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3 Steps to Take Yourself from Good to Great

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In a good economy, you can do reasonably well with “good enough.” Good enough design, good enough marketing, good enough skills. When demand is high and dollars are sloshing around, there’s a market for Decent. Capable. Adequate. Acceptable. Unfortunately, we’re not in a good economy. We’re in a wretched economy. Industries all over the world are falling like bowling pins, and “good enough” professionals in all fields are scrambling. There’s always room at the top, the guru says smugly. Don’t you want to smack that guy sometimes? How are you supposed to get to the top? And how are you supposed to pay your bills until you figure that out? But believe it or not, there’s a map to the top. And you don’t have to have superhuman skills, talent, or even perseverance to get there. Take these three (ok, four) simple steps. No, they’re not easy, but they are simple. You can do them. And you must do them. Good enough isn’t good enough anymore. Find out what you’re better at than anyone in the world Now before you start hyperventilating, hear me out. You’re probably not going to be the greatest copywriter or greatest web designer or the greatest dry cleaner on the face of the planet. You’re going to be the greatest in your world. The greatest copywriter for Dallas high-end commercial real estate, or Orange County chiropractors, or for B2B direct marketing in Bangalore. You’re going to find a world small enough, and then work your tail off to make yourself the greatest Doer-of-the-Thing-You-Do in that world. Sometimes you create a world of one. I’m the world’s greatest practitioner of Sonia-style marketing. Brian’s the world’s greatest Copyblogger. (I nip at his heels to keep him honest, but he’s still the greatest.) Seth is the world’s foremost Seth. Being “the world’s greatest you” isn’t an excuse to slack off, though. It means that every day you show up and try to do your thing a little better than you did yesterday. Find a viable business model If what you’re best at is playing Mozart sonatas on air guitar, even if you’re quite amazing at it, you may struggle to find paying customers. If it’s a business, you’ve got to get paid. Sometimes there are multiple strong business models for what you do, and it’s a matter of picking the one that suits you best. Sometimes one strategy will stand out. And sometimes, what you do is a very enjoyable passion, but it doesn’t form the kernel of a business. A viable business model isn’t a matter of will power or can-do attitude. The customers are either there or they aren’t. If they aren’t, keep framing and reframing your ideas and strengths until you find a market of buyers. Then offer them something they want (not need) to buy . Find something that gives you juice Remember when I mentioned working your tail off? Running a great business, even a business of one, isn’t easy. You’re going to have to be stubborn. You’re going to have to get past hurdles that make you uncomfortable. You’re going to have to give some things up, especially when you’re getting started. You’re going to have to care. A lot. And you’ll never do that if your business bores you to tears. Understand — you don’t have to necessarily love real estate to be the best agent in your well-defined world. You might love negotiation, or you might love the type of clients you focus on, or you might love playing matchmaker between houses and buyers. But you’ve got to adore something about it. It’s got to give you juice. It’s got to make you stronger . Otherwise you’ll run out of gas before you can make it happen. Of course this comes from the book Good to Great The three steps above are from Jim Collins’ groundbreaking book — he calls this trio the “ hedgehog concept .” (Hence the cute if slightly creepy small mammal at the top of this post.) These three factors aren’t just for copywriters and web designers — they’re for multinational conglomerates and billion-dollar empires. And they’re for soccer teams and nonprofits and musicians. I’d heard great things about Jim Collins’ book for years, but I never read it. I looked at it this way: Every idiot CEO and Dilbert-worthy executive in the country has read Good to Great . And from what I’ve seen, most of them couldn’t effectively manage a hamburger stand, much less run a great company. But then I read Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness , and darn it, Hsieh does run a great company, and he found Good to Great essential reading. If I can pick up a $14 book that made Tony Hsieh smarter about business, don’t you think I should? So I did. And it’s brilliant. But I can also see why it failed. The crucial fourth step Collins (or more accurately, his team of researchers) found another common element in great companies. It’s certainly the case with Hsieh. You’ve got to love the business more than you do your own ego. The leaders of Collins’ great companies were, without exception. personally humble and self-effacing, but they were fanatically passionate and driven to make their companies succeed. If you’re in it for the Breitling, the house in the Hamptons, the thrill of watching minions scurry to carry out your personal immense vision, then your endeavor (small or large) is in deep trouble. (If your CEO is in business for these things, start looking for a way out now. Luckily, mine isn’t). If you’re crazy in love with the market you serve, the product you create, and the good that you do in the world (even if that good is a bit frivolous … frivolity can be a beautiful thing), you’re on to something big. Don’t stop. That’s why Good to Great didn’t create a million great companies. Every executive in America read it and puffed up with pride. “Why, we’re in luck! Humble and self-effacing, that’s me to a tee!” Self-delusion is a powerful thing But you’re more honest than that. You have the potential to level with yourself, and to step up your game. Good to Great is probably a pipe dream for most big companies — the entrenched egos are too giant to shift. More important, they don’t really want to. But you can hone your hedgehog concept. You can refuse to let yourself off the hook. And you can get the hell over yourself and start getting obsessed about helping people. And when you do, you’re going to do some amazing things. How about you? What has your own “good to great” journey looked like? Let us know in the comments what you’ve found along your path. About the Author : Sonia Simone is CMO of Copyblogger Media and founder of Remarkable Communication . Share your brushes with greatness with her on twitter .

