Anyway, enjoy this post. It’s a good one.

——

The third-grade teacher asks the class, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” She gets the standard answers: cowboy, princess, firefighter, doctor. But Billy says, “I want to be rich.” Everyone laughs, then the teacher asks, “But what do you want to do?” Billy answers, “I want to make lots of money.”

Fast-forward about twenty years. Who from that class do you think has the highest net worth?

Gut check

Right now, you’re either thinking, “Yeah, that sounds like me,” or “Sure he’s rich, but I’ll bet he’s a shallow, self-important prick.” But aren’t you reading online marketing blogs because you want to be rich now? Why is it wrong for a 9-year-old to want to be rich, but okay for an adult? When did money as a primary goal become acceptable?

Those aren’t abstract philosophical questions. You really need to answer them for yourself to understand what you’re willing to do. Because unless you really, deep down, believe in putting the money first, you must be putting something else first.

Do you know what that “something else” is?

Online marketing … of what?

Look at all the courses that teach you how to do AdWords campaigns. How to identify niche markets and exploit them. How to optimize your landing pages to convert the long-tail keywords. PPC arbitrage … Affiliate marketing … ClickBank … Yeah, I speak marketing. I also know what all that stuff means and how to do it. But I don’t want to. It’s soul-crushing boredom.

I might discover there’s an untapped market for wombat grooming. Do some research and write an ebook. Start an AdWords campaign and start selling like crazy. Woo-hoo! But I really don’t give a shit about wombats, no matter how many rich people there are looking for a book on cleaning them.

If I want to spend all day doing work that I don’t care about, I’ll just stick with a job. You know, let someone else figure out the business plan, do what I’m told for eight to nine hours a day, and do what I want nights and weekends.

Money makes anything interesting, right?

Lots of jobs pay well not because they’re hard, but because they’re distasteful. Ask Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs guy. Or check this list of 10 High Paying Dirty Jobs. Number 1 on the list? Crime scene cleaner: “With a little experience under your belt and flexibility with your work hours, you can easily make about $75,000 a year with this job.”

So there are jobs out there that you could apply for today and start making a decent living. But you won’t apply for them, because you aren’t interested in the work. So why do you think pay-per-click arbitrage is going to do it for you? The money? Look at that list of dirty jobs again. Still think it’s all about the money?

Self-employed, but still just a job

The mythical salesman who can sell ice cubes to Eskimos, do you think that’s because he likes ice cubes? Or is it because he likes closing the sale? It’s the rush and the money. And if you’re doing it online instead of face-to-face, you don’t even get the rush.

What you get is research, analysis, number crunching and, if you do it all really really well: money. Are you okay with that, or does that sound like a “job”?

Follow most online marketing advice and you know to follow the data. It’s easier to find the desire than to create the desire, so it’s more profitable to sell to an under-served market than to create a whole new market. It’s not about what you want to sell, it’s about what they want to buy. To make big money online, you can’t focus on what interests you.

That’s the forumula for success I keep seeing. Ignore my own interests. Sell what other people want. Build the sites other people want. Discuss the products other people want. Study hard, work harder, and after about a year you, too could make $111.

Screw that

If you have interests other than money, there are plenty of free resources to show you how to effectively sell what you’ve got. And you’ll care about it because you’re learning how to more effectively talk about what interests you.

Unless … well … are you the exception? Are you the one who, back at the start of this article, thought, “Yeah, I was just like little Billy”? Then you probably could sell the wombat grooming book, and smile all the way to the bank. If that’s you, I’ve got a couple of cook books that could use some good affiliates.

Drew Kime teaches people how to cook like Grandma at How To Cook Like Your Grandmother. He has published the book of the same name, and Starting From Scratch: The Owner’s Manual for Your Kitchen.

I guess this is what happens when you work online, and work in it in as skewed of a way as I do — where the borders between personal and professional are as thin as the premise that Justin Timberlake has sex appeal. I had this friend — let’s call him Mike — who met this girl on the internet back in 1993. We all thought, “Oh, she’ll be a total weirdo. And meeting someone online is both strange and creepy.”

But we were wrong. She was more “disturbing” than a weirdo, and in the place of “creepy,” we sort of described her and the situation affectionately as “sad.”

But times have changed. As the internet grew up — from being countless phone lines running to countless 2400 baud modems in the basements of the mothers of countless oily losers to being the porno superhighway we know today — it became possible to actually “meet” people online who couldn’t recite the entire Star Wars script by memory. You know, people who aren’t totally socially retarded.

So I need to find my buddy Mike and apologize, and to let him know that if he had met this girl today, I wouldn’t mock him because… because you actually can form relationships online. I’ll admit it.

And maybe that’s just me justifying myself, because I’ll repeat: 95% of my non-wife and non-kids social interaction. So very odd.

In just a few days, I’m going to get on a plane and fly to Austin, Texas to meet some of the people I hang around with all day. (I’m particularly interested and excited to meet all of the folks I know from the Third Tribe, which just so happens to be the coolest and most attractive bunch of people alive today.)

Now, there’s technically a conference going on in Austin at that time, but I’m not going to get an event pass. The pagan lesbian transsexual couple I’ve never met that I’ll be staying with convinced me that there was no point. (And to think people say that the internet is nothing but freaks.)

Through all of this, my friend and client Jess (a chainsaw-weilding pervert energy consultant I’ve never met) keeps telling me that I have to AT LEAST get business cards, and to upgrade my dumbphone to a smartphone, because if I go to SXSW to meet the rest of the people who neither of us have met, I at least have to be somewhat professional and hip. I considered splurging $10 at VistaPrint for a stack of glossy cards that said only THIS IS JOHNNY’S BUSINESS CARD on the front and THIS IS THE BACK on the back but got inspired and sprung for something far more insulting and irreverent, but haven’t yet made up my mind on the phone with only about 72 hours left to decide.

It’s strange to me to think that I hang out with these people (with you people) all day every day, and yet I don’t know any of you.

But that’s a lie, isn’t it? I do know you.

People who don’t live in this space the way we do still think that internet friends are an impossibility, that the only people you can meet online are 400 lb. pedophiles named Jasper, who are masquerading as 14 year old girls. While that’s true on MySpace (and here I’m supposed to say hi to SexyJasper221, this friendly girl scout I know online who apparently has candy in the back of her windowless white van*), it’s not true on the Net at large. And here’s why:

Nobody is that good of an actor. Not as many people are fucked-up weirdos as the world would have you think — and I’ll stand by that.

After exchanging countless emails and tweets with Anne Sorensen (who will get all bubbly at this mention), I’m 100% convinced that she’s not actually a male prison inmate doing time in Tennessee.

I’ll wager dollars to donuts that Michael Martine isn’t actually a college kid operating out of his dorm room.

I think I have a pretty good bead on Naomi Dunford, and although I’m told that I’ll immediately remark that she should have shorter hair and swear more, I’m pretty sure she’s not actually an 1880s riverboat gambler.

This is Web 2.0. A lot of the people we interact with, we see them and hear them as they really are. And when we don’t actually see or hear them, we see photos. And even if we don’t trust the photos (they could all be lies, of course), we get little snippets of off-the-cuff, unrehearsed interaction that by themselves mean nothing, but which all together paint a surprisingly vivid picture.

