judging their worth later. 2. The Expert Syndrome This a big problem in any field where there are lots of gurus who tell you their secrets of success. It’s wise to listen, but unwise to follow without question. Some of the most successful people in the world did what others told them would never work. They knew something about their own idea that even the gurus didn’t know. Every path to success is different. 3. Fear of failure Most people remember baseball legend Babe Ruth as one of the great hitters of all time, with a career record of 714 home runs. However, he was also a master of the strike out. That’s because he always swung for home runs, not singles or doubles. Ruth either succeeded big or failed spectacularly. No one wants to make mistakes or fail. But if you try too hard to avoid failure, you’ll also avoid success. It has been said that to increase your success rate, you should aim to make more mistakes. In other words, take more chances and you’ll succeed more often. Those few really great ideas you come up with will more than compensate for all the dumb mistakes you make. 4. Fear of ambiguity Most people like things to make sense. Unfortunately, life is not neat and tidy. There are some things you’ll never understand and some problems you’ll never solve. I once had a client who sold a product by direct mail. His order form broke every rule in the book. But it worked better than any other order form he had ever tried. Why? I don’t know. What I do know is that most great creative ideas emerge from a swirl of chaos. You must develop a part of yourself that is comfortable with mess and confusion. You should become comfortable with things that work even when you don’t understand why. 5. Lack of confidence A certain level of uncertainly accompanies every creative act. A small measure of self-doubt is healthy. However, you must have confidence in your abilities in order to create and carry out effective solutions to problems. Much of this comes from experience, but confidence also comes from familiarity with how creativity works. When you understand that ideas often seem crazy at first, that failure is just a learning experience, and that nothing is impossible, you are on your way to becoming more confident and more creative. Instead of dividing the world into the possible and impossible, divide it into what you’ve tried and what you haven’t tried. There are a million pathways to success. 6. Discouragement from other people Even if you have a wide-open mind and the ability to see what’s possible, most people around you will not. They will tell you in various and often subtle ways to conform, be sensible, and not rock the boat. Ignore them. The path to every victory is paved with predictions of failure . And once you have a big win under your belt, all the naysayers will shut their noise and see you for what you are — a creative force to be reckoned with. 7. Being overwhelmed by information It’s called “analysis paralysis,” the condition of spending so much time thinking about a problem and cramming your brain with so much information that you lose the ability to act. It’s been said that information is to the brain what food is to the body. True enough. But just as you can overeat, you can also overthink. Every successful person I’ve ever met has the ability to know when to stop collecting information and start taking action . Many subscribe to the “ready – fire – aim” philosophy of business success, knowing that acting on a good plan today is better than waiting for a perfect plan tomorrow. 8. Being trapped by false limits Ask a writer for a great idea, and you’ll get a solution that involves words. Ask a designer for a great idea, and you’ll get a solution that involves visuals. Ask a blogger for a great idea, and you’ll get a solution that involves a blog. We’re all a product of our experience. But the limitations we have are self-imposed. They are false limits. Only when you force yourself to look past what you know and feel comfortable with can you come up with the breakthrough ideas you’re looking for. Be open to anything. Step outside your comfort zone. Consider how those in unrelated areas do what they do. What seems impossible today may seem surprisingly doable tomorrow. If you recognize some of these problems in yourself, don’t fret. In fact, rejoice! Knowing what’s holding you back is the first step toward breaking down the barriers of creativity. How about you? What mental habit has been hardest on your creativity? Let us know in the comments how you’ve handled it. About the Author: Dean Rieck is one of America’s most creative advertising copywriters. He shares his writing and freelancing experience at Pro Copy Tips .