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Blogging with a Learner’s Mind

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“¿Qué quiere para su desayuno?” she asked, inches from my face. I thought as quickly as I could, and managed to haltingly request a piece of toast. “Pan tostado, por favor.” It was the only breakfast food that I could remember from Spanish class. It ended up being all I ate for breakfast for the next week. Clearly, I hadn’t yet found my learner’s mind. Each of the first few nights I spent in Bogotá I curled beneath the covers with a pounding headache. Trying to think and speak in another language was physically painful. Of the six Americans going through exchange student orientation that year, my Spanish was the worst of the bunch. Those first weeks I spoke like a four-year-old. It was excruciating, especially for someone who took pride in her communication skills. Despite the painful beginning, I learned a valuable lesson that year. It didn’t have anything to do with the Spanish language. It had to do with losing my fear of looking like a fool . Public humiliation If you’ve ever tried to make yourself understood in a language you’re just learning, you’ll know what I mean. You’re proficient in your native language, but to learn a new one you need to start from the beginning. You have to be willing to speak like a toddler for a while. Once you’ve learned some basic vocabulary, you might begin to speak like a young child. All the while, you mangle words and raise eyebrows and send people into fits of laughter several times a day. It’s the public humiliation aspect to learning a new language that no one ever mentions. You’ve mastered your own language, but to master a new one you have to be willing to look like a fool for a while. A fool with a tool Fast forward … let’s say “many years.” As a blogger, I find it’s great to feel comfortable making a fool of myself. Blogging is a decidedly public venue to make beginner’s mistakes in, but the only way to become an experienced blogger is to be a beginning blogger for a while. You publish a draft post by mistake. You send out a link that doesn’t work. You discover — too late — that you’ve left out a crucial piece of information. The only way to get past blogging mistakes is to make them in the first place. When it comes to developing products to sell, we go through the same thing. Our first sales pages suck. The first products we develop may not sell . We cast about, trying to get a bite on our lines. Often we head home empty-handed. And it all happens in public. But each failure gets us closer to success, even if the only thing we learn is what doesn’t work. Baby chicks are easy to spot Twitter is another space where it’s easy to see who the beginners are. I know, because I was one of them not long ago. People start out talking about their breakfast. They check into Foursquare incessantly. They try to direct message someone, but post it publicly instead. After a while though, they observe how the power users make the most of Twitter . They figure out a way to fit it into their workflow so it doesn’t consume all their time. They master the language. Here’s the thing: if you want to master a new skill, you have to start somewhere. As uncomfortable as it is, you have to submit yourself to looking like a fool while you master the tool. There’s no use standing on the sidelines analyzing . You can’t study your way through the beginner’s phase. You can’t strategize yourself into mastery of a new skill. At some point, you have to dive in, make your mistakes, get them out of the way and move on from them. That’s where having a learner’s mind will help. A learner’s mind is fearless Children are wired to learn, which is why they make such huge developmental strides in their first years of life. In the space of a year, they go from unable to hold themselves upright to running; from crying to expressing their needs quite clearly. They fall, shed a few tears, pick themselves up, and keep going. They don’t worry about what people will think: they don’t give it a thought. All the while, they’re learning and making great progress. We can apply this attitude to the new skills we’re learning, too. We can expect mistakes and embrace them when they happen. We can pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, put our chins up and keep going. Plan to fall Blogging, Internet marketing, Twitter and all the rest of these newer technologies present great opportunities. You can learn a lot by studying them before you start to use them. You might be able to avoid some mistakes by doing that. But you can’t vault yourself from beginner to expert just by reading about it. You have to take the first steps, and prepare for the inevitable bumps and bruises that come with making real progress. It’s the only way to learn, really. And it’s the only way to get past plain toast for breakfast every day. Worth it, though, don’t you think? About the Author: Pamela Wilson helps small businesses grow with great design and marketing tips. Learn the basics with her free Design 101 e-course at Big Brand System.