Could Sean Oliver be someone other than who he say he is? Well, I suppose the internet enhances his or anyone’s ability to create a false face — it allows you to be a different age, sex, race, height, weight, national origin or whatever than what you actually are — but I’m going to bet that even if he’s a Hasidic Jew midget FBI agent named Beatrice, I still have his personality nailed.

The saying goes, You can’t hide what’s inside. (I think a candy bar or something stole that as a slogan once upon a time, much like the co-opting of the popular expressions “Once you pop, you can’t stop” and “Where’s the beef?”)

I think that if you’re some creep trolling for action on a creep forum or if you’re an FBI agent trying to catch creeps trolling for action on a creep forum, you can create a persona and be that persona for a while. But let me see either of those people interacting daily on Twitter. Let me see their blogs, or their guest posts on other blogs, or their comments on blogs across the blogosphere. Let me see how they answer wall posts on Facebook or respond to off-the-cuff Skype chats or emails.

I think the people who are falsifying their personalities have to hide in the more faceless, more contrived, less “live” forms of online interaction. And I think that if you have been putting people on, your true nature is going to come out… because there’s no way it can’t. We are who we are.

(And don’t go saying that we know James is a woman because she admitted it. I know plenty of folks who said they could tell ahead of time. Because in this arena, you can’t hide who you really are for long, and how you really are inclined to behave and be and interact. You reveal little bits of yourself with every exchange, and eventually, people were kind of like, You can’t hide what’s inside. And hey, while we’re on the topic, where’s the beef?)

So these people I haven’t met, who I’m excited to meet this weekend? Well, I already know them.

My dad would shit bricks if I told him that I was staying with Pace and Kyeli, but I didn’t think twice about it.

I don’t expect to be surprised at all in my interactions with Charlie or Dave or Sonia or anyone else. Because I know these people already.

And back to my dad and his brick-shitting? All of the membership money for the Charlie and Johnny Jam Sessions goes into Charlie’s account, and he pays me my share. I’ll do something similar for my new, as-of-yet-unnamed course (tentative release date: March 23!) with Lee Stranahan. People think, “That’s idiotic. They could be criminals. They could rip you off.”

But… I know Charlie. I know Lee. Could they rip me off? Sure they could, but so could anybody I see every day in my day-to-day life. Does being able to see the face of a person make them more trustworthy? Hardly.

This world is getting smaller. It’s weird: Jonathan Fields, Pam Slim, Darren Rowse… I can’t walk through a bookstore anymore without seeing half a dozen books from people I talk to every day.

So I got my business cards. I’m going to spend a few days hanging out and breaking bread with these people who I know really well and who I’ve never met before. Because when you know people, and you like them, shouldn’t you meet them eventually? Yeah, that makes sense.

Besides, I owe Chris Brogan one for stealing my gimmick.

.

* “Windowless white van” joke stolen from Jordan Cooper so that I can get insulted by him already.

.

I’m going to be launching a new, awesome course soon, with my buddy and master networker Lee Stranahan. You can read a bit about it here.
.
If you’d like to keep apprised of updates and be able to get it for a pre-launch discount, be sure to enter your name and email address below.

Name:
Email:

Tim and his co-author John Strelecky wrote a book called How to be Rich and Happy and decided on an ambitious goal and an unusual way of reaching it: They decided that they wanted to get a million copies of the book into people’s hands, and would do so by reverse tithing almost all of the money that came from sales of the book back into producing new copies.

In this interview, we talk about values, philanthropy, why Tim and John decided on an admittedly sensationalistic title, and how to get what you really want — but suspiciously little about dolphins and/or ratatouille:

.

.

So how can you help? Well, you can listen to the audio. You can spread the word on your blog, in your newsletter, and on Twitter. And lastly, you can and should buy the book. Remember, nobody is making money on this, if that makes a difference — not me, not Tim, and not John. We just want to make a difference, because it’s a good cause.

I’ve realized something.

Even though I pitch the whole “unmarketing” thing — wherein I blog about stuff that has nothing to do with anything I sell, and tell clients that I don’t care if they work with me — the truth is that there is a core of marketing beneath everything I do. Anyone who wants to follow my school of thought will need to learn how to do this balancing act.

On one hand, you’ll need to ignore a lot of marketing convention, and you’ll need to get used to underhyping rather than overhyping. You’ll learn to break rules. You’ll emphasize flaws and you’ll admit ugly truths.

But on the other hand, the truth is that you have good stuff and good services, and you want to make sure people know about them. So, while people are busy admiring your unmarketing, you really want them to keep the fact that you’re a solid and reputable person in the back of their heads, and you want them thinking that they should maybe buy from you eventually.

So, you need to do enough marketing to let them know about your cool stuff, but you need to do it without looking like a douchebag.

For me as a consultant and as a creator of almost-consulting (you’re a member of the Jam Sessions, aren’t you? If not, what’s wrong with you?) my best business credential is my own experience: Within nine months of making my first cent online, I was making five figures monthly in this little endeavor of mine. Accordingly, I’m sure to put that factoid up on my sales pages, as a bit of proof in the pudding.

But the problem is that if you dangle that kind of nugget out there, it unsurprisingly draws people who want to have five-figure monthly businesses… like, immediately.

But I tell them, “Dude… you have to put an asterisk next to my name: ‘Results not typical.’ I’m going to tell you right here and right now that I cannot and will not promise that you’ll be able to do that if you work with me, or if you buy anything I have to sell.”

So we get this tug of war. I did well, and I know I can show other people how to do well. I can help, and my clients’ testimonials seem to agree with me on that. But there are no guarantees, and especially no guarantees of doing it as fast as I did.

So this is my fundamental issue. Everyone in online marketing is selling solutions. Everyone is selling answers, selling ways to make your first and second millions. Many of those people promise that if you’ll follow these steps, 1-2-3, you’re guaranteed to make some huge amount of dollars in no time and retire to the Bahamas.

The question that I have for myself is this: How can I give my best advice, in a way that is as easy to replicate and follow as possible, without being one of those assholes who make hollow promises? People expect and deserve the best I have to offer. Is there anything I can teach that is a sure thing, or as close to a sure thing as possible?

Because, see, I’m not against money-making “systems” per se. What I’m against is false hope. If I could give you 1-2-3 that would always work, I’d happily sell it and hype the shit out of it and promise money-back guarantees and tell you to spend your mortgage payment on it because without question, you’d make it back pronto.

I just don’t think that’s how it works.

But fortunately, I realized there’s another way.

.

Maybe there is a system. But maybe it’s not really a “system,” at least in the way we normally think of “systems,” if you know what I mean. Does that make sense? No? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

When Lee Stranahan and I started talking about doing a project together (that story is in this pretty awesome post), one of the things that probably annoyed the piss out of Lee is that I was immediately dead-set against overpromising anything, and killed several ideas before they had a chance to even be born.

I didn’t want a blueprint.

I didn’t want a plan with a timeline, the end of which culminated in leaving a day job or making a certain amount of money or moving to Hawaii with five naked supermodels.

I didn’t want a guarantee. Or at least, I didn’t want a traditional guarantee based on results achieved, given that we all know that results in life are never guaranteed.

But then I realized that I was looking at it the wrong way… which brings me to a metaphor, because I like metaphors. Especially convoluted ones that are barely apt and just confuse the fuck out of people.

.