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8 Bad Habits that Crush Your Creativity And Stifle Your Success

Why Being Too Diligent About Your Facts Can Hurt Your Content

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Once upon a time, the world was flat. Now it’s round. Who knows? Maybe some day we’ll find out it’s square. It’s hard to come across a cold hard fact anymore. Drink 8 glasses of water a day. Drink 16 glasses of water a day. Don’t drink any water; get all your water from fruits and vegetables. The contradictory advice goes on forever. There’s almost nothing you can nail down with absolute certainty. Even your own content. When you’re writing a game-changing piece of content, it’s natural to want to nail that article down with irrefutable data. So you spend seventeen hours to come up with data from books, white papers, and online sources. But your research is tainted No matter how hard you work to nail down the facts, you’re going to run into accuracy problems. That’s because your information sources aren’t entirely reliable. Even if the source is reliable, the information may not be. For example, a magazine may accurately report the findings of a study, but who says the study results are actually correct? Here are just a few ways your research can become tainted: Research is often funded by lobby groups pushing their own agendas. Passed-down information can lose relevant bits. What was once fact has since been overturned by new evidence. Let’s look at them one by one. Problem 1: Research may not be objective Let’s say a lobby group wants to increase sales of lemonade. They fund research to find more reasons for you to drink lemonade. They pour squillions of dollars into their research, and amazingly enough, all that research comes to the same conclusion: lemonade has amazing health benefits. Of course, that’s not how the research is presented to you . The research is presented in an interesting, fact-driven way that makes you believe it. Given a slew of reasonable-sounding facts and a truckload of statistics, and most of us will change our perception . That’s not to say lobby groups are bad people. They’re just like you and me. We tell our kids to eat spinach because it will make them big and strong. Doesn’t matter if the spinach doesn’t actually have the nutrients to get kids big and strong. Doesn’t matter if we’ve cooked the goodness out of the spinach. The kids swallow the idea — and hopefully the spinach. We all present information in the best light. And when we add figures and facts, it becomes something written in stone. Except it’s not written in stone. It’s not cold, hard fact. It’s just one view, one presentation of the data. Problem 2: Hand-me down facts Use tea bags to polish hardwood floors. Mix turmeric and honey in hot water and drink it for a cough. Use the underside of a ceramic mug to put an edge on that dull kitchen knife. These are hand-me down facts. They work — but do they work just the way they’re written? Did the author leave out a piece of critical information in the re-telling? Perhaps you have to steep the tea bags for a certain amount of time. Maybe you have to be careful to get the exact correct angle between your knife and that ceramic mug. Facts often develop holes over time. As stories get handed down, they lose information. The main part of the story may be true, but misleading without key pieces of information that go with it. The only way to be sure it to check for yourself. You take those tea bags and polish a part of your hardwood floor. If the floors shine, you’ve got a personal story of your own to tell. Hand-me-down data looks valid, but unless you’ve proved it yourself, you’re quoting unproven research. And that takes us to the final problem: The data keeps changing. Problem 3: Facts evolve As recently as 1980, most neuroscientists would tell you with confidence that the brain had no meaningful plasticity. Plasticity means that the brain is adaptable. That it can heal damage from strokes, accidents, and other horrible things, and that it can change and adapt after the critical period of childhood. There’s now research (yeah, I’m aware of the irony in referencing research in this article) that all areas of the brain can change and evolve even in adulthood. Destroyed function can be “re-routed” to other areas of the brain. And intense mental activity (like studying for med school exams) can change the brain in measurable ways in a matter of weeks. I want you to understand one thing: these original nay-sayers were neuroscientists. They live, breathe, and map their entire careers around research about how the brain works. Some of the smartest people on the planet. And they were wrong. Today, neuroplasticity is an irrefutable fact. But who’s to know what will come around the corner? Does this mean you shouldn’t research your articles? Not at all. Research matters. Facts matter. All I’m saying is that it isn’t necessary to spend all those hours tracking down facts. Often, the facts you find are only half-right, or they’re just a part of greater truths to be revealed. Go ahead and do your research, but put on an egg timer. If you don’t get what you’re looking for in about 20 minutes, it’s time to get your own facts together. Don’t make up facts that aren’t true, but tell us your own experience. It’s better to simply write what you know. Not only does it make for a good story , you can be secure that what you’re saying is really true. Research makes things interesting, but your own case studies are just as interesting. So don’t be bashful. Use your personal stories and experiences more often — you don’t need fifteen sources and two experts to back you up. You might be wrong Sure, you may be wrong about the way you interpret what you experience. The neuroscientists were wrong too. So were all the smart, educated people who insisted the world was flat. There have been countless geniuses who insisted on theories that would ultimately prove to be wrong. Research won’t save you from being wrong. It’ll just get in the way of telling your story — and that’s more important than having irrefutable facts. Especially because the facts are never irrefutable. No matter how much research you do. About the Author: Sean D’Souza offers a great free report on ‘Why Headlines Fail’ when you subscribe to his Psychotactics Newsletter . Be sure to check out his blog , too.