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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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Discover Your Strengths and Supercharge Your Business

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Have you ever been kept awake until 2 in the morning having an imaginary conversation with one of your blog readers who thinks you’re great and left a long comment telling you so? Or spent hours obsessively trying to figure out how to do better work, spurred by a fan letter from a customer about the terrific job you did? Or is it maybe more likely that your late-night solo conversations and obsessive problem-solving go to the trolls , the complainers, and the folks who just plain can’t stand you? Don’t worry. If you give an undue amount of attention to negative comments and feedback, to the extent of almost ignoring the good stuff altogether, it doesn’t mean you’re neurotic. It means you’re exactly like the rest of us. Chip Heath and Dan Heath in their marvelous book Switch make this observation: Imagine a world in which you experienced a rush of gratitude every single time you flipped a light switch and the room lit up. Imagine a world in which after a husband forgot his wife’s birthday, she gave him a big kiss and said, “For thirteen of the last fourteen years you remembered my birthday! That’s wonderful!” This is not our world. But in times of change, it needs to be. Play to your strengths I’ve long been fascinated by the advice to those who tell us to focus on our strengths, not our weaknesses, in order to create breakthrough success. It’s so appealing. You mean I don’t have to learn to cold call, balance my checkbook, or know how my RSS feed works? Sign me up. But it seems like it might be contradicted by another idea that’s gained a lot of attention recently: there’s not really any such thing as talent. Researchers like Carol Dweck and brilliant nonfiction writers like Malcolm Gladwell tell us that what we call “talent” is really the result of a heck of a lot of hard work. What are strengths, anyway? Until recently, I never realized this was a trick question. I thought that your strengths were things you were good at, and your weaknesses were things you sucked at. But Marcus Buckingham, who’s made a career out of writing about strengths, put it this way: A strength is “an activity that makes you feel strong.” It is an activity where the doing of it invigorates you. Before you do it, you find yourself instinctively looking forward to it. While you are doing it you don’t struggle to concentrate, but instead you become so immersed that time speeds up and you lose yourself in the present moment. And after you are finished doing it, you feel authentic, connected to the best parts of who you really are. Your strengths are the activities that give you the juice to put your 10,000 hours in. They’re the work you love enough to become the best in the world at. I’ll give you an example I recently heard Yo-Yo Ma giving an interview about how he got started as a cellist. As it happens, Yo-Yo’s parents are both musicians, and had high musical expectations for their little son. So when Yo-Yo was three, they gave the boy a violin. And Yo-Yo hated it. Wouldn’t practice. Wouldn’t focus. Didn’t have any zest for it. His frustrated parents finally gave up in disgust. And then little Yo-Yo saw and heard something amazing, something that surprised and delighted him. Something that he knew was exactly what he wanted to play. It was a double bass — the violin’s really, really big brother. Now that was more like it. He and his parents split the size difference, and Ma began to study first the viola and then settled (at four years old) on the cello. By seven he was a recognized prodigy, performing for Eisenhower and JFK, and by eight he played on national television, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. To have become so skilled between the ages of four and seven, he must have put in untold hours of practice. But they were hours spent on something he adored. One thing that interests me about Ma is that he isn’t just a brilliant cellist. He isn’t just world-famous and in-demand and a name brand. He also seems to be a remarkably happy and kind human being. He loves working with children. He’s been married a long time to the same person. He radiates kindness and a certain goofy charm. He’s got a great sense of humor, referring to himself at times as an “itinerant musician.” And he’s known for boundless energy. If I’m going to be a nationally-famous virtuoso, that’s the kind I want to be. Build your business like Yo-Yo When you see someone busting her tail to build a business, writing tons of great content, reaching out to potential customers, speaking and podcasting and doing everything we’re supposed to do to build a terrific content-based marketing program , it’s easy to ask: How does anyone find the time to do all that? The truth is, it’s not a time management problem — it’s an energy management one. When you focus on your strengths, you do the work that gives you energy. You do the work that drives you, that makes you giggle, that keeps you up late because you’re just having too much fun to stop. When you’re starting out, you do everything. You build the blog site and write all the content and do the bookkeeping and answer the support emails. Some of those things build you up and some wear you down. Pay attention to which is which. As soon as you can (it could be today), find partners who are energized by the tasks that exhaust and deplete you. If you can’t find the right partner, outsource the aspects of your business that make you want to crawl back into bed. And put your time and attention on what the Heath brothers call the “bright spots” – on what’s really working today. Put your time on the work that gives you juice. Do more of what’s working well. Do more of what energizes and strengthens you. Do more of what your readers and customers adore. Do more of what you can do better than anyone on earth. I know it sounds too simple to be real. But it’s how every genuinely great business — of any size — is built. About the Author : Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger, CMO of Copyblogger Media, and founder of Remarkable Communication . Share your bright spots with her on twitter .