My stupid metaphor — or at least an entertaining story.

I have a barn in my backyard. It’s pretty damn big, and holds my wife’s horses and the tractor that I enjoy stalling out (often) and setting fire to (once). I built that barn. Or rather, my father-in-law Frank and I built it, with a few days of help from my brother-in-law Dale, my wife Robin, and my friend Scott. But mostly, it was just me and Frank. 95% of the boards, beams, nails, screws, wires, siding, and shingles are there because one of us put them there with our own two hands.

Now, I don’t know how to build a barn. When I started, I barely knew how to use a framing hammer, which is a huge motherfucker that you swing like a broadsword. You have to drive these pole barn nails that are as big around as nightcrawlers, and believe me, there is an art to it.

I didn’t know how to install asphalt shingles on the roof. You have to put them down with a certain amount of overlap and staggered a certain amount off of the row below. You work from the bottom and you have to know to put the nails not just anywhere, but in the tar strip.

I didn’t know how to wire the lights. And if pressed, I wouldn’t probably have realized that you need a circuit breaker out there, and I wouldn’t have known how to wire it if I had known.

Now: Frank was in fact telling me exactly what to do and what to put where so that at the end, we ended up with a barn instead of a humidor. But let’s pretend he hadn’t told me exactly what to put where. Let’s pretend that he’d taught me only the skills: How to set the poles. How to do the framing. How to do the wiring. How to raise the roof trusses, and how to tack down the shingles.

Wouldn’t you agree that I have a better chance of figuring out how to build a barn if I know the skills required to do it than if I started cold? Maybe I could have stumbled through it. Or maybe I could have read a bunch of books or hired an architect or gotten the building inspector to come out more often than necessary to give me tips (or reprimands)… but I could do it, eventually.

And wouldn’t you agree that if I knew these skills well enough — and was persistent enough, and took enough action — that I could create any number of pole buildings in time, to suit whatever need I may have? Maybe a small shed. Maybe a bigger barn with a huge loft. Maybe a detached garage.

.

Forget teaching results

I’ve decided that building a business is a creative endeavor. I don’t agree that you can map out a blueprint for a business, because so much depends on the strengths, weaknesses, quirks, habits, needs, and desires of the owner.

The business that would work perfectly for me may not work at all for you, so I can’t teach you the exact layout of my business for you to replicate. What I can do is to teach you the skills I used — the metaphorical hammering, shingling, wiring, and so on — and let you build your own unique business. Same skills, applied to your best purpose.

What has always bothered me is that if I told people stepwise where each nail and screw for their business should go, it wouldn’t work because they’re different than I am. And what’s worse is that even if it did work, what they’d build might not be the business they want.

Going back to the barn metaphor, I might give them a 2-stall design, but they’d own four horses. Or I’d instruct them on building a barn, and they’d say, “This is great, but I want to store cars in it, not horses. It should really have a concrete floor.”

So when Lee and I started mapping out our new course (tentatively planned for a March 23rd launch, because that’s my birthday), we decided that instead of trying to give you a blueprint, we’d instead teach you our best tools, and show you how we and others used those tools with great success. We’d show you the means we used to form beneficial partnerships, to make a movie, to write regularly for Copyblogger and Problogger or the Huffington Post, to accumulate 70 active job leads at a time and to create that five-figure monthly income, to interview Kevin Smith at his house or have Neil Gaiman retweet us on Twitter.

We decided not to give you the outline for our ideal lives, but to teach you how to determine what that ideal life truly is for you. And then, rather than teaching you how to do every detail of every task you’ll ever need, we figured it made more sense to show you how to find the best people to help you with those tasks. We figured that while you may not have the connections we have now, you almost certainly have the kinds of connections we had a few years ago — even though you probably don’t realize it.

I can’t and won’t give you instructions on how to build a whole barn, and expect that barn to fit your unique needs perfectly. And I don’t expect you to be able to build it all by yourself, from A to Z, the first time through, without making mistakes.

But I know I can teach you how to swing a hammer. To do the wiring and put up the shingles. I can show you how to enlist the help of someone like Frank to fill the gaps in your knowledge, and how to make sure that you’re building that barn to your own best specifications — even if it takes a long time, and even if your first few barns fall over.

That I can promise, with a clear conscience. That I can do.

We’re not really about giving you what you want. We’re more about giving you the tools you need to go out and get it for yourself.

“Teach a man to fish,” and all of that.

.

If you’d like to see what we come up with — a way to teach you how to fish, instead of promising you the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, enter your information below.
.
When we launch this thing, you’ll also have a shot at an advance discount.

Name:
Email:

.

There’s some real meat to this review of Scribe SEO (and even a cool video) further down, but let me give you a bit of background as to why I’m writing this first. Why? Well, before you know what something can do, I think it’s important to answer the question of “Why bother?”

So:

What you have to understand about this review of Scribe SEO — a software service that helps users SEO optimize their copy (and which works with Wordpress through a plugin) — is that I’m the same guy who wrote a post called “Screw SEO,” after which Michael Martine stalked me with nunchucks for dispairaging his craft.

And yet, when Brian Clark asked me to demo Scribe (a Copyblogger project), I thought it might be cool to give it a try. But it gets more ridiculous: Today, you can find me on the Scribe site, giving a shining testimonial. So given the aforementioned “Screw SEO” mentality, you’re probably wondering what gives.

Allow me to explain: I guess I don’t really think SEO sucks per se. It’s more that I feel it sucks conditionally.

For me, most of the time, SEO feels pointless because I blog about nothing that anyone would ever search for. When I wrote “Christmas is Gay,” for instance, I wrote it because the idea seemed funny to me, not because I expected people to Google “gay Christmas” and find that post.

(Note to self: Google “gay Christmas” and see what comes up. I’ll bet it’s interesting.)

But I’ll admit it… there are times I should probably be optimizing. I have a really good aWeber tutorial that would probably be earning me some business if people could find it in the search engines. And I suppose I’d get a few more clients if I optimized for the phrase “Wordpress blog setup,” maybe.

When people pointed this out to me — that SEO and compelling content worked together and that a few SEO tweaks would essentially help me get more mileage out of what I had already written and done — my reply was always that the effort wasn’t worth the reward.

In other words: I was doing fine as it was, so optimizing was too big of a pain in the ass to be worth whatever increase in business I might see from it.

In order for me to give a shit about SEO, one of two things was going to have to happen: Either the reward I could expect from optimizing was going to have to get more promising, or doing the work to optimize was going to have to become so stupidly easy that I’d basically trip over it.

So, to the punchline: The reason I like Scribe is that it makes SEO stupidly easy and obvious.

(I’m pitching the above to the Scribe folks as their slogan. I haven’t heard back yet.)

When you use Scribe as part of your workflow, it happens like this:

1. You write a post naturally, the way you normally would, using your normal writing voice to talk about the topic.

2. As you write, Scribe is staring at you in the corner of the “Write Post” window. From the get-go, it’s yelling at you if you’ve forgotten something obvious.

3. Once you’re done writing, you click a button to analyze the post. Scribe then tells you which keywords you’re already naturally optimized for.

4. You can then decide to roll with the keywords that are already primarily emphasized (and Scribe will tell you how to do that), or you can decide to emphasize different keywords (and Scribe will tell you how to do that, too).