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Three Training Tips to Become a Better Blogger

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I don’t go to the gym. I could. There’s a gym right here in my town. I’d like to be stronger, faster, and more badass. But I don’t go to the gym, and the reason has nothing to do with my not wanting to get all of the benefits of a good workout. It has to do with the fact that when I want results, I want them now. I want to go to the gym just one time and walk out with muscles I didn’t have when I went in. Now, everyone knows you don’t achieve your physical peak in just one gym session. Yet I keep noticing bloggers out there who seem to believe that they can achieve writing prowess in just one blog post. That’s just as silly as me expecting to be able to do 50 pull-ups on my first trip to the gym. Your brain is like a muscle Your brain is not actually a muscle, so don’t put any bets down on your trivia skills at the local bar. But your brain acts like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. This is how you learn a language, for example. The first time you learn that “Bonjour” means “Hello” in French, you have to think about it pretty hard whenever someone asks you the question. But if you move to Quebec and hang out with me awhile, you’ll find yourself soon saying “bonjour” automatically when you walk into stores. Your brain doesn’t have to think about it anymore. It’s walked down that neural pathway often enough that saying “bonjour” becomes an automatic response. When you write a blog post, your first posts might take a lot of effort. You’re going to work hard to remember how to craft a good story , or pause to wonder whether you just made a common grammatical error , or remind yourself to break things up and use bullet points so people can read more easily. After a few years of blogging, you don’t think about that stuff anymore. It happens naturally. That part of your brain becomes so strong that it doesn’t feel like work. How to make your blogging muscles stronger If you want to be stronger, faster, or in better physical shape, you go to the gym often. Maybe every day. If you want to be a stronger blogger, a faster writer, or in better shape to whip up posts that people want to read, write a blog post every day. Even if you only post once a week on your blog, put in the time to write every day. Otherwise, you’ll never make your blogging muscles any stronger. If you only lifted weights once a week, how long do you think it would take you to turn yourself into an Ironman? The more frequently you write, the faster you’ll improve, and the stronger you’ll get. Here are a few tips to get stronger in even less time. Switch it up. Trainers and fitness magazines say to work different muscles on different days, because muscles need to rest. The same goes for blogging. Try writing about a different topic every other day, or testing new approaches three times a week. You don’t have to post those topics — you just have to write them. You’ll still be working your writing muscles, but you won’t exhaust yourself writing the same type of content every day. Make every repetition count. A lot of people go to the gym and sort of sleepwalk through their routine. They’re doing each motion, but they’re not working that hard. They don’t notice when they could move up a weight bracket to get more results. When you blog, don’t just toss off a post in 20 minutes without thinking about it. Make every single post count. You’ll write faster when you’re stronger, but right now, slow down and make sure the post you’re working on is the best it can be. Increase your difficulty. Speaking of moving up a weight bracket, don’t stick to posts about simple topics. If you feel like you’ve exhausted your current knowledge about your favorite topic, go out and do some research on more complex areas of that topic. Work to make your writing even better and more compelling. Push yourself. Don’t stick around lifting 5-pound weights when you could be lifting 50s. You’re never going to get stronger if you stay in your comfort zone. Above all else, put in the work. Plenty of people think they can run a marathon. They sign up, they undertrain, and when the big day rolls around, they can’t do even a fraction of the run. The blogging equivalent of that is when a blogger pitches a big blog for a guest post, but can’t deliver anything like the caliber of writing that blog demands. So put in the training. You’ll get stronger, faster, and better — and before you know it, you’ll be at the front of the pack with the big shots. About the Author: If you’re looking for more training advice on your blogging, head on over to Men with Pens , where James Chartrand gives you a writing gym packed with equipment to work those muscles.

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Hyper Responsive Marketing Secrets

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Everybody dreams of having a successful profit-making system; now the dream has come true with Dr. Glenn Livingston who has dedicated his time and efforts to teach people how to run a profitable online business and increase their profits. Glenn Livingston, Ph. D. was the brain behind the 80/20 Rule which stands for the 80%

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Hyper Responsive Marketing Secrets