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Why Your Blog Doesn’t Make Money

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Darren Rowse doesn’t make his money from Problogger . Brian Clark doesn’t make his money from Copyblogger . Chris Brogan doesn’t make his money from his blog, either. Neither does Sonia Simone . Not a single founding member of Third Tribe earns the bulk of their income from the blogs that are practically (or in Chris’ case, literally) synonymous with their names. Yes, they make some money directly from those blogs. But revenue directly from the blog doesn’t represent the bulk of their income. Not by a long shot. So why do so many bloggers equate blog success with financial success? Many, if not most, of the bloggers I see are hoping that their blogs will make them popular. They are also hoping their blogs will make them money. This isn’t exactly surprising. Fame and riches are supposed to go hand in hand, after all. But when you need a new stream of income tomorrow, you don’t write ten more blog posts. You create a new product. You launch an email campaign . You make a special offer. You network. You find a great new JV partner. You ask for referrals and check in with your current clients. Similarly, when you want to get more subscribers for your blog tomorrow, you don’t launch a product. You write better content. You get more active on social media. You guest post on other people’s blogs. You link to other good articles. You improve your SEO . Building a profitable business and creating a popular blog are two different things Related, yes. But different. The most popular blogs you know do not make most of their money simply by racking up the subscriber numbers. They make their money with products, consulting, services, and advertising. They make their money by running a successful business. The fact that they run a popular blog facilitates that business. If Brian wants to launch a product tomorrow, he has a big, engaged audience to whom he can launch it. Having a huge audience who will listen when you launch a product isn’t the profitable part, though. The profitable part is that Brian will create a product that his audience wants and needs. He’ll run an informative and compelling launch. He’ll have an affiliate program that works and a sales sequence that converts prospects into buyers . Does the large subscriber base help with that product launch? Absolutely. But the blog itself is not the thing that’s making money. If Copyblogger, with its magnificently large platform, were to launch a terrible product with a really weak campaign and only promoted it with a few blog posts to this vast audience of readers, they wouldn’t make enough money to pay my grocery bill. Having a popular blog is not enough. You still have to build the business. No, of course you shouldn’t neglect your blog There are many, many virtues to a popular blog: social proof, credibility, enhanced visibility. They’re good for forging new business contacts and partnerships. They’re good for attracting potential customers for the products you’ll make or services you’ll provide. They’re brilliant for creating relationships. I don’t know my dentist as well as I know some bloggers. And I trust my dentist with my teeth even though he comes at them with a variety of pointy things with hooks on their ends. Blogs help us make those trusting, potentially valuable connections, and for that reason alone, they’re worth pouring time and energy into. But no matter how hard you try, your subscriber numbers are never going to magically transform themselves into your bank balance. When it comes to making money, simply having a blog isn’t enough. Now you have to take all the things the blog has given you — visibility, authority , a reputation for knowing your industry, social proof — and put them to work building you a profitable business. Because it won’t happen on its own. If you want to use your blog as a jumping-off place for that business, though, Third Tribe has got you covered. The seminar you’ll want to listen to is the 4-part series on Building a Business Around a Blog, which features interviews with Sonia Simone, Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan, Brian Clark, and Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. They cover a lot of ground, including: The three factors your blog must have if you want to make serious money with advertising Brogan’s two favorite ways to start bringing in revenue by using a blog The specifics about where the bulk of their income really comes from (you may be surprised) Why “blogging about blogging” isn’t the way to go How Darren uses surveys to build his business (and why Brian doesn’t) A quick creativity technique to develop the next killer idea for your business How to handle pushback if your customers respond negatively to your products I listened to all four of these interviews. And not once, in hours of discussing techniques, business-building ideas, and marketing strategy, did any of these bloggers say that the best way to make money was to get more subscribers. They’ve got a few ideas for how to do that too, though. Because blogs are valuable — just not in the way you think. You can get instant access to all four seminars (and a dozen more), as well as Q&A sessions and the web’s best networking forum for internet businesspeople, by joining the Third Tribe today . About the Author: Taylor Lindstrom is a freelance copywriter and Assistant Editor of Copyblogger . She’s taking lots of notes about how to turn sharp copywriting into a profitable business.

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