It’s right in your face, which is what I needed in order to care about SEO. It also uses intuitive visual cues — like, if you’re doing things right, you see green stuff up there in the corner. If you’re not, you’ll see red stuff. If you’re so-so, you’ll see some yellow. I know, I know… you’re wondering if I really need it to be this simple. The answer is yes. If I’m to do it, then yes… it has to be this simple. And I’ve found that a lot of people are like me in that way.

But enough explanation… let me show you a little video of Scribe in action. (NOTE: If you’re reading this in a feed or on Facebook, you’ll probably need to click through to my site to see the video.)

(You can also click the button in the lower-right corner to play it full-screen)

.

.

Now, Scribe isn’t a magic bullet. It won’t get you millions of visits simply because you’ve used it but done nothing else, and won’t do all of your work for you because it hasn’t developed Hal-from-2001-style evil artificial intelligence capabilities (yet). There’s still some stuff you’ll need to do on your own, to allow Scribe to do its thing for you with the best results.

So here are some things to keep in mind:

Keyword choice matters.
At some point, you’ll want to figure out which keywords are worth targeting. If you write a post about whale oil lamp efficiency, Scribe will help you get laser-focused on those words and you’ll likely rank #1 for “whale oil lamp efficiency” in no time. But chances are nobody is searching for that term, so it’s kind of pointless.

Links matter.
As described in the video, this post is partially an experiment to see how well I can rank for the phrase “Scribe SEO review.” Because incoming links help a post’s ranking, I’m going to try my damnedest to get Copyblogger to link to this review. If they do, having an incoming link to this post from a high-authority, highly-relevant site like CB is going to help me place better. The more links you get coming to whatever you’re trying to optimize (ideally from relevant, popular sites, using your desired keywords in the anchor text), the better the ranking.

The other principles of SEO matter.
If the above two points aren’t things that you already fully understand or if you know little else about SEO, I’m going to very strongly suggest picking up a copy of IttyBiz.com’s SEO School. SEO School is by far the most accessible, most no-bullshit / no-technobabble guide to SEO I’ve ever seen. You get SEO School and Scribe and I think you’re off to a fantastic start.

In fact, if you care about SEO and write or work in an area where search engine visitors matter (”wedding photographers in oregon”, “IKEA cabinet repair”, “Wordpress tips and tricks”) I’d go so far as to suggest a full starter pack that will take you from knowing virtually nothing to being pretty damn near as optimized as you can be given who and where you are. Pick up the following and you’re golden.

SEO School: To teach you the basics of SEO quickly and easily in a way anyone can understand and implement.

Scribe SEO: To allow you, in a very intuitive and natural way, to implement the copywriting part of what you learn from SEO School.

Thesis: Scribe was designed to work as a compliement to Copyblogger’s most visible product — the Thesis theme for Wordpress. Thesis is widely regarded as perhaps the best out-of-the-box-SEO-friendly Wordpress theme currently in existence, and contains all of the code machinery that Scribe uses to work optimally.

(Note: Thesis is not required to use Scribe. You can also use Headway (which I also really like), and you can use any other theme if you install the All-in-One SEO plugin.)

The three-pack I’ve recommended above won’t magically make your site a magnet for whatever terms you want to target, but it will give you a hell of a lot better shot at it than if you just kind of dick around and don’t really have any idea what you’re doing.

For many niches, search engine traffic is EVERYTHING. If that’s you, and you’re either just starting out or if you haven’t been optimizing, invest a few bucks and pick this stuff up. Even all three together are hell of a lot less expensive than an SEO consultant, and you’ll likely be paid back quickly in new profits if you do things right.

Look, I’m going to be blunt here. Do I suddenly care all about SEO, and am I going to start optimizing everything I write? No, absolutely not. I still don’t give a shit 90% of the time because I don’t write often about stuff that is all that optimizable (like Christmas being gay). But sometimes I’ll do a tutuorial. Or I’ll create a service, or a product. And those will be things I really probably should at least try to optimize.

And now, with Scribe, I can do that without hassle, and absolutely will. So yeah, my definitive word is that if you’re like me, you should get it.

.

But instead, I realize I kind of came off wrong, and that it almost looks like I’m advocating creating actual value in life over materialistic things, or some other hippie bullshit.

Okay, so it’s not bullshit. But I don’t want anyone thinking I don’t like me some good materialism now and again. Just because money has been everywhere from some fat tourist’s sweaty pocket to a stripper’s butt crack, that doesn’t mean that I don’t still want to fill a bathtub with it and roll around in ecstasy.

(And furthermore, since that post ended in the suggestion that I’m going to be launching a new product soon, I don’t want some Robin Hood asshole suggesting later on that I’m a hypocrite when I charge for it. YES, I will want your money when I launch that thing. NOM NOM NOM NOM tasty sexy dirty money.)

Look, I think everyone today has money issues. And I don’t mean issues like you can’t make the car payment and that mutant freak circus from Operation Repo is going to come and take your car away, but more like we kind of all have issues around money, like shrink issues, like lay down on the couch with a wad of bills while some guy with a goatee and a notepad says, “Hmm, and how did that make you feel?” issues.

Like, I think these past few years have been rough on all of us, and what we’ve all kind of learned deep inside is that money equals a common means of exchange (nobody lets you pay your electric bill with a goat anymore) and that the more you have, the better, and moreover that if you have some, you’d better grip it tight and be prepared with some kung fu shit if anyone tries to take it from you.

You know, the scarcity mindset.

I’m trying to break this mindset myself, because I do have issues with money. Money tries to control me; it gets all passive-aggressive with me; when something comes up in my marriage, it’s usually because growing up, my money didn’t love me enough. I lived the past few years in a state of chronic panic because I owned real estate investments in Cleveland, where the market dropped so fast that it actually collapsed in on itself and formed a series of interconnected black holes that now provide superior transportation to what is available via the RTA train.

Live like this for a while, with every cent you earn and a few thousand dollars more flying out the window each month, and see what it does to your hoarding tendencies. In theory, I wanted to give money to the Red Cross, but in reality, let’s see them try and pry a buck out of my hands. The local kids’ clubs would be outside the grocery store collecting for this or that and I’d be like, “Dude, get your own.”

Then I started this business that I’m doing today. And over the course of this past year, things have eased up. That hideous phase of my financial life is finally coming to an end, but now it’s like I want to hang on to my dollars for dear life anyway, and never, ever let them out of my sight.

So, to combat this, I did what most wise people do when faced with financial psychological issues. I decided to become a good tipper in restaurants. You know, to practice.

Flash to my thrilling Saturday night.

We live kind of out in the country, with the “kind of” meaning that although we do have neighbors, those neighbors have sheep out in their yard. So when we go to the areas where there are restaurants, the best places are 35 minutes away.

That’s what we did on Saturday. We drove those 35 minutes, to go to Sam’s Club to stock up, and then to go out to eat.

On the way home, the kids were asleep and so I could woo Robin by showing her how I still knew all the words to “Ice Ice Baby” (”girlies on standby waiting just to say Hi… did you stop? No, I just drove by”) but on the way out, the long drive essentially just gave my daughter Sydney a nice long time to play her favorite new car game.

It sounds like this:

She says, “Daddy.”

And you’re in the middle of a sentence, so you ignore her.

And she repeats, a bit more urgently, “Dad-day!”

And so you stop your discussion and you half-turn and say, “Yes?”

And she goes, “Birdie.”

So you tell her how that’s the most amazing thing ever and resume your adult conversation. As many as ten seconds will pass and then again she’s interrupting you urgently, like, “Dad-day. Dad-DAY!”

So you ignore her a bit, because this is like the tenth time already.

“DAD-DAY.”

So maybe you go like, “Quiet.”

“Dad-DAY!”

“Sydney, knock it off.”

“DAD-DAY! DAD-DAAAAY!”

“What? What is it? What could you possibly want?”

And she returns to her normal voice and says, “Car.”

It goes on like that for like a half hour, and then we get out and buy a bunch of stuff at Sam’s Club, and when we’re done, when we’re leaving and getting really hungry, it sucks because the Girl Scouts aren’t selling cookies yet at the exit, and that’s not cool because I want to buy some of those damn cookies already and I’m HUNGRY, and all of this despite the fact that I pre-ordered 13 boxes through my gym (and don’t even get me started on the notion that this happened at my fucking gym) and Sydney is still like “DAD-DAY!” every two seconds and Austin keeps hopping off of the shopping cart so that I run into his foot and then we try to go to this hibachi place but it’s full out the door and we end up at Ruby Tuesday and I just want some damn food already and to sit down and relax a bit, and we’d promised Austin ice cream earlier (to coerce him into skipping a sledding run we didn’t have time for) and I decide I want an ice cream sundae too at the end, because I’m tired and because the Girl Scouts are entirely too slow on delivery.

But the waiter tells me that the sundae bar is $3 for all-you-can eat, and I’m like, “I just want like one little sundae.” See, I’m getting my winter fat on, and honestly, all I need is all-you-can-eat. Plus, I’m having disproportionate concern over that $3 because, you know, every cent is vital to my family’s continued existence on the planet.

So the kid, this waiter who’s already been really attentive and generally cool and in really positive spirits despite handling a table of like a billion behind me, he says kind of on the sly that he can bring me a single-serving sundae for like $1.19 if he rings it up as the kids’ version.

For some reason, this offer is super-awesome to me. Because I’m tired and because $1.79 is apparently some huge amount of money.

I eat, I enjoy. It’s winter; give me a break.

Five minutes later, the check comes and our total is $40.14 and I mentally calculate, okay, maybe I put down five bucks for the tip.

But then I think, “Dude, this kid did right by you. And you’re not throwing money down the investment black hole anymore.” And frankly, I have this notion that being awesome and not bitching about life should be rewarded, and maybe it’s time to pay attention to that idea myself, for a change.

So I put down $50 and told him I didn’t need change.

Okay, stop here for a second, because this may sound like I think I’m some great philanthropist or martyr or something because I’m giving a few more bucks on a tip. I don’t. But… wow… paying extra for something? You get down to a tip, where it’s up to my discretion, and I give more than I have to? Wow, that’s foreign. That’s a mindbender. You get in this mindset where you pay what you’re asked, and if you aren’t asked, you don’t pay.

Remember the Red Cross and the kids outside the supermarket? They were trying to get me Lucky Charms. That wasn’t cool.

But now I think that a natural part of growth is to start circulating some goodness where you can, even if it’s in small ways like leaving a few extra bucks on a tip or tossing something in the coffee can the kids have outside of your supermarket. Like when that thing comes in the mail for St. Jude Children’s Hospital, maybe you finally write them a check. Maybe you try to remind yourself that you don’t need to hold each dollar in a death grip, so that your brain figures out that you truly believe more will come.

You know, the scarcity mindset. Like, this is how you fight it.

And a few minutes later, after the waiter kid has presumably run our check, he comes back and kind of in a low voice thanks me again, like seriously and earnestly this time. Like you get the impression that not many people tip more than 10-15%.

And I’ll admit it; that felt good. It wasn’t much, but it did feel nice to reward this hard-working kid who was pleasant and friendly and good at his job, and probably kind of needing every dollar that he makes.

I really do love the idea of charity. You read shit like this (last subhead near the bottom) and you think how awesome it would be to do. I know Naomi felt really good after that, like it did her good to do it as much as it helped the kids who’d attend the school she was going to build.

I’ve heard it said that there’s no such thing as a selfless good deed, because people who do good deeds are ultimately doing them to make themselves feel better, to feel noble, or to alleviate their own uncomfortable feelings about seeing the suffering of others. But I don’t see it that way. That’s too nihilistic. I keep talking about win/win thinking, and this is just one more example of win/win. The recipients of charity win. The giver wins. Everyone is happy.

There’s not really a lesson to this story. I was stingy as all hell for a long time, and I wasn’t going out of my way to over-tip even when the waiter or waitress was really awesome. I wasn’t giving to anyone, so I’m not exactly casting a moral imperative as I write this now.

But if you’re hanging on to each buck, consider that maybe there’s a possibility that you don’t really need to be doing so. Maybe you’re not in the dire straits you think you’re in, deep down.

If that’s the case, then tossing a ten or a twenty into the can when the Salvation Army is out collecting might just do you a world of good.

Something to think about.

.

Remember that cool new product I said earlier that I was going to be launching? Well, it’s going to be cool. You probably guessed that when I said “cool new product,” but you never know.
.
If you enter your name and email address below to get on the ADVANCE DISCOUNT LIST, you’ll get first crack at it and be able to get an ADVANCE DISCOUNT. You probably guessed that when I said “Advance discount list,” but you never know.

Name:
Email:

I’m trying out the guest post thing on this site recently – one from Tim Brownson a while back, this one, and two more in the hopper. It’s strange for me to have folks writing on a blog that is about me more than it’s about any topic, but this is a very cool post and fits the tone here, and it’s also kind of about me, and pulls a reference from Fight Club, which I wrote about two posts ago.

He also wrote this a few weeks ago and because I’m incredibly organized, I’m not getting to it until now, so the time references that are off are my fault. Please FedEx tomatoes and I will throw them at myself.

Dig on it.

—–

Johnny B. Truant is a man on a mission. He’s on fire and literally kicking the shit out of life right now.

I just logged in to the Third Tribe today and there he is…front and center…taunting me with his excellence.

He’s over at Ittybiz, Copyblogger, Problogger, and a thousand other places it seems. There’s really not a spot I can turn to where he isn’t glaring at me…laughing his ass off.

Just when I was Comfortable
It’s not that I have a problem with Johnny being awesome; it’s that now that he’s stepped up his game, I have to step up mine. It’s like a game of chess…the minute you let up is the minute that a 15 year old kid comes and beats your ass.

If he’s the Verizon guy bragging about his awesome 3G network, then I’m a shabby Luke Wilson trying to pimp a shitty network, all while making really lame jokes.

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em…Join ‘Em
So, while I’m all about expanding the pie (thanks, Chris Guillebeau), I’m also pretty darn competitive, which comes in handy when trying to stand out in a crowded blogosphere. Because of that, I like to keep my eye on the growth of other bloggers in order to give me a little extra motivation.

The problem is that Johnny has raised his game too far, and now, my normal lazy tactics don’t work as well as they used to.

As a result, I’ve decided that it might be a better idea to learn from this guy than to compete against him.

3 Steps to Kicking the Blogosphere’s Ass

1. BE DIFFERENT.
Johnny is smart enough to know that there are dozens of already successful bloggers talking about how to blog for cash. Instead of jumping in those shark-infested waters, he decided to tweak a bit and talk mainly about what he calls “personality branding,” which apparently means finding a way to make money by being “the best YOU that you can be.” What I like about this is that not only are there relatively few people who see how the tide of marketing is changing (look at the success of the “Third Tribe” mentality), but that there are very few that take it as seriously as Johnny does.

And for kicks, he somehow also tosses in setting up Wordpress blogs, as an additional service. Like, being the funny blog setup guy, too.

He’s not forcing himself into a niche that he hates in order to make a few bucks, and he isn’t using hit and run tactics to churn customers. He actually over-delivers, which is something that any service provider can learn from.

The key here? Do something unique instead of copying everyone else.

2. NETWORK TO EXPAND YOUR CONNECTIONS.
Networks are paramount to the success of any business, and to that end, Johnny has become a master networker. The guy was a nobody just a year ago, and now he’s hanging out with all the cool kids. How’d he do it?

First, he actually put money on the line to buy IttyBiz’s $400 Online Business School course when he was starting out…something that a lot of new business owners would be afraid to do. Next, instead of simply using the course, he also got in touch with Naomi Dunford, who made the OBS course, and worked out a win/win mentor/protegee relationship…brilliant move. Lastly, he continued to develop new connections and leverage the ones he already had in order to expand his network. Guest posts and phone calls…next thing you know, he’s on top of the world.

Of course, this wouldn’t have worked as well if he wasn’t good, but to be quite honest, aggressive networking still sort of works…even if you suck. (Johnny’s note: What are you saying, Nathan? Dammit.)

3. KEEP TRYING UNTIL SOMETHING WORKS.
Some of you know that Johnny was a comedy blogger for a while, but because comedy readers prefer reading and then leaving to actually spending money, it just didn’t work out. Instead of quitting, Johnny found a way to combine his personality (humor) with another skill (consulting and tech help), and then used that combination to make money by simply being himself.

Now, he can laugh his way to the bank…just because he was willing to keep trying new things.

If you read through his archives (as I did, and as any guest poster should do), you’ll see that he mentions trying different taglines and branding options to see what resonated best with his audience. Eventually, he found a combination that worked.

Lesson learned…if you aren’t constantly trying new things, then you’ll have a hard time finding what works.

A Desperate Plea

Instead of ending this post with your typical summary paragraph and call to action, I’d like to beg Johnny to take some time off to let that bloody fist heal.

Johnny, you’re like that guy at the poker table that keeps going “all in.” It’s really hard for me to continue being lazy when you keep raising the stakes.

Besides, it’s Superbowl Sunday, and instead of drinking beer and stuffing my face…I’m writing a guest post. Where’s the love man? (Johnny’s note: I love you, man.)

–

Nathan Hangen is a cool guy whose email signature proves that he’s just as all over the place as the guy who normally writes on this blog, so let’s just say that you should check out his blog and follow him on Twitter and kind of see which crazy places that takes you.

Don’t worry. It’s not your fault. Today, here and now, in our world of internet and TV and McDonald’s and the Jonas Brothers and that Cling Wrap shit, it’s hard to figure out when you have it right because everyone is always shouting at you about how you have it wrong. This isn’t a conspiracy; it’s human nature. And it’s marketing. I mean, look at me: I’m telling you that you have it wrong too. You big fuck-up.

But here’s the thing: I can almost guarantee you that what you think would make you successful or happy or complete or rich or whatever isn’t what you really want. I’ll bet you’re shooting for the wrong goal.

Let me step back a bit.

I was talking to Lee Stranahan the other day (I did an interview with Lee for a series that includes Seth Godin – check it out!), and Lee has this thing about UN. Not the United Nation, but UN as in the prefix, as in “not” or “different.” As in UN-marketing and UN-schooling. And also as in UN-assisted birth, which he and his wife are into but which he’s not going to convince my wife about, ever.

And Lee and I, we share a lot of the same beliefs about freedom and about what you could, I guess, call UN-jobbing, or getting people out of the 9-5 pressure cooker and into something they love. Lee wanted to partner up on something where we’d create a program to get people out of their jobs and into their own thing in six or twelve months or whatever, but I resisted.

Because I’m like, “People are going to fuck it up. And then they’ll quit their jobs on some half-assed dream and then they’ll lose their house and be all miserable.”

See, I have this whole thing where I try to tell the truth about how — let’s be honest — not everyone is going to make a go of their big dream. A lot of people are going to fail. A lot of people are going to fail repeatedly, in fact. So to promise to get them out of a job in a certain period of time is going to be an issue for me.

But then it dawned on me: This unjobbing thing isn’t really about getting people out of their jobs, or about teaching them how to start a business that makes X dollars per month so that they can replace their income. It’s about getting them into the life they want. We sort of assume that the way to get there is to find a new source of money, then quit the job, then keep on truckin’ to Shangri-La. But there are other routes to meet a goal, and other ways to define success.

For instance.

I’ll bet you think you want money. But really… do you? Do you want green slips of paper with photos of dead presidents on them the way you’d want an original Monet if you were a collector of impressionistic art? If you got a million dollars, would you make a special box for it so that you could display it? Would you iron that cash so that it looked its best, and admire it constantly?

Or would you spend it?

I know what you’re thinking, you bastard. You’d spend it. After slaving away for that million dollars — after all the blood and sweat and tears and striving for it daily as if your life depended on it — you’d just piss it away in exchange for other stuff. You finally got your million, and now you’re letting it go again.

So yeah, you didn’t really want the million. Too bad you sacrificed so much to get it.

Nobody wants money. Money sucks. People use the bathroom and don’t wash their hands and then pick their nose and then the cat barfs on the rug and some cat barf gets on their thumb and then they sow manure into their garden and then they grab a twenty out of their pocket and hand it to you.

If you’re shooting for money, stop it. Look at the real goal. Maybe it’s getting out of your job. Maybe that takes money and maybe it doesn’t, but at least be clear what you’re really after.

It’s like in the movie Office Space. Lawrence asks Peter what he’d do if he had a million dollars, and Peter tells him he’d do nothing. He’d just lie around all day and do nothing. And Lawrence says, “Hell, you don’t need a million dollars to do nothin, man. Look at my cousin. He’s broke, don’t do shit.”

See, Peter hates his job. He wants out, but thinks he needs a million dollars to do it, to sit around and not go to work and do nothing. But doing nothing is our default. It takes work and initiative to do something, but nothing happens automatically.

Tony Robbins tells this story about going to Fiji, and seeing Americans arrive on the island in awe, and they’ll say things like, “I want to live here. I’m going to work really hard to accelerate my retirement and make enough money that I can come back here and buy some land and live in Fiji year-round.” And the Fijians just look at them like, “Dude, why would you do that? Why not just drop your old life and stay here right now?”

We don’t even know what success, or happiness, or our ideal really is. We think it’s something outside of ourselves, and that if we want to be successful, we need to get what the “successful people” out there have.

Maybe you look at Brian Clark of Copyblogger and you think you’d like your blog to be as big as his. Really? Why? Maybe what you actually mean is that you want his lifestyle, but of course that’s a joke because I doubt you know him and have any idea what his lifestyle actually is like. Maybe he lives under a bridge. That may be the case, too, based on what Sonia says*, like, “Oh, Brian lives under a bridge with some hobos.”

I think Lee, who I mentioned earlier, is pretty damn successful. He writes for the Huffington Post. He conducted an interview with director Kevin Smith that Smith says is the best interview he’s ever given. He knows this long list of celebrities that he’s too humble to name-drop unless you weasel it out of him. He made a movie. Every day, he works at home, working with film and video, with his kids and wife around him, because they home school.

But Kevin Smith isn’t impressive to everyone. As pleased as Lee is to have that “success,” other people wouldn’t care about it. I met Blake Schwarzenbach from Jawbreaker once and exchanged a few emails with James Brogan of Samiam. You probably don’t care, but those are successes to me.

Success and happiness are relative. You can’t chase role models because their values are different from yours, and what is vital to you is meaningless to others. If you refuse to give yourself credit for achieving things that matter to you and won’t feel successful until you achieve things that matter to other people, you’re going to be one confused and unhappy motherfucker.

Me, I think I’m really successful. It’s not because I’ve started making a great income lately, because honestly, most of that went down the toilet thanks to my really terrible real estate investments. It’s because of what that income is starting to afford me, which is freedom from those hideous investments and peace of mind. And it’s because I have this great family, and because we’re all healthy, and because I do stuff I like every day.

But… dude. I could have gotten the exact same results — the same criteria by which I’m currently defining success — by moving to a small town in Nepal. If I picked up with my family and moved there with virtually no money and left everything here behind to rot, I’d have peace of mind. I’d have a great, healthy family. I could find something to do all day that I’d enjoy.

If that sounds like a ridiculous scenario, look at Baker from Man vs. Debt. He didn’t move to a hut in Nepal, but his family sold almost everything and travels the world. You’d think you need millions to do that, but that’s only the case if you’re holding on to a mortgage and attachments back at your home base. You can earn and earn and save and save with the hopes of one day traveling the world, or you can set your priorities straight and do it now.

So I was talking to Lee, and we’re discussing how ideas — especially big ideas — are like Stephen King’s definition of stories as things that already exist and need only to be unearthed. And it kind of occurs to us is that in our discussions, we’re beginning to unearth something very cool, that feels new and exciting to both of us. And maybe, what we should be working toward is a way to show people how to get what they really want, not how to do something objective and externally verifiable like quitting a job or making X per month.

That, I can do. That, WE can do. From where you are now. With the resources you have, the people you know, the situation you’re in, the connections you have. It’s a thing that’s just starting to be unearthed, but holy shit is it cool from what I can see already.

* May be a total libelous fabrication

.

If you’d like to keep abreast of the cool shit that Lee and I are digging out of the ground, you’ll want to sign up here.
.
Yes, we’re going to sell something, but you shouldn’t care about that because it’s going to be so bad ass.

Name:
Email:

Like any responsible and loving parent, I always look for as many opportunities as possible to get away from my children. So this past weekend, my wife Robin and I dropped Austin (5) and Sydney (almost 2) off with my mother and checked into a hotel for four days.

When we do this, we get a room with a giant hot tub and spend most of the weekend in it. And we get to do things that we’re not normally able to do, like read books without pictures in them and watch movies that aren’t animated.

When you read in a hot tub, you need a light book so that you can hold it above the water. I was working on Stephen King’s Under the Dome at home, but it’s like 1300 pages and hardback, so instead, I brought along my paperback, 200-page copy of Fight Club, which I hadn’t read in a while.

If you haven’t read Fight Club, do yourself a favor and go buy it now. (And no, having seen the movie doesn’t count.) If you like reading my stuff, you’ll like that book. It’ll put ideas in your head. Bad ideas. Rebellious ideas.

It’s about a group of guys who discover that they’ve been living very sterilized, materialistic lives. You wake up, you go to work, you come home to your IKEA furniture that you just had to have and that felt very important, and you repeat. You behave, you become soft, your emotions and reactions and behaviors dull to the predictable, and soon you realize that the things you own, they actually own you.

What the narrator does — and this is a complicated setup, so I’m simplifying — is that after months of insomnia, and after months of attending support groups for diseases that he doesn’t have just so that he can feel alive enough to sleep, he meets a guy named Tyler Durden. They’re both learning that the things in life they thought were essential, that maybe they’re not essential after all. It starts to feel like the only way to be reborn is to hit rock bottom. But society teaches you to live a safe life. A predictable and behaved life, where you do not only what you’re told, but what is expected of you.

Neither of them have ever been in a fight. So they go into the parking lot, and they take turns hitting each other as hard as they can. Who are you fighting? They ask. My father. My boss. My life.

Well, it goes on from there.

I’d read Fight Club several times before, but I found myself reading it this time and thinking, “I kind of want to join a Fight Club.”

Not literally, I mean. The fights in the book take place barefoot on a concrete floor, two guys to a fight, and the fights go on as long as they have to. Everyone ends up with knocked-out teeth, gashed lips, and broken bones. So yeah, I’m not quite antiestablishment enough to want to actually do that in its full glory, but I’m intrigued by the concept.

Now, try to see beyond what may be an initial reaction to this all as a bunch of macho bullshit, and get what’s behind it: What do we fight (no pun intended) to avoid in our day to day lives?

What is the standard of beauty and order that we’re upholding at all costs? What are we afraid of, and what would happen if we did that thing that terrifies us?

Life used to require exertion and threat. Don’t get me wrong, I’m digging the fact that I don’t have to fight daily to keep my woman and my cave, but would it really be the end of the world if I had to fight? And how would I do in a fight, anyway? What am I made of at a deep, deep, deep and primal level?

I’m not saying that fighting is a good thing. I am, however saying, that most of us are afraid to find out if we could hold our own, because of the threat of pain and discomfort. Again, don’t go thinking I’m saying that we should get in fights to find out. I’m not saying that at all. But I do find it interesting that we’re so very afraid of it.

These guys, these stockbrokers and waiters and customer service representatives in the book, they find out that they can be hit and that they can hit back and that still, life doesn’t end. They’re not as fragile as the world has caused them to believe they are. They find out that they’re different people than who they thought they were. Harder. More resilient. Confidence carries over into every other area of their lives. The petty aggravations that used to upset them can no longer faze them. They sleep well. They have explored that darker side of themselves and found out what’s in there, and it’s like they’re magnified, in person and in personality, as they go about the rest of their daily business.

And all I find myself asking is, Are we really so intent on living and dying a safe existence?

And at this point, I could easily slip into a lot of the themes I’ve been writing about lately, about doing something crazy and breaking the rules and being abnormal. I’ll let you make that connection for yourself, but… you know. There’s the whole “What are you really afraid of?” thing to consider here.

The guys in the book, they decide they don’t want to die without any scars.

I have a pretty fucking badass scar. It’s on my left forearm, and I got it doing a 205 lb. Olympic clean and jerk at my gym a few years ago when at the bottom of the clean, my elbow hit my knee, hard.

That was gross. It was also expensive, and one hell of an inconvenience. I don’t recommend it. But it is an awesome story to be able to tell, I won’t lie. I like that scar. It’s proof that I’m not living my life wrapped in protective bubble wrap.

Some of you ladies reading this are likely disgusted by the testosterone in this post.

Except Jess Commins. I’ll bet she really likes it.

(Oh, and on a side note, when Sonia Simone interviewed me for the Third Tribe, she described a certain masculinely pushy internet marketing technique as “masturbatory,” and I was like “Yeah, it’s awesome, right?” and then I realized she meant it in a negative way. Women.)

I’ve built a career out of saying what’s on my mind whether it’s stupid or out of context or embarrassing or what. And so I’m telling you, whether you think it makes me a macho jerk or not, that part of me wants to get into a fight, for once. To see what I have in me. To take a peek at some aspects of myself that I’m never allowed to let out. To explore my id. To take and overcome a trial.

So maybe I’ll join some sort of a class. Like mixed martial arts (what the Ultimate Fighters do) or Krav Maga, which is supposed to be one of the few self-defense things that actually works in real life. I’d be wearing pads and wouldn’t get the shit beat out of me, but maybe it’s close enough.

I think the essence of pretty much everything I’ve been doing lately is this, to make a point out of this whole Fight Club thing:

I ask myself, “What am I afraid of?”

And then, if I can find a version of it where I won’t die or risk major injury or other huge ruin, I do that thing.

Maybe this is all too macho for you. Maybe a safe life is just fine, in fact. But just for the hell of it, ask yourself what you’re most afraid of, and ask why it scares you.

You try one thing that seemed impossible or terrifying and suddenly, it’s like you’re a new person. You’re bigger and better and stronger and bolder than you thought you were.

All I really want to know is who I truly am.

In fact, as that fact settled in and I reflected on the way I conduct the rest of my business, I realized that I do pretty much everything wrong, all the time.

And so I was like, “Self, you’re off track. You’re getting sloppy. You need to stop what you’re doing right now — playing on Twitter and chatting with people aimlessly and answering unimportant emails and whatnot — and get to work on the things you’ve been neglecting. Maybe create that ‘Store’ page you’ve been meaning to create, or put up some of the cool new testimonials you got yesterday.”

So then, fully motivated, I got up, turned off the computer, and went to the theater to watch that movie Daybreakers because I like vampires.

I do everything wrong in my business. It’s retarded. The call I had with that prospective client was just one shining example. So, for the sake of illustration and because I heard that both Legion and The Book of Eli sucked, let’s take a look at what I did incorrectly:

1. I told my prospect that I didn’t have a clue about some of the things he wanted to know.
The rule is supposed to be that when someone asks about something that is sort of within your ability to learn, you say yes now and learn how to do it later. But instead, when he asked me about something foreign, I said, “Sorry, I know nothing about that.” I added that if he wanted, I could probably look into whatever it was for him later on.

2. I referred my competitors.
The guy I was talking to was interested in my unique breed of “personality marketing,” but also asked if he should maybe focus more on using AdWords to drive traffic, or try harder to get good rankings through search engines. So I told him that I knew a guy who is a genius at generating automated AdWords traffic (Clay Collins) and another guy (Michael Martine) who is an SEO whiz. Then, I gave him both of their website addresses and told him that if that was the direction he wanted to go, to tell Clay or Michael that I said Hi.

3. I didn’t push the big sale.
At the end of our call, my prospect indicated that he’d like to hire me for coaching. He asked how many sessions I thought would be optimal. I told him, “This is the part where I’m supposed to say that unless you buy five hours, you’re wasting your money. But instead, I’ll suggest you buy whatever you’re comfortable with.” And with that, I left it to him to decide.

4. I didn’t offer a fast-action discount.
A really good sales tactic is to get someone to act fast (while they’re still pumped up from talking to you) by offering a discount if they buy NOW. I thought about doing that, but didn’t. Instead, I told him to get back to me “whenever.”

5. I didn’t care if he hired me.
Yeah, work is good and yeah, money is also good. But I’m kind of woo-woo about such things, so the concept of “meant to happen” comes into play — at least in my mind. The way I saw it, he’s either “one of my people” or he’s not. If he is, then he got a feel for how I roll, would like me to help him, and will be back. And if he’s not one of my people, then it’s probably best we don’t work together anyway.

Now, you could play that call back in a sales training course as an example of what not to do, but it’s how I handle every call. It’s how I handle every email. I say, “Here’s the info you’re looking for. Here’s how I can help you. If you want to do it, awesome. And if you don’t, no hard feelings.”

I don’t upsell current clients. It’s not that I think it’s not a good idea; it’s simply that I’m too lazy to do it.

I don’t optimize my own site to attract search engine traffic.

I don’t blog often about what I do for clients in order to establish myself as an expert, and I certainly never blog about technology tips and hints anymore. Instead, I blog about my shitty insurance plan and how well I did on a fitness test.

I don’t write to clients in a “professional” manner.

I hardly ever send email my mailing list, and when I do, I don’t include the sales link three times.

I blatantly, unashamedly ask people to use my affiliate links so that when they buy stuff, I’ll make money.

I swear, write about my vulnerabilities, and generally am not normal.

You take that “what not to do,” where I scored a big fat zero, and you multiply it by the number of people who contact me and the number of days I persist in backwards marketing. And somehow, all of that together adds up to a lot of clients, a lot of referrals, and a good chunk of income.

Why enough wrongs make a right

I guess I should be clear that this is a musings post (or maybe an anecdotal post that was fun for me to write) and not an advice post. I don’t totally understand why my “wrong” approach works, and I’m not really suggesting that you pursue it.

But I do have a theory.

See, some of you were reading my litany of mistakes above and getting the wrong impression. I’m not bragging about my flaunting of the rules, and I’m not saying that everything I’m not doing would be wrong to do. Could I benefit from a chain of upsells? Of course I could. Could I sell more — and still sell with integrity — by offering bonuses and discounts to urge someone to buy sooner rather than later? Yeah, absolutely.

Some of the people I respect most in this realm teach people to do the very things I don’t do, and this leads to a strange set of contradictions in my mind: I ignore most email marketing; email marketing is good to learn. I close poorly; good closings can benefit clients while boosting sales.

I think the reason I can operate in spite of eschewing so many of these “right ways” has to do with the fact that I am very clearly not a pro, bent on separating my clients from their money in order solely to line my pockets. Not that all pros do this… but there are a lot of shysters out there, and they DO play by the rules.

Instead, it’s incredibly, incredibly obvious that I am just an ordinary guy. I fuck up; you can hear my dogs or kids in the background of my calls; I lose my train of thought when I’m talking.

Just like an ordinary, everyday person.

Just like my clients.

Just like you.

It might help, in terms of sales, to polish my image… but leaving some of the tarnish there just gives me a more obvious level of truth.

Look, I don’t have a moral to this post. I can’t tie it up neatly, and say, “Here’s what you’ve learned today.” I’m just jamming here. I just find it interesting that the boundaries of authenticity can apparently be pushed much further than I ever would have thought. I don’t seem to need to be an internet pro. Apparently I can get away with being good at what I do, without the sparkles and glitter and e-commerce razzmatazz.

That’s good news. Because what you see here is truly what you get. And what’s awesome is that authenticity is easy. I don’t have to do something that’s not natural to me, that I have to learn and remember.

Maybe this is part of the lesson behind the Third Tribe, or maybe it’s not.

All I know is that if you believe there is one best way to do business online, you’re mistaken. Rules are made to be broken, and I’m living proof.